Writers have different places under heaven.
Writing preferences can vary like the various kinds of expertise and talents.
Among others, poems come to everyone like magic chants, puzzling crystals, and the pleasure of switching rainbows.
What are poems? How do you write it? How does it differ from prose? As for me, I'm trying hard everyday to write them.
I go bird by bird and nail by nail.
I try to taste jello and wonder how it melts.
I strive.
I fail.
I win.
I wait.
I love.
I just hope everything works.
Poetry teachers advise, "Say the hardest thing.
" Check these fixed forms of poems: A sonnet is composed of fourteen iambic pentameter lines rhyming in various ways.
An Italian sonnet (or Petrachan) is divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines).
The English (or Shakespearean) is made up of three quatrains and a final couplet.
A sestina has six six-line stanza and a three-line envoy (short concluding stanza).
The villanelle (a villanelle was originally an Italian country song or dance) is a nineteen-line poem, consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain and having only two rhymes.
It repeats the first line (A1) and the third line (A2) according to the scheme at the left.
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem by Dylan Thomas is an example.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rage at the close of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
The "tanka," a 31-syllable poem is a poem, whose fives lines have 5.
7.
5.
7.
7 syllables.
It may have influenced the cinquain (an American invention) with 2.
4.
6.
8.
2 syllables.
The "renga" is revived by Mexican poet Octavio Paz.
Haiku is a poem about nature and generally follow the principles of minimalism and immediacy.
There is a suggestion of season.
The Haiku is composed of 17 syllables (5.
7.
5).
The pantuom is made up of quatrains in which the second and the fourth lines of each stanza become the first and the third of the next one.
The concluding stanza repeats lines from the first stanza.
Here's part of a poem I wrote, as pattern.
Four Seasons With God "Dear God, dear God I give you myself Split from skull to toe Hold me.
I give you myself My hands and the work I do Hold me Talk my thoughts...
" The diamond poem is a poem that makes the shape of a diamond (The Diamante, 1969).
Check my example.
The first line is love.
The second line is sweet, sour.
The third line is hugging, beating, promising.
The fourth line is heart, hands, sky, earth.
The fifth line is living, working, embracing.
The sixth line is brilliant, strong.
The seventh line is God.