Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 20

Another week begins, even when the year is almost at an end, and I am CC Champagne here to try to help draw you some sort of a map over the impenetrable landscape that is poetry form.

Today is actually my birthday, and one of those big ones at that. I don't celebrate at this time of the year though, but prefer to have an official birthday in summer (if the English Queen can do it, so can I!) and can therefore be here to keep you company under the gooseberry bushes. Let's, however, try something reasonably short today so I can get back to the arduous celebration I have planned (including swimming with dolphins).

My best source for these posts is, as you may have noticed, Wikipedia, and I have stumbled upon a poetry form that I have actually not seen used. A Copla is a Spanish poetry form where the name quite simply means union or link. It consists of:

• four stanzas of
• four lines each and
• no line is to be longer than eight syllables.
• The rhyming pattern varies, but is typically in the romance meter where the even numbered lines (one, three etc) have a near rhyme (assonance) and the uneven numbered lines are unrhymed.

This form is said to be very common in the Spanish language, and was used by (among others) the influential Frederico Garcia Lorca. I will admit to not having tried this form myself, but perhaps you can provide me with some other examples?

As I head back to the enticing turquoise waves of the Caribbean and my date with the dolphins I would like to encourage you to share you poetry, coplas or any other forms, with us at the Poetry Picnic, which this week has the theme of Forgiveness, Gifts, Holiday Songs and Traditions. Or why not join in the Poets Rally 59 over at the Promising Poets Parking lot?

With this I bid you adieu for 2011 and hope to see you again in the wonderful New Year (which, if some are to be believed, means the end of the world according to the Mayan Long Count Calendar), with loads of new, weird and wonderful Poetry Forms, poems and inspiration! Gott Nytt År and Happy New Year!

*Cheers*