Skip to main content

Ars Poetica

A term meaning “the art of poetry,” an ars poetica poem expresses that poet's aims for poetry and/or that poet's theories about poetry.

Aubade

A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn.

Common Measure

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad.

Concrete or Pattern Poetry

Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic

Couplet

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length.

Elegy

In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subject's death but ends in consolation.

Epic

Free Verse

Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition.

(to crave what the light does crave) [if mama / could see] "oh antic God" A Blessing A Noiseless Patient Spider Advection Blues American Smooth Apollo At Noon Author’s Prayer Barber Black Boys Play the Classics Brother, I’ve seen some Cadillac Moon Carousel Christmas, 1970 Consider the Hands that Write this Letter Courtesy Danse Russe DetoNation Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River Early Elegy: Headmistress Eating Together Eve Revisited Ex Machina Famous Flying Lesson Free Radical Future Memories Gitanjali 35 Grandfather Hanging Fire Harold’s Chicken Shack #86 High Noon at Los Alamos Hunger for Something I Eat Breakfast to Begin the Day I Know, I Remember, But How Can I Help You I, Too In In Heaven In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr. Inside Out Istanbul 1983 Key to the Dollar Store Kitchen Fable Late Summer Le Maudit Leda Lions Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Maui’s Mission Meditation on a Grapefruit Memory As a Hearing Aid Mighty Pawns Momma Said Mothers mulberry fields Night Nurse Not Guilty Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market On the Existence of the Soul Oranges Passing Perhaps the World Ends Here Pinocchio Pleasures Possible Answers to Prayer Propositions Rabbits and Fire Refusing Silence Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West Saguaro Sanctuary Sea Church Self-Portrait September Song Sheltered Garden Siren Song So This Is Nebraska Song of Weights and Measurements Squirrels Surfaces The Angelfish Greet Odysseus The Bloody Sire The Calm The Emerald Mosque on the Hill The Forecast The Goddess Who Created This Passing World The Greatest Grandeur The Luggage The Negro Speaks of Rivers The Poet The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter The True-Blue American Their Story They are hostile nations To Elsie To the Angelbeast Today Toy Boat Twilight Undress Vision in Which the Final Blackbird Disappears Watching the Perseids Where the Wild Things Go Windigo Y2K
[Buffalo Bill 's] [in Just-] from Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza 83 A Blind Fisherman A Small Moment alternate names for black boys And Soul Arrhythmia At the Holiday Gas Station Backdrop addresses cowboy Beginning Break of Day in the Trenches bug’s psalm Camouflaging the Chimera Catch Clear Night Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15) Cow Song Dead Reckoning III Diameter Dust Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest El Olvido Everybody Believes They Are the Good Guy Fairy-tale Logic Father Son and Holy Ghost For a Traveler From Blossoms Ghost Dance Glitch gravity furnace Happy Hour Helen Himself Hush I Genitori Perduti I look at the world If They Should Come for Us In a Dark Room In Little Rock In the Basement of the Goodwill Store Interlude It Isn’t Me Kindness Kites Layabout Learning to swim Legacy Little Father Magnitudes Mechanism Medusa Mi Historia Mimesis Monstrance Man Movement Song My Brother the Artist, at Seven Nocturne Not Horses Ode to the Midwest On the Lawn at the Villa Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark Past-Lives Therapy Pietà Piute Creek Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) Prayer Rug Queen-Anne’s Lace Rain of Statues Remarks on Poetry and the Physical World Rock Me, Mercy Saguaros Say Grace Seen Through a Window Semblance: Screens September, 1918 Siblings Snake Oil, Snake Bite Somewhere Southern Gothic Sunshower Susie Asado The Bad Old Days The Bookshelf of the God of Infinite Space The Campus on the Hill The Enigma The Garden The Golden Shovel The Hill The Minks The Night of the Shirts The Rain The Robots are Coming The Well Rising Then and Now Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird To Live with a Landscape To the Harbormaster Torque Truth Serum Two Guitars Vagrants and Loiterers Waiheke What pleasure a question, Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper Women Like Me Youth
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] “No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved” 300 Goats A Kind of Meadow Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation Always Something More Beautiful Angels Ars Poetica At the New Year Banneker Big City Speech Bright Copper Kettles Burning the Old Year Carnival Cathedral of Salt Cloud Fishing Corn Maze Coyote, with Mange Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree Dressing My Daughters Dyed Carnations Earth, You Have Returned to Me End of Days Advice from an Ex-zombie Evolution of My Block Falling: The Code First Storm and Thereafter For the Climbers Fundamentalism Girl Sleuth Good People Greed Harold & the Purple Crayon Here Is an Ear Hear Holding Court I Am the People, the Mob I Hear America Singing I won’t come Ikebana In California: Morning, Evening, Late January In Love, His Grammar Grew In the Desert Intimate Detail Katrina Kingdom of Debt Last Snow Lazy Least Concern Lenten Song Lunar Baedeker Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings Meditation at Lagunitas Meeting at an Airport Midnight Office Mockingbird Moon Mr. Darcy Negative Nocturne Now I Pray Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow Onions Over and Under Peculiar Properties Pilgrims Planetarium Poem for Haruko Prisoners Queens Cemetery, Setting Sun Reflections on History in Missouri Respiration Rocket Saint Francis and the Sow Scale Self-Inquiry before the Job Interview Semi-Splendid Sharks' Teeth Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt Snowy Owl Near Ocean Shores Somewhere Thuban Is Fading Speak Superfluities Tasting Braille The Bear The Bug The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee The Film The Gift The Good in the Evil World The Lamb The Moonlight The Oldest Living Thing in L.A. The River of Bees The Strength of Fields The Wheel Revolves There Are Birds Here Through a Glass Eye, Lightly To Myself to the notebook kid Totem Pole Turning the Tables Under the Lemon Tree Very Large Moth Waking from Sleep When the saints went Who Said It Was Simple Xenophobia

Imagery

These poems are largely concerned with the use of strong and evocative images to create a highly visual, imaginative reading experience.

Metaphor

A comparison that is made without pointing out a similarity by using words such as “like,” “as,” or “than.”

Rhymed Stanza

The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line.

Sonnet

A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme. Literally a “little song,” the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding lines.