The question for me is not whether good poetry can be written which happens to conform to the cinquain requirements, it's whether the requirements themselves have any value. In a good sonnet, the poet's obeisance to (and play with) sonnet form--in rhyme, meter, and a striking turn of thought--increases one's pleasure reading. Villanelles, ballades, blank verse, rhymed quatrains, rhyme royal, terza & ottava rima--all have their own music & their own associations which, when used to good advantage, are pleasant in themselves. Even haiku & tanka, to enthusiasts of those forms, have their own expectations which a skilled practitioner can subvert or fulfill in pleasant and exciting ways. What are the expectations a cinquain establishes? What are you playing off of more than just an arbitrary syllable count? No doubt imposing such a count could occasionally help a talented poet write a poem that might not otherwise have been written--but why the requirements of the cinquain as opposed to any others? What is the logic of the form?
Cinquains
made Adelaide
a name, I guess, somehow.
All in all, I find them pretty
Crapsey.
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