Organization - Form

Setting The Stage
Specific poetic forms have been developed by many cultures. Poetic form refers to various sets of "rules" followed by poems of certain types. The rules may describe such aspects as the rhythm or meter of the poem, its rhyme scheme, or its use of figurative language.

In more developed, closed or "received" poetic forms, the rhyming scheme, meter and other elements of a poem are based on sets of rules, ranging from the relatively loose rules that govern the construction of an elegy to the highly formalized structure of the ghazal or villanelle.

In addition, it uses units of organization that are purely poetic. The main units that are used are the line, the couplet, the strophe, the stanza, and the verse paragraph. Lines may be self-contained units of sense or, alternatively, a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence. The linguistic unit is generally completed in the next line. This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.

In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

Response Stance
Students choose one of the concrete poems to share with their blogging parner how the placement of words on the pages is related to the meaning and purpose of the poem.

Invite students to write their own shape poems using ReadWriteThink's Shape Poems interactive.