Zend Form: How do I make it bend to my will?

Render each element individually in your view - for example

<!-- view script here -->
<form method="POST">
Name: <?php echo $this->myForm->getElement('name')->render(); ?>
some other text between the fields
Birthdate: <?php echo $this->myForm->getElement('birthdate')->render(); ?>
<input type="submit" />
</form>

This maintains the ability to use the Zend_Form view helpers (i.e. to display error messages and maintain the values of the form fields when validation fails) but gives you full customization ability.

If you want to go further, then turn off the default decorators of the individual form elements and then either attach your own to further customize exactly what tags are used (i.e. for error messages and labels) or don't use decorators at all (other than to render the form element itself) and then write all the surrounding HTML manually. Complete customization ability without losing the benefits of Zend_Form, both at the form level and at the view level.

If you just want to add arbitrary markup before or after your form elements without using the ViewScript decorator, you could use my AnyMarkup decorator: http://www.zfsnippets.com/snippets/view/id/62

For example, here is how you would prepend an input field with an image inside a wrapper tag (needs include paths for autoloading to be set correctly):

$form->addElement('text', 'my_field', array(
  'label' => 'Enter Info:',
  'decorators' => array(
    'ViewHelper',
    array('AnyMarkup', array(
      'markup' => '<span class="imgwrapper">'.
        '<img src="info.png" alt="info icon"/></span>'),
      'placement' => 'prepend'
    ),
    'HtmlTag',
    'Label'
  )
);

whycantitbemorethan25c mentioned them above, but ViewScripts give you extremely fine-grained control for rendering forms. Zend_Form is meant to be fast and so it assumes many defaults like standard decorators and orders the element the way they were added to the form object. With the ViewScript you can skip much of that that and place all of your elements however you would like within normal HTML.

Don't skip over the concept of Decorators entirely though. They style the individual elements even if they are used in a ViewScript later. For example, you can use them for error messages as others have suggested.

If you have very complicated form that has multiple data points with similar actions (think of a list of users with active/inactive buttons and a delete button for each) you should consider Zend_Form_SubForm. The subforms can utilize the ViewScripts just like normal forms and if you cascade a form with a ViewScript with subforms with their own ViewScripts you end up with nicely contained logic and presentation that is much more powerful than just a straight form.