POETRY FORMATS
Abecedarian - A form guided by alphabetical order in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet.
Acrostic - A form in which names or words are spelled out through the first letter of each line.
Aisling - An Irish dream poem in which Ireland appears to the poet personified as a woman.
Apostrophe - An exclamatory passage directly addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified) such as an inanimate object, abstract qualities, a god, etc.
Ars Poetica - A poem about poetry, examining the role of poets, poets’ relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.
Avant-garde - Experimental writing that pushes boundaries. Avant-garde rejects the canonized and standard practices of other writers and instead looks for what is new and exciting. Innovation is at the heart of avant-garde work.
Ballad - A plot-driven narrative or song with one or more characters. Often constructed in quatrain stanzas with rhyme scheme ABAB or ABCB.
Ballade - A form popular in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France that contains three main stanzas and a shorter concluding envoi.
Bhakti Poetry - A form that began in India in the sixth century and traditionally celebrates love for and devotion to specific Hindi gods.
Billet-doux - A French term that means "sweet letter." A billet-doux is a love letter, or a poem about love. George Moses Horton published a poem titled "A Billet Doux" in 1845.
Bird Song - An important influence on poets and poetry recurring across cultures and eras. A poem inspired by birdsong can be a variety of types, including a haiku or a poem that imitates bird song.
Birdsong Haiku - A short Japanese poem that is typically written in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Many poets have imitated bird song, including Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, Osip Mandelstam, and Randall Jarrell.
Blackout - Blackout words of a document to make a poem. Newspapers, magazines, social media, legislation, etc.
Blank Verse - Refers to poetry that does not rhyme but follows a regular meter, most commonly iambic pentameter.
Blues - A form that stems from the African American oral tradition and the musical tradition of the blues.
Bop - A recently invented form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each stanza followed by a repeated line or refrain.
Cento - A poetry collage. You don’t write any of the lines; rather, you assemble lines from other poems while avoiding using more than one line from a single poem. Citation is imperative!
Cinquain - A poem or stanza composed of five lines, also known as a quintain or quintet.
Closed Form - A poetic form subject to a fixed structure and pattern; the opposite of open form.
Concrete - A poem that is as much a piece of visual art made with words as it is a work of poetry.
Council - Weighty, serious advice given after careful deliberation.
Dialog - Designed to compare and contrast the perspectives of the same event or situation from the point of view of at least two parties. One variation of the dialog poem is the internal dialog poem, where dialog emanates from the internal voices of a single person.
Doha - A form in Hindi and Urdu verse that consists of rhyming couplets made up of twenty-four syllables each.
Elegy - A form of poetry in which the poet or speaker expresses grief, sadness, or loss.
Elegiac Couplet - A poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.
Each couplet consists of a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter verse. The following is a graphic representation of its scansion:
– uu | – uu | – uu | – uu | – uu | – x
– uu | – uu | – || – uu | – uu | –
– is one long syllable, u one short syllable, uu is one long or two short syllables, and x is one long or one short syllable (anceps).
The form was felt by the ancients to contrast the rising action of the first verse with a falling quality in the second. The sentiment is summarized in a line from Ovid's Amores I.1.27 Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat—"Let my work rise in six steps, fall back in five."
Translating Friedrich Schiller:
Im Hexameter steigt des Springquells silberne Säule,
Im Pentameter drauf fällt sie melodisch herab.
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Elliptical - Poetry that is oblique and without prosaic information or a logical sequence of meaning.
Epic - A long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person, or group of persons.
Epigram - A short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end.
Epistolary - Also known as an epistle, a poem of direct address that reads as a letter.
Erasure - A form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.
Existential - Poetry that pushes the boundaries of reading comprehension, often crossing into complete non-sense. Examples include dreams, drug-induced thoughts, and exotic science fiction.
Exquisite Corpse - A collaborative poetry game that traces its roots to the Parisian Surrealist Movement.
Fable - A story in prose or verse that often arrives at a moral.
Found - A collage-like form consisting entirely of language taken from outside texts.
Fragment - A part of a larger work, or a poem made to appear discontinuous or incomplete.
Free Verse - Poetry not dictated by an established form or meter and often influenced by the rhythms of speech. No rules, no form. Free verse is the most popular form of contemporary poetry.
Ghazal - A form with its roots in seventh-century Arabia that is composed of five to fifteen structurally and thematically autonomous couplets.
Glosa - A glosa begins with a four-line epigraph by another poet, where each line becomes the last line of each ten-line stanza. Lines 6, 9, and 10 of each stanza should rhyme.
Example:
Scientist by Robert Lee Brewer
“The time has come to reconsider my careen;
what good has come from bouncing away fast?
They say time is a thing that runs out,
that my buzz is nothing more than a flash.”
Example:
The Fastest Man Alive by Nate Pritts
In the beginning, there was a problem waiting
to be recognized. Then, how to form
the question, how to prove the problem
exists. Each word another puzzle piece
closer to expressing what everyone feels
even if nobody is certain what it means.
After the expression, there is the problem
of considering an array of solutions before
choosing the one that seems the most pristine.
The time has come to reconsider my careen,
my slow departure from what once made sense
into this new hypothesis, this fresh
perspective. Hand clap, toe tap, and what
data will best prove my empty case. I chase
the correlation fantastic! And pray for causation
ecstatic! My proof-worthy theory is cast
into the sea of observation and experimentation
as I fight the allure of pushing conclusions
before proving the power of every blast.
What good has come from bouncing away fast?
The holes left behind throw all work into doubt,
which is why I hold out. And then it happens,
the lightning bolt and chemicals with only me
present to receive them. How do I explain
what no one else can see? How do I refute
what I feel should be accepted without doubt?
Is someone ready to observe my future?
My past? I won’t fade quietly into the night,
I won’t race from school like some dumb trout.
They say time is a thing that runs out,
but what happens when one can travel here
and there? My heart, a drum machine, beats
past infinite Earths. I give birth to a new
type of method, one hidden in the covers
of a silver age. My hypothesis, a twist
on yet another death, some spectacular crash!
I will save the planet and the universe,
if it comes to that, but don’t stand there
and try to explain that all science is trash,
that my buzz is nothing more than a flash.
Haibun - A prose poem followed by a haiku.
Burning Haibun - A hyper-contemporary form invented by Torrin A. Greathouse in 2018. A burning haibun is prose poem that erases itself, then erases the erasure to create a haiku.
Example by Torrin A Greathouse:
Once, my mother accused me of throwing alcohol & gasoline on my emotions. Once, my father’s breath was a guilty verdict. His car curved inward like a palm, how it birthed him back as a fist & I became the bloody rise of crescent moons hidden inside. I skin my knuckles & smell the alcohol before it enters the wound. Yesterday, I read that cleaning a cut with this clear burn will worsen the scar, make the undamaged cells forget how to rebuild. Maybe each scar is the skin’s blackout. Each blackout, erasure down to the cell. Once, my father tried to collision a child into perfect. Once, I tried to drink myself into blackout or erasure myself into something more poem than memory. Since the birth of words we have languaged our history into burnable things. Papyrus, paper, plastic film. Once, I bought a box of cassettes just to watch their innards burn, flashpoint from wound to wound. Once, the cops accused me of lineage, my blood a guilty verdict, each breath my father’s. How we first called delirium tremens the blue devils—alcohol possessing the body. How each drink curls me into a tighter fist & this too is not mine or if I claim innocence, each bruised wall, each jaundiced dawn without midnight before it, becomes a guilty verdict. My mother marries an alcoholic & gives birth to kindling. This is to say, my father calls his child a faggot & watches them burn. Did I inherit this addiction from my father or the queer of my blood? Once, I swallowed liquor like guilt & named this family.
Once, my mother accused me of █████ my father’s breath▐███ ████ his ████████████████ fist ████████ hidden inside. I ███████ smell the alcohol ████████ forget how to rebuild.▐█ Each █████ blackout █████ erasure down to▐██████████ █████████████ birth of █████████ burnable things.▐███ ██Once, I ██████ just ██ watch the █████ wound ▐███████ accuse █ me of █████ my blood ██████ my father’s▐███████ ███▌possessing the body. How each drink ███████ too is not mine or ██ I claim ████████ guilt ██████ my mother █████ gives birth to █████ his child a faggot & ██████ I inherit this▐█████ queer of my blood ███ I swallow ██████ & name ███ family▐
█▌father▐█████████▌ hidden in ▐█████ ████▌erasure █ of ██ me ███ each drink▐██ ▌mine▐██ my █ faggot ██ blood▐███████
Haiku - A form that originated in Japan, is traditionally composed of three lines with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count, and often focuses on images from nature.
Hudibrastic Verse - A narrative, humorous form related to the mock epic and consisting of eight-syllable lines and rhyming couplets.
Immersive - An immersive, in-person reading that allows the viewer or listener to have a transformative experience that is connected to the reader. Rather than simply listening and clapping when expected, an immersive event transports the listener by way of sound, space, lighting, and a goal. These readings are often intimate, where energy is exchanged between the listeners and the performer. Together, in a sense, they both achieve something. Perhaps the audience is asked to take part in some way by praying, writing, intentionally interrupting the poet, holding hands donating items to a podium space, sitting close together, or asking the poet questions. What is gained may be different for both parties, but there’s a shared experience occurring that transcends a typical reading poetry.
Inaugural - A poem read at a Presidential inauguration
Incantation - A chant or formulaic use of words invoking or suggesting magic or ritual.
Lament - A poem or song expressing personal loss and grief.
Limerick - An often comical or nonsensical form composed of five lines and popular in children’s literature.
Lullaby - A song or folk poem meant to help a child fall asleep.
Lyric - A non-narrative poem, often with song-like qualities, that expresses the speaker’s personal emotions and feelings.
Milieu - Poetry with a focus on a specific place or environment.
Modern Syllabic - A syllable poem is poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses.
Monostitch - A monostich is a one-line poem or a single-line stanza, derived from Greek for "single verse". Known for extreme brevity, it often relies on imagery, irony, or a title for context to create a complete poetic experience in one line. It is a sparse, impactful form often considered a "startling fragment". Monostichs can exist as completely independent poems or as singular, standalone lines.
Key characteristics and examples include:
Structure: Often used to deliver a single vivid image or a witty insight.
The Role of Titles: The title is crucial and often works in tandem with the line, such as "Regret" by Robert Lee Brewer: "I hold a chip bag that only holds crumbs".
Origin: While originating in classical antiquity (e.g., Martial), it has roots in modern poetry, including one-line haikus or short works by poets like Guillaume Apollinaire
N+7 - A popular OuLiPo form in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary. Care is taken to ensure that the substitution is not just a compound derivative of the original, or shares a similar root, but a wholly different word. Results can vary widely depending on the version of the dictionary one uses.
Naked Poetry - Free verse poetry written without a set form and stripped of any artifice or ornament.
Nocturne - A poem set at night.
Nonsense Verse - Humorous or whimsical verse that resists rational or allegorical interpretation, also referred to as nonsense poetry.
Occasional Poem - A poem written to document or provide commentary on an event.
Ode - A lyric address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.
Open Form - A poetic form free from regularity and consistency in elements such as rhyme, line length, and form; the opposite of closed form.
Organic Form - A form that is dictated by its specific content and not by a mechanic or pre-determined system.
Oríkì - The oral praise poetry of the indigenous Yórùbá communities of Western Africa.
OuLiPo - An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts. For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Notable members of this group include the novelists George Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
Pantoum - A poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.
An example of the pantoum is Carolyn Kizer’s “Parent’s Pantoum,” the first three stanzas of which are excerpted here:
Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses
More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.
They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group—why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them.
One exciting aspect of the pantoum is its subtle shifts in meaning that can occur as repeated phrases are revised with different punctuation and thereby given a new context. Consider Ashbery’s poem “Pantoum,” and how changing the punctuation in one line can radically alter its meaning and tone: “Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.” which, when repeated, becomes, “Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!”
An incantation is created by a pantoum’s interlocking pattern of rhyme and repetition; as lines reverberate between stanzas, they fill the poem with echoes. This intense repetition also slows the poem down, halting its advancement. As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explained in The Making of a Poem, “the reader takes four steps forward, then two back,” making the pantoum a “perfect form for the evocation of a past time.”
Persona - A poem also known as a dramatic monologue in which the poet assumes the voice of another person, fictional character, or identity.
Political - Poetry that is related to activism, protest, and social concern, or that is commenting on social, political, or current events.
Praise - A poem of tribute or gratitude.
Premonition - A premonition is a strong intuitive feeling, forewarning, or anticipation that a future event, often something negative or adverse, is about to occur. It acts as an early warning or presentiment, sometimes appearing as a vivid dream or a nagging sensation.
Prose Poem (Poet's Prose) - Lacks the line breaks traditionally associated with poetry. A prose poem is the most subjective form of poetry, and labeling your poem as such will likely be upsetting to poetry purists. That said, it is the artist who labels the art, not the consumer. The term "poet's prose" is far better suited to describing this format. "Poet's prose" puts emphasis on the poet and softens the highly subjective focus on the prose itself. Some might argue that a "prose poem" is not poetry, but no one can argue that "poet's prose" is not poetic.
Proverb - A short statement or saying that expresses a basic truth.
Renga - A form consisting of alternating tercets and couplets written by multiple collaborating poets.
Riddle - A short poetic form with roots in the oral tradition that poses a question or metaphor.
Rondeau - A traditionally French form composed of a rhyming quintet, quatrain, and sestet.
Sapphic - A form dating back to ancient Greece made up of metered, four-line stanzas.
Sestina - A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words (called teleutons) of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza:
Stanza I 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi —2—5
—4—3 (Envoi can be any order)
—6—1
The difficulty in writing a sestina is being bound to six specific words. because of this limitation, it is advisable to limit the use of sestina to a singular theme or thought rather than trying to develop a narrative plot.
Sonnet - A fourteen-line poem traditionally written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes, and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization.
Shakespearean Sonnet
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
Petrarchan Sonnet (split into and octave and a sestet)
ABBAABBA CDEDCE
Spenserian Sonnet
ABAB BCBC CDCD EE
Heroic Crown of Sonnets - A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of 14 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous. This process continues until the loop is closed by the last line of the 13th poem and first line of the 14th poem repeating the first line of the first poem. In the 15th and final sonnet, each line repeats first line of the corresponding sonnet – line one of the 15th sonnet repeats the first line of the first sonnet, and the 14th line of the 15th sonnet repeats the first line of the 14th sonnet; therefor, the 15th sonnet has the same first and 14th line. A technically sound example of a heroic crown of sonnets is Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, first published in 1970.
Tanka - A 31 syllable poem, Japanese in origin, that is traditionally written in a single unbroken line but is better known in its five-line form. When written in English, tanka poems must meet criteria concerning their structure and content. Regarding structure, the first line of a tanka poem has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables, and the third line again has five syllables—a pattern also found in haiku poetry. A tanka poem deviates from a haiku poem, however, with fourth and fifth lines that are each seven syllables. The number of syllables in each line is the only stylistic constraint of tanka—there’s no need to rhyme or follow any specific meter.
5/7/5/7/7
About a place:
New York is brimming / With people who are thinking / About the city / That gives them a lease on life / But takes as much as it gives.
(This tanka begins with a picture of a well-known metropolis and transitions into a reflection on how it can uplift and drain the people who live there.)
About a plea:
You will please notice / The books on my dreary shelves / Read by nobody / They cry out a thousand times / Louder than the average man.
(This short poem proposes that leaving books unread is egregious to the tomes themselves.)
About a person:
Rushing down the hall / She can’t spare just a moment / To notice her heart / Is like a timpani drum / In search of an orchestra.
(This tanka makes the reader wonder why she’s rushing down the hall and why her quickly beating heart is so lonely. An air of mystery is common among this Japanese style of poetry.)
Terza Rima - A form invented in fourteenth-century Italy that is composed of tercets woven into a complex rhyme scheme, often described as “two steps forward, one step back.”
ABA BCB CDC
The most famous example of terza rima is Dante's epic poem, The Divine Comedy.
Triolet - An eight-line poem, French in origin, with only two rhymes used throughout.
Triptych - There seems to be a great deal of confusion and interpretation about what defines a triptych poem. The two traditional definitions:
1.) A poem of three stanzas. The first stanza comments on the past, the second comments on the present, and the third comments on the future. The second stanza is twice as long as the first and third.
Example:
COGNIZANCE: A TRIPTYCH
by Kurt MacPhearson
strange how the aliens open up
their third eye like a window
perceiving views with shades
can invoke emotions showing
revulsion as proof
inside a spectrum of lying
2.) A poem consisting of three poems of equal length displayed side-by-side, like the panels of a triptych painting. Not only do the poems work together thematically, like the painting, they actually form a fourth poem. The fourth poem is read horizontally across the three poems. This fourth poem completes the theme of the Triptych. It is this second type of triptych poem that causes confusion, because some poets label any poem that is broken into three parts as a triptych. Certainly there is plenty of room in poetry for artistic interpretation and creativity, but splitting a free verse poem into three sections and calling it a triptych is just lazy, and frankly, untrue.
Verbless - Poetry written without the use of verbs.
Verse Novel (Novel in Verse) - A hybrid form in which a narrative with structural and stylistic similarities to a traditional novel is told through poetry.
Villanelle - A highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains.
The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as:
A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.