Different Types of Poems You Should Know About
While some poets may argue passionately that poetry isn’t true poetry unless it adheres to the rules of classical form, there are times when a well-used poetry form can go stale for you. Knowing that there are many more different types of poems and poetry, may lights your fires as a reader or a poet, to get you going.
Purpose of this article is not to be the presentation of all different kinds of poetry formats (although we maintain to be a valuable resource by elaborating all Poetry Genres & Different Forms of Poems here »). Our intention is to disclose and depict those particular types of poems that, in our humble opinion, bring the most excitement and positive impulses, and at the certain point are exotic by their form or the origin.
TwiHaiku
TwiHaiku, Twitter Haiku or Twitter Poetry – is a novel form of short verse poetry that unifies genuine virtues of traditional Haiku (brevity, point to an actual, lived experience, evoking deep feelings in the reader..) with simple, straightforward purpose and interface of Twitter application.
You don’t have to be a writer to write TwiHaiku
Although twiHaiku does not restricts its form to any particular set of rules, and you do not have to be a poet to write it, it strives to convey the significance of the poetic experience in expressing your genuine thoughts and feelings, in accordance with the particular object, event or phenomenon.
Early wake up.
Strong about life,
strong about love,
strong about people.
Only too weak about my baby girl.
One may ask what separates a TwiHaiku from Haiku or other short, light verse. TwiHaiku is a poetry for today and our fast-paced lifestyles. Starting from the simple Twitter question: “What are you doing?”, the reader and the writer within are enticed to get involved, to share with the community their sincere attitude about world that surrounds us, with the perception of what is occurring at the moment, concisely and without embellishment.
TwiHaiku about twiHaiku
The butterfly in the concrete city of Eden.
So fragile and so beautiful.
Silent cry that you follow instinctively,
is the kiss of salvation.
TwiHaiku official website aims to collect and publish quality original short poetry, which moderated selection of best twiHaiku poems is available at TwiHaiku Twitter account page for immediate subscription.
Japan’s most popular unrhymed poetic form, The Haiku is just a tiny poem, “the size of your breath”, that glorifies the importance of the poet’s first impression, just as it was, of subjects taken from daily life, and of local color to create freshness. It traditionally consists of three lines. The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven, and the last line five. The traditional subject-matter is a description of a location, natural phenomona, or wildlife.
The ocean waves crash,
As a storm brews in the sky,
Mad mother nature
The Haiku originated in Japan and its name is generally translated as “good words.” One of the first Japanese writers who practiced the Traditional Haiku specific form was Basho, Matsuo. (1644-1694). The name Basho (banana tree) is a sobriquet he adopted around 1681 after moving into a hut with a banana tree alongside. During the years, Basho made many travels through Japan, and one of the most famous went to the north, where he wrote Oku No Hosomichi (1694). On his last trip, he died in Osaka, and his last haiku indicates that he was still thinking of traveling and writing poetry as he lay dying:
Fallen sick on a journey,
In dreams I run wildly
Over a withered moor.
by Matsuo Basho.
The Modern Haiku derives from the haikai (a linked-verse poem) which was created by a group of poets as a long series of small stanzas. The first stanza, which was called the hokku (”starting verse”), set the tone for the rest of the poetic chain, and thus it enjoyed a privileged position in haikai poetry. It was not uncommon for a poet to compose a hokku by itself without following up with the rest of the chain.
Largely through the efforts of Masaoka Shiki (the famous Japanese author, poet, literary critic, and journalist), this independence was formally established in the 1890s through the creation of the term haiku. This new form of poetry was to be written, read and understood as an independent poem, complete in itself, rather than part of a longer chain.
Few great examples of modern Haiku by outstanding Japanese haiku masters:
Sick and feverish
Glimpse of cherry blossoms
Still shivering.
by Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. (1892-1927)
From a bathing tub
I throw water into the lake –
slight muddiness appears.
by Kawahigashi, Hekigodo. (1873-1937)
First autumn morning:
the mirror I stare into
shows my father’s face.
by Murakami, Kijo. (1865-1938)
American Haiku is a short form that evolved from the Japanese Haiku form. There are many different types of poems in American Haiku sub-genre, ranging from the simple 5-7-5 style taught in most grade schools, to more complex styles that not only consider every single element to be important, but also demand a certain type of punctuation.
they’ve gone…
where the beach umbrella was
the sand not quite so hot
by Lindsay Dhugal
Faceless, just numbered.
Lone pixel in the bitmap-
I, anonymous.
by Alexey V. Andeyev
Many of the thousands of poets outside Japan studying and writing this brief form in English and other languages are becoming aware that it will be an accepted form of poetry for time to come.
You may find more interesting details about this form of poetry here: Haiku Poems
Limerick
“There are three distinct types of limericks: Limericks to be told when ladies are present; limericks to be told when ladies are absent but clergymen are present–and LIMERICKS”.
Definition of Limerick by Don Marquis
The limerick, has been and probably always will be “an indecent verse-form”. Any nonsense poem that lacks five lines, thirteen metric feet, or the aabba rhyme pattern is simply not a limerick. It might be a sing-song or a la-de-da, but it’s not a limerick.
There ONCE was an OLD man from WHEEL-ing
Who HAD a pe-CUL-i-ar FEEL-ing
Said the SIGN on the DOOR
Please don’t SPIT on the FLOOR —
He JUMPED up and SPAT on the CEIL-ing.
The first, second, and fifth lines are trimeter, while the third and fourth are dimeter. Often the third and fourth lines are printed as a single line with internal rhyme.
The metric feet MUST be anapests ( da da DUM ) although the leading foot of each line may be an iamb ( da DUM) and the last foot of each line may have a trailing unaccented syllable ( da da DUM da). If you can’t sound out the da-da-DUMs, no Limerick involved – Sorry.
A mosquito was heard to complain,
‘A chemist has poisoned my brain!’
The cause of his sorrow
was paradichloro-
triphenyldichloroethane.
The simplicity of the limerick quite possibly accounts for its extreme longevity. Variants of this form dating as far back as the fourteenth century are found in English nursery rhymes and animal-warning poems such as “The lion is wondirliche strong”. Since then, the form has appeared sporadically throughout the history of the English language, from the bellowing songs of half-naked street beggars during the sixteenth century to the drinking songs of inebriated pub-crawlers in the seventeenth century.
The term limerick itself has its apocryphal origins in the refrain “Will you come up to Limerick,” a now-forgotten tavern chorus from the Irish town of the same name.
Despite its popularity in pubs and taverns, formal poets were familiar with the limerick; Shakespeare employed the form in several of his plays, King Lear and Othello. However, one does not need the talent of Shakespeare to compose a limerick, but merely a sense of humor.
The reprinting of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense in 1863 inadvertently created the English limerick fad. The English humor magazine Punch, inspired by Lear’s book, began to publicize the “new” form within its pages, and thus began the limerick craze. In about 1870, some forty years after the original publication, A Book of Nonsense was re-published in an edition with color illustrations. In all likelihood Edward Lear colored them himself.
The limerick has refused, and still refuses to die, despite its curious role as the vehicle of cultivated, if unrepressed, sexual humor in the English language.
