Due to a technical difficulty, the wrong post auto-published this morning. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Now let’s all get our poems on!
How’d everybody do getting Gothic this week? Are we going to get some vampires, spirits of the night and drafty castles? I hope so!
Now’s the time to leave us a link to [...]

Ah, the word gothic. It has so many meanings. More than I had realized as a matter of fact, but the one at issue is: “Noting or pertaining to a style of literature characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay.”
Not really suitable for spring (which [...]

Not too long ago I spent some time talking about rhythm and meter in poetry, but I haven’t yet said much about rhyme, which is the other big thing in formal poetry. And not only is rhyme interesting, it is generally an easier topic to address.
Why rhyme?
In terms of poetry, what does rhyme bring to [...]

Most formal poetry has rules about how words are arranged on the page. Sometimes they’re based on sound patterns, sometimes on stress patterns, sometimes on counting letters or syllables. These rules are often based on a way of arranging the content of poem, allowing the form to emphasize an idea or a style. While they [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution, something smelly, or even stinky. Or anything else.
Be sure to check back through the week and see what others have written: Read Write Poem!
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Newsy: [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution, a ballad. (Or some other poetry project of yours. We hope it sings, and we’d love to read a ballad, but we are all about poetry [...]

Aside from Christine’s excellent post on Shakespearean Sonnets, there hasn’t been much written here about metrically formal poetry. There are a couple of reasons, one being that I wanted to write a piece on meter before I started writing about verse forms that use it, and another is that I rarely write in meter. It’s [...]

Yes, the song. No hidden meaning there. For over thirty years the Eagles’ “Hotel California” has inspired and intrigued people the world over. It has been covered and translated and parodied and most people still have no idea what the song even means.
But what in the world has that to do with a poetry prompt?
On [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution. (Carolee hopes in sympathy with her aversion to sun strokes, but leave a link to any poem or poem-like writing you’d like to share this week.)
Be [...]

Following up on last month’s talk about the two “root” styles of verse, today we’ll explore metrical verse. Most formal poetry uses this as its basis.
Metrical verse
Most English verse uses an accentual-syllabic rhythm. While this could be four stresses in an eight-syllable line with no regard to the pattern, most accentual-syllabic verse uses meter: iambic [...]