Oh my! It's Poetry Friday and for the first time in an AGE I am back and writing with my poetry sisters. This month, it's skinny poems ( Read more... )

This month, my poetry sisters and I are working using what's called the Aphra Behn form. It is a form used by the female author and poet, Aphra Behn, back in the 1600s. I like to think of it as a mini-sonnet. It uses 9 lines of iambic tetrameter (4 poetic feet per line) plus one of iambic pentameter (5 poetic feet), for a total of 10 lines. And its ( Read more... )

Today, I'm sharing a raccontino, which is a new form for me to work in. Heck, for all I know, it's a newer form in general. All I know is that this is what the Poetry Princesses opted to write for this month, so I opted in and wrote mine ( Read more... )

This post is largely a reprise from a post I wrote in 2006, though I've made minor tweaks. It's here because I'm currently working on a post for the poetry princesses - we are supposed to be posting original sestinas this Friday, and mine is not yet done. I simply have to get better at meeting these deadlines and stop postponing until the last ( Read more... )

Today, a (possibly tl;dr) post about how to write a villanelle, since I'm currently working on one with my poetry sisters, which is supposed to post this Friday ( Read more... )

Today, I want to talk about a particular form of poetry called the pantoum. The pantoum is an evocative form that originates in Malaysia. It involves a lot of repetition, since each line will repeat once in the poem. A pantoum can have as many stanzas as one likes. Each stanza holds four lines. Lines two and four of stanza one become lines one and ( Read more... )

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Fans of the 1995 movie version of Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, with Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon, will likely recognize part of the featured stanza below. It's from Edmund Spenser's epic work, The Faerie Queene, an extremely long allegory written in praise of Queen Elizabeth I in the late 16th century. Spenser ( Read more... )

One of the simplest rhyme schemes is the rhymed couplet. Basically, two sentences (a couplet), the ends of which rhyme (rhymed couplet). Although usually there's some sort of metre involved as well, it's not always the case.

Some of the best English literature has employed the device. For instance, Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales using rhymed ( Read more... )