Quote:
Originally posted by Marcia Karp:
Just to remind people of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Vetted, cross-reffed, fabo. Reasonably priced in the paperback.
Marcia
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Thank you for the reminder, Marcia. It's a great reference and resource. I certainly value it more highly for accuracy than Turco's
The New Book of Forms.
Of course,
Princeton has a very different purpose than just defining forms. If you want the history of the Tanka and Haiku and their respective relationships to all other Japanese poetry and the history of the poetic movements and who the poets were, go to
Princeton. Buried in many of their articles are forms that I have yet to encounter. Somebody mentioned the Meridithian Sonnet to me today. It is buried in
Princeton's entry on sonnets. It was over 600 words into the article, and there is no index of forms mentioned or people mentioned. Hundreds of other forms are buried in their 1383 pages. How does one find them all without reading every word? (That is what I'm doing in my spare time, and I have run across several forms that way.) They also have an eight-page listing of the contributors to the book. Articles are written by various people. It is not a book that speaks with one voice. They have hundreds of man-years, if not thousands invested in that book, and that richness shows. They are the resource for the type of information that Katy Evans-Bush was asking for. But their focus is the scholarly, not the practical.
So, Marcia and everyone else, by all means, get and use
Princeton. It's a wonderful resource. It has many strengths, but also several weaknesses for my purposes.
My real purpose was the practical. "Here's what the form is and how to do it." I wound up off-purpose with some entries, mainly because of the variety of things that get called forms. My main focus and the bulk of the entries in my little on-line resource is structural form. My resource is also on-line and relational in nature. There are no less than 1,892 "See Also" links on the 500 pages. I can change things quickly and on the fly. A gentleman pointed out two errors I had this morning via e-mail. They are corrected. Tim suggested a few new indices. While I haven't added them yet, I can. If you invent a new form today, I can put it up today.
Princeton definitely doesn't have several forms that I do have. Their process is much more in depth, but also slower. Part of why I am making my information available now is a Darwin and Wallace dichotomy. If I wait to be as comprehensive and accurate as
Princeton, nobody gets to use the information except for me until I publish.
There are several on-line references like mine, and from that, I assume there are many people interested in the great variety of poetic forms. Of the repositories I know, mine is the most organized, and even though it is very much unfinished, is more comprehensive that any other resource I have seen. If anyone else knows of better, I want to hear about it.
I am also open to your suggestions for improvements, form additions, and error corrections.