How to use this Page

May is Asian Heritage Month and is a time to celebrate the arts and cultures of Asia.  Poetic forms arise out of a cultural group’s language and can sometimes work well in another language like English with some modification and changes.  Poetic forms can also be used as a means of expression of one’s cultural identity or sensibility.  Over the weekend at a conference I attended, I had a chance to listen to poet Sheniz Janmohamed talk about the ghazal, a poetic form originating in Arabic, and later made famous by Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz.  For Janmohamed, learning about the ghazal form and its traditions lead eventually to her own ghazal writing in English. The ghazal was a way to connect her with her South Asian heritage and to deepen her knowledge and awareness of the rich potentials of the form as it could be explored in English.  The result of her work is her book Bleeding Light, TSAR publications, 2010.  Of course, you don’t have to be South Asian to write a ghazal; it is a form like any other and artists are always interested in experimenting with forms!   However, because I am myself a poet of Asian background, I appreciate those artists who plumb the depths of their cultural traditions and find new hybridized ways of expressing themselves through traditional forms, particularly non-western ones.

An example of a poet playing with traditional Japanese forms — haiku and senryu — is Richard Stevenson, who has compiled a book of poems called Casting Out Nines: Haiku and Senryu for Teens (Ekstasis Editions, 2011.)  This is a collection of flip, irreverent high-school haiku — which reminded me of a long ago incident in my high school days when an English teacher allowed students to submit creative writing for their papers and was stymied by my friend who submitted a haiku (or maybe it was two!) for his paper.  Leave it to a teenager to exploit a literary form to his own ends!

Anyway, that aside, Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Katja at Write. Sketch. Repeat.

Tweet

National Poetry Month, is nearing its end, and the royal wedding is just around the corner, so let’s write poems about it. I’ve made some suggestions below, but all forms are welcome. (If you really want to win me over, I suggest attempting my favorite poetic form, the sestina.) Send your poem care of [email protected] and I’ll post what I can tomorrow. (Keep it clean, please. Humor, satire and effusive excitement are welcome, insults are not.)

Additionally, our Twitter followers are eligible to win one of the below Oxford World’s Classics. To enter, tweet:

Take @OUPAcademic’s #royalweddingpoetrychallenge http://oxford.ly/msrv0S

Entries will be accepted all weekend. Winners will be contacted via DM.

*     *     *     *     *

ghazal (ghasel; gazal; ghazel) A short lyric poem written in couplets using a single rhyme (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.), sometimes mentioning the poet’s name in the last couplet. The ghazal is an important lyric form in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry, often providing the basis for popular love songs. Its usual subject-matter is amatory, although it has been adapted for religious, political, and other uses. Goethe and other German poets of the early 19th century wrote some imitations of the Persian ghazal, and the form has been adopted by a number of modern American poets, notably Adrienne Rich.

cinquain [sang-kayn] A verse stanza of five lines, more commonly known as a quintain. Examples of such stanzas include the English limerick, the Japanese tanka, and the Spanish quintilla; others include the variant ballad stanza employed intermittently by S. T. Coleridge in his ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ ( 1798 ), and many more varieties with no name.

terza rima [ter-tsă ree-mă] A verse form consisting of a sequence of interlinked tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc ded, etc. Thus the second line of eac