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A Rundown of Structured Poetry

rousseau

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Jun 23, 2010
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This thread is mainly directed at WAB who seems to be well studied in more formal, structured poetry. I don't know much about this style of poetry at all and am interested in learning some basics, and maybe attempting some pieces that adhere to an actual structure.

Unfortunately I don't have much time to drop a lengthy OP so I'll just add a few conversation starters:

1) What are the most popular forms? Which forms should I know about?
2) Are there poetic forms that are considered more obscure and esoteric?
3) What are your favourite forms and why?
4) Which poets were considered the strongest with a more structured style?

Looking forward to input!
 
This thread is mainly directed at WAB who seems to be well studied in more formal, structured poetry. I don't know much about this style of poetry at all and am interested in learning some basics, and maybe attempting some pieces that adhere to an actual structure.

Unfortunately I don't have much time to drop a lengthy OP so I'll just add a few conversation starters:

1) What are the most popular forms? Which forms should I know about?
2) Are there poetic forms that are considered more obscure and esoteric?
3) What are your favourite forms and why?
4) Which poets were considered the strongest with a more structured style?

Looking forward to input!

Heavens to Betsy! Another poetry thread.

Will be back! :joy:
 
This thread is mainly directed at WAB who seems to be well studied in more formal, structured poetry. I don't know much about this style of poetry at all and am interested in learning some basics, and maybe attempting some pieces that adhere to an actual structure.

Unfortunately I don't have much time to drop a lengthy OP so I'll just add a few conversation starters:

1) What are the most popular forms? Which forms should I know about?
2) Are there poetic forms that are considered more obscure and esoteric?
3) What are your favourite forms and why?
4) Which poets were considered the strongest with a more structured style?

Looking forward to input!

I've loved poetry all my life and am an amateur poet. I participate on online poetry forums. I can offer my two cents:

1. For structured poetry, I've found the most popular forms to be as follows (and I've listed some poets who have written strong examples in some of these structured styles):
Limerick
Haiku--Matsuo Basho
Sonnet
Villanelle--Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, Elizabeth Bishop
Sestina--Elizabeth Bishop, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ezra Pound
Acrostic--EA Poe, Lewis Carroll, Melvina Germain
Cinquain
List Poem
Pantoum
Rondeau--James Henry Leigh Hunt, Henry Van Dyke
Rondel
Triolet--Thomas Hardy

2. Abstract (Sound) Poems
Alphabet Poems
Cascades
Chants
Contrapuntal Poetry
Echo Verse
Golden Shovel
Palindromes
Paradelles
Roundabouts
Tautograms

3. I really like all the above as well as the following:
Fibs
Lunes
Haynakus
Kimos
Nonets
Tricubes
Triversen

The reason I like those in #3 is because it gives a specific form to your thoughts and ideas without trying to force rhymes or meter. You can still sound modern but there is structure to it. There is nothing more daunting for a writer or artist than staring at a blank piece of paper or canvas with a limitless number of possibilities rushing through your head. By setting yourself limits (through structured forms, or meter, or rhyme schemes, or a mixture of all), you focus your ideas and do not succumb to writer's block as easily or as often.
 
Rousseau,

I will dig into this topic as soon as I can.

I am in a motel and I just retrieved my Kindle Fire. Typing will be slow going.

:joy:

Hawkingfan,

Greetings, well-met fellow, hail!

I wonder if I know you. Were you ever at PFFA or Eratosphere?

Go private if need be.

Also, William Empson was no slouch with the villanelle.

More later. I require more cheap beer and college basketball...
 
Structured poetry. I've always just called it 'Formal',** or 'Traditional '. Doesn't matter.

I have put this belief of mine forward before:

I believe that someone who wants to write poetry is much better off learning the fundamentals first. As with any craft. I do not care for Judson Jerome's advice: that amateur poets should think of poetry as a hobby. Yeeeesh! No, no, no! If your approach to poetry is as a hobbyist, then may I impolitely suggest that you take up stamp collecting?

There happens to be an insufferably gigantic, heaping colossal tremendously malodorous pile of horrifyingly bad poetry in the world. We as decent and caring citizens must put a stop to this! Or at least put a damper on it! For the love of God! And even for the love of Pete!...............|

To be continued... Thumbs getting tired! MUCH more to say. Great topic, rousseau....[P][ENT][/ENT][/P]

**You DID say 'formal', rousseau. Sorry.
 
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Structured poetry. I've always just called it 'Formal',** or 'Traditional '. Doesn't matter.

I have put this belief of mine forward before:

I believe that someone who wants to write poetry is much better off learning the fundamentals first. As with any craft. I do not care for Judson Jerome's advice: that amateur poets should think of poetry as a hobby. Yeeeesh! No, no, no! If your approach to poetry is as a hobbyist, then may I impolitely suggest that you take up stamp collecting?

I think one of problems here is that there isn't much of a profit motive in poetry anymore, and I think you can make good analogies with other art forms. For example, I can't think of many people in my city capable of executing realist paintings on the level of those done in Renaissance Italy. But I think they could do it if there were an incentive. In reality, painters of a former time became so skilled at it because they could make a living do it.

Similarly, if there were crowds of people lining up to buy new poetry you'd like see more excellent poets, but since there isn't those who are interested in poetry have no real motive to become great at it. I'm a pretty good example of this - I've thrown a few books together, spent a lot of time in the hobby, and in the end I've lost money.

So I think it's true, if you want to make a name for yourself there is likely an appropriate way forward, but to me taking it up as a non-serious past-time or hobby is fine. Personally, I try not to think of any poetry as bad, just a particular expression of a particular person. Yes, some I find more boring than others, but to the writer what has been expressed is important to them.

There happens to be an insufferably gigantic, heaping colossal tremendously malodorous pile of horrifyingly bad poetry in the world. We as decent and caring citizens must put a stop to this! Or at least put a damper on it! For the love of God! And even for the love of Pete!...............|

My personal take, or at least my personal preference, is poetry that is interesting, that says something unique. I like to think of poetry as a form a philosophy which expresses ideas that can't be put into explicit vernacular. And in that light I'm usually looking for authors who say something that resonates with my own worldview, not so much those who are just good with words, or studied in tradition. This is largely why I've always been so drawn to the writing of Cohen - he said a lot of interesting things. Similarly with a few Nobel Prize winners I've read - they show a depth of thought that is unusual in the genre.

I think the problem here is that depth of thought isn't something we find in many people, so to get an intersection of both that quality and an interest in poetry is even more rare.
 
Yeeeesh! No, no, no! If your approach to poetry is as a hobbyist, then may I impolitely suggest that you take up stamp collecting?

I'd be too afraid of collecting the stamps wrong.
 
Okay, that last post of mine was full of sound and fury, signifying silliness.

Of course it is okay to eschew any and all of the formal constraints of rhymed, metered, or otherwise measured verse. About one third of my output is in free verse. In fact, I write in a lot of experimental styles, including Sound poetry, and Found poetry. Hey that rhymed!

I think it's important to discuss whether one regards structure in poetry as a bad or a good - is it a constraint or a restraint?

Try thinking of rhyme and/or meter as a device, a part of your toolkit, rather than some arbitrary set of rules and parameters, some unnecessary hearkining back to ancient times, a formality which stifles and limits your expression.

Might that feel better?

I want to present some examples of the power and utility of rhyme and/or meter. For the latter, maybe something obvious like Poe, Byron, Kipling? For the power and utility of rhyme, I know right where I'm going: three grand masters, Tennyson, Robinson, and Emily Dickinson. Hey, they all end in 'son'! Lol. Hmm...

Will do this tonight hopefully, after my shift. It's a double. :joy:
 
Please see post number 9

Rousseau,

I have read your last post several times. When you say you like poetry that "says something unique", I am trying to wrack my brain to think of something unique that some poet said. Could you possibly mean "something said in a unique way"?

I would love to think that I've said something unique, but when you consider thousands of years of communication, and thousands of years of written communication, saying something unique is unlikely.

For me, poetry comes from a love of language, a love of words. For me, words have a particular taste and texture, they have an auditory quality as well as a more rudimentary quality which has to do with communication, vocabulary, and meaning.

Have you heard of nonsense poetry? Have you heard of Sound poetry?

Here is my foray into Sound poetry. The words carry only as much meaning as their power as utterances or iterations will allow. From my webpage:

Diin Ocquonoctua (A Sound Poem)

Poems performed are poems sounded, where the sounding by the voice or by instruments acting as surrogate voices can bring a new sense of power/empowerment to performers and auditors. The further extensions and transformations of voice move it closer and closer to "the condition of music," to the point where words and syntax — the common constituents of language — are obscured, subordinated, or totally abandoned. The push toward such a poetry has long been present at the far limits of the modernist project and with it the recognition of similar processes and works outside of literature as such. Thus Velimir Khlebnikov, early in the game, with reference to a traditional Russian poetry equivalent to his newly minted zaum language:

Spells and incantations, what we call magic words, the sacred language of paganism … are rows of mere syllables which the intellect can make no sense of, and they form a kind of beyondsense [zaum] language in folk speech. Nevertheless an enormous power over mankind is attributed to these incomprehensible and magic spells, a direct influence upon the fate of man. … The magic in a word remains magic even if it is not understood and loses none of its power. Poems may be understandable or they may not, but they must be good, they must be truthful. (Translation from the Russian by Paul Schmidt) - Jerome Rothenberg http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings.html


Illia shanta desit, penui tevit o novo,
ed tues speci kalcho, te diti shangra natta,
spui zezonte kli evi, derche pui tankat,
o te min denta biniavo lor kalaii envo da shakt.
Tues menehesu feldo, finna voiheshu shent
talik ed duo nuesa, shali in teka, oveni.
Biejake tenko polto, te tues indomo valo.
Henta macanta shela, duo dentika tegant,
ed vena yordo menako, tues adolvo shent
irdi benith duis ordit, puis posheko fultis,
illia shanta edi, es potu timortho dehi.

Totumen deffa hesha, cris et dana bedova,
mortumen fonta kiella, as ed tued id dievi.
Non ak akande, tormo es tues toid esta,
illiia benquo vento, towoor mena casata,
ish ina fulti toworka do esh incomto plekta,
cana bet borno, indui, enduisha sot.
Mena can templa udorphoset, rina, rina quelo
bei endado da calsa de morno, ahasth.
Sot tues fumit a glanta, tezida morno eganta,
suis et a ganta quormosa a benta, banli Chi!
In id indingota plues vanda du ples, fekant.
Tues et odi, beyanka, tiyendha depit tramak.
De do i o se i remaka. Ontov filest eshilla.
Ilies es stilla, tues ed op, enna chaihka,
buenit denno, sot yanga, sed yis, olto benoto.

Dolia ghenata tuos, et id benadi shaldo,
tues yi haddi fenulta, cris toh tokit tondanti.
Shent, illia shantavento, puier dena velago,
pormos dokeh shi dano, quilo quuai na ti.
Jhed! ig vornosto zenaltis, ed tormo yadi ki
quat el te damma, te damma, tues eth shont.
Beno pir aldon ishentak, khali hedianna,
shentin o feldi fahnka puier codolfto khelid,
Ba damo tenti shistolo, vuquielati, Chi!
Nesto bilendi tamka, tenka di shesh,
volden es ed, ed voldo, vadla do si, si veka.
Belda jhos shesso kanta, illia ganta menoldo,
cando di nestili kloshist, zentus zenalta yot.
Quielpet in dano ve mortoshos, pello polto adiin.
Oquentis kesto i kempo, suyo sha sed tues di!
 
Yeeeesh! No, no, no! If your approach to poetry is as a hobbyist, then may I impolitely suggest that you take up stamp collecting?

I'd be too afraid of collecting the stamps wrong.

What do you mean, Wiploc?

It was a joke. It was, at least, intended as a joke.

So, lemme study on it for a minute ...

Yeah, yeah, I still think it works.
 
This thread is mainly directed at WAB who seems to be well studied in more formal, structured poetry. I don't know much about this style of poetry at all and am interested in learning some basics, and maybe attempting some pieces that adhere to an actual structure.

Unfortunately I don't have much time to drop a lengthy OP so I'll just add a few conversation starters:

1) What are the most popular forms? Which forms should I know about?
2) Are there poetic forms that are considered more obscure and esoteric?
3) What are your favourite forms and why?
4) Which poets were considered the strongest with a more structured style?

Looking forward to input!

I cannot do this topic as much justice as Hawkingfan does above, so rather than trying to reproduce their work, I'll just throw in some general comments of my own.

I love writing villanelles and sestinas. They are very hard to get right, and because of that, they are incredibly satisfying to get right. By nature, the key phrase of a villanelle must have a sort of double meaning, and it is difficult but exhilerating to try and maintain that duality over the extravagant length of a complete villanelle. Pagans say that rhyming isn't just incidental or formulaic, it is part and parcel with the inherent power of words. Rhyming words is amplifying words. I grok that on a fundamental level, and while I understand the impulse to freeform and even engage with it, if I'm really sitting down of a free evening to "write poetry", I am usually engaging with a form. Sometimes I'll throw poetic elements in places they don't belong, sneaking acrostics into lesson plans or alliteration into project proposals, just because I can. I love Iambic pentameter as well, and even my intentionally freeform work often winds up falling back into it.

I think most forms of structured poetry are considered somewhat obscure and esoteric, the literary world having turned its back on them so utterly. At least here in the US. I see people engaging in haiku and limerick as part of popular culture, and pop music tends to fall into couplet or quatrain. But they aren't taken seriously. "Real" poets break whatever rule they feel like, just as paintings shouldn't look like anything or music sound like anything, lest your hallowed individuality as an artist come into question! :D That sort of thing has its place, but it also starts to make me roll my eyes a bit when it goes to excess.
 
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Rousseau,

I have read your last post several times. When you say you like poetry that "says something unique", I am trying to wrack my brain to think of something unique that some poet said. Could you possibly mean "something said in a unique way"?

I would love to think that I've said something unique, but when you consider thousands of years of communication, and thousands of years of written communication, saying something unique is unlikely.

I'll give you a few examples to illustrate. I won't win Tharmas as a friend here because he's a fan, but I'll use a poem of Denise Levertov that I don't find particularly interesting.

The Ache of Marriage

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

It's a pretty poem, and she's clearly talented with words, but beneath the poem she's basically saying she is attracted to people outside of her marriage and aches for more relationships. I don't find this to be much of a revelatory or interesting idea. So all I really get from this poem is a unique complex of words. It doesn't tell me anything. I get a painting by Levertov, but that's about it.

Now contrast that with these lines by Czeslaw Milosz:

My plain face, the face of a tax-collector,
Merchant, or soldier, makes me one of the crowd.
Nor do I refuse to pay due homage
To local gods. And I eat what others eat.
About myself, this much will suffice.

These are words clearly coming from a person of deep understanding of human nature and the world.

Or you can contrast Levertov's poem with Leonard Cohen's late catalogue. Cohen, late in his life, was a man who was steeped in a number of world religions, and who had had an enormous amount of interesting life experiences. And so his poetry at the end of his life isn't just about words, but who the man behind them was. In Book of Longing he says many fascinating things.

When I read Levertov I don't find nearly as much substance. For many people it is there in her writing, but not for me.

If you take an extreme like Leonard Cohen's first book of Poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published in his early twenties you have an example of someone who was talented with words but whose understanding of the world was all theoretical and incomplete. As a 35 year old man I don't have much to learn from a poet who is in his early twenties.

And so I think one of the important, maybe most important elements, of poetry is that it is a means to express the essential - concepts that can't be put into explicit vernacular. With that in mind, in my perspective a poem needs to say something above all else. If it's just words strung together it might be pleasant to read, but to me not very interesting.

But you're right, after thousands of years of written word and poetry it is very difficult to say something unique, like in any other art form. This would be why, for example, the work of Shakespeare is almost untouchable - he expressed many of the foundational tenets of human nature first. You can't just write another Hamlet with the same effect. This is also why I find a lot of poetry written today fairly boring, except from a select few people who I can relate to.
 
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But you're right, after thousands of years of written word and poetry it is very difficult to say something unique, like in any other art form. This would be why, for example, the work of Shakespeare is almost untouchable - he expressed many of the foundational tenets of human nature first. You can't just write another Hamlet with the same effect. This is also why I find a lot of poetry written today fairly boring, except from a select few people who I can relate to.

I should add that this is largely the theme of the book I just put together. After centuries of poets writing about love, relationships, and power dynamics, what is there left for the new poet to write about? So I wrote about exactly that: what is beyond love.
 
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Rousseau,

I will dig into this topic as soon as I can.

I am in a motel and I just retrieved my Kindle Fire. Typing will be slow going.

:joy:

Hawkingfan,

Greetings, well-met fellow, hail!

I wonder if I know you. Were you ever at PFFA or Eratosphere?

Go private if need be.

Also, William Empson was no slouch with the villanelle.

More later. I require more cheap beer and college basketball...

Greetings, WAB!

No, I don't believe we know each other. I'm afraid my poetry life and experiences are limited to the confines of my bedroom and online forums. I read it everyday, of course, and try and write several per month if I can. I am just a novice. My expertise and training is actually in music (classical and jazz), and I am an accountant by day. But I love all the arts (I also dabble in fiction (I am published) and painting).

I am enjoying your input.
 
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audible

Rousseau,

I will dig into this topic as soon as I can.

I am in a motel and I just retrieved my Kindle Fire. Typing will be slow going.

:joy:

Hawkingfan,

Greetings, well-met fellow, hail!

I wonder if I know you. Were you ever at PFFA or Eratosphere?

Go private if need be.

Also, William Empson was no slouch with the villanelle.

More later. I require more cheap beer and college basketball...

Greetings, WAB!

No, I don't believe we know each other. I'm afraid my poetry life and experiences are limited to the confines of my bedroom and online forums. I read it everyday, of course, and try and write several per month if I can. I am just a novice. My expertise and training is actually in music (classical and jazz), and I am an accountant by day. But I love all the arts (I also dabble in fiction (I am published) and painting).

I am enjoying your input.

:joy:

ETA:

rousseau:

"Two by two in the arm of
the ache of it."

- Surely you can hear the amazingness of those words strung together in exactly that way ?? Forget about what it means for a second. Can you appreciate the sound of it?

Do you like the sound of any language you do not know?

I LOVE the sound of classical Latin, especially pronounced accurately by someone like Anthony Hopkins.

How do you like the following line (I think of it as the greatest line of poetry I've ever heard. Even as great as Shakespeare!) by the superamazinglyscarilysuperior Publius Vergilius Maro - AKA Virgil?

Quadrupedente putrim sonitu quatit ungula campum...

If heard spoken correctly, you can HEAR the horsies galloping over the grass!!!! The line is a Thing Of Beeeeeeeeeeeee-Yoooooooooooty?:joy:
 
"Two by two in the arm of
the ache of it."

- Surely you can hear the amazingness of those words strung together in exactly that way ?? Forget about what it means for a second. Can you appreciate the sound of it?

Mainly I heard that Levertov is tired of sleeping with her husband :)

More seriously, though, her phrasings and word choice are what I get out of much of her poetry. Very beautiful imagery and wordplay, but as a personal preference I like poems to be a touch more cerebral. Or at least more so than Levertov provides, personality wise there are other poets I have more in common with.
 
For the record, I'm glad WAB clarified the Yeeeesh! post. :happydrinking: I consider my writings as a hip-hop hobbyist, poetry. I admit I don't know the first or last thing about poetry though. With that said WAB, as you seem to have some passion about poetry; Is there reading materials you'd suggest I pick up that would add value (by means of writing skills and appreciation of the art) for an MC?

Here is a really short snip from one of my songs.

Every Strike's pretext to reject civil liberties
google wizardry Facebook & Twitter symmetry
whack intel, any mainstream industry
Apple fell from the same tree literally
 
For the record, I'm glad WAB clarified the Yeeeesh! post. :happydrinking: I consider my writings as a hip-hop hobbyist, poetry. I admit I don't know the first or last thing about poetry though. With that said WAB, as you seem to have some passion about poetry; Is there reading materials you'd suggest I pick up that would add value (by means of writing skills and appreciation of the art) for an MC?

Here is a really short snip from one of my songs.

Every Strike's pretext to reject civil liberties
google wizardry Facebook & Twitter symmetry
whack intel, any mainstream industry
Apple fell from the same tree literally

I can't speak for WAB, but as someone who listens to a lot of hip hop too I don't see too close of a parallel between much poetry I've read and hip hop. Hip Hop is definitely a poetic form, but to me it's more musical and rhythmic than literary, more performative, like something you'd hear at a poetry slam (which can actually be very analogous to hip hop).

There are probably some literary devices you could read up on and use in your writing (alliteration, metaphor, simile etc), but I'd guess most of the major inspiration you'd find would come from within the tradition of hip-hop.
 
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