Free verse has reigned over Canadian poetry for the past 50 or 60 years. Writers moved away from the formal poetry, by which I mean poetry with a certain and controlled form, and moved towards the anything-goes-anywhere on the page.
In some poems, for example, "I Watched a Snake," by Jorie Graham, the form supports the content in that the lines on the page imitate the content, by creating the weaving-in-and-out of a snake moving through the grass.
Experimental poetry moves further towards the unformed by unhinging the normally accepted meaning of the words from the words themselves.
Returning to formal poetry, however, is a great exercise for the writer's brain. So let's think about those forms that we all learned in grade school and beyond:
Haiku - everyone always liked this because it was only three lines! We all know the formula: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. Mention a season or something in nature and Presto! A haiku! (A glance at the major haiku journals will show that many of today's haiku writers find a lot of wiggle room in that formula.)
Limerick - We all know about that girl or boy from Nantucket. Perhaps this type of verse is not very high in the hierarchy of poetry, but it's lots of fun to try. Does someone you know have a birthday coming up? Write a limerick for the birthday girl or boy!
Sonnet - Okay, some of you are having flashbacks to high school. Your English Lit teacher, Mrs. Dalrymple, is trying to teach you rhyme scheme, abab cdcd efef gg . . . or was it abba abba cde cde? The terms swim in our heads: octave, sestet, couplet, Elizabethan, Petrarchan, iambic pentameter . . . now we're lost, just like back then.
Step up to the plate. Try writing a sonnet! Taking the strict requirements of syllable stress and line length into consideration is great training!
One more:
Villanelle: a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets (sets of three lines) followed by a quatrain (four lines). The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2. (Thanks to Poets.org for help with this explanation!)
Sound complicated? Again, it's great training to think in such a structured way.
Give it a try! Upload your haikus, limericks (remember this is a family-friendly site!), sonnets, and villanelles in the comment section. The rest of you, offer some encouraging comments to those who step up to the plate!
such fun - and good practice - trying on these different poetic forms! when my actors study greek drama, we try our hand at writing odes. odes address an intended audience and 'raise up loftily' a person or object. i challenge students to use the traditional ababcdedce form to write an ode to a little-celebrated item - a favourite food, a kitchen gadget, a cherished sweater or cap ...
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