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Forms

List of Forms and Future Plans

Hi poetry lovers! April is National Poetry Month. Many people embark on a 30/30 during April (they write thirty poems in thirty days — usually one each day). A few of us poets from Columbus and Gainesville — and now Tampa and Charlotte too, have been participating in an informal “April Formal Poetry Challenge” for...
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Haikrostic Double Sestina

So, this form birthed a few years ago from an admittedly overly geeky, slightly masochistic brain, when I was attempting to think of the most ridiculous form I could think of. There are variations, and I’ll talk about those later, but the basic idea is that you write a double sestina where those 12 repeated...
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Follow up on Double Sestina

Friends, I couldn’t let it go. Here’s the problem with what has been moderately agreed upon to be Swinburn’s double sestina: first, it isn’t widely agreed upon, and some say it’s random, and secondly (and perhaps most importantly), it doesn’t follow the logic of the sestina. The sestina follows a couple of rules, or rather...
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Sestinas

Let’s talk Sestinas. The Sestina is an complex form based in intricate repetition. It’s a 39 line poem attributed to Arnaut Daniel from the late 12th century, of Medieval French origin. The original Sestina is 6 stanzas of 6 lines and a concluding triplet envoy, where the end words, or teleutons, of the first stanza’s 6 lines are repeated throughout the...
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April NaPoWriMo and the Triolet

April, as you might know, is National Poetry Month. Therefor, many poets see that as a chance to do the poetic version of NaNoWriMo and do NaPoWriMo, meaning 30 poems in 30 days.  A bit of a combination of writing workshop, sprint, marathon and self-flagellation. Of course, leave it to my own community of Gainesville...
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