Unique Poetry Styles?

Hey everyone! How do you do?

This year during NaPo, I saw a lot of really amazing poetry styles on YWS and it was super fun! I wanted to open this discussion to see if you guys have any favorite unique or new poetry styles/formats that you have come across and want to share. I am looking for some new ones to try and have some to share too.

One of my favorite styles that I discovered earlier this year was poetry that uses slashes (/) to break apart sentences or thoughts. I discovered it first when alliyah posted a poem in that style! Another favorite was whiteout/blackout poetry, using both white and black and other colors to block out different words to symbolize different things said or not said. I've seen a lot of different listing styles, shape poems, spoken poems, and visual poems!

So, what are your favorite styles? Feel free to post links or images so we can see!

EllieMae wrote:Hey everyone! How do you do?

This year during NaPo, I saw a lot of really amazing poetry styles on YWS and it was super fun! I wanted to open this discussion to see if you guys have any favorite unique or new poetry styles/formats that you have come across and want to share. I am looking for some new ones to try and have some to share too.

One of my favorite styles that I discovered earlier this year was poetry that uses slashes (/) to break apart sentences or thoughts. I discovered it first when alliyah posted a poem in that style! Another favorite was whiteout/blackout poetry, using both white and black and other colors to block out different words to symbolize different things said or not said. I've seen a lot of different listing styles, shape poems, spoken poems, and visual poems!

So, what are your favorite styles? Feel free to post links or images so we can see!

tw: sa mentions

I recently read Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal. It's a poetry book that features many different poems in the Modernist style. In her seventeen page poem "Nightingale: A Gloss," she employs many of these Modernist techniques such as erudition/learnedness and fragmentation.

"Nightingale: A Gloss" is a poem about Rekdal's own experience with sa and how it left essentially left her feeling like she had no voice. She compares her experience to that of Lavinia from the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus and to Philomela from book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Through the mentions of these two seperate texts, Rekdal employs erudition/learnedness over the two texts, but also helps her find her voice to be able to write about her experience. She talks in an interview about the difficulty about writing on the subject of sa, because you need to take care not to sensationalize it to the point where readers lose the purpose of the text, and you also need to be careful not to romanticize it.

While employing that technique, she also employs the technique of fragmentation. She uses fragmentation in the sense of creating a collage of events. If you read the poem, which I recommend because it's really good, you'll notice that each stanza is broken up. There are stanzas where she is talking solely about the texts, and then there are stanzas where she talks about her personal experience. This nonlinear form of storytelling through poetry makes the reader really think about what they're reading, and what the author is trying to say.

Wow, @farq4d that sounds like an incredible book!! And that broken up stanza organization sounds super cool, I will have to check that out! Thanks for sharing that!!

Personally, I have always gravitated towards poems with a beat or rhythm. I also have never understood freestyle poems. If you are to write a a freestyle poem you might as well just write a paragraph. However I have been trying to change my opinion and move toward other options in poetry. An example of this is the fact I have never actually liked the jabberwocky as a poem but as a fun little story. It messes with my perception of the poem when the beat or rhyme scheme changes. Even my own poems, I have written many poems and just erased or destroyed almost 3/4ths of them because their change or beat or rhythm. It's petty and annoying to me as well as others so I have been trying to change it.

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big fan of danez smith and their poetry. i think that their poetry serves as a form of activism? especially if you consider their background. like for example, the poems i linked above talk a lot about systematic racism, police brutality, and human rights. it's very personal. like a nuanced perspective on both individual and collective identity.

they use a lot of white space and line breaks in their poetry, as well as a lot of frequently changing structure. it's definitely intentional. the same could be said about the conversational tone of their writing, or the code-switching. i think that all of it creates a very distinct poetic voice, very vivid and direct.

but yeah their writing is neat. it is bold and unapologetic. it's not easy to stomach at points, but i think it is necessary to be uncomfortable sometimes.