“What differs between prose and poetry is the way in which the poem sings. It’ll feel like a poem. That means there will be something underneath the narrative.” – dimitrireyespoet.com
If you’ve written any poem, chances are you’ve either “written into” or “wrote aside” one of these 5 types of poems below. When I started being a student of poetry I began to realize that though I didn’t know what I was necessarily doing, whatever I was writing was a poem that fit into a certain framework.
This blog is a confidence booster for anyone who has written at least a few poems. And as a reminder, as long as you tell yourself that you are a writer and you practice writing, you’ll always be improving. Appreciate your work and OWN IT!
Here are 5 Poetry Styles You Are Probably Already Writing Into:
1. Free Verse
This is the most general kind of poem which is simply a poem without a rhyme scheme. If you are a beginner that decides to write something different than a sonnet, a verse with an abab rhyme scheme, or something to that effect, it will most likely fall into the category of the free verse. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have a rhyming couplet or internal rhymes, for example, as a cleverly placed rhyme can go over very well in a poem. As long as there are poetry elements like metaphor, sonic qualities, interesting syntax, or raw emotion,any piece of writing that isn’t in a poetic form would be considered free verse.
The other poetry styles you already write in will be specific kinds of free verse poetry.
2. Ekphrasis
This is a poem based off of an image. It can be a picture, painting, sculpture, or video; basically, anything that is an image which can be described could be considered ekphrasis. It began with still images such as the paintings and sculptures in order to reimagine or expand on that artform through written word. Contemporarily, other visual mediums that involve movement have been reinterpreted into a poem as well. So if you’ve ever been fascinated by an image and wrote something that feels in dedication to that thing, you are essentially writing an ode. Poetry has the ability to empower its subjects to reveal different fields of vision.
3. List Poem
The list poem usually uses the process of associative thinking, which is one thought that leads you to another, which leads you to another, and so on. Richard Hugo refers to this as the triggering subject. Associate thinking or the triggering subject can be chronological or dispersed ideas, but it is always an internal subconscious, tethering one moment to the next. This allows the poem to go on its own journey while sparing it a narrative. Here’s an example of a list poem that keeps a narrative even when it isn’t in narrative form.
All of this encompassed into the list of a poem creates its own narrative and it’s the job of the reader to piece together the story and create it themselves.
4. Prose or Narrative Poem
I’ve started many prose poems from journal entries and freewrites. The prose/ narrative poems are essentially the speaker telling a story, think of The Illiad, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, or more recently, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or Willie Perdomo’s The Crazy Bunch. These poems also have a pretty clear beginning, middle, and end in order to gently lead your audience through the scenario. Though there can be an underlying metaphor working through the poem, these can often be less heady than other poems in a figurative sense. What makes it a poem rather than a prose piece is the way the poem sings. It’ll feel like a poem and by what that means is that there will be something “underneath” the narrative. Whether that is several words meaning multiple things or a few tropes, pastiches, or character/ plot types, the deeper purpose of the narrative make it a poem.
5. Epistolary Poem
This is also called the letter poem. If you’ve ever written a letter you never sent out or if you’ve ever written a poem in the second person (the you) you may have grazed up against the epistolary. The letter poem can bring the speaker really close to the subject matter, feeling personal in a way that other poems cannot. If one thinks about the intimacy of writing a letter, one can also imagine how that would intensify if we add the personal sentiment of a poem, where the speaker is transfixed on a certain feeling or tone.
Please refer to the YouTube video below for more information. Any questions? Leave a comment on this blog or my YouTube channel.
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