Fixed Forms

Sesintas are defined as "A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi.The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoi contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza:

       1 2 3 4 5 6

       6 1 5 2 4 3

       3 6 4 1 2 5

       5 3 2 6 1 4

       4 5 1 3 6 2

       2 4 6 5 3 1

       (6 2) (1 4) (5 3)"

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sestina

An example of this is evident in "Sestina: Altaforte" by Ezra Pound

  LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born.

  Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.

  Eccovi!

  Judge ye!

  Have I dug him up again?

  The scene is his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur. “The 

Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cœur de Lion).

                                 I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.

You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!

I have no life save when the swords clash.

But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing

And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,

Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

                                  II

In hot summer have I great rejoicing

When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,

And the light’nings from black heav’n flash crimson,

And the fierce thunders roar me their music

And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,

And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.

                                  III

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!

And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,

Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!

Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace

With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!

Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!

                                  IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.

And I watch his spears through the dark clash

And it fills all my heart with rejoicing

And prys wide my mouth with fast music

When I see him so scorn and defy peace,

His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.

                                  V

The man who fears war and squats opposing

My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson

But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash

For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;

Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

                                  VI

Papiols, Papiols, to the music!

There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,

No cry like the battle’s rejoicing

When our elbows and swords drip the crimson

And our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.

May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”

                                  VII

And let the music of the swords make them crimson

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!

Hell blot black for always the thought “Peace”!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53967/sestina-altaforte

The sestinas originate from Italy: type of poem in fixed form, 1797, from Italian, "poem of six-lined stanzas," from sesto "sixth," from Latin sextus (see six). Invented by 12c. Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel. The line-endings of the first stanza are repeated in different order in the rest, and in an envoi.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sestina

"Nonce forms are essentially poetic forms created by poets for one-time use." Nonce form is basically a free verse but with an actual structure to it.

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/nonce-forms-what-they-are-and-how-to-write-them

An example 

"I could create a nonce form right here on the spot. Write a poem with 17 lines, the odd lines rhyme, even lines do not, the odd lines are 6 syllables, and the even lines are 5. Also, indent the even lines. This form doesn't currently exist, but if I wrote a poem using it, I would be using a nonce form. In my example above with the 6-syllable title, 10-syllable lines poems, I created my nonce form before composing the first drafts. But I've also created nonce forms during the revision process when I've noticed that my poem could easily fit into a form if I decided to take it there. Often, I prefer a nonce form to straight up free verse--as long as it makes sense."

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/nonce-forms-what-they-are-and-how-to-write-them

"Petrified by tomorrow,

pretty but tortured,

preceding the tyranny

portrayed on television,

peacefully with trepidation."

https://wordwool.com/nonce-poem-type/

No specific origin: "Nonce forms, typically, are given short shrift by standard poetry dictionaries and guidebooks. Lewis Turco provides a minimalist if admittedly conventional definition ("Many poems are 'regular,' that is, traditionally formal, but the specific combinations of stanza pattern, line length, rhyme schemes, and meters have sometimes been created by the poet for that specific poem"), but neither The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, nor Abrams, Baldick, Kennedy, et al., have one."

http://www.unsplendid.com/noncedef.htm

History: The Pushkin sonnet, also called the Onegin stanza, is a form initially created by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in his novel "Eugene Onegin," published in a series of smaller segments between 1825 and 1832 summing to 389 total stanzas.

Form: Its rhyming scheme is abab ccdd eff egg, where the bolded must be a feminine rhyme. Note how the poem can be divided into three sets of four lines and one closing couplet and how it uses iambic tetrameter (shorter than a traditional Shakespearean sonnet of pentameter line length).

Example: As translated from Russian to English by Lieut.-Col. Henry Spalding from "Eugene Onegin," the beginning of the novel is as follows:

My uncle's goodness is extreme,

If seriously he hath disease;

He hath acquired the world's esteem

And nothing more important sees;

A paragon of virtue he!

But what a nuisance it will be,

Chained to his bedside night and day

Without a chance to slip away.

Ye need dissimulation base

A dying man with art to soothe,

Beneath his head the pillow smooth,

And physic bring his mournful face,

To sigh and meditate alone:

When will the devil take his own!

To read more about the Pushkin sonnet, check out the Poet's Collective or the Poem Analysis.

(Written by Gabriel Cowley)

DEFENITION: A poetic form that uses a word from each line of an existing poem as the last word of each line in the new poem.

HISTORY: The first golden shovel poem was created by Terrance Hayes. It was written in 2010 to honor the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the poem borrows words from her poem “We Real Cool”.

EXAMPLE: “The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes

I. 1981

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

in them but approachlessness. This is a school

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.

Standing in the middle of the street last night we

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike

his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die

before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.

II. 1991

Into the tented city we go, we-

akened by the fire’s ethereal

afterglow. Born lost and cool-

er than heartache. What we

know is what we know. The left

hand severed and school-

ed by cleverness. A plate of we-

ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-

ing in the afterglow. A late-

night chant. Into the city we

go. Close your eyes and strike

a blow. Light can be straight-

ened by its shadow. What we

break is what we hold. A sing-

ular blue note. An outcry sin-

ged exiting the throat. We

push until we thin, thin-

king we won’t creep back again.

While God licks his kin, we

sing until our blood is jazz,

we swing from June to June.

We sweat to keep from we-

eping. Groomed on a die-

t of hunger, we end too soon.

The poem borrows words from each line of  “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, and uses them as the last word of each line in this new poem.

Definition: a poem or stanza of eight lines in which the first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh and the second line as the eighth with a rhyme scheme of ABaAabAB (Merriam-Webster). In other words, it is an 8-line poem in which the first two lines are also the last two lines. And the first line is the fourth line. The only other rhyme is with the first line.

History: This started as a French form however it made its way into English a few separate times. It started as mostly devotionals by a Monk named Patrick Carey, and was re-popularized by Robert Bridges. (More Here)

Example: Thomas Hardy’s, “How Great My Grief” I had trouble finding poems that were not this one. 

Definition: A type of lyric poem made up of couplets, ranging from five to fifteen couplets. These poems are typically about love, either the acquisition of love, or the loss of it. The rhyme scheme is typically AA BA CA DA (essentially, the last line of each couplet rhyme, often with the same word or phrase).

History: The ghazal is a poetic form of Arabic descent, and was a form that stemmed from a much older form called a qasida, which was also composed of rhyming couplets, but were usually much longer than the typical ghazal and did not focus on themes of love. Eventually, ghazals became their own distinct poetic form, taking the structural elements of the qasida, but placing an emphasis on musicality, as ghazals can be easily accompanied with a musical score.

Tips/Tricks: Love and music are your key words for employing this poetic form. Writing a ghazal means that you have to pay very careful attention to the meter of your poem; you can't let there be significant substitutions of metrical feet that throw off the poem's very specific rhythm. There's also a very repetitive element of this poetic form, as in most ghazals, the last word or phrase of the second line in a couplet will be the same, so you need to centralize your topic around it. There are a lot of unique opportunities to create very interesting poetry with this form, as you can contextualize a specific word or phrase around a different couplet each time to progressively add more complexity to a seemingly simple line.

Famous Poets/Poems: The form of ghazal poetry is dated, and not common in the modern canon of poetry. Additionally, due to the origin of this poetic form, there is little to no ghazal poetry from older times that are in English. In more modern times, however, Dejan Stefanovic, a poet out of Serbia, has played with this poetic form, writing a short ghazal poem named "Ghazal of Love."

"I love the new sounds of love; 

Only the new cures an old love.

Watching the love making of waves and the shore

I desire to be the wave of love.

There is no real hate in quarrels,

Only stupidity and lack of love.

The Sun shone upon me

And I shone upon the world with love.

I fly through memory

To find a newborn love.

Sing to me sea, sing to me sky

And the hiding world sprang out from love."