Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 9

Hello everyone! This is Ava and welcome to a new week of inspiration!!! Last week C.C. Champagne enlightened us about the "ins ans outs" of free verse. Lovely work C.C!! This week we will be uncovering the secret of tanka AND cinquain! These two forms are very different, but they will widen your spectrum of knowledge nevertheless! So bake some cookies, grab a glass of milk and snuggle up close to the fire.  

First up is tanka! This is why I decided to do a double post today: A haiku is a short version of a tanka. I wrote about haiku a couple weeks ago. The syllable counts for tanka are 5-7-5-7-7 and the rules are exactly like haiku except that tankas do not have to be about nature: they can be about ANYTHING!!!!

So that is it for tanka! Now for the fresh and unknown world of cinquain. Now do not be intimidated by the word because this a very easy from to do. Even I can do it (and I am not the best at doing different forms! I only do free verse!) So I am not going to go into the history today but more of the mechanics and some examples.




Cinquains are very simple. The y do not need to rhyme and they consist of 5 lines. The first line has 2 syllables, the second line has 4 syllables, the third has 6, they fourth had eight, and the last have two.  This is pretty easy right? So, these are the rules for cinquain. I encourage you all to write one and try it out because this form is a lot of fun!!! There are other variations of this such as quatrain which has slightly different rules but is particularly easy to master.


Line 1-  2 Syllables
Line 2 - 4 Syllables
Line 3 - 6 Syllables
Line 4 - 8 Syllables
Line 5 - 2 Syllables


I hope this lead you farther down the long road and poetry forms. Please leave a comment in the comments box about what you want to see and what forms you are interested in. If you write a cinquain, I would be delighted to read it. Tune in next week when C.C Champagne is your tour guide. Write on!