Prompt: Round

I was looking through some books on poetic forms for a new form to use here. I noticed four forms that not only begin with "R" but also have similarities.

The Rondeau is a lyric poem from the 13th century which is characterized by repeating lines or "rounds". It has 15 lines written as a quintet, quatrain, and sestet, with two rhyme schemes.

The Rondel is a 14th-century French lyrical poem that is a variation of the Roundeau. It consists of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). The first two lines are refrains which repeat at the end of the second and third stanzas. The rhyming pattern is ABba, abAB, abbaA.

Then we have the Rondolet, another French form consisting of a single septet with two rhymes and one refrain. The refrain is written in tetra-syllabic or dimeter, and the other lines are twice as long - octasyllabic or tetrameter.

And finally, the Roundel, a form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne as a variation of the rondeau form.

DON'T PANIC. We are not asking for any of those four. They are all examples of forms that get so specific that they can trap the poet.

What I see as the central structural element shared across all four forms is the recurring refrain derived from the poem's opening phrase and an organization of three distinct movements or stanzas. So, here is our new poetic form designed around those shared mechanics without any constraints on rhyme or syllable counts. Let's just call it simply a "round."

While "round" is rarely used as a modern standalone name for a text-only poem, it is the literal English translation and ancestor of all these French forms. You probably know rounds as songs like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Frère Jacques," "Three Blind Mice," and"Sumer Is Icumen In" which is the oldest known English round, dating back to around 1250 AD.

As you can see in our example poem, the title is also the refrain repeated in the first line and in the last line, making a kind of circle, a round.

In summary, the poem is 12 lines in 3 stanzas. It's free verse (no forced syllable counts or rhyme schemes required). The form also suggests that the poem in some way is itself thematically circular.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 31, 2026

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

The Cento

street wall collage   -   Photo:PxHere

The cento is a poetry form that I used with students but that I haven't used myself or used as a prompt on Poets Online. "Cento" comes from the Latin word for “patchwork." Centos are sometimes called collage poems because they are made up of lines from poems by other poets. 

Poets often borrow lines from other writers. It might be an epigraph or the lines might be mixed with their own writing. It sounds like plagiarism and that was part of my point in using it with students. How can you take from other writers legitimately? In prose, we have citations and works cited, but in poetry, other than the epigraph, we don't always cite the source.

If I were to use "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all" in my poem, I might put it in quotes or italics, but I probably wouldn't drop in John Keats' name. But a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. 

Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil. The cento evidently originated in ancient Greece. There are examples in Aristophanes's plays where lines have been taken from Aeschylus and Homer.  Roman poets, as early as the late second century, lifted lines from Virgil. It seems to me to be a bit of thievery. Borrowing can be a creative process. Copyright law allows for reuse when the new use is "transformative." But being transformative is a high bar, which is probably why I haven't used it as a prompt for Poets Online. Separating thievery from transformation is not as easy to do as one might think.

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Poetic Forms

We occasionally use poetry forms in the calls for submission prompts on the website. Here are a few books we have used that you might want to use to broaden your use of forms.

Lewis Turco The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics

    

 The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms

   

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms 

  

 Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

   

Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms by Miller Williams 

 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Quatrain Definitions

In this short month and following last month's zuhitsu prompt that generated many long poems, we will ask you to write a poem in a short form. 

The quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China, and continues into the 21st century. 

In the eleventh century, the poet Omár Khayyám created a book of connected quatrain verses known as the “Rubáiyát” which translates as quatrains in Arabic. In the nineteenth century, the “Rubáiyát” was translated by an English poet named Edward Fitzgerald, which brought about a resurgence of this four-line stanza. Nostradamus used quatrains to write his prophecies. Rumi used the form for many poems.

A quatrain can be a four-line stanza using a rhyme scheme, but these six quatrains by Ursula K. Le Guin illustrate how one alone can also be a short poem. 

SOLSTICE 

On the longest night of all the year

in the forests up the hill,

the little owl spoke soft and clear

to bid the night be longer still.

To make this prompt a bit more challenging, we ask you to use as your title a single word - an unusual word, a word that will need a definition for many readers - and your quatrain will be a rhyming definition.

For example, if your title is "CORUSCATE," the four rhyming lines will need to make it clear - without sounding like a dictionary - that this word means to glitter, sparkle, in bright flashes - like gems or the sunlight on moving water.

I could not find a poem that exactly fits the three requirements of this prompt, so I simply used on the website prompt examples of stanzas from the poems below to illustrate the rhyme possibilities.

You will also need to choose a rhyme scheme. Here are six of the fifteen possibilities and examples of poems containing stanzas using them.

• ABAC or ABCB  is known as unbounded or ballad quatrain - see Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” , “Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks or Melville's "In the Prison Pen."
• AABB is a double couplet) - see A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 
• ABAB is known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic) see Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. This is also known as an elegiac stanza and is in iambic pentameter.
• ABBA is known as envelope or enclosed - Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” fit this type
• AABA, is the stanza rhyme scheme in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” 

Your task: a poem that defines the one-word title in four rhyming lines.

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2022

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Prompt: A Song for the Body

I recently read Marilyn Hacker’s clever poem “Canzone.”  I didn't know much about that form other than it being a kind of song. Her poem is a song to a part of the body - the tongue.

The tongue is certainly an organ with many uses, and to a poet certainly one of interest since it form our words. She writes that it is “sinewy and singular, the tongue / accomplishes what, perhaps, no other organ / can.”

If you read "Canzone" online on our main site or in her Selected Poems 1965-1990, you can see how she examines the multi-uses of the tongue and also how she plays with the words (particularly "organ") as can be seen in this illustrative excerpt from the poem.

...we give
the private contemplations of each organ
to the others, and to others, organ-

ize sensations into thought. Sentient organ-
isms, we symbolize feeling, give
the spectrum (that’s a symbol) each sense organ
perceives, by analogy, to others. Disorgan-
ization of the senses is an acquired taste
we all acquire: as speaking beasts, it’s organ-
ic to our discourse. The first organ
of acknowledged communion is the tongue
(tripartite diplomat, which after tongu-
ing a less voluble expressive organ
to wordless efflorescences of pleasure
offers up words to reaffirm the pleasure.)

​​Marilyn Hacker likes forms. Another interesting poem of hers is the “Villanelle For D.G.B." The poem we are looking at this month for a prompt is labeled a canzone. In ​Edward Hirsch's useful reference The Essential Poet's Glossary (which is the shorter and more focused version of his big encyclopedic A Poet's Glossary ), he notes that this form gets its name from the Italian word for "song."  This lyric poem originates in medieval Italy and France with troubadours and wandering musicians. ​Petrarch established this form of lyric love poem with stanzas of five or six lines, ending with an envoi, and Dante Alighieri was an admirer of the canzone.

Dante created his own version which Hirsch calls "maddeningly difficult... using the same five end-words in each of the five 12-line stanzas, intricately varying the pattern.”​

I don't like to use forms as prompts that are so difficult that they stop poets from attempting to write. Since Hacker, Dante and others have taken liberties with the canzone, we will too. Certainly, you can try to adhere to the form if you like the challenge of a form.

The canzone generally has 5 to 7 stanzas probably meant to be set to music. A end rhyme scheme, as one would suspect of a song, is usually followed.

Your canzone can be as short as two stanzas, because it must conclude with an envoi. The envoi (or envoy) is a short stanza at the end of a poem used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem. In general, envois have fewer lines than the main stanzas of the poem

True canzones (and many songs) have a strict number of syllables. For our purposes, you should keep the length of lines equal, even if not strict about syllables. Swinburne worked with the canzone meter in “Hendecasyllabics”

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent...

For our June prompt, write a song/canzone to a part of the body

Deadline for submissions is July 2, 2017


For more on the canzone form:
Daryl Hines - “Canzone” ​
John Hollander​ - “About the Canzone"

Writing the Days, One Ronka at a Time

I wrote a guest post for Adele Kenny's poetry blog, The Music In It, about my daily writing practice this year and the ronka poems I have been writing and posting online.

It is a good exercise to get "meta" about your writing once in awhile and think about what you write and why. Treat yourself as an assignment from that poetry class and look at the themes that run through your poems, the language etc. (I didn't realize how many birds were flying into my daily poems.)

Here is what I wrote for Adele.

This year I wanted to take on a daily writing practice with my poetry.  It's not an original New Year's resolution. William Stafford is the poet who inspired me the most. he wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. Not everything he wrote was a poem. His 20,000 pages of daily writings include early morning meditations, poems, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”

I do write every day, but not always poetry, so the resolution was to do a daily poem. Stafford did go through a period when that was also his goal. When he was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, “I lower my standards.” I like that answer, but, while the phrase has a negative connotation, Stafford meant that he allowed himself some bad poems knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day and I thought using a short form might make the project more likely to succeed. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I ended up creating my own form for this project.

Finding a photo of her

from that summer when we were fifteen
that hot day behind the beach house
her bare shoulders, back, arms and legs -
when I suddenly realized she’s a woman
and it startled me.  It startled me.

I call my form the ronka – obviously a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

The term waka originally encompassed a number of differing forms including the tanka (“short poem”) and chōka (“long poem”), sedōka (“memorized poem”?) and katauta (“poem fragment”). Of those, only the tanka has really survived.

If you look at those forms, you notice that the numbers 5 and 7 are the heart of all of them.  The katauta is  5-7-7  and the chōka counts out  at 5-7-5-7-5-7…5-7-7 and the sedōka at 5-7-7-5-7-7 is composed of two sets of 5-7-7.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Even in that short form, the tanka has two parts. The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (“upper phrase”) and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (“lower phrase”).

For my invented form, a ronka contains 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Westerners consider haiku to be 5, 7, and 5 lines counted by syallables, but, since Chinese and Japanese have no syllables, that has always been a Western convention.

Letters Loved

Old letters from lovers, not love letters,
but timelines of relationships like plot diagrams -
conflicts, turning points, resolutions, conclusions, mostly tragedies.
Why do I save them? No sequels.
Dangerous tinder to have around. Best burned.

As with traditional tanka, I decided to have no rhyme. (Even accidental rhymes were considered faults in a tanka.). I also decided to use the haiku principle of show rather than tell. For example, to indicate spring by mentioning cherry blossoms rather than stating the season. I started the year trying not to include myself or people as frequently as we do in Western poetry, those have crept into the poems.

I have even added a few footnotes and links to poems.

Fathers and Sons

Sons grow up and leave their fathers
to become fathers and perhaps have sons.
Child is the father of the man,
said another poet, his heart leaping up.
Five days of rain, then, a rainbow.

We are just past mid-year and I have maintained by daily poem practice without great difficulty. I post them online at Writing the Day and each observation of the day is categorized as being from the outside world or inside the world of dwellings or the mind.

I write at all times of the day, but most poems seem to come at the end of the day. (I also set a daily 10 pm reminder on my phone about posting a poem.)

A non-poet might think that writing 35 words a day is not much of a challenge, but poets will understand that I frequently don't write much faster than a word-per-minute. I also post an image (my own or borrowed) with each poem.

Some poems are ars poetica or poems about poetry or writing.

Firefly Revision

Basho considered a Kikaku haiku as cruel:
A red firefly / tear off its wings -
a pepper.  A pepper / give it wings –
a red firefly, was Basho’s simple change.
Revision as a Buddhist act of kindness.

Carving

No, writing poetry is more like carving
wood and taking away, finding the heart
hidden inside, paring, using point and blade.
The danger comes from the dull knife.
The soft inside will be thrown away.

Some are observations on a particular day, such as this one from the Friday the 13th in June:

A thirteenth day that is a Friday.

A Full Moon to complete a triad

of  strange correlation without any real causation.

We look carefully for signs and connections -

find clockwork regularity; serendipity in the moments.

The blog I post to has a "tag cloud" feature and I tag each ronka with a few keywords that describe the poem. It is interesting to me to see what words occur most frequently: birds, time, the Moon and tea have all been things that I seem to return to this year.

Titles have become another way of adding a line to the poem, though I still limit myself to seven words there too.

I’m Not An Actor in Hollywood But

I want a body and stunt double.

I want better lighting. No high definition.

More scenes and lines, 20 against 20,

gross points on profits, hand and footprints,

a star on the Walk of Fame.

There are lots of books and websites to find poetic inspiration through writing prompts. I have been doing a monthly one at Poets Online since 1998.  Adele has provided almost 200 well-defined prompts here already. My fellow New Jersey poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Lockward have excellent craft books with prompts - Writing Poetry To Save Your Life and The Crafty Poet, respectively. William Stafford and Stephen Dunning's Getting the Knack is a book I bought when I started teaching and I still dip into for inspiration.

Daily practices have a long history as paths of transformation spiritually, physically and for learning a craft. Perhaps, meditation and prayer will be your spiritual practice. Perhaps, yoga, tai chi or running is your physical practice. You might even combine them - kinhin is walking meditation. Consider a daily writing practice, whether it be poetry, a field guide from nature, a garden journal, one page of that long-intended novel. Disciplines of the mind are a good way to a healthy brain!

Adele is a poet and offers regular writing prompts online that are very well explained and illustrated. She is a fine poet herself - check out her collection What Matters - and she has written many books on a variety of topics.

A former professor of creative writing in the College of New Rochelle's Graduate School, Adele Kenny is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series (NJ), which is where I first met her. She is one of those many people across the country whose local efforts keep poetry alive. The readings have featured New Jersey poets and nationally-known poets, including Mark Doty, Jim Haba, Stephen Dunn, BJ Ward, Renee Ashley, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Diane Lockward, Alicia Ostriker and Patricia Smith.

Adele is also the poetry editor of Tiferet Journal. She has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France, and has been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”

It’s not that I don’t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn’t meet his standards, he replied, “I lower my standards.”

I like that answer, but I know that phrase “lowering standards” has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka – a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside – inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that’s an English version, since Japanese doesn’t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than “spring.”

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

Figurative Language

These days, many people associate formal poetry with "old poetry."  Forms, like sonnets, and rhyme schemes are often seen as those things we had to study in school.

When many readers see lines like

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?

their eyes get cloudy - and they stop reading.

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Temptation by Water.  Her free monthly poetry newsletter (subscribe here) has reviews, writing tips and a poetry prompt. She is collecting some of those prompts and model poems in a new book, The Crafty Poet, due out later this year.

In one issue, I was struck by Diane's suggestion that literal language is not always enough for a poem.

The just-right use of the figurative—moving beyond the dictionary meaning of words—can open a poem to both broader interpretation and greater exactness. Metaphor and simile are what we first think of when we consider figurative language, but there are enough other rhetorical figures to boggle the mind. 

Five of the figurative tools that she suggests (beyond the familiar metaphor and simile) are apostrophe, personification, hyperbole, metonymy, and synecdoche. They are all good tools that poets should know and use.

To use apostrophe, as John Donne does, for example, in his sonnet “Death, be not proud,” is to bring to the subject an immediacy not otherwise possible. Direct address achieves this feeling of being up-close and personal.

Personification creates a similar effect of immediacy. It can enliven a poem and heighten its emotion, as Philip Levine does in “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” a poem in which the pig speaking is given human qualities: It's wonderful how I jog / on four honed-down ivory toes. Personification can be tricky; the key is knowing when to use it and how much is enough in a poem.

Frost, in “After Apple-Picking,” finds a surprisingly convincing way to get across the idea “I have had too much / Of apple picking” with the hyperbole “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch.”

Metonymy, with its substitution of an associated word for the intended one, shortwires the way we think of the substituted term and thereby offers an efficiency of language. In “How She Described Her Ex-Husband When the Police Called,” poet Martha Clarkson ends with, "He’s the joker pinned in bicycle spokes / vanishing down the street." Because it’s common knowledge that a joker is a playing card, the substitution works.

Synecdoche, with its substitution of a part for the whole, is a type of metonymy, providing that same efficiency. T. S. Eliot uses synecdoche in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the lines "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."  In doing so, he gives us claws as an intentional disembodiment.

Prompt: Five

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth, 1928.
Image: metmuseum.org

Although I am going to write first here about five-line stanza forms, this prompt is really about the number five.

The cinquain (AKA quintain or quintet and pronounced sing-keyn) is both a poem or a stanza form that is composed of five lines. Cinq is French for five and examples of cinquain poems are found in many European languages, but the origin of the form is in medieval French poetry.

This form can be very formal or more loosely followed, and there are several variations that have developed over the centuries.

In very formal English poetry, cinquains follow a rhyme scheme of ababb, abaab or abccb.

Going back to the 16th and 17th century poets, such as Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert, Edmund Waller, and John Donne, you find this form used.  Here is the first stanza of  "The World" by George Herbert:

Love built a stately house, where Fortune came,
And spinning fancies, she was heard to say
That her fine cobwebs did support the frame,
Whereas they were supported by the same;
But Wisdom quickly swept them all away.

An American example is "To Helen" by Edgar Allen Poe, whose first stanza is:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

The Sicilian quintain rhyme scheme is used in "Home is so Sad” by Philip Larkin:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

When Poets Online looked at cinquains earlier, we used as our model Adelaide Crapsey. She was an early twentieth-century poet who used a cinquain form of 22 syllables distributed among the five lines in a 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 pattern.

She was influenced by the Japanese tanka, another five-line form that we have tried on Poets Online. Her poems also focused on imagery and the natural world.

Adelaide Crapsey's poetry was published after her death in 1915 as Verseand the completed portion of her work on prosody is in (the very dry volume) A Study in English Metrics. What her form does that the Japanese form consciously avoids doing is to include the very Western closing, climax or message.

Here are two of her poems

Amaze

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Niagara
Seen on a Night in November

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

Not all of her poetry was in the cinquain form. Take a look at her "To The Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window", a poem written as her death from tuberculosis approached, and one she said was “Written in a Moment of Exasperation.”

Five, the number, appears in many forms. It is the third prime number. A Fermat prime. 5 sided polygons are pentagons. Pentagrams are 5-sided stars with many symbolic meanings. I like that it is the fifth Fibonacci number.

And five has many symbolic meanings in cultures from the Greeks through the Maya, Celtic and others, and allusions in the Bible and literature.

A quick search online turns up many poems using five, such as "To a Farmer Who Hung Five Hawks on His Barbed Wire" by David Wagoner, "It Was Going on Five in the Morning" by André Breton, and "Five Easy Prayers for Pagans" by Philip Appleman.

Our new prompt has two parts (I guess it should have had 5 parts) and an additional option.

1. Write a poem that uses some aspect of five as an element of its content and meaning.
2.  Use 5-line stanza(s). You can write a short single cinquain or you can write multiple stanzas (5X5?).
* Optional Challenge: Use one of the formal cinquain/quintain/quintet rhyme schemes as illustrated above by Crapsey and Larkin.

I chose as a model poem on the website this month a poem that uses the quintain and is well known to poetry fans: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. I could not find a poem that uses the five-line form and also has a theme of five. I'm sure one exists. If you find it, post a comment here. 

Frost ends his poem with:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
—I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Rhyme nor Reason and The Faerie Queene

Prince Arthur and the Faerie Queen - Füssli, Johann Heinrich, 1788

I posted yesterday on another blog of mine about the origin of the phrase "rhyme or reason." I have always had a fascination for the origins of words, phrases, and the names we attach to people and things. (see Why Name It That? for more)

The poet Edmund Spenser gets credit for "rhyme or reason" and the story tells us something about the life of the poet back in Elizabethan times and his Spenserian stanza.

In 1589, Edmund Spenser was an admired poet by the rich and famous - which was the audience that mattered. His book of pastoral poems The Shepheardes Calender published in 1579 was a great success at court. But poets did not make a living selling books, but by having rich patrons. Running short on money, Spenser took on a position as a secretary to Lord Grey, the new Deputy to Ireland.


At 28-year, Edmund went to Ireland, where Grey crushed an Irish rebellion against the English, seized lands and gave Spenser about 3,000 acres, with hills, streams, and a castle to live on. Sweet deal.

Spenser worked for Grey for ten years and worked on his new epic poem.

Fellow poet and well known adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, lived nearby on his own 12,000-acre estate. In 1589, Raleigh visited Spenser, who showed him the first three parts of his new epic, The Faerie Queene.

It was a very ambitious writing project. In a letter written by Spenser to Raleigh in 1590, he describes the goal as an allegorical presentation of virtues through Arthurian knights in the mythical "Faerieland". This letter is often presented as a preface to the epic in most published editions. It oulines plans for 24 books: 12 based each on a different knight who exemplified one of 12 "private virtues", and a possible 12 more centered on King Arthur displaying 12 "public virtues".

Spenser never completed all the books and actually diverged from the plan in the earliest books.

Raleigh thought that Spenser should present the first book personally to Queen Elizabeth. They traveled to England together that fall, and Spenser registered the poem for publication with a dedications to "the most mightie and magnificent empress Elizabeth."

Elizabeth heard him read his poem aloud and she did love it. He was hot in the circles of society again and hoped to receive enough patronage to stay in England.

Elizabeth suggested that Spenser be paid £100 but her chief advisor, Lord Burghley, who wasn't high on poetry or Spenser, objected. The story is that Elizabeth told him to pay the poet "what is reason."

Burghley didn't pay him at all.

After a few months, Spenser sent Elizabeth this short verse:

I was promised on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Spenser got his payment, and we got the phrase "rhyme nor reason." Today "rhyme or reason" means "without purpose, order, or reason" as in "The statistics were so disorganized, that the conclusions were without rhyme or reason."

Copley's Red Cross Knight and Ladies

The epic was written in Spenserian stanza, which was created specifically for The Faerie Queene. In this style, there are nine iambic lines – the first eight of them five footed and the ninth a hexameter – which form interlocking quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyme pattern is ABABBCBCC.

Suggestions for its construction were taken from three Italian metres: the Ottava Rima, the Terza Rima, the Sonnet and the Ballade stanza.

This would probably not make a popular poetry writing prompt. Each book of The Faerie Queene contains a proem and twelve cantos. Each cantos has forty eight stanzas. This means that each book as a whole has over 18,000 lines. Over 2000 stanzas were written for the 1590 Faerie Queene.

The poem begins:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
    As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
    Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
    For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
    And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
    Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
    Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
    To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

There are several "modern English versions of Spenser's Middle English language (see link 5 below). One version paraphrases the opening this way:

Lo I the man, whose Muse while did mask,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepherds weeds,
Am now enforced a far less fit task,
For trumpets stern to change mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayers having slept in silence long,
Me, all too mean, the sacred Muse agreed
To blazon broad amongst her learned throng:
Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralize my song.

1. Spenser, Fairie Queene (free audiobook), Librivox.
2. The Faerie Queene (free online edition), Luminarium.
3. Edmund Spenser: A Life
4. Edmund Spenser: The Complete Poetical Works (for the Kindle)
5. You can download several versions of the poem (Kindle, epub etc.) free  from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15272

 

Summer Tanka

We last visited the tanka form more than ten years ago when we asked readers to consider a tanka on yearning. We return to the form this month for our July prompt.

The short tanka form (from the Japanese for "short poem") consists of five lines of 5,7,5,7 and 7 syllables for a total of 31 syllables. Tanka, along with haiku, is one of the better known waka forms.

Tanka has a long history going back over 1300 years. The most famous use of the poetry form of tanka was as secret messages between lovers.

It was the custom of well-mannered persons that after an evening of lovemaking one would write an immediate note about the pleasures of that time. More than just a "thank-you note", this highly stylized five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 onji expressing one's feelings were sent in special paper containers, written on a fan, or knotted on a branch or stem of a single blossom.

These were delivered to the lover by a personal messenger who waited for a responding tanka was to be written in reply to the first note renga-style which the messanger would return to his master.

Since English does not have the same rhythms and syllables as Japanese (see our brief earlier lesson) tankas written in English often do not adhere to the strict form.

Although many English tanka simply use five lines, the first and third being short and the other three being longer, for our prompt we will impose the stricter form.

Since the tanka contains as its first 3 lines a haiku (5-7-5), we should note what the two sections attempt to do. The first three lines (the kami no ku or upper poem) usually present an image or thought - much like we think of a haiku.  The remaining two lines (the shimo no ku or lower poem) then shifts the focus to a related idea. For Westerners, this is often compared to a sonnet's "turn."

For our July prompt, we ask you to write a formal tanka of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables on summer and love. You may send your submissions via email - no fans, branches or blossoms required.

Submission deadline is July 31, 2011 - see the prompt and submission information at PoetsOnline.org


Examples of modern English tankas at http://www.americantanka.com/


A Long Rainy Season: Haiku and Tanka


Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from Midaregami (Japanese Edition)

A Brief Haiku Lesson

Our July prompt uses the tanka poetry form which is the "grandmother" of the newer haiku form. Here is a bit of haiku information that may add to your understanding of the tanka form.

Haiku verse consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The tone of these poems are derived from a combination of this syllabic structure, imagery, and choice of words.

It reflects the values of Japanese culture and the strong influence of Zen Buddhism, especially in the way that haiku emphasizes a single moment. Most haiku give a very brief description of some event or object belonging to nature. In the traditional form, they contain either a direct or indirect reference to a season that turns the reader's attention to the passage of time.

Haiku came from the tanka form which itself was part of a longer renga. Renga (RAY'N-GAH) is "linked elegance" - a Japanese poetry form in which three-line stanzas of 5-7-5 are linked by a two-lines of 7-7 and were usually written by two or more persons. Poets such as Matsuo Basho developed the 3 lines as its own accepted form.

Traditional haiku also contains kigo (KEY-GO) - a seasonal word. Rather than say "spring", the mention of a cherry blossom signals the season, for example.

Japanese does not have syllables, so our Western haiku in 5-7-5 syllables is an approximation of the way on (OH'N), or sound units, are used in Japanese. Each sound in a word is an on. For example, the word "Tokyo" has three on: to- k - yo. These are similar to syllables in English.

Our syllable is an uninterrupted sound. The word "jump" contains two morae in Japanese as does "haiku". But in English language, those two words are not equal in syllables.

The Japanese mora is what we might call a short syllable and the shortest linguistic measure. A long syllable is two morae (the plural of mora).  The word "jump" contains two morae (j-ump) and the word "haiku" contains three (ha-i-ku).


The Haiku Handbook -25th Anniversary Edition: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku
Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (Essential Poets)
Illustrated Basho Haiku Poems (Little eBook Classics)

A Story About Rooms With Phillip Levine

The word stanza means "room." The origin is late 16th century from Italian.

A poem divided into stanzas is a house of rooms. It's not a great hall with space not formally separated by walls and doors.

When you write a poem instead of prose, the act of creating stanzas and breaks has an effect. Yes, prose has paragraphs, but they are "logical" and stanza breaks do other things with those divisions.



Then it might seem odd that I chose the poem "A Story" by Philip Levine as a model this month since it is all one stanza.

Levine is writing about how a story can be a house, a series of rooms, filled with things -

"tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death"

For this month's writing prompt, our subject is a room or rooms. The form is any number of stanzas, but we ask you to think carefully about how you arrange those stanzas. Should 4 rooms be 4 stanzas? Should the movement from room to room be done only by stanza breaks? If a poem about one room has 4 stanzas, why is that?

When you use a poetic form, the rooms are affceted. In ottava rima or rhyme-royal, the rooms all have the same size and shape. Very tidy rooms that rhyme nicely with each other.

Two lines is a couplet. 3 lines, a tercet, 4 lines, a quatrain and so on... Does size have something to say about the size of the rooms - or does it indicate...

Let me be a formalist here and say that style and meaning are inextricably connected.

What kind of building would have the rooms of a sestina?


  

Maybe a Madrigal

Our June prompt used a poem by Vera Pavlova that was in a "form" that I couldn't identify. It's a poem in one stanza with the same opening and closing word/rhyme and three couplets between them (abbccbba).

A commenter (Marie) said that

The name of the form is madrigal or madrigale; at least the form fits under that umbrella. Seems it dates back to the fourteenth century and is sometimes used for poetry that can be set to music.  

I've heard of the form and associate it with songs. So, I did some checking and found that it's a bit unclear exactly about the form of a poetic madrigal.

The madrigal (Italian: madrigale) is the name of a form of poetry, the exact nature of which has never been decided in English. The definition given in the New English Dictionary, "a short lyrical poem of amatory character," offers no distinctive formula; some madrigals are long, and many have nothing whatever to do with love. The most important English collection of madrigals, not set to music, was published by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) in his Poems of 1616.

Another site says that it is a "poetical form of the 16th-century Italian madrigal was a brief poem, the lines of which could be long or short. Its overall rhyme scheme and number of lines were unrestricted by rule."

Any other thoughts on the Pavlova form?

   

Try A Triolet

We did a triolet prompt back in 1999 on Poets Online using that 8-line form.

Diane Lockward posted recently about a little contest for triolets at Allison Joseph's blog, The Rondeau Roundup. That's a blog that is self-described as being for "the exploration, appreciation and publication of the rondeau, rondel, roundel, rondeau redouble, rondolet, triolet, and ballade."

Want to give it a try? Look at our earlier prompt, Diane's post and Allison's contest.

Linda Pastan: When will I be most myself?

This month's model poem for our prompt is Linda Pastan's "Something About the Trees." It's a pantoum and I know from doing Poets Online for ten years that form of any kind scares off poets and limits submissions. (From an editing point of view, limiting submissions has its advantages!)

There is a lot more about the pantoum form on my previous post, but we are going to suggest that your submission be a pantoum, but only require a few rules of the form. You'll see that some poems are often described as "imperfect pantoums" and I can live with that.

Pastan's poem talks about her parents and her childhood belief that her father would "always be the surgeon" and that her mother would remain "the perfect surgeon's wife." She had frozen them in time at a place where they seemed just right. She thought that "they both would live forever."

She recalls that her father told her that:

There is an age when you are most yourself.
He was just past fifty then,

Is the father recalling an earlier time? Pastan recalls them at age 30 being perfect. Would they agree with their daughter?

Because the poem is a pantoum, she needs some strong lines that will repeat and possibly carry changed meanings. Two of those are "I used to think" and "I thought they both would live forever."

Pantoums are sometimes described as musical because of the refrains. I think that they also have a circling, lullaby feel because of the interlocking lines.

I had some trouble with the line, "Was it something about the trees that make him speak?" I imagine the poem's setting as winter. The trees are bare. Her father is 50 - hardly old enough to suggest death, but perhaps old enough to be past autumn and into the early part of the winter of life. Is that why the trees made him speak?

She asks, "When will I be most myself?" and that is the line our prompt focuses on. Write a poem that addresses the age in which you, or the voice of your poem, were, or will be, most yourself. Not an easy question.

As far as the form, you certainly could try a pantoum, but otherwise follow these 3 imperfect rules:

1. You must use quatrains (4 line stanzas)
2. The first 4 lines must reappear in exactly the same format in some subsequent stanzas at least once more, and
3. the poem's first line must also be its last.
   

If you decide to try a true pantoum, take a look at this How-To page - you might find it easier to number your lines, for example.

Our prompts almost always give a print version of the poem, but for this month I really would suggest listening to Pastan read the poem. I think the musicality is much clearer.

There are actually 3 (not 2) poems on the video clip. I recommend that you watch all three. First is the funny "Notes from the Delivery Room," followed by "A Short History of Judaic Thought in the 20th Century" and then the pantoum "Something About the Trees."

To see the poem in print, try this site.

Pantoums

The pantoum is a verse form which is often considered to be "musical." Other forms with refrains, like the triolet, villanelle and paradelles, use refrain and repetition in similar ways.

The pantoum originated in France, but is based on the Malayan pantun form. Pantoums became popular in Europe and moved to North America in the nineteenth and more so in the twentieth century.

In France, the tradition is often credited to the work of Ernest Fouinet, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire who made the form fashionable. For more on the history and examples, check my source, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

The Malay pantun uses metonymy and follows the same rhyme and line patterns as are used in the pantoum. Traditionally, in a pantun the first two lines of each quatrain present an image or an allusion, and the second two lines of each quatrain convey the theme and meaning.

Let us focus on the pantoum. Unfortunately, explaining this type of form often sounds like a riddle. That's why Billy Collins was able to parody it so easily in his invented paradelle form.

A pantoum is composed of a series of quatrains (4 line stanzas). The second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues and there can be any number of stanzas.

The final stanza usually offers a variation. It may contain the first and third lines of the first stanza as its second and fourth lines. Often, the final stanza's fourth line is the poem's first, and the third line of the poem may or may not appear as the second line of the final stanza.

One desired effect in the pantoum is to have the meaning of lines shift when they are repeated. The idea of words remaining the same and meaning changing is basic to poetry in general. This can be accomplished by punctuation, punning, or by placing the words in a new context.

Another way to look at "the rules"

• Use 4-line stanzas (as many as needed - usually an odd number).
• Line lengths can vary.
• Pantoums say everything twice.
• The rhyme scheme is abab in each quatrain - lines rhyme alternately.
• The final line of the pantoum must be the same as its first line.
  

I'm sure some formalists would have more to say (or correct me), but that's the basics.

It is always helpful to look at examples:

1. "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice
2. “Stillbirth” by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
3. “Baby’s Pantoum” by Anne Waldman
4. "Parent's Pantoum" by Carolyn Kizer (includes audio)
5. “Bareback Pantoum” by Cecilia Woloch
6. "Harmonie du soir" by Charles Baudelaire (imperfect pantoum, in French and in English translations)

and, to emphasize that musical quality, how about "I Am Going to Like It Here" by Oscar Hammerstein - another imperfect pantoum, which is a song from the musical Flower Drum Song.