ShakesThese are forms I'm oft working with, by the way. We're locked in a love-late relationship.

1. Pantoum
Four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Expertly rendered, the result is always an obsessive compulsive poem with turrets.

2. Epistle
Poems that read as letters.

Is this an angry letter to my mother, my ex-lover or the most eloquently peeved letter city parking enforcement has ever received?

3. Triolet
The first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme.

It’s pretty for a dirge. But that’s like some jerk in LA calling you New York pretty

4. Sestina
The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.

Is this a poetic form or some Byzantine bureaucracy of a rhyme scheme? It is a scheme indeed. A scheme to make me lose my mind.­­­

5. Haiku
A three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count.

Either I’m a simpleton, a guru or a comedian.

6. Renga
Poets work in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line (haiku) and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long.

Group poems ruin friendships. A brilliant narrative will always be unthreaded by your former bff who punctures your ingenious plot twist with the words “Betsy awakens./Like the dawn, all before this/was just a fool’s dream.”(see #5)

7. Prose
The prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry.

Some say this is fiction-short’s wannabie. I say I worked and reworked my line breaks until line breaks became meaningless.

8. Epic
A long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey.

Does the modern reader really have the attention span for this? Not unless I can figure out a way to turn two seasons of the TV show Wilson Phillips: Still Holding On into epic verse.

9. Free verse
Formalists keep calling your poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Va-jaja” derivative, lazy and self-absorbed.

10. Sonnet
Sometimes there’s so much traffic in this poem, it’s hard to make the turn.