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 [...]

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 story you were given[heard, told, overheard, handed or...].
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I struggled a bit to come up with a topic for this prompt. Absolutely nothing seemed like a good idea. Idly, I was flipping through feeds in Google Reader, and came across a post by Kristin Gorski of “Write now is good”.
Our world of storytellers
Our lives are full of the stories we tell: bits about [...]

There are two traditional areas in the exploration of poetic forms: rhythm and rhyme. For the most part, stanza or line length is based on choices concerning both of these areas.
I’m saving issues about rhyme for another time; this article will be focusing on rhythm and the varieties of it in poetry.
At a basic level, [...]

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We live in a world of increasing specialization. Just about every little things has an entire field of knowledge dedicated to it, and each of those little fields has its own vocabulary.
Science uses a whole lot of Latin, psychology uses the word affect in a very strange way, and unless you happen to be a [...]

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.
Be sure to check back through the week and see what others have written in response to this prompt or inspirations from other sources: Read Write Poem!
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Please [...]

Repetition is one of the pillars of poetry. Sometimes the repetition is of words and phrases (as in sestinas, ghazals, or villanelles), sometimes it’s a repetition of sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), sometimes the rhythm of the words (which we most clearly see in formal meters like iambic pentameter). All these types of repetition are used [...]

I suppose I should start by apologizing for the cliché, but your prompt this week is to repeat yourself poetically. Repetition is one of the most important concepts in poetry. Songwriters understand this with their catchy choruses and repetition is very common in verse forms. Villanelles, sestinas, rondeaux and pantoum are all built on repetition. [...]

Without making any judgments about the value of obsession in poetry, the villanelle is an excellent vehicle for obsession. The repeated use of the refrains force the poem to keep circling and grabbing onto a very small set of ideas. This repetition is the key element of the villanelle.
Villanelle of Change
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Since Persia [...]