The pursuit of form by Robert Pinsky

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70037/the-pursuit-of-form

“Here’s another way of thinking about “body knowledge” and poetry: pursuing excellence, athletes and musicians willingly, even eagerly, submit themselves to tedious, grinding repetition and analysis. They try to cultivate by practice the most effective way of doing each thing, each best movement so reliably summoned that you don’t need to think about it in the fluid, immediate, rapid, intuitive performance of your skills. The goal, in a word used by those who work in these pursuits: to perfect their form.

But beyond that process, or extending it, true form is creative. As a verb, “form” means to make or generate. (In a neat parallel, the verb “generate” is related to the noun “genre.”) Coaches rightly speak of the best form, but there is no mechanical template: true form is what each person discovers, enhancing or adapting it each time. Form is what makes the batted ball sail over the fence, or the leaping dancer sail across the stage, and for no two people is the successful form exactly alike. Similarities may be important, and they are worth studying, but the best form has an element of idiosyncrasy. Everyone is different. And in practice, any one person will hit the ball or leap a bit differently each time.

In keeping with that flexibility, form should be transformative and original. It can elevate the ordinary, re-sharpen the familiar:

You that seek what life is in death
Now find it air that once was breath:
New names unknown, old names gone,
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.”