Some Recent (And Not So Recent) Poetic Forms And Projects

Introduction

I decided to write a drabble (a story in exactly a hundred words) and then, like I often do, thought what if I turned it into a poem, with a constant line syllable count as a series of consecutive ABAB rhyme quatrains and was shocked how much harder it was than writing a simple story. I also could not use emojis to split the verses because they are counted as words, although I could have used a graphic, but I didn't think of that. Maybe I will find one and add it.

It also looks like a lot more than a hundred words, and remember, a hundred words was the minimum word count for a poem on Vocal when I started here. I used to add an introduction, followed by the poem, to hit the hundred words.

This is the poem.

A Few More Recent And Not So Recent Poems And Projects

Vocal has more than a dozen poetic forms listed as tags when you publish. They are:

• Acrostic
• Ballad
• Cinquain
• Ekphastic
• Elegy
• Free Verse
• Haiku
• Limerick
• Ode
• Pantoum
• Senryū
• Sestina
• Sonnet
• Villanelle

These are just a smattering of poetic forms available, but give us the opportunity to try these forms out, though often we have to research them first.

One of the most difficult one I did was a "difficult" Abecedarian (which is not on the Vocal list:

One of the first that I picked up from Vocal's Tag options was the Pantoum that I used for a series of anti-war/pro-peace poems which started here:

I have my own defined format for the Pantoum, although many are a lot longer than the sixteen lines that I use.

Then I saw the Sestina and thought I wonder what that is. It is a lot of hard work to produce one, in which you have six heptains (is that a word?) which have the same six words to end the lines in different places and those six words are used in the final tercet, so that is thirty nine lines. This was my first attempt, but I have done more:

Just to prove it:

The one that set this piece off was the hundred word drabble poem, but this was a thousand words with no word more that four letters long:

This one uses a Garland Cinquain format which I think creates a greating flowing feel in the poem.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it.

I have written a few pieces in the past listing the poetic forms available, which you can check out below, and have tried a lot more than I have included in this piece.