Poetry: Visual Poetry

When you think of poetry, you usually think of things like sonnets and rhyming and meter and all that other stuff I've been talking to you about all month. But there's a whole different form of poetry called visual poetry.

There is concrete poetry, also known as shape poetry. Here are some examples:

These are also called altar poems when the shape the poem makes is related to the textual content of the poem.

In those examples, the text is still in straight lines. But in a calligram, the lines aren't restricted to lines:

This is a calligram in French that describes the items made up by the words (example: the mouth says "la bouche" which is French for "mouth").

This is where things start getting really weird. Asemic writing is more art and less writing (in my personal opinion). Fluxus poetry is a work of poetry created during the course of a performance. I openly admit that I don't know how lettrism and micrography differ from calligrams and other forms of visual poetry, but perhaps one of you could help me out there.

With that, my friends, we wrap up our March of poetry (which I regret is not alliterative or even rhyming) and prepare for the daily challenge of NaPoWriMo! See you then...

Poetry: Hink Pinks

This isn't really the type of poetry that NaPoWriMo is about, but it usually gets included in elementary school poetry lessons, so I thought I'd use it for some fun.

They're called Hink Pinks. You get a clue, and you have to come up with the two-word rhyming phrase that fits the clue. They're usually really groan-worthy, too.

What lawyers feel when they lose: brief grief
Hobbies at a convent: nun fun
A rodent's wife: mouse spouse

Yeesh, right? There are also two-syllable versions called Hinky Pinkies, and three-syllable versions called Hinkety Pinketies:

Fruit that needs to shave: hairy berry
Exhausted flower: lazy daisy

Riot among churchgoers: devotion commotion
Ape ships: gorilla flotilla

I told you they were awful. But they're fun!

Poetry: Internal Rhyme

We've covered rhyme scheme and rhyme (including assonance, consonance, alliteration, and slant rhyme) but I have yet to tell you about internal rhyme.

It is basically what it sounds like: a rhyme between syllables inside the same line.

The best examples of internal rhyme that I know of come from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

There, you see the word "lonely" in the middle of the line rhymes with the word "only" at the end of the line. This is all over the place in "The Raven," to the point that there develops an internal rhyme scheme, which is a pattern like a regular rhyme scheme, but involving internal rhyme. Complex!

I said "The Raven" has the best examples of internal rhyme, but that isn't entirely true. Go turn on your local hip-hop/rap radio station and pick almost any song. The entire musical genre has wonderful examples of internal rhyme. It can be harder to recognize if you aren't looking at the lyrics written out in lines, because you might just think the lines are very short, and rhyme with each other.

Poetry: Beyond Rhyme

We've already discussed rhyme when we talked about rhyme scheme, but there are other ways to make poetry sound lyrical and "pretty," other than rhyming.

Alliteration refers to several words in quick succession starting with the same sound. Hey, look; I just did it: "starting with the same sound" is an example of alliteration. The words don't have to start with the same letters, since we sometimes spell things differently but pronounce them similarly. (Did you catch the alliteration in that sentence? Beautiful.)

While rhyme usually refers to the ending sound of a line of poetry, assonance appears throughout the line, specifically looking at vowel sounds. An example might be if we see the... ha, there it is. "be if we see the": all of those words contain the same long "e" sound, and therefore give us assonance.

Consonance is similar to assonance in that it appears in the middle of lines of poetry (or prose) but it refers to the ending consonant sounds of words, like, "tip, tap, top." (I don't know why those three words would appear together in a line of poetry; poets and poems can be a bit odd.) These three words all end with the same "p" sound, and combined, are an example of consonance.

There is also something called slant rhyme that basically means you're cheating when trying to rhyme something. Sometimes slant rhyme comes about from translating or updating the language of a poem, or regional differences. For example, if we have a poem with these lines:

We wanted some privacy,
So we went by the sea.

Weird poem. Anyway, an American would pronounce the last word of the first line "PRY-vuh-see." An English person would pronounce it "PRIH-vuh-see," and it wouldn't rhyme as closely with the second line's phrase "by the sea." It would still rhyme, but not as thoroughly.

An American might rhyme "mobile" (like a cell phone... if we were stuck in the 1990s) with "global," whereas an English person would rhyme it with "while" or "tile." So regional differences can causes slant rhyme.

Or, sometimes, it is done on purpose: perhaps because the poet wants to draw attention to a certain pair of lines, or perhaps because s/he cannot come up with a closer rhyme, or rhyme just isn't that important to this poet or poem.

Poetry: Haiku, Tanka

On Monday, we looked at common European poetic forms. Today, we'll look at some from Asia!

Haiku

Almost everyone is familiar with the haiku. It's a short form of Japanese poetry that does not rhyme. Traditional Japanese haiku have different rules from the English version, because of the differences in language. I will be exploring English haiku (mostly because I don't know Japanese).

English haiku tend to be more lax in the number of syllables, but everyone knows they are supposed to have three lines with a total of seventeen syllables (five in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line).

A haiku is supposed to be a hint; an exercise in showing, not telling. They are also supposed to mention a season word, traditionally. They can employ a caesura (which looks like two slashes, like this: //) to compare two adjacent words.

I have a t-shirt with a popular silly haiku on it:

Haiku are easy

But sometimes they don't make sense

Refrigerator

There is also a form of Japanese poetry called senryu that is the same as a haiku, but haiku are usually about nature, while senryu are usually about people, and are dark and/or humorous. So really, my t-shirt more likely has a senryu on it, if you want to get technical.

Tanka

Tanka also come from Japan. They have five lines, with five syllables in the first and third lines, and seven syllables in the second, fourth and fifth lines. (It's like a haiku with two seven-syllable lines on the end of it.)

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There are hundreds of different types of poems from all over the world, but this week has been a small sample of the more popular ones here in America. I will be attempting most of these during NaPoWriMo in April.

Poetry: Sonnets, Villanelles, and Odes

Today, we'll be looking at some of the more popular poetic forms from Europe.

Sonnets

Sonnets are poems typically consisting of fourteen lines.

There are many different types of sonnets, but the two most common are the Italian sonnet and the English sonnet, popularized best by William Shakespeare.

Italian sonnets (also known as Petrarchan sonnets) begins with an octave (two quatrains, or four-line sections) which describes a problem or a situation that needs to be resolved. The octave is followed by a sestet (two tercets, or three-line sections) that solves the problem by suggesting a resolution. The ninth line (the first line of the sestet) usually serves to change from problem presentation to problem resolution (it is sometimes called the turn). A common rhyme scheme of Italian sonnets is ABBA ABBA CDC CDC or ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. Less often, the rhyme scheme can be ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. (This makes the sestet look more like three couplets than two tercets.)

The English sonnet (or the Shakespearean sonnet) is usually written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is usually ABAB ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Villanelles

Villanelles are nineteen-line poems that start with five tercets and end with a quatrain. They usually don't tell a story, because they follow a very specific system of refrains: The first and third lines of the first stanza are used as two refrains that end each of the other tercets. Perhaps a diagram is the best way to explain a villanelle's structure:

Refrain 1
Line 2
Refrain 2

Line 4
Line 5
Refrain 1

Line 7
Line 8
Refrain 2

Line 10
Line 11
Refrain 1

Line 13
Line 14
Refrain 2

Line 16
Line 17
Refrain 1
Refrain 2

The rhyme scheme here is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. For those of you who have never read the liner notes of a CD (is my age showing already?) a refrain is a repeated line, like the chorus of a song.

Odes

Odes come to us from ancient Greece. Normally, odes are meant to be used to celebrate the glory of an individual or an event. (Think of Hercules and Odysseus and wars.)

Odes have complicated structural rules (or, depending on how you see it, have very few rules at all). The English ode has no "usual" meter, but its typical rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE.

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On Thursday, I'll discuss some Asian poetic forms!

Poetry: Rhyme Schemes

As promised on Monday, here are the answers to my mini-quiz on meter:


dactylic hexameter (six dactylic feet (S U U) per line)
trochaic octameter (eight trochaic feet (S U) per line)
iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet (U S) per line)

Today we're looking at rhyme scheme, which focuses on the last syllable(s) of each line in comparison to each other.

If you studied poetry in school (and didn't we all sit through that) you probably remember writing letters at the end of each line of a rhyming poem to indicate a rhyme scheme. Example:

I saw in the kitchen a cat so large,
It was truly bigger than a barge;
The Kitchen Lion, it was named,
And my roommate it had completely maimed.

(Really dark poetry about the Kitchen Lion.) So what you would do to determine the rhyme scheme of this poem is to start with "A" on the first line. The "A" represents rhyming with "large." Any other line that ends in a sound that rhymes with "large" would get an "A." That means the second line, ending with "barge," gets an "A" for rhyming with "large."

The third line's last word, "named," does not rhyme with "large" and "barge" so it does not get an "A." Instead, it gets a "B," which will now represent rhyming with "named." The fourth line ends with "maimed," which rhymes with "named," so it also gets a "B."

So this is what our poem would look like:

I saw in the kitchen a cat so large,     (A)
It was truly bigger than a barge;        (A)
The Kitchen Lion, it was named,       (B)
And my roommate it had completely maimed.   (B)

So the rhyme scheme of my sad little poem about the Kitchen Lion is AABB. These are called couplets, when two lines in a row rhyme with each other, then the next two lines rhyme with each other, and so on. There are also triplets, which are exactly like couplets, but in groups of three lines instead of two lines. (AAABBBCCC...)

Alternate rhyme is an ABABCDCD pattern, like in this example:

He had eaten the bread,
And eaten the fruit.
He ate my roommate's head,
And his freshly pressed suit.

Morbid, and in alternate rhyme.

Rhyme schemes can be fairly simple, like the examples above. They get more complicated, like AABA (rubaiyat), or limericks (AABBA) or ABABB (a cinquain). But then they can also get a little crazy. A fire-and-ice stanza (named after the poem "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost) has the rhyme scheme ABAABCBCB. A rhyme royal is ABABBCC. A terza rima is ABA BCB CDC... until you get to the end, and you have YZY ZZ or YZY ZYZ.

Poetry: Meter

Meter is the established rhythmic pattern for a poem.

In English poetry, we divide lines into feet, which are typically a specific group of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Not this type of stressed.

The type of feet being used determines the first word in the phrase describing the meter, and the number of feet per line determines the second word.

When you have two of a certain type of foot in each line of the poem, it's dimeter. Three feet per line makes trimeter; four makes tetrameter; five makes pentameter; six is hexameter; seven is heptameter; eight is octameter.

Typically, you find the stressed and unstressed syllables that build feet by really over-doing it on the "bounciness" of reading a line. For example, an iamb (or an iambic foot) is made of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (U S). Example:

In there, I found a cat so large,

This is a line consisting of four iambs. When reading it, you naturally stress - just slightly - the words "there," "found," "cat," and "large." Try over-acting it:

In there, I found a cat so large,

See? Those are four iambs. In iambic pentameter, (which is a well-known form of meter because (1) it sounds impressive so people say it to sound smart, and (2) Shakespeare used it in his plays and sonnets) you would have five of those in each line of the poem. Because I only have four, this poem would be in iambic tetrameter.

So we know how to identify an iambic foot, but what about the other kinds of feet?

A trochee (or a trochaic foot) is like a backwards iamb. Where an iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (U S), a trochee is one stressed followed by one unstressed syllable (S U).

Kitchen Lion

I apologize for my inability to write well in trochees (I think they're really hard) but the phrase "Kitchen Lion" is made of two consecutive trochees. You slightly stress the first syllable in each word:

Kitchen Lion

If you used this phrase as one line of your poem, you'd have trochaic dimeter: two trochaic feet per line.
A spondee (or spondaic foot) is two stressed syllables in a row (S S). An anapest (or anapestic foot) is two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed (U U S). A dactyl (or dactylic foot) is a backwards anapest: one stressed followed by two unstressed (S U U). An amphibrach (or amphibrachic foot) is one unstressed, one stressed, and one unstressed (U S U). And finally, a pyrrhic (or pyrrhic foot) is two unstressed syllables in a row (U U).

This is all, of course, in the case of English poetry. Every language has differences in emphasis, how to count feet, and other various factors in determining meter.

Not all poets or poetry styles identify meter as being important, or even a part of poetry. Much free verse poetry doesn't rely on meter because it "feels" like prose (it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't "bounce," and it isn't usually in evenly divided lines).

Want to see how much you learned? Try identifying what these types of meter mean:

dactylic hexameter
trochaic octameter
iambic tetrameter

I'll post the answers on Thursday!

NaPoWriMo 2013

It's still a month away, but I've joined NaPoWriMo 2013 with this blog!

NaPoWriMo is National Poetry Writing Month. You write a poem every day for the month of April. That's it! You can join at www.napowrimo.net and submit your site if you plan to participate in a public, online way. (Although you could always do it on paper or in a Word document or wherever you like.)

I don't normally write poetry, so I thought this would be a fun way to try it out. I'll be talking about NaPoWriMo and poetry every Thursday through the month of April on Review Me Twice, and we'll be wrapping up the month with a book of poetry.

To prepare, I'll be spending the month of March posting (still on Mondays and Thursdays) about poetry-related topics. Then, every day in April, I will post a poem. We'll be back to normal grammar-related posts in May.