[Stylist] Some Poetry Trivia

[Barbara HAMMEL]

I'm reading a book I downloaded from Bookshare called Writing Metrical Poetry. It's right up my alley because the author says that in order for a poet to break all the rules, he/she should be well-versed in the traditional forms.
Some things I have gleaned that will now stick is how to remember which syllables are accented in which feet, here are the four common ones: iamb "the heart", trochee "heartless", anapest "in the heart", dactyl "heartlessly".
Thus far I have written a poem in common meter, which is first and third lines in iambic tetrameter and second and fourth lines in iambic trimeter — think hymns. But where hymns usually have an abab rhyme this quatrain could be abcb.
I'm currently working on a blank verse poem. For this particular assignment, given in the book, it has to be 20 lines. Blank verse is unrhymed lines of imambic pentameter. (Some website lied to me a number of years ago and told me it was tetrameter.)
I can't wait to see what else I get to practice in this book. If I don't get through it by November, I'll may be writing some of these poems with my November Poem-a-day challenges. If you want to try your hand at that quatrain, the actual assignment was to read Stephen Vincent Benet's Daniel Boone and write your quatrain in imitation of that poem about a person of myth or a real person preferably who lived before 1900. And you're supposed to keep sarcasm and satire out of it. Those weren't the words the author used but I forget what they were, it might have been humor.
Barbara Hammel
We are all but characters in the books of God’s library. — Chris Colfer
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