YAY it's September and cause this is supposed to be challenging we are upping the difficulty again.
The poems this month are the Onegin Stanza, the French Cinquain, and the La'ritmo (which is a brand new poetry form I found just for you.)
Onegin Stanza- I've never heard of this one so I don't have much to say about it. To me it's a more difficult sonnet.
The Pushkin Sonnet, also known as the Onegin stanza, is a verse form created by Russian poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin for his novel in verse, Eugine Onegin. It is a more unusual sonnet than the English or Italian, and rarely used.
It again has 14 lines, but they have a peculiar rhyme scheme of aBaBccDDeFFeGG. The change in case in this explanation DOES NOT MEAN REPETITION as it does in most cases. Lower case letters denote lines with feminine endings in Russian and upper case are masculine. This is hard to replicate in English but not impossible.
Poets like Shakespeare might make a pentameter feminine by adding an extra unstressed syllable to the end. Here, we'll just ensure a masculine line ends with a stressed syllable and a feminine with an unstressed.
(This website gives a really simple explanation to stressed and unstressed syllables http://www.writingrhymeandmeter.com/?page_id=1787 )
Example:
It's Friday night, the unfettered city
Resounds with hedonistic glee.
John feels a cold cast of self pity
Envelop him. No family
Cushions his solitude, or rather
His mother's dead, his English father
Retired in his native Kent,
Rarely responds to letters sent
(If rarely) by his transatlantic
Offspring. In letters to The Times
He rails against the nameless crimes
Of the post office. Waxing frantic
About delays from coast to coast
He hones his wit and damns the post.
--The only poet/novelist to use the Onegin stanza in English that I could find is Vikram Seth. He doesn't actually stick to tetrameter, either, though he does keep to the masculine/feminine scheme.
It should be noted that this, like any example from, Eugine Onegin, is part of a larger narrative and is not a single poem. However, since it ends with a couplet, I see no reason why it can't potentially stand alone.
(I copied and pasted the entire definition and example of this from implicatedisorder.wordpress.com)
French Cinquain- The Cinquain is also one of those kinds of poetry that's popular with elementary/jr high teachers. You've probably done one or two of them before. It's not very long either. This is probably the simplest poem on this list.
Cinquain is a short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines. It was developed by the Imagist poet, Adelaide Crapsey.
Another form, sometimes used by school teachers to teach grammar, is as follows:
Line 1: Noun
Line 2: Description of Noun
Line 3: Action
Line 4: Feeling or Effect
Line 5: Synonym of the initial noun.
YOU ARE READING
A Poet's Journey
PoetryA Poetry Challenge Revisited This is for poets who want to learn about and write more challenging forms of poetry. For the next twelve months we will pick one type of poetry and write a minimum of one poem a week in that month's chosen style- prefer...
