Well, Charley, that certainly looks like a lot of work!
Quite a lot, and still very incomplete. Not only do I have literally hundreds of other potential entries, but most of
these entries are incomplete, as they say at the bottoms of their respective pages.
On a quick read, the main thing I noticed was some disagreement in the tables between your singulars and plurals. That is, a singular definition may be explained in terms of plurals, and even some of your "forms" are listed as plural ("alexandrine couplets") where others are singular ("amphibrach"). On a low-level note, I think poets value precise and controlled use of language, & will notice it if the language is out of control.
Quite right. I'll fix those as I am updating and completing the respective pages. I'd seriously hate for a poet to be put off by an "s" or the lack thereof after I've spent thousands of hours on this. I'm sure that it doesn't matter that this isn't the final product either, but a work in progress. There's no excuse for sloppiness.
You do have a long list of poetic forms! I'm a bit puzzled by some of it, though: why you have, for example, a "Bowlesian" sonnet but not a Shakespearean or a Miltonic one? Shakespeare and Milton both made the sonnet greater than it had been. The sonnet has a long and rich history spanning several countries, and the form is dictated as much by its rhetorical structure as by anything else - no understanding of a Bowlesian sonnet could really be complete without at least a nod to Sir Philip Sidney, say.
Shakespearean Sonnet ? I thought Henry Howard came up with that rhyme scheme. Old Will just borrowed it. Of course, I also have no clue how you could have missed it. Did you look under the "S" entries?
As for Miltonic/Miltonian sonnets, I haven't found enough agreement to post that one as of yet. Was it caudated? Or just a Petrarchan with the pivot in the middle of the line or are the two names different things, or... Well, I'll keep researching that one. It can go in the queue with many other entries.
Sir Philip? Did he create a unique form of sonnet? I know he did a double sestina.
As for honoring Bowles in naming that particular variant of the sonnet, that was not my decision. That was the decision of a gentleman who enlightened me as to the existence of that variation.
Perhaps you aren't understanding the purpose of this guide? It is not a history of the wonders of poetry. It is a technical manual. The history of poetic form creation is not the history of the greatest poets, but of the greatest cranks in poetry. That's why A. C. Swinburne created so many forms. He was a nutcase. Barmy to the scuppers. With a mind like that, he should have been an engineer. A double sestina with 150 lines? That wasn't difficult enough, so he made a rhymed version turning on only two rhymes? This is a resource for those who want to learn through challenges, not for those who wish to learn history. There are other resources for that.
You give two stress examples for alexandrines, without explaining that it works differently in French, and why. It's actually a syllabic line.
I rather glossed the subject rapidly with only one flippant sentence, but it was certainly in the description. Mon Dieu! I really must expand that maintenant! Perhaps when I add in all of the information that makes that entry "incomplete" as it says at the bottom? Or perhaps when I decide to write a monograph on how differences in languages can effect changes to poetic form and sensibilities? I'm not sure I have time for that at present. Perhaps you could take up that challenge?
"Rondeau redoubled" is more usually called "rondeau redouble" I believe (forgive me, I can't do an accent on ths keyboard).
Allow me: redoublé. Both names are in the list, and both will get you to the same place. It's one click difference.
Also, rather than inventing a classification system (type, form, metrical requirements, rhyme requirements) it might be more useful for you to say something about each form? (See above.) Maybe a couple of examples?
The classification system is actually in two parts, although the separation should be invisible to the casual user. The first set of classifications (structure/style/ subject/subgenre/ poetic devices) are actually data modeling subtypes of the aggreggation of things that people call poetic forms. A true structural form has different information that is necessary than a subject needs. For instance, a serenade is a poem about lovers meeting in the evening. That's a subject. Schematic? No such thing. A villanelle can be a serenade, a threnody, an aubade, or about any other subject, because the rules of the villanelle do not restrict subject. They restrict structure. There will be a certain rhyme scheme and repetition scheme, and that needs to be delineated. A villanelle will need a schema. It also has strengths and weaknesses in applying it and there are places to start that will make a villanelle a stronger work from the beginning. None of those data fields apply to the serenade.
The second set of categories are really subtypes of structural requirements: rhyme, repetition, a pivot, etc. Those classifications are merely ways for a poet to slice and dice the forms. If a poet is interested in improving his knowledge of rhyme, he can look at the list of poems that have a rhyming requirement to find forms to practice. That's all that that the "Type" field that you see is doing, slicing and dicing the forms by type and requirements for the convenience of those interested.
As for saying things about each form, you do realize that the menus, such as
this one , are all links? Each poetic "form" is defined on an individual Webpage. You must have seen that considering you mentioned the two stress examples (accentual-syllabic and syllabic) I have for the Alexandrine. I have 500 pages of saying things about the forms. Admittedly, only 159 of the 500 are complete, but I believe each form there does have information about it. The styles and subjects tend to be more sparse than the structures, but how much does one need to know to have a handle on what a threnody is? Does one really need more than a single sentence? A villanelle is much more complex to conform to.
Examples are an area where we are generally still incomplete; however, had you found the entry for the Shakespearean Sonnet (
http://www.poetryrenewal.com/forms/002/285.shtml ) you would have seen no less than five examples linked. We have two examples for the
Villanelle . We have other examples sprinkled throughout, and we are trying to build both those examples and fill the other information gaps. I believe
this entry has all of the fields except examples, in case you'd like to see one of the more finished products.
You say: "Given the information in the entry, you should be able to write a poem in the form", but that is clearly not the case. It really IS just a list. I don't believe that a mere syllable-count is enough to acquaint someone with what, say, ballad (or indeed "ballade") form is all about. What material would someone arrange in ballad stanzas?
Again, when each entry is complete, there will be more. It will have discourse on strengths and weaknesses and starting points and other information. You're criticizing a work-in-progess for being a work-in-progress. But even beyond that, some things a poet has to find on his own. I can say that the repetition of a villanelle can either heighten the comic effect or seriousness of a poem, but the poet has to read and write several villanelles before he understands that fully and how to use that information fully. It is practice and reading that bring the true revelations.
Please also note that ballad measure is different from an actual ballad. I can write many types of things in ballad measure that are not ballads, and I can write ballads and not use ballad measure. "Ballad" is really a style of poetry, not a structural form. Which gets back to why I have that classification system that you seem to think so useless.
Finally, you say that for your book you were collecting "101 tips" (you make them sound like fingertips) from people's crits - I take it, from this site, as you've posted here? Interesting. Were you planning to credit people for their ideas and knowledge?
First, you've wandered out of the forms area and into other parts of the site.
Second, I was doing live crits for years for those 101, actually well over 200, tips. You might note that this is my eleventh post on Eratosphere. And thus far, I have picked up one idea (that will be credited) that was new to me here. In gathering my tips (or pointers or helpful hints), I have not only participated in crits, but I have read extensively, written extensively, and interviewed several successful poets. Being in England, you might know a couple of them, like Les Barker and Jez Lowe. Again, their tips will be credited. But the bulk of the tips came from me. They were my comments on other people's poems. That was how I collected the first seventy tips. If you've read one of my fuller critiques, you might see that I am a very incisive critic. Then I started the interviews. I probably got at least thirty off Peter Berryman, a well-known lyricist in folk circles. There are also several old saws in my list that are on every list of ways to improve writing out there. Those are more difficult to credit. "If you want to write poetry, read poetry!" I can't find that in Shakespeare's writings, but I'm sure it was around before him. So, to answer your question, yes, there will be acknowledgements when I get that section up on the site.
Oh, and I also noted your ideological provisos, where you talk about not liking anything that criticises God or America, and you think swearing & vulgarity is a sign of lack of creativity. So I'm assuming you won't be printing examples then? Hate to have to illustrate with Donne's "To his Mistris Going to Bed", or "The Flea"? Or pretty much any political poetry, or is it just America you don't like poets to dislike? Or is it okay for people who are dead to do it?
First, those "provisos" you refer to are addressing submissions of poetry to the magazine section of the site. They have nothing to do with the poetic forms section.
But beyond the fact that they have nothing to do with the forms, they have a purpose. You might say that having those provisos on the site are a form of test to help weed out the the idiots who are too emotional to write good poetry. When we started the magazine, we had three editors: a conservative Christian Canadian woman, a libertarian Jewish American male, and a libertarian Taoist male from outer space.
It's not like we can't handle a bit of foul language or poetry critical of what we believe in. Our provisos don't preclude us from publishing good poems we don't agree with. We have in past issues. What it does is cut down the political rants disguised as poetry that are submitted. It's much better than trying to restrict subjects to ones accessible to a general audience. Instead, poets self-filter. Either they get upset, like you, and don't submit at all, or they submit love poetry or poetry on neutral topics. That and not accepting free verse are two forms of filter against bad poetry.
Now, getting back to the forms and the idea of examples for them, I have no idea how you think that our belief that using four-letter words (which is what we mean by vulgarity) would preclude "To his Mistris Going to Bed." Perhaps it is some British understanding of the term? Yes, Donne was describing some rather tender subjects openly, but he did so in a fine demonstration of vocabulary. What we are trying to avoid is people who think that dropping the f-bomb makes them better poets. And please believe me when I say that those folks are out there by the multitudes.
The examples we've been linking in are mostly on the Poetry Renewal site published in past issues. It was just in the last month or so that I decided to seriously expand from the thirty-six forms that I had represented on the site to basically dump my database from the last year-and-a-half of gathering data. So, when October started, many of the forms out there had examples linked to them. But there's a big difference between 36 and 500 entries on the list, and we haven't caught up yet.
We are open to any examples, however there can be two issues. First are the copyright issues. I'm sure that you understand those. Second, if we link to a poem on another site, we have to constantly check our links to ensure they are still going to what we think they are showing. If it is on our site, we can control it. So, we have concerns about pointing offsite for an example poem.
As time goes on, the quality and mass of the information available will go up. As I've stated several times, it's a WIP.
Sorry; I don't think I'm really your target audience, anyway: I read a LOT of poetry.
Our audience is people open and wanting to learn more about poetry.