Creative Writing – Poetry

Genres
Particular categories of literary work

Pedagogy
theory of teaching

aesthetic
a sense of what you want to see in a work of art

allusions
references

revision
the act of reconsidering and altering a piece of writing

free verse
a composition not in metrical writing

prose poem
a composition that looks very much like the paragraph you are now reading but has all the heightened, compressed, and figurative language found in poetry.

prose
the ordinary language of writing and speaking

cliché
an overused phrase or formulaic structure with a predictable conclusion

etymology
derivation

imagery
mental pictures or impressions that evoke one of the five senses

lines
those entities that begin on the left side of the page and end somewhere on the right

stanzas
are made by grouping lines together

meter
a regular pattern of accented and unaccented syllables

rhythm
a variable but nevertheless recognizable pattern of strong and weak elements in a poem (usually used instead of meter when describing prose)

symbols
acts, sounds, or objects that signify something other than themselves

diction
the choice of the words themselves

syntax
the way that words are put together to form phrases in a sentence

lyric poem
“any fairly short, non-narrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling” (Defined by M. H. Abrams)

narrative
storytelling

chapbooks
a short book of poetry, usually fewer than thirty-two pages

end-stopped
a line that ends with any sort of punctuation (a period, semicolon, comma, or dash)

enjambment
to wrap a line in the middle of a sentence so that related words are in different poetic lines

couplet
two lines of verse that are connected in some way

tercet
a group of three lines

quatrain
a group of four lines of poetry

quintet
five lines

sestet
six lines

septet
seven lines

octet
eight lines

meter (second definition)
the arrangement of words in a poem based on the relative stress of their syllables

scansion
the process of counting the number of stressed and unstressed syllables and analyzing their patterns

foot
the basic metrical unit in poetry

iamb (iambic)
_ /

trochee (trochaic)
/ _

anapest (anapestic)
_ _ /

dactyl (dactylic)
/ _ _

spondee (spondaic)
/ /

pyrrhic (pyrrhic)
_ _

monometer
one foot

dimeter
two feet

trimeter
three feet

tetrameter
four feet

pentameter
five feet

hexameter
six feet

heptameter
seven feet

octameter
eight feet

prosody
the study of metrical structure

end rhyme
“the agreement of two metrically accented syllables and their terminal consonants” (defined by Mary Kinzie)

connotations
the meanings a word suggests rather than specifically names or describes

single (masculine) rhyme
perfect rhymes

perfect rhymes
the correspondence between the two rhyme sounds is exact

falling (feminine) (weak) rhyme
the rhyme is a stressed syllable followed by one or more unstressed syllables

Triple rhyme
have three of the same syllables

polysyllabic rhyme
rhymes of more than one syllable

double rhyme
a rhyme with two rhyming syllables

light verse
poetry, usually rhymed, that treats its subject in a comic or good-natured manner

slant rhymes
the vowel sounds may be either similar or significantly dissimilar, and the rhymed consonants maybe similar rather than identical.

sight (eye) rhymes
words that look as if they should rhyme, even though they don’t when we say them aloud

Internal rhyme
occurs within a single line of poetry

alliteration
the repetition of initial consonant sounds

consonance
the recurrence of consonant sounds

assonance
repetition of vowel sounds without the repetition of similar end consonants

figurative language
“a deviation from what speakers of a language apprehend as the ordinary, or standard, significance of words, in order to achieve some special meaning or effect” (defined by M.

H. Abrams)

style
the author’s selection and placement of words in a line, lines in a stanza, and stanzas in a poem

Metaphor
a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily denotes one thing is applied to something else in order to suggest an analogy or a likeness between the two things (Your smile is a bouquet of daffodils)

Simile
a figure of speech that states a likeness between two unlike things (Your smile is like a bouquet of daffodils)

tenor
the subject to which a metaphor is applied (your smile)

vehicle
the metaphoric term itself (bouquet of daffodils)

metonymy
the name of something is substituted with the name of something closely associated with it (the White House means the president of the U.S.A.)

synecdoche
a kind of metonymy although the term is more often used when a part is used to describe the whole (All hands on deck means more than just the crew’s hands)

personification
the awarding of human attributes to an abstraction or nonhuman thing

pun
a play on the multiple meaning of a word or its relation to other words that sound like it

Verisimilitude
the incongruity between the way things appear and the way they actually are

verbal irony
whens someone says one thing but means another

situation irony
the results of a situation are distinctly different than one might expect

tone
the style and manner of expression

archaic language
language that evokes an earlier time

sonnet
fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, with varying rhyme schemes

Shakespearean sonnet
its three rhyming quatrains- abs cdc efef are followed by a final couplet that rhymes gg

Petrarchan sonnet
italian sonnet. abbaabba cedecde

villanelle
five tercets and a final quatrain.

Typically in iambic pentameter