Poemtastic Form

Learned Vol. 4, Issue 31

This week: Poetry comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. We're going to explore a few of the more esoteric ones. Then there are a few linguistics-related stories in the news to share, and then, of course, the footnotes. Let's get to it.

If pressed, I could name, maybe, about a dozen distinct kinds of poems. Maybe add a few more if we count blank-verse and kinds of songs. But there's no way in heaven or hell I'd get to 168. And yet, that's exactly what Writer's Digest has done in their "List of 168 Poetic Forms for Poets." So, how did they get to 168? By counting everything that could possibly be considered a poem:

This list is a combination of well-established traditional forms, newer types of poems, and even a few fun super new nonce forms.

Nothing wrong with that. The article also notes that the original version of the list had only 50 entries, which then grew and grew as feedback from poets and scholars was gathered¹ until it reached the current state...and that, too, may change as future poetic forms are created and become canon.

From Basho to Bukowski, all the best poets were drunks. Just ask them.

What I want to do in this week's letter is look at ten different forms that were new to me. I'm going to skip over limerick and haiku and present ten forms that look interesting to me, that I'll be researching over the next couple of weeks as we discuss poetry. So, in no particular order other than alphabetical:

Blackout Poem - Take a page from a book or other text, use a thick, black marker to color out everything except the words you want, and there you have a blackout poem. I love these; they pop up across social media quite a lot because of their inherently visual nature. I had no idea there was a term for them.

Cascade Poem - Similarly to a sestina, the cascade poem requires that each line from the first stanza become the final line of a succeeding stanza in order. If that makes no sense, it will when you look at examples. Suffice it to say it is one of my favorite kinds of poem where strict boundaries and repetition allow the poet to draw emphasis or multiple meanings to repeated phrases. When done well, these are really powerful.

Dodoitsu - Like many Japanese forms², the main restraint in a dodoitsu is that each line is must contain a set number of syllables as in haiku's 5-7-5. A dodoitsu is 7-7-7-5.

Glosa - This is a really interesting form in that it is based off and incorporates another poet's work. Basically, start with a four-line (or one stanza) quote from a poem and then use those lines as a kind of refrain by using them to finish the stanzas of your poem. There's a lot to unpack here and I'm looking forward to getting into the history of this poem.

Interlocking Rubaiyat - I'm not going to try to summarize all the rules for this form; the form is one that Robert Frost used a lot and so it is immediately familiar and yet there are more constraints and boundaries than I was ever aware of. The biggest hurdle is that it must be written in certain meters, which, yeah, no.

Luc Bat - This Vietnamese form is another that is defined by strict syllable and rhyme rules. However, what intrigues me is that it's Vietnamese. Of course Vietnamese has poetry traditions, try finding a language that doesn't. However, prior to the advent of the modern internet, I may never have found them. And that is very cool.

Mistress Bradstreet Stanza - C'mon, you can't throw a name like that into a list like this and not expect me to pick up on it? Lots of rules, more curious about the history than I am the form. Points for the name though.

Mondo - This is another one that I've seen everywhere but didn't know the name for. A Mondo is a Q&A in poem form. They are often written by pairs or groups of writers in games or other creative activities. I think I'd like to actually try this as a drinking game.

Nonce Forms - Basically the poetry version of just making it up as you go along. Nonce forms are when a poet sits down to write a poem, realizes it doesn't match any particular style or form, but might have something interesting or replicable in the form itself, aside from the content. The poet then begins to work the form, looking for meters, rhyme schemes, or other patterns until they have a new form to name and debut. Every artistic school needs a nonce form.

Skeltonic Verse³ - These things read like doggerel unless you read it aloud and then, well, it's like reading a lot of things in English - it's so much better when you can hear it than when you can just see it. Skeltonic verses tumble around with very few rules, you just have to find the flow.

And that's it, ten of the 168 forms listed in the article. All of these are intriguing to me in some way but they all lead into a few of the words we'll cover in the next few weeks: stanza, verse, meter, rhyme, and others. Until then, have a favorite form, favorite poem or poet? Leave it in the comments below!

Stay curious,

J

Linguisticalicious News:

Lifehacker had a pair of grammar and vocabulary articles this week that are worth talking about. The first, "10 Common Grammar Rules You’re Probably Messing Up All the Time" has some very good advice for business writing. It discusses things like further vs. farther and then vs. than. While most of the tips are grammatical in nature, a few feel like typos that our grammar checkers aren't sophisticated enough to differentiate yet, which is a discussion worth having.

The second Lifehacker article takes a similar look at vocabulary. "Rein vs. Reign, and Other Tricky Homophones You’re Mixing Up All the Time" looks closely at words that sound the same but have different meanings, i.e. homophones, and again point out a lot of common errors that are sometimes made in ignorance but often made because we have trained ourselves to look at corrections suggested by spellcheck and not by a grammar checker. So, we may be typing the wrong word and in too much of a hurry to do a proper editing job and, boom, a correctly spelled word used incorrectly. Still, both articles are worth reading as a reminder if nothing else.

The last article, from Gizmodo, is a much-more "proper linguistics" article: "The Race to Document Endangered Languages, Now That We Have the Technology." In it, author Dr. Ben Macaulay discusses what, exactly, the process of documenting a language can be in this age of technological miracles and how you can get involved in it. If you're interested in diving deeper into the technical world of practical linguistics, this is a good place to jump in.

1. One note about this list is that each variation on a theme is counted as its own entry, so Curtal Sonnet and Sonnet are listed separately. This is not to throw shade, just to note, that much like a dictionary, the question of where one entry ought to be separated from another is largely a matter of taste and self-imposed restraints rather than any inherent rule.

2. Poetry was a bar game in feudal Japan. Wealthy samurai would go to the tea houses and relax with the ladies of the evening. Both the samurai and the entertainers were expected to be glib and facile with language, thus hundreds of poetic forms were invented. You could fill a list like this with just Japanese forms, I think, but most of them would be relegated to the archaic or historical categories; but there are survivors, like the haiku and the tanka.

3. I think of the Beat poets when I read the examples given, which is odd because the poet they're named for, John Skelton, lived in the 16th century...