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DeeSoul Carson: I’ve seen so much weird art. And I’m like, I don’t know if the artist is worried about how I’m encountering it, or I don’t think they care. When I got to it, I’m like, “I don’t think they wanted me to understand.”
I appreciate poets who have that consideration, like, how [are] the people that are going to actually encounter my work going to sit with it? I appreciate not just a text where I — not necessarily a text where I feel confused, ‘cause that’s not always what it is, but a text that asks me to do more than just look at it once.
Nick Martino: Mm-hmm.
DeeSoul Carson: Helllllllo poets of the internet. I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word? , the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Nonce! I am here today with my pressmate, Nick Martino.
Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection, Scrap Book (from Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in June of 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.
Nick, hello!
Nick Martino: Hello, so good to be here. Thanks so much for having me, DeeSoul.
DeeSoul Carson: Of course, thank you for being on. It’s so nice to be having a more extended conversation with you. I’ve been really excited for your book.
Nick Martino: I’m so excited for yours, as well. It’s an honor to be press mates with you. Really blessed.
DeeSoul Carson: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I keep telling people how in love I am with your book’s cover.
Nick Martino: Oh my God, yeah. Alice James [Books] did such an amazing job, I love it. This beautiful collage work by this Australian artist named Lizzie Buckmaster Dove, who’s just incredible. I’m very lucky.
What Are Nonce Forms?
DeeSoul Carson: Something that I’ve been enjoying, and I think this will kind of segue us well into the episode: I’ve been really enjoying thinking about how your cover really reflects what’s happening inside of the book. I mean, also a reflection of the title itself being Scrap Book, but that [cover] as also a clear indication for what we might encounter inside of the book, because I know your book has some really fun visual stuff going on.
And so, thinking about that and thinking about the innovations that you’ve been taking inside of your book — this is, first and foremost, a learning podcast. [We] try to teach people new terms, new words, and today we are thinking about nonce forms, which is a term that I think I only learned like a year or two ago. So I would love it if you could tell the people what nonce forms are.
Nick Martino: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m so excited to talk about this and I have to begin by confessing that “nonce form” is a term that I only learned maybe a year and a half ago, actually.
DeeSoul Carson: Okay. So right around the same time. Yeah.
Nick Martino: Yeah. Someone pitched an AWP panel to me that didn’t end up getting picked up about the employment of nonce forms, and I was like, “Yeah, thank you so much. Absolutely. What is a nonce form? I don’t actually…”
DeeSoul Carson: “What the hell is that?”
Nick Martino: “What is that?” Yeah. And they’re like, “Oh, well, it’s what you’ve been doing.” And I go, “Oh, thank you for giving me… furnishing me with language for what I’ve been doing.” I’ve been just striking out in the dark, [and] have no idea what I’m doing. What I’ve come to understand, what a nonce form is, is that it’s a form created to fit one particular need. A kind of one-time form that’s created to address a particular topic that the poet wants to bring up.
And so we have the traditional forms of the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then nonce form, which is for a one time use, but all traditional forms started out as nonce forms.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. The one I always think of is the golden shovel. Like, Terrance Hayes made the golden shovel for this particular poem. And then other people were like, “That’s sick. Let me do that.” So now it’s like a form.
Nick Martino: I think of the duplex by Jericho Brown, that has the repetition in couplets. The first line of one couplet is the previous line, or a play-off of, or repetition/near repetition of the previous line.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. It’s like a sonnet pantoum. It’s doing a lot of different stuff.
Nick Martino: Call-and-response kind of thing. And now that’s become tremendously... yeah, I have a duplex in Scrap Book actually, too, and so that’s, it’s taken on its own life and moved beyond the scope of Jericho’s amazing book, The Tradition, where I think he debuted that form.
Other Nonce Forms To Reference
DeeSoul Carson: Are there other — we’ve already just talked about Terrence and Jericho — are there any other existing nonce forms that you’re already a fan of, or I’ll even say ones that spoke to you, like, “Oh, it’s cool to see a poet doing something, like, for this project.”
Nick Martino: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that some of my favorite poets play with nonce forms, or I’m just very captivated by the nonce form. I think of Diana Khoi Nguyen, who, in her book Ghost Of, has the triptych poems that take family photographs and then write into the spaces that have been cut out of those, based upon that particular biography and write around it.
I think of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, which is replicating the language in that congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans in this satirical or scathing kind of way. Her poem, “38” as well, which is featured within that book. There’s a lot of Layli Long Soldier’s poems.
I was just reading one of our pressmate’s books, R.A. Villanueva’s A Holy Dread. Incredible poet, incredible person, incredible book. He has a poem, one of my favorites within the book itself. I’m forgetting the name of it1, but it’s a kind of play, he wrote in the notes, off of Layli Long Soldier’s “Obligations 2,” which is a poem that you can read through in various different ways. Like a garden path methodology of approach.
I think Solmaz Sharif plays with nonce quite a bit as well. I think her first book, LOOK, is the dictionary of military terms, yeah, and employing those in her writing as well. Danez, their book, Bluff, opens with the anti-poetica. It’s kinda like an ars poetica, which feels like a play on a nonce form as well.
Before I sat down today, I was looking through all of my poetry books and trying to pick out other [examples] like, “Oh yeah, this one and that one.” And I came across Olio by Tyehimba Jess, which is incredible in its use of existing forms and building off of existing forms. One of my favorite poems in the book, or series in the book is [the poem] that talks about, I think it’s the McKay sisters, the conjoined twins2, and he writes in these contrapuntals, then he makes contrapuntals of the contrapuntals.
DeeSoul Carson: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nick Martino: It’s just, it’s mind boggling. It’s such an incredible book and project. Most recently I just read Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, which is this really long epic poem. Her project was to feature a woman as opposed to a man, which typically is centered within the epic tradition. She’s playing with the epic form because they’re varying lengths, the poems themselves, across the entirety of the novel-in-verse or however you might describe it, but they all engage with quotation marks and there are certain phrases that are encapsulated within quotation marks. And I think she has a note where she’s gesturing towards the tradition, the oral tradition of the epic, and allowing those quotation marks to syncopate certain beats for the reading of it. It’s this cool, crazy project that I loved reading as well, so yeah. I could go on and on. torrin a. greathouse’s burning haibun too, which —
DeeSoul Carson: That’s another one that’s like, those nonce forms [are] now just becoming a traditional form, which is kind of beautiful to see. Obviously I love when poets make a thing and they’re like, it’s mine. But I also love seeing a form catch on because it has activated something within people.
I think the burning haibun is one of those forms that just captures a very particular energy about loss or erasure. I’ve written two, actually. They’re two separate ones, but they’re both thinking about memory. I wrote one thinking about my mother, who passed away recently from an illness, just thinking about…
What’s nice about the burning haibun, for anyone who doesn’t know what a haibun or a burning haibun is: So a haibun is basically a long-ish prose block followed by a haiku. And a burning haibun is a haibun that then erases itself down into a haiku, which is like a nice change in that form.
It’s kind of an excavation of language from language that’s already created by the poet. But what I was thinking about when I was writing it was, just thinking about the inability — like I’ve said so much, and then there’s less and less that I’m able to say; it has to be encapsulated down into this core feeling. That’s something that I felt was really well done with the burning haibun.
The Possibilities of Visual Poetics
DeeSoul Carson: There’s something about the element of visual poetics that touches on something that language itself cannot necessarily capture, right? Like, when I’m thinking about Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Triptych,” which strikes me besides, you know, obviously her verse is great, her language is great, but what gets me is the literal shape of the poems, either in the shape of the missing brother, or it’s shaped around his absence, right? So it’s either filling in or filling around that space. And there’s something that visual poetic is communicating to me that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t looking at it. And I’m wondering what you think about those ideas of visual poetics?
Nick Martino: Yeah, I am really glad you brought that up. Whenever I’m thinking about visual poetics or talking about visual poetics with others, I think about this podcast with Paul Tran, who’s an amazing poet. I believe they said it was Denise Levertov who said, so this is like, Denise Levertov by way of Paul Tran: you read the poem before you read the poem.
Meaning: When you, as a reader, encounter it on the page, regardless of whether or not it’s engaging with an explicit visual tradition or, you know, visual poetics or not, the shape of it, that’s arrangement upon the page, the way in which the poet is using or not using white space says something about the poem. We’re visual creatures. We’re inclined towards, you know, taking in that kind of visual data and coming to some sort of conclusion, be it explicit or implicit before we necessarily encounter with the content of what’s being said. So I just think of the visual medium within a poem as another way to perhaps emphasize or highlight or say something that the poem in its content is already saying. A kind of doubling of what is being denoted or noted.
And it can emphasize what’s being said. It can undercut what’s being said. And so I think that, like, to bring up the triptychs, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poems within Ghost Of, make me think about how seeing the arrangement of words on the page in the shape of the cutout of her brother does more than just providing those words that in that space upon the page in a kind of normal way. There’s something haunting about it, gesturing towards this form or this shape. It’s just another way to include additional data or an additional atmosphere or mood or feeling atop what’s already being said.
DeeSoul Carson: Something about that impression, right? The impression of the brother upon the text and the way that his shape kind of moves with us. Claudia Emerson has this terrific poem that I talk about all the time, called “Artifact,” and it’s from her collection, Late Wife.
In this particular poem she’s talking about this man that she’s with; she’s recently divorced [from] her ex-husband and she’s now with a new partner. And this new partner’s wife has passed away, which is the late wife that the collection is thinking about. In the poem, she’s thinking about the energy that this wife has left behind. And so, there’s this… I’m just gonna read this part of the poem that I’m thinking about, right? So it says:
…You have told me you gave it all away then, sold the house, keeping the confirmation cross she wore, her name in cursive chased on the gold underside, your ring in the same box, those photographs you still avoid, and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed — small things. Months after we met, you told me she had made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.from “Artifact” by Claudia Emerson. Copyright © 2001 by Claudia Emerson.
Originally published in Poetry Magazine.
And so I’m thinking about that shadow that we’re thinking of, moving with us. That’s the sense I get when I’m reading “Triptych”. But just like, how is that person haunting the narrative? It’s not a prose class, but nonetheless. But yeah, so those are all things that I’m, I’m thinking about.
Nick’s “Polaroid” Form
DeeSoul Carson: Which is now gonna bring me to your nonce form, the “Polaroid.” I would love it if you could just tell us more about this form. What prompted it? What was your process for deciding its rules? Were there other things that helped to inform it? ‘Cause when I’m looking at it or thinking about it, I’m already thinking of burning haibuns, maybe in reverse or something like that. Tell us about how that came to be.
Nick Martino: Yeah, so the burning haibun was really foundational for my approach to the Polaroid form, which I kind of fell into, honestly, into writing, in part because I was in the third year of my MFA, at the time that I first started writing these, and I was writing a lot about my father’s history of incarceration, and the effect that it had had on our family and the way in which I found out about this history because he had been imprisoned prior to me being born.
This was something that kind of came out, slowly, over, the course of a decade and a half, essentially. I think I was 16 when he first told me about this history. And it was something that I really kind of repressed because at the time, I had a very unnuanced or unsophisticated understanding of prison in general, and who would go to prison, and so I was trying to write into and through that experience and that history.
I was home taking care of my mother, and she did the very classic family —or I dunno, mother — thing, which was like, “Oh, have I ever told you about those photographs that we have of your father when he was in prison?” She kinda referenced them as if I knew full well all about them.
DeeSoul Carson: Very casually.
Nick Martino: Very casually. And then so, “the Polaroids of your father in prison,” I was like, “Wait, hold on, stop. You’re telling me that there’s actual visual evidence of this time period that I’ve been thinking nonstop about, that I’ve been talking to you endlessly about?” This is a history that I talk quite a lot about with my mother.
And she’s like, “Oh yeah, the Polaroids, the photos.” And I was like, “Please, let’s find those.” And so she was able to excavate those out from the attic. And there are nine Polaroid photographs of my father, and my mother as well, on select visitation days of his, and I just was fascinated by these photographs. I couldn’t stop looking at them. My father was not too much older than I currently am at the time of taking those photographs, and seeing this window into the past was just fascinating and saddening and I really just was obsessed with them. I just wanted to spend some time kind of looking at them. And because I was in the middle of writing a full-length thesis and trying to figure out just how to address this history, I thought, well, let me just sit down with these Polaroids and write ekphrastic poems about the photographs themselves.
And honestly also, too, I needed a little daily break from one-on-one mom and son time a little bit as well. So I was like, all right, I have a project for myself. Every day, I’m gonna spend two hours in this coffee shop that’s right next door to her apartment, and I’m gonna sit down and I’m just gonna look at the Polaroid and write about what I see. And as I was starting with that premise or that project, I was thinking about the actual concrete object of the Polaroid itself, and the idea of the Polaroid developing.
That kind of process was made plain to me as well, because there are certain spots on certain Polaroids that didn’t fully develop, these little marks or dings that didn’t really fully come out. So it’s made manifest, the process of development on the actual object itself. And so I was thinking too about how, and I was writing a lot about how when I first learned about this family history, I had this really unnuanced or unsophisticated understanding of it. And I really didn’t know a lot of the pertinent details, like how long he was even in prison for, what exactly was the nature of what he was in prison for, all of these things. And steadily over the course of, I don’t know, a decade and a half following my father first telling me about this history, little details started to fill in and I don’t know when it first happened, but I just made a connection between the Polaroid and things filling in and developing within a Polaroid, and the way that details fill in.
DeeSoul Carson: Like that revelation.
Nick Martino: Exactly. It was a revelation, but it was like a long or a slow revelation; we talk about epiphany, like these “aha” moments. For me, it was this period of 10 years wrestling with, not actively every single day, but coming to terms with the way in which this history predetermined certain elements of my life. My parents divorced when I was in eighth grade. I grew up in this household that was tremendously contentious.
There was a lot of silence and fighting and hushed conversations behind closed doors, and I have a lot of memories of that, but I had no idea as to what was the nature of these things that they were fighting about. And coming to an understanding like 5, 6, 7 years later, “Oh my God, this history of incarceration, their eventual… the collapse of this relationship and of our family in some ways.” And so I thought to myself, okay, what if I play with that idea on the page, the idea of how I have only certain details at first around this family history, and then more things fill in and it’ll be like filling in like the way a Polaroid fills in.
I wrote the Polaroid poems first as erasers, or I wrote them with the gaps, basically, and so I would be like, “and then the blank color of the blank.” And I wrote those and I wrote a few, and I was like, “This is so contrived. This is not working. This doesn’t work. This doesn’t make any kind of sense. I’m just fabricating absences.” And they didn’t really feel real to me? So I thought, okay, what if my methodology is wrong here? I still really love the idea of a slow filling in of details, but what if I began writing the fully-developed image, you know, towards not only what’s happening within the photograph, but I was really interested in, or I felt like there was a lot of heat when I was writing about my looking at the photograph too.
What was I surprised at when I first encountered the photograph? What was my eye drawn to? What detail only emerged after repeated viewings? What is something that surprised me or I dislike about the photograph? Thinking about my positionality as a viewer of the photograph was more interesting to me, almost, than what was actually physically at play. So I said, “Okay, what if I write the full thing first and then erase the Polaroid from there and present the erasures first so that the poem fills in over the course of two or three or four, even, pages?” And then that’s kind of how it came to be. It was honestly a project or an idea that took months, if not a year or a year and a half.
DeeSoul Carson: I think very similar to the first one, that was my approach to writing my burning haibuns. The way I would go about writing that burning haibun is I start with the haiku, so I’m like, these are the words. What I’ll do is I’ll write the haiku, but I’m trying to write not like a perfectly congruent sentence necessarily, or I understand that in order for it to be a proper erasure, it has to arrange in a way that may not be perfectly grammatically correct, whatever. But I start with the haiku and then I build language around that.
And the reason I do that is just, if I know what I’m going to get to, like I just know these words have to appear in the original text in this order to get the haiku that I want.
I feel like I was on the opposite end of where I really wanted the heat. I really wanted the heat in what it was being erased down to. And so I was just like, “Yeah, I need it to come together this way, so I’ll throw these words at the wall and then I’ll build the bricks around this language.”
Print VS Digital Representations of the “Polaroid” Form
DeeSoul Carson: I think they’re both really interesting ways into it. What I really appreciate about — and this is maybe a triumph of digital poetics — when I see your Polaroid poems online: I get to see the actual development of the text into that full “Polaroid.” I’m like, “Wow, this is, this is exactly the way that it’s supposed to look and this is the way it’s supposed to feel.”
With it being in a physical book, unless you know some magic about the presses that Alice James is working with, it’s obviously not doing that same development thing. How do you feel like that changes, if at all, the energy of, how the poems are encountered? Do you prefer ‘em being encountered one way versus the other?
Nick Martino: That’s a great question. Yeah. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I think it began with a conversation, again, another podcast. I think these were both podcast conversations on VS. And I think it was a conversation with Airea Matthews on limitations that a physical paper book holds.. and she was saying something like, “Maybe in the future books will have batteries and like we’ll be able to actually have something that kind of moves on the page,” or maybe in the future… like I think she has this hypothetical around like, you walk into a gallery space and the book is projected on the walls and you encounter it in that way.
So just like, allowing us or asking us, inviting us to think about different ways of engagement with text.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, the possibilities.
Nick Martino: I think, yeah, all those possibilities were at the back of my mind when I first sent some of these Polaroid poems — I think it was originally the Los Angeles Review. I was, at that time, listening to that conversation with Airea Matthews and thinking to myself like, “what if I made a version of this that could be presented in a book with batteries, so to speak? What if I made an animation?”
And so I sent these poems to the Los Angeles Review and the editor, Brent Ameneyro, he wrote back to me, and he was someone who was interested in video poetics or cinematic poetry or these video poems as well. And he was like, “Oh, well, like, here’s how I might imagine doing this.” And it was a collaborative project to animate these poems in this way.
And I figured out how to do it in PowerPoint and when I came to that iteration of the Polaroid poem, I was so excited to see, yeah, like, here’s the manifestation of the development actually happening before your eyes. And I think there’s something interesting about if it’s a GIF, having to sit with it and perhaps not catching all of the information at first, like two or three cycles of it. So on the one hand I was like, “Is it maybe an issue that I’m making this poem more difficult to read for people?” Like poetry, there is perhaps a higher barrier to entry for certain people, but then I was like, no, there’s something cool about asking or inviting someone to sit down and spend some time with this piece in this way. So I really loved that aspect of it, that you might not catch everything in the GIF and have to kind of sit through multiple cycles.
When I think about the actual poem on the page, I think there’s something really lovely in the way in which it becomes then a twofold arrangement where I am providing for the reader the Polaroid as it’s developing on the page, but it’s up to the reader to flip the page and kind of develop it themselves.
DeeSoul Carson: Right.
Nick Martino: Like the difference between putting a vinyl record on or hitting a button and it plays for you. So I like the way in which there will actually be, in the book itself, an invitation for the reader to develop the Polaroid.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, we’ve gone from the reader with the Polaroid picture to the reader who’s in the dark room themself, actually turning it, making sure that it’s developing properly. If they skip a page, right, then they’ve gone past a part of the development, like how does that mess it up?
If they skip a page and they don’t get to that final, you know, for some reason they skip that final fully rendered photo. Thinking about the possibilities of human error, right. But then the other ways that invites new kinds of interpretation. Like, what if someone stopped at the second page of the polaroid, right? And they were like, that’s all I’m gonna read from it, and that’s gonna be my understanding, for whatever reason.
Nick Martino: Wow. Yeah, because all of a sudden there’s like a million new opportunities or ways to read this poem. I mean, it has now instantly, yeah, a hundred million… as many ways as you can think of, different avenues of exploring it in that way. And it’s out of my hands, I can’t, there’s nothing I can do at this point.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. Which is really, maybe especially with like debuts, right? We can get really precious about this thing that we’ve made and we’re like, this is so cool, and now other people get to do it, like, fuck all with it, do whatever they want with this.
I had a conversation with Kay E. Bancroft, they have a new book coming out through Sundress Publications, Bloodroom.
Nick Martino: Bloodroom, right? Yeah. I’m excited for that.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. We had a conversation earlier in this podcast about hybridity and just like the possibilities of visual poetics, messing with other [texts], getting funky, and what does it mean for us to engage with other texts with a poetic eye.
Poetry is a nice, fun genre because it can really be anything it wants. The way I always explain poetry to other people, I’m like, poetry to me is anything that engages in some type of rhetorical experimentation with text. Basically anything that’s asking you to engage — and I say text, like I do say it has to be textual in some sort — but it’s asking you to engage with a text in some way outside of how we would usually encounter language. So I think our traditional forms fit that nicely because we’re not usually talking in rhyme. And so if a poem’s rhyming, that’s a different, non-usual engagement of text. That’s rhetorical experimentation.
But that also goes up to things like Layli Long Soldier turning the poem into “Obligations 2,” right? Or when you’re doing erasure, like Nicole Sealey doing an erasure of this very long Ferguson report, right? Or if we’re doing these pantoums or, like, you’re doing these Polaroids, poems that develop over time. Like, these are not how we usually encounter texts. We usually encounter texts in forms and applications and brochures and military propaganda and copy, yeah. And so when we’re thinking about poetry, we’re thinking about how we are estranging that relationship in some way. And so I love everything that makes me do that.
Nick Martino: I’m gonna hold onto that definition, because so many people will ask me, “What makes poetry, poetry as opposed to prose? And I’m like, “That’s a great question.” And honestly, the only answer I’ve ever been able to engage with is like, it’s doing something either purposely or not. Vis-a-vis like lineation. It’s attending to the line in a way different from prose, but I don’t know. That’s always been for me, like, a not fully satisfying definition. So I like yours a lot.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, and that was a big struggle for me. That’s why I had to come up with one.
Nick Martino: I mean, yeah, it’s like the first day of poetry instruction. ‘Cause I’m a high school English teacher. And they’ll ask, “What is poetry?” And I’m like, well, we could spend the entirety of the class talking about that. I hope I can show you things that expand your notion as to what poetry can be. And that’s what I love about your definition, which is that it’s engaging with the idea of surprise, which is one of the most favorite things that a poem can engender in me, which is surprise.
And I think it’s, at this point, really old hat kind of like advice, the phrase that everyone bandies about, which is like: a good poem surprises the reader, and a great poem surprises the poet. And that idea of reading and writing, alongside or adjacent to the notion of surprise, just makes it more fun too.
Like I’m always chasing pleasure. When I’m writing, I’m chasing experimentation and reverence, even if the subject matter is weighty and perhaps at times I’m leaning less so into a reverence than others, depending upon the matter. But that, at least, is what it allows for me to keep coming back. The ability that I have to hopefully surprise myself in some way, or to engage in text in a non-traditional kind of format, like you described.
DeeSoul Carson: I mean, I basically came up with it because I had the same issue. People asked me what poems are, and I have this the Essential Poet’s Glossary next to me at my desk. Poetry definitions are always like, “Yeah, a poem is not prose (unless it’s a prose poem). Or a poem is not music (unless it has music set to it).” Right? So it’s all these things. And I was like, well, I need to have something that is not just “poetry isn’t X,” you know? ‘Cause I hate [the] “this thing is not” answer.
I use this definition ‘cause it also takes away the idea that… whether or not it’s doing it on purpose, my relationship to language is now different, you know?
Nick Martino: Cool.
Where to Start with Making a Nonce Form
DeeSoul Carson: The last question I’ll ask you is: if someone wanted to approach doing their own nonce form, how should they start?
Nick Martino: So how, I mean, how to approach a nonce poem? I think that when I was thinking about this question, I was thinking about this experience I had in workshop once where I got a poem back from a mentor of mine, and at the top of the poem, she had written in huge block letters: FORM = CONTENT.
I was kind of confused about it until I went in and I talked with her a little bit more. And what she was trying to say was that the form that I had engaged in with this poem didn’t really do anything to further the message or to undermine the message or to highlight the message. Like, it was an arbitrary decision to, say, put it into couplets or tercets or something like that.
It felt as if it wasn’t necessarily doing anything to further an underlying message or idea or atmosphere. And so, I guess I ask You, dear listener, to consider what shape or rhetoric or syntax on the page might help emphasize what you’re trying to say, or perhaps undermine what you’re trying to say in some way to kind of come in conflict with it.
Like, how can you employ the kind of blank canvas of the white page, that 8 ½ x 11 — or, you know, however big piece of paper you wanna use — that in some way gestures towards, a kind of emotional valence that you’re trying to capture within the poem.
And you know, I think that’s perhaps easier said than done. Like, “Oh yeah, just consider what/how form equals, you know.” But I think, maybe taking a step back from that, I think first and foremost what you have to be willing to do is to just play around with things and to understand that your experiments in writing might not pan out in any kind of way. You might scrap it, it might never see the light of day, but you have to become less precious, or I had to become less precious with my own writing, so as to give myself the space to kind of dream up and grow into this form that became the Polaroid poem.
I had to sit for a long time with the discomfort of, “Oh, I like this idea,” or, “Oh, this is a fun idea, but the way that I’m evoking it on the page is not doing it justice and it’s not working right now.” And I had to become less precious and more willing to experiment and play. I was thinking about nonce and I was thinking about how I used to be an assistant first-grade teacher, one of the most happy periods of my life. It was a great job that maybe one day I’ll go back to, but, I think about nonce forms and the way that kids play on the playground.
You know, they’re inventing rules for themselves. They’re saying, “okay, this is lava, but this is safe. Then you can’t do this, but you have to do that.” And they’re kind of coming up with it, typically together. Maybe there’s one leader, but they’re like giving themselves these parameters in which to play. And I think that there’s something interesting about how sometimes, for poets, or at least for me, giving oneself constraints, okay, only 10 lines, or only lines of this length, or only engaging in this kind of syntax, or this kind of rhetoric or vocab. The constraint can actually be freeing or liberating, ‘cause, at least for me, it can actually make me… it gives me something to kind of bounce off of, and have ideas upon, basically.
A willingness to kind of play and experiment and a lack of preciousness in, like, ensuring like, oh, this has to be the perfect iteration of this idea, and thinking about how, visually, on the page, before you even read the actual content of what’s being said, what are you saying already to the reader?
DeeSoul Carson: Experiment’s a fun way to think about that too. Like the point of an experiment is never actually the end result, it’s the process. It reminds us the purpose isn’t necessarily to succeed or fail because the point of an experiment is to learn what’s happening and to observe what’s happening. We’re not making a product. We might succeed or we might fail, but we’re learning something every time, and that’s really helpful.
Nick Martino: You have to have fun in the process of it in that way, yeah.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. Perfect. Well, Nick, this has been a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for telling us about nonce forms and telling us about your nonce form. And to close this out, I would love it if you could read a poem that demonstrates your nonce form.
Polaroid: Prison Visit
July 7, 1989
Copyright © 2026 by Nick Martino. Originally published in The Los Angeles Review.
Used with permission of the author.
DeeSoul Carson: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in nonce forms, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Our guest Nick offers the following prompt:
Nick Martino:
Choose a photograph that’s significant to you OR that you want to spend some time with.
Write a poem in 10-12 lines of equal length that describes this photograph--what does it look like?
Who’s there? Not there?
More than description, consider the gaze itself: as the speaker of the poem looking at the photograph, where is your eye drawn?
What is present, and what is not present?
How do you approach this photograph? Can it be looked at sitting down? Standing in a hallway?
When you have your 12-line poem, copy and paste it onto the consecutive page of your document.
On the first page of your document, begin to erase certain portions of the text. Erase by rendering certain portions of the text white. This will preserve the spacing of your Polaroid.
Your erasure methodology is up to you: an embedded story within the overall narrative, or perhaps preserving only those details your eye was drawn to first. What narrative can you develop--about the photograph or your looking itself--across both pages as more details reveal themselves?
DeeSoul Carson: Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, and thanks for listening.
If You are Interested in Nonce Forms, Nick Recommends:
Sand Opera by Philip Metres,
Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez
Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (more specifically, “Triptychs”)
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
Obit by Victoria Chang
The poem reference here is “Paternoster” from A Holy Dread
The series of poems referenced here is Tyehimba Jess’s Syncopated Sonnets from Olio
