I am in the process of assembling poems for a poetry collection. This was one of my goals when I started the 30 Poems in 30 Days project. I have already discussed chapbooks as an inexpensive way to publish your poetry. For myself, however, I am planning to use a print-on-demand publisher to create a paperback book with a glossy cover. I’m doing this because I want something that I can advertise and sell through the website and I want it to look as good as possible. I have a little money to spend (currently a budget of $800 but I can free up more if I need it) and I am leaning towards using Lulu, a print-on-demand service with a good reputation and a lot of options. I have also found an excellent photographer, David Hwang, to help me in the creation cover art. I encourage you to check out his work.

Choosing poems for my collection has been an interesting experience in time travel. I have never published a book, so I feel like I need to consider all of my poems (or at least all that I can find) for this collection. Unfortunately, my perspective on some of the poems is skewed. The poems I wrote about love and relationships before I met my wife now seem dated and unfamiliar. My perspective has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean the poems are good or bad. It just means that they don’t express what I feel now. This makes them hard to judge. Will I leave a good poem out because I don’t feel like it doesn’t match my current thinking? That’s a risk, and demonstrates why it is important to publish regularly rather than occasionally.

I currently have about 25 poems that I am sure I want in the book and another 30 or so that I am also considering. I figure I’ll publish around 40 once I make my final decisions. That should make for a reasonable length without pushing expenses too high. For now I need to keep rereading my work, making some edits and removing a few more poems from the list until I get a collection I am comfortable with. With luck, by next week I will have settled on the collection and start working with Lulu. I also have a photography session for the cover coming up. More on that next week…

This Week’s Poetry Assignment

Write a syllabic verse poem about a love or relationship topic. It may have as many stanzas as you like, but the composition of each stanza should be:

8 syllables
8 syllables
6 syllables
6 syllables
4 syllables
4 syllables

Good luck. I look forward to reading everyone’s work!

For Further Reading:

You can read more about syllabic verse at Wikipedia. You may also be interested in learning more about the study of verse form in this article about Prosody and Metrics. If you are looking for a place to submit and read poetry, check out Web Del Sol, the best collection of poetry magazines on the web.

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1. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Why you should write poetry
2. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Writing About Yourself
3. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Writing About Issues
4. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Poetry of Place
5. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Persona Poems
6. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Developing Your Voice
7. 30 Poems in 30 Days: About Forms and Lists
8. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Elegies and Memories
9. 30 Poems in 30 Days: A Brief Glossary of Meter
10. 30 Poems in 30 Days: The Good the Bad and the Meter
11. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Courting Controversy
12. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Syllabic Verse
13. 30 Poems in 30 Days: What is Your Writing Process?
14. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Repetition
15. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Imagism
16. 30 poems in 30 Days: Review Your Old Work
17. 30 Poems in 30 Days: The Constraint as a Tool
18. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Joining the Community
19. 30 Poems in 30 Days: About the Line
20. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Staying Positive
21. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Progression
22. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Breaking the Rules
23. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Confessional Poetry
24. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Say What You Want to Say
25. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Poetry Contests
26. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Free Verse
27. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Finding New Ways To Stay Inspired
28. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Word Choice
29. 30 Poems in 30 Days: A Little Advice
30. 30 Poems in 30 Days: Collaboration

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The Imagism Movement

For the past week or so we have been discussing meter and rhythm as a framework for creating poetry. Today I want to move in another direction. The use of the image as the primary driving force behind your poem. Image driven poetry began with the Imagism movement in the early twentieth century. The movement began with poets such as Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and eventually dovetailed into the Modernist movement as exemplified by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for which Ezra Pound was the editor.

There are three basic rules that the imagists followed:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Ezra Pound’s most famous application of this concept was the poem:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The concept, as exemplified in Metro, was to reduce a poem down to its most essential images, leaving out all the chaff that traditional poetry, especially iambic pentameter, seems so prone to. This does not mean that most poems should only be two lines, but rather that poetry should not waste time or space.

The Imagist and Modernist movements began the path that eventually led to today’s widespread use of free verse over meter and rhyme. While the Imagist movement itself was fairly short-lived and not widely embraced (Wallace Stevens famously commented that “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this”) it opened up the possibilities of poetry and influenced future movements such as the Objectivists and the Beats.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write a poem that follows the three rules of the imagists.

Today’s Featured Poet

Jane Gentry is the poet Laureate for the state of Kentucky, and her poetry is strongly influenced by the region. She writes poems about nature, family, and the everyday world. I felt she was appropriate for today discussion because the title poem of her newest work, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig, is a reference to one of the original modernists, James Joyce.

Books

A Garden in Kentucky

Portrait of the Artist As a White Pig

Sample poems, including Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig

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As previously discussed, there are many types of poetic meters and forms. One of the most straightforward is syllabic verse. Syllabic verse sets a specific number of syllables per line or per stanza, but does not focus on stressed or unstressed feet. This type of meter has been more popular in languages with less of a focus on stressed syllables, such as Japanese and Spanish. Haiku, with its pattern of five, seven and five syllables, is one of the most common examples of syllabic meter.

The benefit of syllabic meter in English language poetry is that it is less restrictive than meters that focus on stressed and unstressed feet. Syllabic verse gives a poem structure, but avoids the patterned, sometimes singsong qualities of popular English meters such as iambic or dactyl. Syllabic meters can be as simple as ten syllables per line and can grow quickly in complexity from there.

Those who dislike syllabic meter feel that it doesn’t provide real structure, that the English language is far more focused on stressed and unstressed syllables than on the number of syllables. Their contention is that most people don’t notice the number of syllables in a line, only the number of stresses, therefore, determining line length solely by the number of syllables is meaningless.

In my opinion, syllabic meter is a reasonable poetic compromise between image-based lines and metered poetry. While length-based word choice still enters into consideration when writing syllabic verse, you don’t have to torture yourself trying to replace the most appropriate word with one that fits the meter. Syllabic verse “looks” like poetry because the line length is patterned, but it allows you the freedom to experiment within the line.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write a poem using syllabic verse. You can assign length ether by line or stanza. If you are stuck for a way to begin, start with this two-word ten-syllable line:

Incompatible Participation

Today’s Recommended Poet

Jon Anderson was one of my first poetry instructors when I was in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. He doesn’t publish as often as I wish he would, but his 2001 book, Day Moon remains one of my favorite all time books of poetry. His style is very literate, rich in description and he definitely has a feel for meter.

On the web:

Exiled On Mountain, Bewail Fate & Praise Autumn

Listen, Leo

The Parachutist

The Secret Of Poetry

The Trucker

Voyage

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Thoughts on Meter

I rarely focus on meter when I write poetry. In my college days I took many of my style cues (though not my content cues) from William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski and others who wrote in an imagistic style. Meter will always have a place in poetry, but in the 20th century the move was away from forms and meter and towards less structured styles. The beauty of poetry though, is that there is room for everyone. If you want to write sonnets, you are still welcome at the party. If you want to write stream-of-consciousness free verse, that’s fine too. People who rhyme? Well that’s kind of like inviting smokers to the party. You still like them; you just wish they would stop (that’s a joke).

Here are some arguments for and against the use of meter and form:

What are the reasons to use meter?

• It adds structure. It is a framework on which you can build a poem.
• It forces you to think about word choice and word order. This helps you develop and reinforce language skills.
• By dividing a poem into beats and feet, you create the same patterns as music. For many, this musical quality is one of the primary reasons to listen to poetry.
• It was the choice of poetic masters for thousands of years and some consider it to be the only true poetry.

What are the reasons to avoid meter?

• Structure adds predictability. I love Emily Dickinson, but I am distracted by the fact that I can sing any of her poems to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas”.
• Meter can force you to avoid the most meaningful word or phrase in favor of a word that “fits”.
• Meter often forces people to use “padding” words to fill out a line.
• After 4000 years of iambic pentameter, we could use a little break.

There is nothing wrong with writing poetry in a metered form. Just don’t become a slave to the meter. Also, be bold enough to move beyond iambic pentameter to some of the lesser used and often more interesting styles of meter.

Today’s Assignment

Write a three or more stanza poem that uses a metered style for the first two stanzas and a non-metered format for the remaining stanzas. As always, feel free to post your poem in the comments section for others to see.

Today’s Recommended Poet

Sarah Vap is a new poet who published her first two books this year. Her poetry combines her knowledge of the rural west with spirituality and a distinct feminine perspective. Her language is direct and rich. While she does not write in forms, meter and rhythm clearly have a strong influence on her poetry.

Poems on the web:

Everything Offered Happens

Push-off Sideways

Five Poems

Books:

American Spikenard 2007

Dummy Fire 2007

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Terms You Should Know

In order to have an intelligent discussion of meter, it is necessary to set forth a few preliminary definitions. These should be enough terms to get us started. You might also want to read the WRC article Rhythm and Stress by Gwyneth Box.

Poetic Meter: Word choices that create a pattern of sounds, stresses, word lengths, syllables, or beats that are repeated to create a line of poetry. In English the focus is generally on stresses and beats, but all patterns make for possible meters and other languages often focus on different types of patterns.
Beat: The smallest reducible part of a meter, such as a syllable.
Foot: A repeated unit of meter – usually two, three or four beats.
Stressed Syllable: The syllable a speaker emphasizes in speech. Shown here in Capital letters: CARpet, RABbit, oPEN, PATsy. Stressed syllables are also called long syllables.
Unstressed Syllable: The syllable a speaker demphasizes in speech. Shown here in lowercase letters: CARpet, RABbit, oPEN, PATsy. Unstressed syllables are also called short syllables.

Additional Terms

Amphibrach: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables. This meter is most commonly seen in limericks. There ONCE was a HAPpy young PASTor.
Anapest: A foot that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a long syllable such as Double UP double DOWN.
Choriamb: A foot that consists of four syllables: stressed,-unstressed,-unstressed,-stressed such as FIGHT for your RIGHTS.
Dactyl: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. HAPpily
Dimeter: A meter that consists of two feet.
Elegiac Meter: A meter that consists of two lines (a couplet) the first in dactylic hexameter and the second in dactylic pentameter.
Heptameter: A meter that consists of seven feet
Hexameter: A meter that consists of six feet
Iamb: A foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable such as TYrant. This is the most commonly used foot in English poetic meter.
Iambic Pentameter: A meter that consists of five feet of iambs. This is the meter common to sonnets, epics and Shakespearian plays.
Molossus: A foot that consists of three stressed syllables such as SHORT SHARP SHOCK.
Octameter: A meter that consists of eight feet
Pentameter: A meter that consists of five feet
Tetrameter: A meter that consists of four feet
Trimeter: A meter that consists of three feet
Trochee: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable such as PLAYpen.

Today’s Assignment

Write a poem using a specific meter. The meter can be of your own choosing or even your own making, as long as you put a pattern into place. As always, feel free to post your poem in the comment section of this post.

Today’s Recommended Poet

Diane Lockward is a poet, teacher and an active blogger. Her poetry is feminine and feminist. She is smart and funny. Here poetry probes the politics of family, motherhood and food with affection and a bit of exasperation.

What Feeds Us 2006

Eve’s Red Dress 2003

You might also want to read her blog enries about voice vs. tone here and here.

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Sushi

Squid, eel and tuna
Upon a bed of rice
Sit ready to be eaten
Happily by those who can stand
It.

There are very few other requirements to the form. Acrostic poems don’t normally rhyme, which can be a relief for teachers and can help prepare students for less lyrical forms such as blank verse and free verse. The form still requires students to think about language and word choice without having to rely on rhyme or meter. Because the form has a reputation as a beginner’s or children’s form, it is not commonly taught at the college level and is rarely used by published poets, but it is an excellent introduction to the world of poetry.
Acrostic poems across the web:

• Animal acrostic poems
• Color acrostics
• Repository of acrostic poems
• Our name poems
• Sample acrostic poems
• Third grade MLK acrostics
• Important things acrostics
• Children’s Bible acrostic
  

Here are some additional articles about writing and teaching acrostics:

• Definition and much more: acrostic
• Enchanted learning acrostic poems
• Emory acrostic poetry
• Poetry Teachers How to Write Acrostic Poems
• Poetry Workshop Acrostics
• Acrostic Poems: All About Me and My Favorite Things
  
• Teacher lessons for acrostics
• How to Write an Acrostic Poem

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Today, we call this rhymed form an enclosed tercet because the two rhymed lines enclose the blank line. Most modern tercets employ unrhymed or blank verse. An even more stringent form of the tercet is the Sicilian Tercet. The Sicilian Tercet incorporates the enclosed form, but also requires that the poet write in iambic pentameter.

The tercet is rarely a complete poem in itself. Instead, poets write multiple stanzas of tercets to create longer works. A famous English example of a poem using tercet stanzas is Percy Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, which includes:

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

The triad is a specific form of tercet. The origins of the triad are Irish and Welsh. A triad is a poem composed of three tercets. It is a consideration of three things and their effect on a person. Welsh versions of the Arthurian legends make heavy use of this form.

Here is a smaple triad that I have written:

Cold Comfort

Parrot Bay and pina colada mix
Turn snow to sweet cold liquor
And I can smile now


The triad is one of the lesser know poetry forms, but it is an enjoyable outlet for expression. You can add as much challenge as you wish. You can simply write in three-line stanzas or you can use iambic pentameter and enclosed tercets if you wish to increase the writing challenge.

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Most people who think of epistles think of the Bible. Many of the books in the New Testament are epistles, especially the Epistles of St. Paul. The poet Robert Burns also frequently wrote epistles, as did Alexander Pope.

Over the past hundred years, as the telephone took over for letter writing, letters became less personal and more formal or business related. The concept of writing letters to relatives, friends, colleagues and lovers went out of fashion. In the last few years, however, letter writing has had a rebirth of sorts as the Internet grew in prominence and people began to send e-mail to each other.

There are no meter or rhyme requirements for an epistle. Epistle is more a form of voice and persona. A poet can address their epistle to a real or imaginary person and express their views or take on the character of a different writer. The wonderful quality of an epistle is that it can be such a freeing form. The tone can be formal or use very personalized voices. The poems can be many pages long or as short as a post card.

Some things you should keep in mind when writing the epistle are who is writing the letter, who is the letter being written to, and how you would address that person. What would interest the writer and the recipient? How formal or informal would the writer be when addressing that person?

Below is an epistle I wrote several years ago. I think it is a good example of how fun and flexible the form can be. An epistle doesn’t have to sound like a formal letter, this one actually takes the form of notes.

Notes To Shelly

One

Anyone who would give me
A Winnie-the-Pooh book for Christmas
Deserves the benefit of the doubt
Still, what will it be
To have you disappear
Don’t make it forever.

Two

Got your postcard today
Read all twenty-four words
Twelve times

Three

Saw Rocky Horror again tonight
And I thought about your first time
And your devirginization
Afterwards I drove under
Every overpass I could find

Four

First date since you left
Took her to dinner
At the Mexican restaurant
You told me gave you food poisoning
I never told you I’d wait
But I didn’t want to take her
Anywhere I’d go with you

Five

I had a feeling this morning
That I would find a letter from you
In my mailbox
You know better than I
That it was empty
That sounded bitter, didn’t it
Sorry

Six

Reading Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Wanted to recite to you the passage
About the ship captain and the Manatees
Instead I read it to the palo verde in the yard
Much to Mr. Parra’s consternation
It’s important to maintain my image.

Seven

Ran into Maria at the mall today
We asked each other about you
Must be fun to be so mysterious and everything
Maria and I ate lunch together
She told me she’s marrying Jimmy
And she took my address
So she can send me an invitation

Eight

Happy Birthday
On your behalf
I spray painted the walls
Of my living room black
And splattered little specks of color all over
To make it look like space
The effect was different than I expected
I feel like I’m in one of the less exiting rides
At Disneyland

Nine

The invitation arrived today
John and guest
There’s nobody to take though
Dating really didn’t work out
After you left
I expect I’ll send my regrets

Ten

Went to the wedding after all
Because I thought somehow
You would make an appearance
It would have been a good moment
Like the mail though
The appearance didn’t come
Instead I started talking to Tammy
And we started dancing together
And drinking half the punch
She’s getting over somebody
And she said I can call any time
I won’t though

Eleven

Called Tammy today
We got even drunker than at the wedding
And we had to walk back to my house
Where she took off her clothes
In the bathroom
And slept on the couch

Twelve

Of course your postcard
Would arrive today
From Arkansas of all places
Your message simple
Just wanted you to know I’m alive
Don’t worry
I know

Fourteen

I didn’t answer the phone today
I sat in the living room
And watched the walls
Late in the day I decided
It’s time for me to buy a TV again

Fifteen

I repainted the living room today
My lease is up and I decided
That I didn’t want to stay here
I’ve been sending out my resume
For a couple months now
And I heard back from a company in Sacramento
It seems everybody is leaving California
Which makes it probably
The most appropriate place for me to go

Sixteen

Tammy came over last night
And this time we didn’t go drinking
And this time she didn’t sleep on the couch
This morning, just to be different
I asked her to come with me
And, just to be like you
She’s quitting her job
And jumping lease
For the first time in a long time
I know I will see you again
But then, I’ve been wrong before

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Most cinquain poems consist of a single, 22 syllable stanza, but they can be combined into longer works. A cinquain consists of five lines. The first line has two syllables, the second line has four syllables, the third line has six syllables and the fourth line has eight syllables, the final line has two syllables:

2

4

6

8

2

The line length is the only firm rule, but there are other guidelines that people have tried to impose from time to time.

Cinquain Guidelines

• Write in iambs (Two syllable groupings in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable stressed. For Example: i DRANK she SMILED we TALKED i THOUGHT) For the last line of the cinquain, however, both syllables should be stressed, NICE BAR.
• Write about a noun. Cinquains generally fail if you try to make them about emotions, philosophies or other complex subjects. They should be about something concrete.
• Don’t try to make each line complete or express a single thought. Each line should flow into the next or the poem will sound static.
• Cinquains work best if you avoid adjectives and adverbs. This doesn’t mean you can’t have any, but focus on the nouns and the verbs. This almost always works best in a cinquain.
• The poem should build toward a climax. The last line should serve as some sort of conclusion to the earlier thoughts. Often, the conclusion has some sort of surprise built into it.

One possible, but not required, format is as follows:

Line 1: Title Noun

Line 2: Description

Line 3: Action

Line 4: Feeling or Effect

Line 5: Synonym of the initial noun.

If you look at my examples, I prefer to use the noun as a separate title, not as part of the cinquain. Also, only one of the three poems is written in iambs.

Sample CinquainsTucson Rain

The smell
Everyone moves
To the window to look
Work stops and people start talking
Rain came

Opening Game

Game time
Season looked good
National champions
We told ourselves as we sat down
Not now

New Bar

Across
The street I went
To drink at the new bar
I drank she smiled we talked I thought
Nice bar

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