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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.
| | Indrisos
Indriso is a form created by contemporary Spanish poet Isidro Iturat. The poem is formed by two triplets and two one-line stanzas (3-3-1-1), with free use of the rhyme and the number of syllables in its verses. "The indriso comes from the sonnet but it is not a sonnet. In the same way, the sonnet is a variation of the Provençal song but it is not a Provençal song." See examples (mostly in Spanish, with some Englist translations) on his website.
| | Poetic Asides by Robert Lee Brewer
Poetry blog on the Writer's Digest website features interviews with contemporary authors, writing prompts, advice on the craft, and introductions to exotic poetic forms.
| | Poetry Through the Ages
Poetry Through the Ages, a project of the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA), is a free online exhibit that showcases poetic forms and movements from different cultures, with examples and instructions. A special feature of the site is a new poetic form called "node poetry", which breaks the traditional linear flow of a poem into branching clusters of words that the reader can read in different sequences. Drawing its inspiration from synthetic and visual poetry, the form is found exclusively online, and enables readers to take the poet's lines and construct the poem as they explore it.
| | 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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