Shapeshifting Poetry – Form by Form - April 2022

Start with a topic, a memory, or a line. Where do your poems come from? We will start with free verse and move on form by form to see if that work fits into a particular form or stays in free verse. My project for April 2022 National Poetry Month will be one blog post a day, each day highlighting a different poetic form with a description and at least one example. 

The posts will be available here on this blog - which also links to my website EllieOLeary.com. I’ll be posting links on the Amesbury Poet Laureate Facebook page, the Fall Writerfest group page, and the Stonecoast Poetry Writers page as well as my own Facebook timeline. 

The primary source books for the project are The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms Edited by Ron Padgett and A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. You are welcome to comment with your own poems, your examples of the form, but be careful about posting previously unpublished poetry. Some publications would then call that published work, so use your own discretion. You can email the poems to me at EllieOLeary@gmail.com but I will not be able to critique individual poems. 

We are planning to include poetry written in this project at our monthly Amesbury Reading Series. You will be welcome to read your poems then. Email me for the Zoom link.

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