Tag Archives: couplet

For-Get-Me-Not

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  • For-Get-Me-Not is a tiny verse originated by Viola Gardner.The For-Get-Me-Not  is:
    • a small poem, a complete couplet (2 lines).
    • syllabic, 4 syllable lines.
    • rhymed.
    • titled.
      May by jvg
      A daisy day
      will lead the way.
My Thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the wonderful resource at PMO
My Example Poem
Ahhh!
If you want brief –
Here’s your relief.

Teddy Poem

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Teddy Poem
Type:
Structure, Subject, Metrical Requirement, Rhyme Scheme Requirement, Other Requirement, Isosyllabic
Description:
A fixed form of three six-line verses summed up by an orphan couplet. All lines are in alexandrines. Rhyme scheme is aabbcc. There is an additional starter line which is, “Many, many years ago when Teddy was much younger than today…” The starter line occasionally varies slightly. The topic of these poems is always the adventures of a certain Theodore E. Bear, or Teddy as he is better known, who was created in the Garden of Eden, and having found the Fountain of Youth is immortal and eternally youthful.
Attributed to:
“The Dread Poet Roberts”
Origin:
American
Schematic:
Rhyme and line pattern: x aabbcc ddeeff gghhii jj
Meter: xX xX xX xX xX xX, or
xxxxxxxxxxxx
Rhythm/Stanza Length:
6
Line/Poem Length:
21
Reference:
See Also:
My Thanks to Charles L. Weatherford for this most complete description that I could find.
Example Poem and Visual Template
Ode to Theodore E. Bear     (Teddy Poem)
Many, Many years ago when Teddy was much younger than today…
For many, many, years- and I have now lost count
young Theodore E. Bear, went searching for the fount!
The fountain that he found- it grants perpetual youth.
He’s  been around forever- should be long of tooth.
That he has found it- any children will attest,
as silently he speaks, and puts them to their rest.
He dresses up in dresses, or may wear a bow.
He doesn’t mind cross-dressing, that much all of us know.
He may don a railroad cap or a Smokey hat,
or ‘bear’ soft messages, that tell of this and that.
He’s never embarrassed to go nude as it were
and sit about quite proudly, wearing only fur.
He goes with first responders – he’s most often there-
to mitigate the panic- temper their despair.
While firemen fight the blaze- before the clean-up starts,
kids will cling to Teddy, a balm for frightened hearts.
If they sustain an “Owie”,that requires a shot-
with Teddy there the pin-prick’s pain is soon forgot.
And when things are all peachy, Teddy you will find
as husband’s ways of saying “Thanks I’m glad you’re mine.”
© Lawrencealot – February 8, 2014

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Sheshire

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Sheshire
Type:
Structure, Metrical Requirement, Rhyme Scheme Requirement, Isosyllabic, Pivot Requirement
Description:
A poem based on six-line verses with a closing couplet. Here are Chuck’s rules:
  1. The Sheshire is comprised of three stanzas of 6 lines with a rhyme scheme of either ABABAB or ABCABC. Completed by a rhymed couplet.
  2. Each line has the same number of syllables. The one exception to this is the last line, which may have up to six additional syllables. The additional syllables must a phrase that is set aside (by parenthesis or dashes, for example). If this aside is removed, the correct syllable count would be there and the line would remain a reasonable sentence.
  3. Each stanza should have a shift in tone. The ending couplet should leave the reader (or at least the poet) with a grin. It can be a darkly ironic grin, but a grin, nonetheless.
The derivation is from the Hebrew words shesh and shir or shira meaning six poem.
Attributed to:
Charles David Lipsig
Origin:
American (Jewish)
Schematic:
Rhyme: ababab or abcabc
Total schema:
ababab cdcdcd efefef gg or
abcabc defdef ghighi jj
Rhythm/Stanza Length:
6
Line/Poem Length:
20
Examples:
Status:
Incomplete
See Also:
My thanks to Charles L. Weatherford for the wonderful resource quoted. 
  • The Sheshire is an invented verse form by Jewish-American poet Charles David Lipsig found at Poetry BaseThe name comes from Hebrew six=shesh and poem=shir.The Sheshire is:
    • a poem of 20 lines made up of 3 sixains followed by a couplet.
    • isosyllabic except the last line which includes the same # of syllables as the previous lines plus a finishing phrase separated from the base line by caesura.
    • rhymed, rhyme scheme ababab cdcdcd efefef gg or abcabc defdef ghighi jj.
    • composed with a pivot or change of tone from stanza to stanza and ends with a note of irony.
 My thanks to Judi Van Gorder for the wonderful resource quoted. 
 
 
Example Poem
Shovel Snow (Sheshire)
When I was only nine or ten
and winter’s chilly nights dumped snow,
I loved to help my daddy then
We’d bundle up, he’d say, “Let’s go!”
Together, we two working men
would scrape and push and scoop and throw.
Into my teens I found it paid
to take my shovel- make the rounds
to work for those who were dismayed
how quickly that white stuff abounds.
While others in their warm homes stayed
I worked with scraping, grunting sounds.
I had no sons to share the task.
Our drive was shaded by our house;
“Please clean the walk,” my wife would ask.
Of course one ought to please one’s spouse
so covered up, and with ski-mask
I worked. It did no good to grouse.
Retired and lazy now I nap
or read or watch my football game. (Let teens now do that crap!)
© Lawrencealot – February 2, 2014
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Landay

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An Afghan form  has only a few formal properties.  Each has twenty-two syllables:   nine in the first line, thirteen in the second.                                 
The poem ends with the sound “ma” or “na.”
(One meaning of the word landay is short, poisonous snake.)
These are the specifications  I found at
Along with almost all of the examples below.
Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not.                                 
In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby                         
that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for                         
its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate                         
a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love.                                
Within these five main tropes, the couplets express a collective fury, a                                 
lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a                        
call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as                         
nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
The landays* are a way to subvert the social code in which women are prohibited
from speaking freely. Since the poems are collective and anonymous “women can
claim they just overhead the poems in the marketplace,” says Griswold, “not
that they authored them.”
*Authors note:  Even in this extensive site, we note Landays used as the plural, but
formally I read somewhere the plural is Landai.  That seems consistent with English usage.
“These poems are part of an oral tradition that goes back thousands of years, sung by nomads and farmers at wedding ceremonies or around campfires. Today, the landay form has in some ways gone underground, becoming a means of expression and defiance for oppressed Pashtun women.”
Poetry to Die For.
Jim Fleming: In Afghan culture poetry is revered incompetent fact, you can find lines of famous poems graffiti-ed on sides of buildings.  There are though some poems that are secret, like this one: I call your stone, one day you’ll look and find I’m gone.  There is a story behind that poem and Strainchamps is here in the studio with me, and you have the story.
Anne Strainchamps: Well Jim the story begins with a teenage girl named, Rahila, and she lived Helmound, which you know is one of the Taliban strongholds [xx].  Like a lot of real Afghan girls, she wasn’t allowed to leave her home or go to school, her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade and she found refuge in poetry.  The poem you just read is a landay, that’s a folk poem part of a Pastian tradition of woman’s poetry.  Rahila began to write and quote poems like this.  Then one day her brothers discovered that she was writing love poetry, and that is something that is considered very dishonorable and they beat her badly.  In protest, Rahila doused herself with cooking oil and she set herself on fire and she died.
Jim: Oh my Lord.  In our culture to imagine a culture where a woman dies for writing poetry.
Anne: Yeah, and the reason we know about [?] Rahila [?] Muska- her real name turned out be [?] Zirina – is thanks to American Journalist and Poet, Eliza Grizwald.  Eliza heard about Rahila, and she traveled to Afghanistan to try to find out more and she uncovered this hidden poetry tradition.  Poems called landay.
What I can tell you after personally visiting several educational and revealing sites is that the specified requirements are WIDELY ignored in the poetic examples I was able to find, and to no detriment to the form, and that there is on other poetry form that is used so exclusively by women.  Further,
 I think it is the most vital and socially functional poetry in the world today.
Here are some examples.  I rarely found a poem that met the line by line syllabic requirements.
I never found one with the “ma” or “na” ending.
See for yourself if the have “bite”.
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.
Making love to an old man
is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk blackened by mold.
The old goat seized a kiss from my pout
like tearing a piece of fat from a starving dog’s snout.
May God destroy the White House and kill the man
who sent U.S. cruise missiles to burn my homeland.
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.
Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.
Come, let’s lie thigh against thigh.
If you climb on top, I won’t cry.
My lover is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.
Be black with gunpowder or blood-red
but don’t come home whole and disgrace my bed.
Here are some from the Tenth Muse
What can a woman know of war?
Only how to weep angry tears and bury her dead.
*
I sing even under my blue hood.
My mother says I am a most determined songbird.
*
He says at home I am a flower
but to the world I should be as plain as a weed.
*
And finally, I am required to write one myself:
So poets, give structured writes a try,
but let your words cry for those who wrote then had to die.
 
 

A L'Arora Poetry Form

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The A L’Arora, a form created by Laura Lamarca, is stanzaic, consisting of an octave made up of a sestet and a couplet.
It is syllabic with no count or meter specified.
The rhyme scheme for this form is abcdefgf.
The minimum length for the poem is 4 stanzas (32 lines or more) with no maximum length stipulation.
The A L’Arora is named after Laura Lamarca as “La” is her signature. “Aurora” is Italian and means “dawn” – “Arora” is derived from this. This form is dedicated to Chad Edwards.

Rhyme Scheme Re-Stated: xxxxxaxa, where “x” = no rhyme
My Example Poem

Simple, Not Simplistic      (A L’Arora)
 
My mentor mentioned making my attempts
at penning poetry as speaking to a friend.
The grandiose perhaps will awe a few,
the academics, whose investment
in obcsure even
may seem propitious.
 
The common man will find
pretention not auspicious.
Your poems should be fun or run with one
to ideas delible in reader’s mind
making them now indelible in his own
Arcadia.
Eschew condemnations, and benisons
but be exponent of provoking thought.
 
Let poetry maraud through newest  notions
and through concepts the Ancients may be taught.
Ignorance is pandemic
and helped along
by dogma,
the quintessential foe of reason.
If agencies are instrumental
in dumbing people down. . .
 
We poets and the world-wide net
is where new hope is found.
Confounding folks
won’t do the trick
Didactic rants
shall also fail,
but creative and probing poems
when free of condescension,
 
may lead the Exodus from apathy
and get the world’s attention.
 
(c) Lawrencealot – Nov 2013
 
I visual template is neither possible nor required.
 

Ravenfly

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This is a form created by Amanda J. Norton, writing on Allpoetry as DarkButterfly.
 
It consists of two quatrains and a couplet
with syllables of 8/7/8/7/10/10
rhyming abab cdcd ee
There are no metric requirements.
Example Poem
May I Sit Here   (Ravenfly)
Penelope prevaricates
She’s done it throughout her life.
The truth she just approximates.
Glad she’s someone else’s wife.
She runs down gals she doesn’t know.
Bill,  when choosing where he sits
avoids her;  I would never though,
I appreciate her tits.
Besides by sitting there when ‘ere I can.
She has to slime and smear some other man.
© Lawrencealot – July 11, 2013
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Dahquain

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Dahquain form invented by  D.A. Hemingway, aka, DianeAH on Allpoetry.com.
Iambic Tetrameter Quatrains
axAA bxBB cxCC dxDD, etc.
Minimum of 4 stanzas,
Ends with a separate rhyming couplet. (14 lines or more)
The capital letters indicate that the words are identical.
In the rhyme pattern indicated by axAAbxBBcxCCdxDD, the lines indicated with capitals contain word refrains.
Example Poem
Write a Dahquain
A Dahquain seems a friendly form.
Line two will never have to rhyme,
although I guess it is my norm
to try to monkey with the norm.
I suppose could to try to rhyme
all the unrhymed lines; even try
to challenge up with monorhyme
that is, if you like monorhyme.
Or you could get busy and try
to link as I’ve done here, those lone
lines lightly “Ah ha!”, slap your thigh.
Excited guys will slap their thigh.
Now that trick treds path of my own;
It’s not part of this easy form.
My tricks just wanted to be shown.
I’ll be anxious to see yours shown.
Enjoy the Dahquain, Di’s new form.
A Dahquain seems a friendly form.
© Lawrencealot  –  July 14, 2012
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Ignore name Dahtrain…That was my misunderstanding.

 

Hex Sonnetta

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The HexSonnetta, created by Andrea Dietrich, consists of two six-line stanzas and a finishing rhyming
couplet with the following set of rules:
Meter: Iambic Trimeter
Rhyme Scheme:  abbaab cddccd ee  (abbabbcddccdee)
Iambic Trimeter means the usual iambic (alternating unstressed/stressed)  meter for every line of the poem, but instead of the ten syllables that comprise a typical sonnet’s iambic pentameter, this particular form uses
six syllables of iambic trimeter per line.
Thus, the name HexSonnetta.
The first part of the form’s name refers to the syllable count per line.
The second part of the name, Sonnetta, is to show this to be a form similar to the sonnet, yet with its shorter lines and different rhyme scheme, it is not the typical sonnet. Not only does this poem have six syllables per line, it also has a set of two six-line stanzas, giving an extra “hex” to the meaning of HexSonnetta.
The rhyme scheme is a bit of a mixture of the two traditional sonnet types, with the two 6-line stanzas having more the rhyme scheme of an Italian sonnet, but with the ending rhyming couplet being the featured rhyme scheme of the English sonnet. The first stanza presents the theme of the poem, with the second stanza serving to change the tone of the poem, to introduce a new aspect of the theme or to give added details.
The final couplet, as in an English sonnet, can be either a summary (if the theme is simple) or it could be the resolution to a problem presented in the theme. In any event, it should nicely tie together the whole piece and could even appear as a nice “twist” presented at the end.
Example Poem
Gam-boy No Batteries
The tramp stamp tattoo’s swell
but now it is passé.
This tat’s for every day.
It’s sure to cast a spell
and start-up jitters, quell.
Just need a pen to play.
You verbal skills may suck.
You may be shy to boot.
The guys will closer scoot.
Keep in your car or truck
a pen for your own luck.
and playing is a hoot!
Put one upon your thighs.
for really studly guys.
© Lawrencealot – May 22, 2012
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Imaginaerium

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Invented by  Caroline Ann Gordon on Allpoetry.com.
This form is:
Isosyllabic: 12 syllables per line
Rhymed: abcabadeedff
Stanzaic: Presented as a sestet, a quatrain, and a couplet.
* Sestet is written followed by your Quatrain, this stanza is begun with a Volta.
* A Volta, which in Italian means “turn”.
The turn of thought is one in a Sonnet that is often indicated by such words as: “But”, “and”, and “yet.”
This form is Copyrighted © 2012 Caroline Ann Gordon.
If you pen in this form, please mention where you learned the style from.
Example Poem
Deferred Treasure
I wandered through the deserts high and slept in caves
while searching for the Montezuma’s gold that lies
in Utah hills. The Aztec fortune deemed so great
that it cannot be computed. Brought here by slaves
or Montezuma’s minions, several tons of prize.
Only one man survived the rest were put in graves.
Yet, years of toil and searching yielded only grief.
The map the old guy claimed good but not exact
Has led me here and many possibles I’ve tracked.
I miss my love, I’m through with greed. Time’s been a thief.
I’m still an able man, I’ll work.  The tide has turned.
My treasure is the girl who waits.  That I have learned.
© Lawrencealot – April 7, 2012
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Roger's Refrain

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This is a form invented on AllPoetry.com by Rockape 

It is written in iambic tetrameter with
Any number of mono-rhyme quatrain stanzas, and
and ending rhyming couplet.

It is stanzaic, with quatrains, each stanza being mono-rhymed with the last half of line one, being the repeated refrain, as the last half of line 4.
There is no limit to the number of stanzas but the poem must end with a rhyming couplet.


Example  Poem

I Lost My Kid     (Roger’s Refrain)
On a long trip I lost my kid.
Responsible I am- yet did
and not because he went and hid.
‘T’was late at night I lost my kid.
Me and my boys driving quite far
It would be three day trip by car.
It’s cool at night; that’s how things are
I like that when driving quite far.
In Rock Springs WY I’d stopped to pee.
Got back in checked back seat to see,
indeed my boys were there with me.
I went back where I’d stopped to pee.
There I bought some coffee to go,
got in and went; I don’t go slow.
After an hour got tired you know
Even with the coffee to go.
Pulled off and slept ’til morning light.
That way passed last hour of the night.
My Gary said, Where’s Bob tonight?
I thought him there, ’til morning light.
He had jumped out to take a pee.
and walked to the John don’t you see?
While I was buying that coffee
unknown to me, to take a pee.
I sped back to the coffee shop
without my seeing single cop
who’d been told to locate and stop
one whose kid’s in the coffee shop.
There Bob a grin from ear to ear
A donut in each hand was clear
this adventure had posed no fear.
Powdered sugar from ear to ear.

For dad, there was a bit of fright,
for son,  adventure and delight.


(c) Lawrencealot – August 24, 2012
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