Eighteen forms, each with its own guide. Every one includes what the form is actually for, how it is built, where it came from, and an original example written for the post rather than borrowed from an anthology.
If you are new here, start with the villanelle or the sonnet. If you have written a few and want a fight, try the sestina or the cento.
Forms that repeat
These build their effect by bringing lines back. The repetition is not decoration. It is the argument.
- The villanelle. Two refrains do all the work, and if you pick the wrong two the poem dies quietly.
- The pantoum. A circular form where repeating lines shift meaning with each stanza.
- The rondeau. The first line comes back twice. Same words, different weight.
- The triolet. Eight lines, two of them repeated, and a turn hidden in the repetition.
- The sestina. Six words, thirty-nine lines, and no rhyme to hide behind.
- The ghazal. Couplets that stand alone, bound by a repeated closing word.
Forms that compress
Short forms are not easy forms. There is nowhere to put a weak line.
- The tanka. Five lines to hold a landscape and the feeling of standing in it. Older than the haiku.
- The haibun. Prose and haiku on the same page, describing a moment and distilling it at once.
- The limerick. Started in Irish pubs, survived three centuries of being called lowbrow, and still lands.
Forms with a job to do
Each of these exists because someone needed to do something specific: grieve, praise, accuse, or look hard at a painting.
- The elegy. The consolation is where most elegies lie. There is a way to write one that does not.
- The ode. Praise is a political act, and the ode never stopped being a weapon.
- The ballad. Never a love song. Scottish murder ballads through Lead Belly to Gwendolyn Brooks.
- The aubade. A dawn poem, not a morning poem, and the difference is the whole form.
- The ekphrastic poem. Stands in front of the art and writes down what shifts.
- The sonnet. The form everyone thinks they know, and the turn most people miss.
- The cento. A poem made entirely of lines from other poems. Every line a quotation.
The Irish forms
These are the ones we came to through the archive rather than the anthology, and they are the reason this series exists at all. They are also the least written about in English.
- Caoineadh, the lament. In 1773 a woman stood over her murdered husband and composed one of the greatest poems written in these islands.
- Dinnseanchas, the poetry of place. Before Heaney on bogs there were 176 medieval Irish poems about how places got their names.
- Early Irish lyric, and what Kuno Meyer actually did with it in 1911.
Where this comes from
We publish restored editions of Irish literature, and the poetry writing follows from the reading. If you want the source rather than the guide, Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry is Kuno Meyer’s 1911 translations, and our reader’s guide to the Mythological Cycle covers where the oldest of this material sits.
Last updated 31 August 2026. New forms are added to this index as they are written.