Poetry Forms

Poetry Forms

                I usually tend to write poetry free form, but over the past few days, I have wanted to write structured poetry. The poetry form that I know best, and can write almost as easy as breathing, is the Haiku; which I have written about already. I am also familiar with the Sonnet, and need to find some of the old ones that I have written to post, though I will be writing more of those soon. Yesterday, I was experimenting with Nonet form, Cinquain form, Ketauta form, Sedoka, and Lanturne form.

                A brief overview of the forms:

Nonet: Nine lines, each line going down in syllable from 9 to 1

Cinquain: five lines, each line’s syllable are 2,4,6,8,2

Ketauta: three lines, 5/7/7

Sedoka: two stanza, two Ketauta, 5/7/7 - 5/7/7

Lanturne: five line, with syllable restraints of 1/2/3/4/1

                I wrote some of all of these. I also reviewed the forms Quatrain, Quatern, and Pantoum, though I have not written any of those yet since reviewing them. I will go over the rules for these in another post

                Free form poetry lends itself to being a way to express a thought without any constraints. It is, at times, the easiest to write, since its boundaries are only what sounds and feels right to the author and audience (this is mostly what I write, if you couldn’t tell). Structured poetry, though, can be a wonderful tool and exercise to build up a relationship with words themselves. Being forced to paint a picture and make a point with only X amount of syllables can be hard. It doesn’t always work out at first, but sometimes it can be a decent draft for an idea that might work better in another form.

                I was experimenting with serial Haiku, where multiple Haiku tell a small story and evoke a scene, yet each Haiku must be complete to itself. I have already begun playing with the same concept with the five forms I outlined above, which I will share as time goes on and I have edited them sufficiently.

                 I am also probably going to go through and edit the poetry posts that I have already written to add a note at the bottom about the type of poetry, in addition to the notes that I tend to add to the poems anyway.

                Anyway, enjoy!