The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

(His answer was: No)



by Neal Whitman

Circling the Drain





Poetry could matter in the 21st century, but too many poets today hold the Common Reader (I hold myself to be one) in well, le't's put it this way. Look up the English department in a college catalogue and you will see a listed course abbreviated as Contemp. Poetry." But, if the Registrar followed the Truth in Advertising dictum, it should be listed as "Contempt Poetry." In contempt of us? Yes, they do. Too much of what The Pobiz puts out there deserves to be flushed down the well, let's block that metaphor. But, speaking of flush, have you heard of farf?



Clive James wrote in July-August 2009 Poetry that, "Almost everyone writes poetry, but scarcely anyone one can write a poem." I imagine him circling the 30 pages that preceded his commentary. This was a special section, "Flarf and Conceptual Writing" edited by Kenneth Goldsmith who introduces these new forms of poetry by admitting that "no one has written a word of it. It has been grabbed, cut, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry."



One "flarf" poem was entitled, "Why do I hate flarf so much?" by Drew Gardner. Confession: I had to consult the footnotes because I was not sure if it was a flarf or an editorial denouncing it. It is a flarf. One "conceptual" poem was one of Goldsmith's own: "Metropolitan Forecast," a transcription from the New York Times, September 11, 2001. This poem, the weather report, appears in his book, The Day, in which he transcribed every word of the paper that day. He did this once before on September 1, 2000, in Day. As I circled the 45 of pages of "regular" poems that precede the 30 pages of "flarf," my eye was caught by another "f" word: "Blowing the Fluff Away" by Robyn Sarah.



Here I found more weight than flarf in her ode to "a sprig of an unknown bloom" that, over time, "had turned to fluff some months ago." Her poem is full of wonder. Her words lifted off the page like, well like fluff. Her words had the power to lift me too. I thought I had my full of flarf and fluff until my copy of July-August American Poetry Review arrived. There on the cover, a photograph of Gary Snyder standing on a mountain top. Windblown. Grey beard. Ruggedly handsome. From my angle, looks like an advert for Ralph Lauren designer sunglasses. Turn the page and there they are: frags by Gary Snyder nine of 'em. Here is one:



"White Rumps"



Northern Flicker



Pronghorns



Dwarf stars



receding



Am so jealous. Wish my name were Gary Snyder so APR would publish my pseudo-haiku frags. Here is one:



"



Found at Baxter State Park"



Bear Badger



Berry Bird



Constellations



with no road



July 5 2009, the New York Times, Travel Section, "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown" by Mary Duenwald: Here is an invitation to walk the paths where Mary Oliver found the words to write, "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods." No, not "found" in the conceptual poetry sense of Ms. Oliver copying down the words on the National Park Service signs posted along the trail (one of the Goldsmith's conceptual poetry selections was a shopping mall directory "found" by Robert Fitterman, whose publisher is Ugly Duckling Presse really)!. No, in the last century, Mary Oliver found poems in her heart and soul, as in I'd seen their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night under the pines, walking like two mute and beautiful woman toward the deeper woods Do I hear, "click, click, click"? No, please, no. That is not Kenneth Goldsmith word processing the July 5, 2009, New York Times, to produce his third 900-page transcription?



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Neal Whitman spent 37 years teaching medical school faculty how to be better teachers. Thus, as s a Doctor of Education, his students were Doctors of Medicine. In hit last ten years as a medical school professor, Dr. Whitman gave special attention to demonstrating how the Arts, including literary, performing, and visual, can be used to complement Science in the education of medical students. As Neal brought poetry into the medical school classroom, he realized that there was a poet inside of him, and he began writing poetry in 2005. Neal Whitman retired from his "paid" profession in 2008 as a Professor Emeritus of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City and relocated with his wife Elaine to Pacific Grove, California, where he pursues his second "unpaid" profession as a poet. His personalized California auto plate is PG POET in a customized frame inscribed "Poetic LIcense."





http://www.helium.com/items/1569400-contempt-for-the-common-reader

By ajcor

http://ajcor.hubpages.com/hub/10-Different-Types-Of-Poetry_





Why only ten different types of poetry when with just a little sleuthing you can find about 50 different types or styles of poetry ? So should you be a poet or even wanting to be a poet - then these different ways of writing poetry will help you to recoqnise, digest and even extrapolate your own words so that you can match your wordsmithing with a given but identifiable style or method - no matter what your personal and particular choice of style is.



But possibly you haven't found your own style yet? So maybe you could write your words in your own inimitable fashion and then somehow massage them to meet one of the more easily (or not so easily!) recoqnised literary styles as outlined below.



Indeed you may have already have written poetry in your own style and don't know quite what type of poetry you write! Read the varying examples and see if you can recoqnise if your style falls somewhere in the list- you may well be very surprised with your efforts.



Imagine saying at your next dinner party "Oh yes, I write "etheree poetry in a truly epic form - using alternate forms of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter!" gulp... could be the re-action of your dining partners. What fun!



A big thank you to the work of shadowpoetry.com where I found all this information and where you can also go to find fine examples of each and every style mentioned. Amazingly interesting!



and so for your edification.......



Acrostic Poetry



Acrostic Poetry is where the first letter of each line spells a word, usually using the same words as in the title.



Ballad



A short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain. The story of a ballad can originate from a wide range of subject matter but most frequently deals with folk-lore or popular legends. They are written in straight-forward verse, seldom with detail, but always with graphic simplicity and force. Most ballads are suitable for singing and, while sometimes varied in practice, are generally written in ballad meter, i.e., alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the last words of the second and fourth lines rhyming.



Cinquain



Cinquain is a short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines. It was developed by the Imagist poet, Adelaide Crapsey. Another form, sometimes used by school teachers to teach grammar, is as follows:



Line 1: Noun



Line 2: Description of Noun



Line 3: Action



Line 4: Feeling or Effect



Line 5: Synonym of the initial noun.



Clerihew



A Clerihew is a comic verse consisting of two couplets and a specific rhyming scheme, aabb invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) at the age of 16. The poem is about/deals with a person/character within the first rhyme. In most cases, the first line names a person, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person.



Diamante



A Diamante is a seven-lined contrast poem set up in a diamond shape. The first line begins with a noun/subject, and second line contains two adjectives that describe the beginning noun. The third line contains three words ending in -ing relating to the noun/subject. The forth line contains two words that describe the noun/subject and two that describe the closing synonym/antonym. If using an antonym for the ending, this is where the shift should occur. In the fifth line are three more -ing words describing the ending antonym/synonym, and the sixth are two more adjectives describing the ending antonym/synonym. The last line ends with the first noun's antonym or synonym.To make it a bit simpler, here is a diagram.



Line 1: Noun or subject



Line 2: Two Adjectives describing the first noun/subect



Line 3: Three -ing words describing the first noun/subect



Line 4: Four words: two about the first noun/subect, two about the antonym/synonym



Line 5: Three -ing words about the antonym/synonym



Line 6: Two adjectives describing the antonym/synonym



Line 7: Antonym/synonym for the subject



Didactic Poetry



Didactic Poetry is a form of poetry intended for instruction such as for knowledge or to teach.



Epic



An Epic is a long narrative poem celebrating the adventures and achievements of a hero...epics deal with the traditions, mythical or historical, of a nation.examples: Beowulf, The Iliad and the Odyssey, and Aeneid



Epitaph



An epitaph is a brief poem inscribed on a tombstone praising a deceased person, usually with rhyming lines.



Epigram



Epigrams are short satirical poems ending with either a humorous retort or a stinging punchline. Used mainly as expressions of social criticism or political satire, the most common forms are written as a couplet: a pair of rhymed lines in the same meter.



Practioners of this poetic expression include John Dunne, Ben Jonson, William Blake and Robert Frost.



Epitaph



An epitaph is a brief poem inscribed on a tombstone praising a deceased person, usually with rhyming lines.



Etheree



The poetry form, Etheree, consists of 10 lines of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 syllables. Etheree can also be reversed and written 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Get creative and write an Etheree with more than one verse, but follow suit with an inverted syllable count.



Reversed Etheree: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1



Double Etheree: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1



...Triple Etheree, Quadruple Etheree, and so on!



Free Verse



Free Verse is an irregular form of poetry in which the content free of traditional rules of versification, (freedom from fixed meter or rhyme).In moving from line to line, the poet's main consideration is where to insert line breaks. Some ways of doing this include breaking the line where there is a natural pause or at a point of suspense for the reader. Following the direction of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, many modern day poets use this particular form of expression.



Ghazal



A Ghazal is a poem that is made up like an odd numbered chain of couplets, where each couplet is an independent poem. It should be natural to put a comma at the end of the first line. The Ghazal has a refrain of one to three words that repeat, and an inline rhyme that preceedes the refrain.



Lines 1 and 2, then every second line, has this refrain and inline rhyme, and the last couplet should refer to the authors pen-name... The rhyming scheme is AA bA cA dA eA etc.



Haiku



Most popular definition, but there is more to haiku than meets the eye:



Haiku (also called nature or seasonal haiku) is an unrhymed Japanese verse consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables (5, 7, 5) or 17 syllables in all. Haiku is usually written in the present tense and focuses on nature (seasons). The 5/7/5 rule was made up for school children to understand and learn this type of poetry.



For an in depth description of Haiku, please visit the Shadow Poetry



Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka



section. There is much more to haiku than the made up 5/7/5 version.



Kyrielle



A Kyrielle is a French form of rhyming poetry written in quatrains (a stanza consisting of 4 lines), and each quatrain contains a repeating line or phrase as a refrain (usually appearing as the last line of each stanza). Each line within the poem consists of only eight syllables. There is no limit to the amount of stanzas a Kyrielle may have, but three is considered the accepted minimum.



Some popular rhyming schemes for a Kyrielle are: aabB, ccbB, ddbB, with B being the repeated line, or abaB, cbcB, dbdB.Mixing up the rhyme scheme is possible for an unusual pattern of: axaZ, bxbZ, cxcZ, dxdZ, etc. with Z being the repeated line.



The rhyme pattern is completely up to the poet.



Kyrielle Sonnet



A Kyrielle Sonnet consists of 14 lines (three rhyming quatrain stanzas and a non-rhyming couplet). Just like the traditional Kyrielle poem, the Kyrielle Sonnet also has a repeating line or phrase as a refrain (usually appearing as the last line of each stanza). Each line within the Kyrielle Sonnet consists of only eight syllables. French poetry forms have a tendency to link back to the beginning of the poem, so common practice is to use the first and last line of the first quatrain as the ending couplet. This would also re-enforce the refrain within the poem. Therefore, a good rhyming scheme for a Kyrielle Sonnet would be: AabB, ccbB, ddbB, AB-or- AbaB, cbcB, dbdB, AB.



Lanturne



The Lanturne is a five-line verse shaped like a Japanese lantern with a syllabic pattern of one,



two, three, four, one.



Limerick



A Limerick is a rhymed humorous or nonsense poem of five lines which originated in Limerick, Ireland.



The Limerick has a set rhyme scheme of : a-a-b-b-a with a syllable structure of: 9-9-6-6-9.



The rhythm of the poem should go as follows:



Lines 1, 2, 5: weak, weak, STRONG, weak, weak, STRONG, weak, weak, STRONG, weak, weak



Lines 3, 4: weak, weak, STRONG, weak, weak, STRONG, weak, weak



Minute Poetry



The Minute Poem is rhyming verse form consisting of 12 lines of 60 syllables written in strict iambic meter. The poem is formatted into 3 stanzas of 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4 syllables.



The rhyme scheme is as follows: aabb, ccdd, eeff



Mirrored Refrain



The Mirrored Refrain is rhyming verse form constructed by

Stephanie Repnyek.



Monody



A monody is a poem in which one person laments another's death.



(Also see Dirge, Elegy, Epitaph)



Monorhyme



A Monorhyme is a poem in which all the lines have the same end rhyme.



Naani



Naani is one of Indian's most popular Telugu poems. Naani means an expression of one and all. It consists of 4 lines, the total lines consists of 20 to 25 syllables. The poem is not bounded to a particular subject. Generally it depends upon human relations and current statements. This poetry was introduced by one of the renowned Telugu poets Dr. N.Gopi, presently working as vice-chancellor to Telugu University, Andhra Pradesh.



Nonet



A nonet has nine lines. The first line has nine syllables, the second line eight syllables, the third line seven syllables, etc... until line nine that finishes withone syllable. It can be on any subject and rhyming is optional.



line 1 - 9 syllables



line 2 - 8 syllables



line 3 - 7 syllables



line 4 - 6 syllables



line 5 - 5 syllables



line 6 - 4 syllables



line 7 - 3 syllables



line 8 - 2 syllables



line 9 - 1 syllable



Ode



An Ode is a poem praising and glorifying a person, place or thing.



Ottava Rima



A Ottava Rima is a poem written in 8-line octives. Each line is of a 10 or 11 syllable count in the following rhyme:



one octive poem. abababcc



two octive poem. abababcc, dededeff



three octive poem. abababcc, dededeff, ghghghii



...so on and so on



Palindrome Poetry



Also Known as Mirrored Poetry



A palindrome, by definition, is a word, phrase, verse, sentence, or even poem that reads the same



forward or backward. It stems from the Greek word palindromos: palin , meaning again , and dromos , meaning a running . Combining the two together, the Greek meaning gives us, running back again



Pantoum



The pantoum consists of a series of quatrains rhyming ABAB in which the second and fourth lines of a quatrain recur as the first and third lines in the succeeding quatrain; each quatrain introduces a new second rhyme as BCBC, CDCD. The first line of the series recurs as the last line of the closing quatrain, and third line of the poem recurs as the second line of the closing quatrain, rhyming ZAZA. The design is simple:



Line 1



Line 2



Line 3



Line 4



Line 5 (repeat of line 2)



Line 6



Line 7 (repeat of line 4)



Line 8







Continue with as many stanzas as you wish, but the ending stanzathen repeats the second and fourth lines of the previous stanza (as its first and third lines), and also repeats the third line of the first stanza, as its second line, and the first line of the first stanza as its fourth. So the first line of the poem is also the last.



Last stanza:



Line 2 of previous stanza



Line 3 of first stanza



Line 4 of previous stanza



Line 1 of first stanza



Quatern



A Quatern is a sixteen line French form composed of four quatrains. It is similar to the Kyrielle and the Retourne. It has a refrain that is in a different place in each quatrain. The first line of stanza one is the second line of stanza two, third line of stanza three, and fourth line of stanza four. A quatern has eight syllables per line. It does not have to be iambic or follow a set rhyme scheme.



line 1



line 2



line 3



line 4



line 5



line 6 (line 1)



line 7



line 8



line 9



line 10



line 11 (line 1)



line 12



line 13



line 14



line 15



line 16 (line 1)







- Sent in by Crystal Rose.



Quatrain



A Quatrain is a poem consisting of four lines of verse with a specific rhyming scheme.A few examples of a quatrain rhyming scheme are as follows:



#1) abab



#2) abba -- envelope rhyme



#3) aabb



#4) aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd -- chain rhyme



Quinzaine



The English word quinzaine come from the French word qunize , meaning fifteen. A quinzaine is an unrhymed verse of fifteen syllables.



These syllables are distributed among three lines so that there are seven syllables in the first line, five in the second line and three in the third line (7/5/3). The first line makes a statement. The next two lines ask a question relating to that statement.



Rispetto



A Rispetto, an Italian form of poetry, is a complete poem of two rhyme quatrains with strict meter. The meter is usually iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of abab ccdd. A Heroic Rispetto is written in Iambic pentameter, usually featuring the same rhyme scheme.



Rondeau



A Rondeau is a French form, 15 lines long, consisting of three stanzas: a quintet, a quatrain, and a sestet with a rhyme scheme as follows: aabba aabR aabbaR. Lines 9 and 15 are short - a refrain (R) consisting of a phrase taken from line one. The other lines are longer (but all of the same metrical length).



Rondel



A French form consisting of 13 lines: two quatrains and a quintet, rhyming as follows: ABba abAB abbaA. The capital letters are the refrains, or repeats.



Rondelet



The Rondelet is a French form consisting of a single septet with two rhymes and one refrain:



AbAabbA



. The capital letters are the refrains, or repeats. The refrain is written in tetra-syllabic or dimeter and the other lines are twice as long - octasyllabic or tetrameter.



Sedoka



The Sedoka is an unrhymed poem made up of two three-line katauta with the following syllable counts: 5/7/7, 5/7/7. A Sedoka, pair of katauta as a single poem, may address the same subject from differing perspectives.



Katauta



is an unrhymed three-line poem the following syllable counts: 5/7/7.



Senryu



Most popular definition, but there is more to senryu than meets the eye:



Senryu (also called human haiku) is an unrhymed Japanese verse consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables (5, 7, 5) or 17 syllables in all. Senryu is usually written in the present tense and only references to some aspect of human nature or emotions. They possess no references to the natural world and thus stand out from nature/seasonal haiku.



Septolet



The Septolet is a poem consisting of seven lines containing fourteen words with a break in between the two parts. Both parts deal with the same thought and create a picture.



Sestina



The sestina is a strict ordered form of poetry, dating back to twelfth century French troubadours. It consists of six six-line (sestets) stanzas followed by a three-line envoy. Rather than use a rhyme scheme, the six ending words of the first stanza are repeated as the ending words of the other five stanzas in a set pattern. The envoy uses two of the ending words per line, again in a set pattern.



First stanza, ..1 ..2 ..3 ..4 ..5 ..6



Second stanza, ..6 ..1 ..5 .. 2 ..4 ..3



Third stanza, ..3 ..6 ..4 ..1 ..2 ..5



Fourth stanza, ..5 ..3 ..2 ..6 ..1 ..4



Fifth stanza, ..4 ..5 ..1 ..3 ..6 ..2



Sixth stanza, ..2 ..4 ..6 ..5 ..3 ..1



Concluding tercet:



middle of first line ..2, end of first line ..5



middle of second line ..4, end of second line..3



middle if third line ..6, end of third line ..1



Shape Poetry



-Shape Poetry is also associated with Concrete Poetry-



Shape is one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. Poetry can take on many formats,



but one of the most inventive forms is for the poem to take on the shape of its subject. Therefore,



if the subject of your poem were of a flower, then the poem would be shaped like a flower. If it



were of a fish, then the poem would take on the shape of a fish. >