The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

¹⁶Cracked them! Coconuts, you see. And china plates. Cracked them! Ho, ho. No but really, ho ho.

¹⁷ A manila envelope rhyme?

¹⁸ Jewish readers may wonder why Milton is writing about the tefillin: ‘phylacteries’ here actually refer to religious trinkets used by Presbyterians, whose intolerance the sonnet attacks. Presbyterians, as you may know although Milton probably did not, is an anagram of Britney Spears.

¹⁹ The full manifesto can be read at: http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/concretepoet.htm

²⁰ Save the rich-rhyme sylva of course…

¹ After all, a large bowl of strawberry trifle or a buzzing electric dildo would make most people look twice…

² Though also a great danger that such demotic diction dates even more rapidly than old-fashioned ‘poetical’ language.

Table of Contents

Foreword

How to Read this Book. Three Golden Rules

1 Metre

I How We Speak. Meet Metre. The Great Iamb. The Iambic Pentameter. Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

II End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura. Poetry Exercise 3 . Weak Endings, Trochaic and Pyrhhic Substitutions. Substitutions. Poetry Exercise 4

III More Metres: Four Beats to the Line. Mixed Feet. Poetry Exercise 5

IV Ternary Feet: The Dactyl, The Molossus and Tribrach, The Amphibrach, The Amphimacer, Quaternary Feet. Poetry Exercise 6

V Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Poetry Exercise 7 . Sprung Rhythm.

VI Syllabic Verse. Poetry Exercises 8 & 9 : Coleridge’s ‘ Lesson for a Boy ’.

T ABLE OF M ETRIC F EET

2 Rhyme

I The Basic Categories of Rhyme. Partial Rhymes. Feminine and Triple Rhymes. Rich Rhyme.

II Rhyming Arrangements.

III Good and Bad Rhyme? A Thought Experiment. Rhyming Practice and Rhyming Dictionaries. Poetry Exercise 10

R HYME C ATEGORIES

3 Form

I The Stanza. What is Form and Why Bother with It?

II Stanzaic Variations. Open Forms: Terza Rima, The Quatrain, The Rubai, Rhyme Royal, Ottava Rima, Spenserian Stanza. Adopting and Adapting. Poetry Exercise 11

III The Ballad. Poetry Exercise 12

IV Heroic Verse. Poetry Exercise 13

V The Ode: Sapphic, Pindaric, Horatian, The Lyric Ode, Anacreontics.

VI Closed Forms: The Villanelle. Poetry Exercise 14 . The Sestina. Poetry Exercise 15 . The Pantoum, The Ballade.

VII More Closed Forms: Rondeau, Rondeau Redoublé, Rondel, Roundel, Rondelet, Roundelay, Triolet, Kyrielle. Poetry Exercise 16

VIII Comic Verse: Cento, The Clerihew. The Limerick. Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse. Light Verse. Parody. Poetry Exercise 17

IX Exotic Forms: Haiku, Senryu, Tanka. Ghazal. Luc Bat. Tanaga. Poetry Exercise 18

X The Sonnet: Petrarchan and Shakespearean. Curtal and caudate sonnets. Sonnet Variations and Romantic Duels. Poetry Exercise 19

XI Shaped Verse. Pattern Poems. Silly, Silly Forms. Acrostics. Poetry Exercise 20

4 Diction and Poetics Today

I The Whale. The Cat and the Act. Madeline. Diction. Being Alert to Language.

II Poetic Vices. Ten Habits of Successful Poets that They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Poetry School, or Chicken Verse for the Soul Is from Mars but You Are What You Read in Just Seven Days or Your Money Back. Getting Noticed. Poetry Today. Goodbye.

I NCOMPLETE G LOSSARY OF P OETIC T ERMS

A PPENDIX –Arnaud’s Algorithm

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F URTHER R EADING