Innovation is a poetic necessity. Poets who have stood the test of time were innovators within their schools, and many were innovators among the broader poetic community. From Homer, who took the poetic storytelling form from the oral tradition to the printed page, to New Formalism on the one end of the scale and Language Poetry on the other end, great poets have been innovators. But what does it mean to innovate with poetry? Is it confined to one idea, or several?

Of course, innovation can mean different things. But one thing that it does mean in particular is that poetry is taken to new places, new things are done with it, and new ways or modes of expression are experienced.

The range of innovation in poetry is tremendous. To say that the post-avant poets are more innovative than the New Formalist poets is not really true. Their innovation is different, but not necessarily better. Of course, the reverse is just as true.

The following is to identify ways, or modes, of innovation among poets. It might not be exhaustive. It is simply based on observation and some personal experience. But the main thing in poetic innovation is that poets seek and find new ways to be innovative. Here are some ways poets of the past have achieved that goal:

• Language – Poetry has always been intricately involved in word play. Using language in new ways is one way that poets can achieve a level of innovation;
• Form – Naturally, poets love forms, or loathe them. Nevertheless, form is a method of innovation and involves taking traditional forms and modifying them, inventing new forms, and adapting new expressions for accepted forms, just to name a few;
• Structure – Structure is another way poets have achieved innovation, but structure is not a reference to form. It is, or can be, intricately connected with form, but they are not the same thing. For instance, in free verse forms, structure is varied among poets with some poets using long lines and no strophes to some poets writing in short lines and multiple strophes. Innovation can also be made within traditional forms as Gerard Manley Hopkins proves;
• Word Usage – Different from language, word usage innovation involves using words in new ways to invent new definitions. This includes onomatopoeia, but isn’t limited to that device;
• Visual aesthetics – Many poets have achieved innovation through visual devices. Whether concrete poetry or minimalism, poets have gone to great lengths to make poetry visual;
• Performance – Not necessarily limited to performance poetry, this aspect of innovation can take poetry to new places simply by creating time and space effects for poets to work within. To borrow a phrase from Amiri Baraka, poets are like playwrights. Performance is an aspect of creativity and a way to be innovative;
• Point of View – There is likely another way to express this, but point of view comes to mind. The Language Poets have been very innovative in attempting to rid the subjective I from the poem. There is still a lot more room here for innovation. Novelists have played around with POV long enough that there have been great innovation and success in various modes of POV within the novel form. Poets have not done as much innovation in this regard, but what little innovation there has been beyond the I involves second and third person narratives. Most of that is still done through the poet’s own voice. Poets must get to the point to where we create personas and use POV more effectively;
• Music – Poetry and music are inexplicably connected. But when I speak of innovation in music I am talking mostly about prosody + rhythm. It involves metrical units, but it doesn’t need to. The Modernists were very innovative when they decided that a poem should consist of rhythm and that a poem’s music should consist of natural rhythmic units broken up by the line. That was superbly innovative for their time. It isn’t so much so today. Nevertheless, poets can achieve a level of innovation in musical rhythm and prosody such that new poetic expressions occur. I believe there is still tremendous strides to be made in the area of prosody, which has all but fallen out of use.
• Technology – Naturally, technology is a way for poets to be innovative. Today we see poets expressing themselves through video and audio recordings shared online, but that itself is a limitation. There is a lot of potential for innovation with technology, probably more so now than at any other time in history. Hypertext poetry and Google Sculpting are two new innovative ideas within poetry that are growing in popularity and achieving a level of respect online.

When it comes to innovation there are two types of poetic innovation within each of these modes. There is the prime innovator, or originator of the innovation – the person who spawned the idea and began playing with it. Then there are the secondary innovators or re-innovators. Those are the people who come behind the prime innovator and use the same ideas, but use them with their own voices and maybe even expand upon them. Some groups, like the Language Poets, may not have a prime innovator and may consider all its practitioners to be prime innovators or co-innovators. But there will still usually be a second-wave of innovation, a younger group of poets who take the ideas of the group and expand upon them or begin to use them to great effect.

Do you have any innovative ideas for your own poetry? What are you doing that no one else has ever done?