Tanka/ Renga????

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5793

Poetic Form: Tanka
The Japanese tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. A form of waka, Japanese song or verse, tanka translates as "short song," and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. One of the oldest Japanese forms, tanka originated in the seventh century, and quickly became the preferred verse form not only in the Japanese Imperial Court, where nobles competed in tanka contests, but for women and men engaged in courtship. Tanka’s economy and suitability for emotional expression made it ideal for intimate communication; lovers would often, after an evening spent together (often clandestinely), dash off a tanka to give to the other the next morning as a gift of gratitude. In many ways, the tanka resembles the sonnet, certainly in terms of treatment of subject. Like the sonnet, the tanka employs a turn, known as a pivotal image, which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of the personal response. This turn is located within the third line, connecting the kami-no-ku, or upper poem, with the shimo-no-ku, or lower poem. Many of the great tanka poets were women, among them Lady Akazone Emon, Yosano Akiko, and Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji, a foundational Japanese prose text that includes over 400 tanka. English-language writers have not taken to the tanka form in the same way they have the haiku, but there are several notable exceptions, including Amy Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Hamill, Cid Corman, and Carolyn Kizer. There are many excellent anthologies of Japanese verse, most of which feature lengthy selections of tanka. Rexroth's translations, which include One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, are considered classics, and The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, continues this tradition. Web site for tanka: http://www.tankaonline.com/  RENGA http://www.ahapoetry.com/renga.htm#start

Presentations

Mary
Molly
Nahoma
Kadisha

Workshop and work on new poems

The Prose Poem

ABOUT THE FORM
Excerpt from poets.org:
Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction, the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, "Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."
While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.
The form quickly spread to innovative literary circles in other coutries: Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka in Germany; Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz in Latin America; and William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein in the United States. Each group of writers adapted the form and developed their own rules and restrictions, ultimately expanding the definitions of the prose poem.
Among contemporary American writers, the form is widely popular and can be found in work by poets from a diverse range of movements and styles, including James Wright, Russell Edson, and Charles Simic. Campbell McGrath’s winding and descriptive "The Prose Poem" is a recent example of the form; it begins:

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row.

There are several anthologies devoted to the prose poem, including Traffic: New and Selected Prose Poems and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, as well as the study of the form in The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundries of Genre.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16310

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20957 

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19111

Elegies and Odes

The Elegy
The elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.
The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace. These three stages can be seen in W. H. Auden’s classic "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," written for the Irish master, which includes these stanzas:

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Other well-known elegies include "Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan, written for victims of the Holocaust, and "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, written for President Abraham Lincoln.
Many modern elegies have been written not out of a sense of personal grief, but rather a broad feeling of loss and metaphysical sadness. A famous example is the mournful series of ten poems in Duino Elegies, by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The first poem begins:

If I cried out
           who would hear me up there
    among the angelic orders?
And suppose one suddenly 
           took me to his heart
           I would shrivel

Other works that can be considered elegiac in the broader sense are James Merrill’s monumental The Changing Light at Sandover, Robert Lowell’s "For the Union Dead," Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, and the work of Czeslaw Milosz, which often laments the modern cruelties he witnessed in Europe.

THE ODE

"Ode" comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and belongs to the long and varied tradition of lyric poetry. Originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments, the ode can be generalized as a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.
There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. The Pindaric is named for the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who is credited with inventing the ode. Pindaric odes were performed with a chorus and dancers, and often composed to celebrate athletic victories. They contain a formal opening, or strophe, of complex metrical structure, followed by an antistrophe, which mirrors the opening, and an epode, the final closing section of a different length and composed with a different metrical structure. The William Wordsworth poem "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a very good example of an English language Pindaric ode. It begins:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight
                 To me did seem
            Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
             Turn wheresoe'er I may,
              By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Horatian ode, named for the Roman poet Horace, is generally more tranquil and contemplative than the Pindaric ode. Less formal, less ceremonious, and better suited to quiet reading than theatrical production, the Horatian ode typically uses a regular, recurrent stanza pattern. An example is the Allen Tate poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead," excerpted here:

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.

The Irregular ode has employed all manner of formal possibilities, while often retaining the tone and thematic elements of the classical ode. For example, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats was written based on his experiments with the sonnet. Other well-known odes include Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," Robert Creeley's "America," Bernadette Mayer's "Ode on Periods," and Robert Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket."

How to Write an Ode

Created by Pindar out of the traditional forms of Greek tragedy, the ode is generally defined as a rhymed poem of irregular meter that praises its subject. The English ode consists of an undefined number of 10-line stanzas.

1. 
   
   Consider the subject matter that you wish to write about, and remember that beauty can be found in the least expected places. Was watching "American Beauty" the first time you thought a plastic bag caught in the wind was beautiful?
   
2. Write a 10-line stanza of iambic verse using an ababcdecde rhyme scheme.
   
3. Proceed to write as many 10-line stanzas as desired. Use the same rhyme scheme pattern in the following stanzas, but with different rhymes. If you do this correctly, the "a" of a stanza will rhyme only with the "a" of that same stanza.
   
4. Revise as needed.

Exquisite Corpse

Here's a link:
http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition/About.html

3. Exquisite Corpse Round Two: Write your own poem or short story!

• Using the same directions as the first round, fold a sheet of lined paper into four rows.
• Decide whether you will write a poem or short story.
• Starting at the top, the first player has five minutes to write in the first row. Note: There should be enough space for a small paragraph or 4-5 lines of poetry. The player's last sentence or line of poetry should be written at the top of the next row. Fold the paper to hide all but the last line and give it to the second player. Players take turns—using as much paper as is necessary—until the short story or poem is complete.
• Read the poem or story aloud and experience the fruits of your collaboration!

Read more at Suite101: Exquisite Corpse - A Game for Writers: A Surrealist Writing Exercise for Groups http://www.suite101.com/content/exquisite-corpse-a58007#ixzz141ylI700