shot glass
title
Issue # 8 September 2012
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Glossary of Poetic Forms


The following are poetic forms that have appeared in Shot Glass Journal.

palindromic cinquain
A Palindromic Cinquain is a Cinquain written as a Palindrome. The Cinquain is a short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines. The Palindrome is poem with a sequence that is the same forwards and backwards.

Pantoum
The Pantoum is a type of formal verse that is distinguished by cycling refrains. They are written in quatrains, that may be rhymed or unrhymed. The first quatrain consists of four lines. The second quatrain uses the second and fourth lines from the first quatrain as its first and third lines. The second and fourth lines of the second quatrain are new to the poem. The third quatrain uses the second and fourth lines of the second quatrain as its refrains in the first and third line positions. The third quatrain's second and fourth lines are new to the poem. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Pi-Archimedes
A 6 line poetry form base on PI = 3.14286. Each line represents the number of words used from the PI number.

Prose
A poem written in prose rather than verse. It can look like a paragraph or fragmented short story but acts like a poem. It works in sentences rather than lines.

Quandrel
A Quandrel is a poem of twelve lines, with the refrain appearing at the start and repeating twice. It differs from a Roundel in that the middle stanza has an additional line. The refrain establishes the second or 'b' rhyme (abaR baba abaR).

Rondeau
A lyric poem from the 13th century which is characterized by repeating lines or "rounds". It has 15 lines written as a quintet, quatrain and sestet, with two rhyme schemes.

Rondel
A 14th Century French lyrical poem. A variation of the Roundeau, it consists of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). The first two lines are refrains which repeat at the end of the second and third stanzas. The rhyming pattern is ABba, abAB, abbaA.

Rondolet
The Rondolet is a French form consisting of a single septet with two rhymes and one refrain AbAabbA. The capital letters are the refrains, or repeats. The refrain is written in tetra-syllabic or dimeter and the other lines are twice as long - octasyllabic or tetrameter.

Roundel
A Roundel is a poetry form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). It is a variation of the French rondeau form. A roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, plus a refrain after the third line and after the last line. The refrain must be identical with the beginning of the first line: it may be a half-line, and rhymes with the second line. It has three stanzas and its rhyme scheme is as follows: A B A R ; B A B ; A B A R ; where R is the refrain.

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