Waxing poetical

Yikes, the new year is just a few days away. That means it's nearly time for the Month of Poetry challenge.

I find proper poetry - as in decent poems which actually rhyme and scan, and follow some sort of accepted definition of 'poetry' - rather difficult. It's laziness, essentially - it's easier to cobble together six lines of blah than to actually sit down, work out what the hell a sonnet actually is, and create one.

But any fool can produce six lines of blah (and, to repurpose a gag from an old Goodies episode, most fools do). So, I'm going to try to actually do this properly.

It starts with some research, the sort of things I should have learnt while I was studying literature at uni but was too busy wanting to make a move on the cute boy in the back row (I never did) and working Doctor Who references into my film studies essays.

So, thanks to the wonders of the internet, here's a list of some of the major forms.

It starts with things like acrostic poems - which fall solidly into the 'lazy poet' category, for me - to something which is apparently

"a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets (three lines each) and a closing quatrain (four lines). The poem consists of two main rhymes (AB) which repeat throughout. The main rhyme is produced by the first and third lines of the first stanza, which then alternate as the third line of each subsequent stanza, and form a rhyming couplet to end the quatrain and thus the poem."

I have no idea what that means. Mainly because I'm too lazy to think about it. But if I work through that list, producing one of each sort of poem, I'll have a pretty good start on this Month of Poetry malarkey.