Learn how to write a sonnet by giving one tension fourteen lines. Shape the rhyme, rhythm, and turn with a line-by-line example. See the drafting steps.
Sonnet 116 stakes the speaker's writing on love that never changes. Explore the full poem, its argument, and the final couplet's bold wager in our reading.
A petrarchan sonnet pairs an ABBAABBA octave with a sestet and a turning point. Learn how its structure shapes meaning and differs from Shakespeare's. Read on.
The apostrophe literary device turns description into an address to the absent, the dead, or nature. Learn what that shift reveals in the article's examples.
A Shakespearean sonnet builds its argument in three quatrains and a couplet. An annotated Sonnet 18 shows how form shapes meaning. Explore the reading method.
An AABB rhyme scheme links neighboring lines in couplets. Compare AABB with ABAB and explore Blake, Stevenson and Auden through examples. See how it works.
Learn how to write a haiku from a real observation, using two images, a seasonal hint, and a pause. Compare Japanese and English approaches in the article.
Read three Robert Frost poems in full, including “The Road Not Taken,” with notes on style, essential works, collections, and his life. Explore the poems.
Learn how five literary devices, from metaphor to alliteration, shape a sentence's meaning and sound, with examples for reading and writing. See how they work.
What is a haiku? A Japanese poem shaped by a season word and a cut between two images, not just 5-7-5. Explore the form and why syllable counts mislead.
What is a sonnet? Learn how fourteen lines, rhyme patterns, and the volta shape its meaning, with Italian and English forms explained. Read the article.
Explore 11 types of poems, from sonnets to erasure poems, with the rule that defines each and an example showing why it works. See all 11 forms explained.
Learn how a rhyme scheme works with AABB in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” common patterns, and practice stanzas with answers. See the examples and try it.
The Moment We Finds Ourselves In: A Review of John Amen’s Illusion of an Overwhelm John Amen—Illusion of an Overwhelm NYQ Books, 2017 Page Length: 89 Retail: $15 John Amen’s Illusion of an Overwhelm continues the experimentation in language that was evident in his last few collections of poems, especially The New Arcana (NYQ Books), co-authored with Daniel Y. Harris, and strange theater (NYQ Books). Amen’s latest is a collage of voices and personas, a mix of the physical world and metaphysical one, and an examination of where we are in this present moment, specifically in the way that it addresses hyper-consumerism and carefully incorporates everyday speech into the stanzas, including text speak. At times, it can be difficult to keep track of all the voices within the collection. The first section, “Hallelujah Anima,” contains a number of forms, including prose poems and narratives that veer into surrealism. It also [...]
Dianne Borsenik Age of Aquarius: Collected Poems 1991-2016 Crisis Chronicles Press 978-1-940996-34-9 Dianne Borsenik is a kind of Cleveland Poetry legend. She attends everyone’s readings, travels with her buddy John Burroughs to read at Cafes and Coffeehouses all over the Midwest, runs a small press herself, and performs with a rare kind of energy that echoes so many forms of populism. Often funny, her poems are a kind off mix of heartbreak and comedy. She uses language that is clear, accessible and often uses rhetorical shifts. She can be bluesy, she can tell stories, she can write small imagistic poems, and she can make you laugh out loud, something rare in a poet. She isn’t scared of risking sentimentality and she can be directly political at times. She is musical. She can be unapologetically Reto-Beat. And she is…. Well, she is a fun poet. In the best manner a poet [...]
Joe Weil—A Night in Duluth NYQ Books, 2016 Page Length: 104 Pages Retail: $15 After recently re-reading Raymond P. Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, a book that isn’t afraid to criticize the current state of academia, contemporary American poetry, and the pressure to publish or perish, I can’t help but find similarities between Hammond’s work and Weil’s latest collection of poems, A Night in Duluth, at least in terms of argument. The key similarity between the books is their willingness to take on the contemporary American poetry scene, namely all of the hobnobbing that goes on and the rapid speed at which some poems are churned out in order to fill a CV or earn tenure. Yet, the final pages of Weil’s book remind us of the power that poetry can still have, especially when it elevates the everyday image as something of beauty. Hammond and Weil’s books are completely different forms. [...]