• Acros­tic: A poem in which the first let­ter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when orga­nized ver­ti­cal­ly. E.g. “Dre”:

Don’t for once imag­ine

Rain only falls on the

Evil. The good get pret­ty soaked, too.

• Blues: Sheila Mal­don­a­do has described poet­ry as a con­tain­er of feel­ings that can help you express what’s on your heart, and the Blues Poem is one of those con­tain­ers. The Blues Poet­ry form is based on the tra­di­tion­al African Amer­i­can music struc­ture called The Blues, but it’s a con­tain­er any­one can use. Often tack­ling tough sub­ject mat­ter, the first line of a blues poem typ­i­cal­ly presents a state­ment, the sec­ond line offers a vari­a­tion on that state­ment, and the third line intro­duces an iron­ic alter­na­tive. (Pull sam­ples or men­tor text from Wal­ter Dean Myers poet­ry col­lec­tions for mid­dle grade, and from Langston Hugh­es for young adults.)
• Con­crete: Also known as shape poet­ry. Visu­al poet­ry cre­at­ed by arrang­ing text on the page to form an image or pat­tern that relates direct­ly to the cen­tral con­tent and mean­ing of the poem.
• Cou­plet: A cou­ple, or pair of lines of poet­ry, usu­al­ly but not always rhymed. A cou­plet may be closed or open. In a closed cou­plet, a com­plete thought is pack­aged in two lines. In an open cou­plet, the sec­ond line runs right into the next cou­plet, or pair of lines. (This is also called enjamb­ment, a device that keeps cou­plets from becom­ing pre­dictable or sing-songy.) In oth­er words, there are dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing cou­plets work. A cou­plet is a reminder that noth­ing is as sim­ple as it seems!
• Epis­tle: Poem writ­ten in the form of a let­ter, some­times, but not always, begin­ning with the greet­ing “Dear.”
• Found Poems: Poet­ry con­struct­ed of words tak­en from non-poet­ic sources, e.g. cat­a­logs, news­pa­pers, adver­tise­ments, etc, and then arranged to form a cohe­sive poem. It is a col­lage of words.
• Free Verse: An open form of poet­ry that does not fol­low a strict meter, rhyme scheme, or con­sis­tent rhythm. This is cur­rent­ly the most com­mon form of poet­ry being writ­ten. (“I have eaten/the plums/that were/in the ice­box and which/you were probably/saving/for break­fast”. These are lines from “This is just to say”, a free verse poem by William Car­los Williams.)
• Gold­en Shov­el: A poem formed by bor­row­ing one or more lines from an exist­ing poem, and end­ing each line of the new poem using, in order, one of the words from the orig­i­nal poem. If the line you bor­rowed has five words, your new poem will be five lines long; if sev­en words, sev­en lines long, and so on.
• Haiku: A Japan­ese poet­ry form that is three lines long. Most often, the lines are struc­tured in sev­en­teen syl­la­bles. Line #1 is 5 syl­la­bles, Line #2 is 7 syl­la­bles, and Line #3 is 5 syl­la­bles.
• List: The name describes the form. It is a poem con­sist­ing of an orga­nized list of adjec­tives, build­ing one upon anoth­er, to cre­ate mean­ing, and to describe the main sub­ject of the poem, as in Whit­man’s “Song of Myself” (I cel­e­brate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belong­ing to me as good belongs to you.…/My tongue, every atom of my blood, for­m’d from this soil, this air…)
• Ode: A poem that cel­e­brates a spe­cif­ic per­son, place, thing, or idea. They are some­times elab­o­rate, struc­tured and com­plex. At oth­er times, they don’t fol­low a strict rhyme scheme or pat­tern at all. Hon­or­ing or cel­e­brate the sub­ject of the poem is the one thing all odes have in com­mon.
• Qua­train: A poem or stan­za of four lines. Often part of a longer poem, rhymed or unrhymed. (Famous qua­train by William Blake: “Tyger! Tyger! burn­ing bright/ In the forests of the night,/What immor­tal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fear­ful sym­me­try?)
• Rap: Oral and writ­ten poet­ry form com­bin­ing rhyme, rhythm, and a musi­cal beat. Uses metaphor, asso­nance, and com­plex rhyme schemes to tell a sto­ry.
• Son­net: A four­teen-line poem writ­ten in iambic pen­tame­ter, incor­po­rat­ing a rhyme scheme that often varies from poet to poet.
• It’s a great struc­ture for sto­ry­telling, which is why Shake­speare was fond of using it. My all-time favorite book, Edgar Lee Mas­ters’
• Spoon Riv­er Anthol­o­gy was writ­ten in that form. So was the poem “My Own Man” from my pic­ture book, My Man Blue.
• Tan­ka: Japan­ese poem, five lines long. Some poets who write tan­ka are only strict about the num­ber of lines, while oth­ers pat­tern their poems accord­ing to a syl­la­ble break­down of 5/7/5/7/7.