The trenta-sei is a fairly young poetic form from 20th-century poet John Ciardi. It consists of six heroic sestets (verses featuring both a Sicilian quatrain and heroic couplet). It also utilizes cascading refrains that are all established in the first verse. This form is unusually complex for its region and era.
Vocabularycleft poems are a type of found poetry proposed by Howard Bergerson in 1969. They’re made by scrambling the words from a preexisting poem into a list and then using them to create a new poem. Functionally, they’re similar in nature to a collage. The form’s main exposure was in issues of Word Ways.
The Waltmarie is a simple poetic form that utilizes ten lines with exactly two syllables on each even-numbered line, but no restrictions on the odd lines. The even-numbered lines are expected to form a separate poem when read alone, effectively hiding a bonus poem in plain sight for those familiar with the form.
The tricube is a poem that nearly explains itself in the name. It consists of three stanzas that each contain three trisyllabic lines. The poem’s structure is literally 3x3x3 or “three cubed.” The form was introduced by American poet Phillip Larrea and already has a cult following.
The terzanelle is a hybrid of the villanelle and terza rima verse forms, first created by American formalist poet Lewis Turco. While its heavy use of refrains and physical structure chiefly resemble the villanelle, it takes on some of the freedom and identity of the terza rima, including interlocked rhyme sounds.
The paradelle, as the name suggests, is a parody of the villanelle (and formal poetry in general), created by poet laureate Billy Collins. Despite its introduction as a joke, the form ended up being picked up by multiple writers afterward and now paradoxically joins the list of formal poems out in the wild.
The nasher couplet is a light verse form envisioned by Ogden Nash, from whom they borrow their name. The form relies entirely upon humorous couplets of undefined length and meter, existing mostly as a “for fun” form like the much older limerick.
The Mistress Bradstreet Stanza is a form that gets its name from John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a 57-verse poem written entirely in octaves. The form uses an abcbddba rhyme scheme, with stress counts of 5/5/3/4/5/5/3/6. It hasn’t seen much experimentation since its introduction.
The lune is a poetic form created by Robert Kelly as a sort of rebellion against the haiku. It’s only requirement is that it have a 5-3-5 syllable structure, eschewing the cutting words and seasonal themes that many writers associate with the traditional haiku. It has another variant based on word counts by Jack Collom.
The minute poem, whose creation is credited to the late Verna Lee Hinegardner, is a poem of exactly 60 syllables, each representing one second of a minute. While the poem is quite short it does demand an understanding of rhyme schemes and meter, so it can still present a significant challenge to newcomers.
The Fib (also known as the Fibonacci poem) is a six-line poem in which each line represents one entry in a mathematical pattern called the Fibonacci sequence. The syllable counts for the lines are 1/1/2/3/5/8. The form originates from a 2006 blog post by Gregory K. Pincus.
An inaugural poem is a subtype of occasional poetry. It’s read during an inauguration of a new president. Only three American presidents have poets read an inaugural poem at their inaugurations thus far. Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama were leaders known to be appreciative of literature.
The bop is a poem form that was developed by Afaa Michael Weaver during a poetry summer retreat at Cave Canem. Bop poems are made up of three stanzas, where each stanza is followed by a refrain. This poetic form is argumentative in nature whereby the author presents a problem, talks about it, and then offers a potential solution.
Minimalist poetry is an artistic movement without clear origins. Minimalist poetry may have been influenced by other more traditional poetry forms such as the Japanese haiku and concrete poetry amongst others.
A cinquain is a short five-line, Japanese tanka-inspired poem, created by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey. American cinquains gained popularity in the twentieth century. These five-line verses are also called quintains in the US.