New Verse, Old Web - Verse forms I've created (details)

The Absinthe

Description

A visual poem: a circle subdivided as in the example, one word per division. The poem is read from the center out. (In the example, the first three words are "I & you.")

Example(s)

$Relationship: Phase 3. \ I & you are beginning to fear us now$

Carl Bettis

The Crap stanza

Description

A quatrain.
Lines have 10, 10, 8, and 10 syllables, respectively.
Lines 1 and 2 end-rime.
Lines 2 and 3 head-rime.
Lines 3 and 4 end-rime.
Typographically:
- Lines 1 and 2 are right-aligned with each other.
- Lines 2 and 3 are left-aligned with each other.
- Lines 3 and 4 are right-aligned with each other.

Example

The Bourgeois Saint

The bourgeois saint is always at his prayers.
His calloused knees wear holes in marble stairs.
Quiz not his earnest piety,
You must admit his impropriety.

Carl Bettis

The Glitch

Description

The glitch poem has no hard and fast rules, and maybe it's more a genre than a form. Write a poem, then glitch it up with typos, disorderings, repetitions, static, etc. (I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this.)

Example

Just Once I'd Like

Just once I'd like to answer the phone
and have it be a cloud on the other end
a single loud in a blue mid-mooning sky
lonely maybe and he noticed
and may. noticed
a single cloud in in my clear mind.
Cloud I put her on please?
Just now I'd once like to have
a headful of lighning
handsfree headset so
lightning so
I don't get that call,
I just don't get it.
Maybe a cat instead.

Carl Bettis

The Grackle

Description

Named after the first poem written in the form (by one of my alter egos). A word-count prosody that owes an obvious debt to the form of William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow."

Any number of stanzas.
Each stanza has respectively 1, 3, 1, 3 words per line.
The last stanza asks a question.

Example

The Common Grackle

Everything
the common grackle
knows
I do not

Mysteries
the dying maple
fathoms
exceed my depth

Riddles
my dumb bones
crack
reveal my ignorance

Labors
my hidden mind
completes
find me helpless

Where
within all these
secrets
do I reside?

Bryant Jacobi

The Pi Pan

Description

I invented the pi pan to celebrate Pi Day, 3/14. This is a word-count prosody, in 3 stanzas:

3 lines of 3 words each.
1 line of 1 word.
4 lines of 4 words each.

Example

Their Work of Light Done

Snow-melt-sodden,
rain-pressed black-
flake layers of

leaves

sink into their dissolving
self beds, will not
with March-crazy winds
be stirred to dance.

Carl Bettis

The Quale

Description

Basically four words per line. The poem can be any length. The following liberties are allowed:

Contractions may be counted as either one word or two, at your discretion.
Hyphenated words may be counted as a single word or multiple words.
A line may have five words, if they are all monosyllabic.
A line may have three words, if they all have two or more syllables.
Two adjacent lines may have respectively 5 and 3, or 3 and 5, words per line, but this shouldn't happen too often, and never consecutively. (4/4/5/3/4/4 is all right, but not 4/4/5/3/3/5, etc.)

Two examples from one of my alter egos follow.

Examples

of some account

i found, in front
of the once elegant
building now settling delicately
into delapidation that housed
the bank where i
had just closed an old
account, tangled in unkempt
grass, a fortune — right
next to where someone
had dropped a filthy
twenty, a wild strawberry!

sylvester hobson

i want to go

i want to go
far away from everywhere
to a place that's
only here. with owl
& snakes for neighbors?
no, not even those,
or yes, owls & snakes,
& bars & night clubs,
a car wash maybe,
perhaps a gun range,
an interstate just beyond
my front yard, next
to a firehouse, down
the block the ER,
& all around dogs,
who howl at nothing
& bark at everything.
all that, as long
as it's quiet, as
long as i can hear
what the silence says,
and i'm not there.

sylvester hobson

The Ronga

Description

Having invented the unku as a parody of the haiku, and the thunka as a parody of the tanka, I went on to create the ronga as a parody of the Japanese renga (not to be confused with the American form of the same name). I don't know why I'm picking on Japan, but in my family, you only mock the ones you love.

The first stanza is an unku. The unku's title is the title and theme of the ronga.
Alternating 14-word and 17-word stanzas follow, with whatever line division the poet desires.
Each stanza is on the theme given by the title.
A stanza may or may not have anything to do with the preceding stanza(s).
Taking liberties is encouraged, e.g. bending the definitions of "word," "stanza," "on the theme of," etc.

The example below is by myself and all of my currently active heteronyms.

Example

Metamorphosis

Searching the alleyways of dreams,
I found you. Waking to new light,
whose stranger am I now?
— md

BELIEVEEVERYTHINGMIRACLE
SPROLIFERATEQUICKERTHANTHE
YPERISHTHERESASUCKERR
EBORNEVERYMINUTE
— bc

When I hear one of those
old hillbilly hymns, for a moment
wrath lives in the sky.
— ie

When the plague came
I mishappened
to live
alone
to learn
to love
myself.
— tg

Once I gave up drinking for a month. Was still an asshole, but didn't enjoy it much.
— sg

Our house-wolves dream slaughter of foxes, hares.
A fat toad escapes them both.
— cb

Hello, handsome Mr. Butterfly! You
won't remember me, but I knew you
when you spoiled my parsley.
— romr

The place I want to go
won't exist until I'm where
it's always been.
— bj

a couple of desires, coupling.
a knot of desires, twisting, combining, fighting.
neither desire nor no desire.
— sh

by Mort Duffy, Basil Cartryte, Ian Erinson, Thomas Gorn, Sturgis Giteau, Carl Bettis, Roynald O'MacRossinski, Bryant Jacobi and sylvester hobson

The Skance

Description

A quatrain, each line having 8-10 syllables.
It's not necessary for each line to be a complete sentence, BUT...
the first two lines are interrogative, and...
lines 3 and 4 are NOT interrogative. (Declarative, imperative, etc.)
The connection between lines 1-2 and lines 3-4 is indirect, intuitive, associational.

Example

Late March

Where's the wind going in such a rush?
Who waits in suspense for it to arrive?
Children race from the pier to Dad's car.
Fish on a stringer shimmer and gasp.

Carl Bettis

The Thunka

Description

Thunka because it has five lines like the tanka, and I thunka it. A word-count prosody,.

5 lines of 3, 4, 1, 4, and 1 words, respectively
no punctuation but whitespace
no capitalization.

Examples

thunka journal 2022-06-27

the dog poops
in thick grass suddenly
four
from nowhere flies appear
busy

Carl Bettis

thunka journal 2022-07-11: centenary no

i might have
forty years of aging
left
i'd swap for five
young

Carl Bettis

The Unku

Description

In or around 2014, I created a poetic form I called the "unku," sort of an anti-haiku. Of course, I couldn't reverse everything about the haiku and have the result be anything meaningful. I made the following flips and changes.

The haiku is three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. The unku is three lines of 5, 7 and 5 words. This means most unku will be longer than a haiku.
The haiku is about the natural world. The unku is about the human world.
The haiku is objective. The unku is subjective.
Haiku generally eschew similes, metaphors and the like. The unku requires figurative language.
Haiku are usually not titled. The unku must have a title.

Examples

An Outrage

While you're gnawed with waiting
for news from the doctor, the rest
of life gabbles and giggles.

Carl Bettis

Hobo

You're no mental traveller, man,
if you keep hopping the same freights
and know all the cops.

Carl Bettis