Poetry Project Styles and Techniques

These are styles we have learned:
- blank verse
- ballads
- song lyrics
- couplets and quatrains

These are other styles you could use, if you read about them:
- sonnets (three quatrains and one couplet)
- limericks, a five-line humorous poem (be careful - some examples are very rude!)
- quintains (five lines), such as: cinquain, tanka and limericks
- English haiku or senryu

Many languages trade poem styles, so you may do the same from your own, so long as you write in English:
- haiku, senryu and tanka  are from Japanese

- ghazal from Arabic via Urdu

- sonnets  came from Italian
- Onegin stanza, or Chastushka from Russian
- various Spanish forms
- Chinese forms
- Korean forms like sijo
- Swedish, such as Old Norse forms (Viking war ballads!)
- Tagalog, such as tanaga

These are techniques you can use in many poems:
- metaphor and simile, descriptive adjectives and adverbs
- assonance, consonance and alliteration
- iambic and trochaic meter
- anapest and dactylic meter