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Useful Resources : Websites for Poets and Writers : Exotic Forms
A Gift of Ghazals
The ghazal is a poetic form from the Arabian Peninsula popularized in the modern West by the late Agha Shahid Ali. This essay shares Ali's insights into this challenging, rewarding structure, whose literal meaning is "flirtation".
| | A Guide to Verse Forms
Bob Newman has found exquisite forms to frame your words. Bone up on Chant Royal, Domino Rhyme, Rhopalics and Rubaiyat. An idiosyncratic links page presents treasures like Arnaut & Karkur's ultimate on-line prosody resource, a great resource to learn about important verse forms.
| | Cento
In Latin, a cento is a patchwork. In poetry, a cento is a work composed of lines from works by other authors. Examples include "The Dong with a Luminous Nose," "SemiCento" (multi-lingual!) and "Familiar Lines." Read more about the cento form at William Delamar's Werd Trix and A Word A Day's series on poetry forms.
| | Chiasmus.com
Chiasmus is "a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases." Dr. Mardy Grothe collects exemplars of the art. We especially like this one, relayed by John F. Kennedy in 1956: http://www.chiasmus.com/mastersofchiasmus/kennedy.shtml
| | Clerihew
A Word A Day defines a clerihew as "a humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject." This form is a relatively recent invention of Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). A typical creation: The people of Spain think Cervantes/Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;/An opinion resented most bitterly/By the people of Italy. Some clerihew links... More Bentley: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/207.html; Thinks Words and WordPlay: http://thinks.com/words/clerihew.htm; On Women Poets of the Romantic Period: http://www.umsl.edu/~english/faculty/sweet/swetcler.htm; Mystery Clerihews: http://www.smart.net/~tak/clerihew.html; Student Guide: http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass/clerihew.htm; Clerihews in T-town: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/wordgame/wg404.htm
| | Concrete Poetry
Concrete poetry physically arranges words and letters on a page to create an effect that adds meaning to a poem. Explore Michael Garofalo's collection of weblinks to concrete poems and William Delamar's discussion at Werd Trix.
| | Digital Poetry
Brian Kim Stefans presents "the dreamlife of letters". Words from A to Z scamper, dissolve and deconstruct themselves in this 11-minute animation, Stefans' playful response to postmodern jargon. Read Teemu Ikonen's commentary on the genre, "Moving Text in Avant-Garde Poetry".
| | Formal Poetry Venues
Poet Rose Kelleher maintains this useful list of links to journals and contests that welcome traditional verse.
| | Forms of Poetry for Children
Page of links to writing exercises and examples of forms such as haiku, cinquains, nursery rhymes, songs, and concrete poetry.
| | Timothy Steele
Website of neo-formalist poet Timothy Steele, a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, includes selections from his poetry and critical essays as well as a useful introduction to traditional poetic forms and meters.
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