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TO START THE NEW YEAR, WRITE EVERY MORNING. Start with an aubade.

aubade
(oh – bahd’)
from the French for dawn

a lyric poem about the dawn, set at dawn, or a morning serenade. The theme of an aubade is traditionally about the parting of lovers, a standard example is the lark scene in Act 3 sc 5 of Romeo and Juliet. Many scholars consider the alba to be an early form of an aubade.

"I make myself write. I write every day, and I get up and write into the light."—Peter Cooley

example: Peter Cooley’s “Your Own Hours”

Check out poetical forms
under poetical terms

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This section includes a a different poem for each day of the school year complete with cross curricular lesson plans. Simply click on a highlighted date below.


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"Form like comedy rescues us."-- Peter Cooley



abecedarian
(ab’ – eh – suh – dare’ –ee – um)
plural—abecedaria
also called abecedarius, abecedary, and alphabet poem
from the Latin for alphabet/ primer

a form similar to an acrostic poem, but it follows the letters of the alphabet. It is either a twenty-six line or word poem. The first line or word begins with a and the last line or word ends with z.

example: Pete Flora’s “Civics Abcediary”






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POETICAL TERMS
abstract language
accent
allegory
alliteration
allusion
anaphora
antithesis
assonance
aubade
blank verse
boutes-rimes
bucolic poetry
cacaphony
cadence
canto
cesura
chanson de geste
chiasmus
conceit
concrete language
connotation
consonance
corrupted form
dead metaphor
denotation
didactic
dissonance
dithyramb
doggerel
duende
envoy
epigraph
epistrophe
euphony
explication
figuration
figurative language
figures of speech
form
fragmentation
imagery
inversion
irony
juxtaposition
kenning
line
litotes
meiosis
metaphor
metonymy
negative capability
objective correlative
onomatopoeia
oulipo
oxymoron
paralipsis
personification
poem
poet
poetry
prosody
pun
rhetoric
rhetorical devises
schemes
sentence
sentence fragment
sequence
setting
simile
speaker
subject
substitution
symbol
synecdoche
syntax
theme
tone
trimeter
trochee
tropes
form variation
verse
voice
word

POETICAL RHYTHMS AND SHAPES
accent
accentual meter
accentual-syllabic meter
alexandrine
alliterative meter
amphibrach
anapest
blank verse
catalectic
couplet
cretic
dactyl
dimeter
diminishing rhyme
distich
elegiac distich
elision
end-rhyme
end-stopped
enjambment
falling ending
foot
fourteener
hexameter
iamb
internal rhyme
line break
meter
monometer
octave
off rhyme
ottava rima
pentameter
pyrrhic
quatrain
quintain
refrain
repetend
repetition
repeton
rhyme
rhyme scheme
rhyme royale
rhythm
rising ending
sapphic stanza
sapphics
scansion
septet
sestet
slant rhyme
spondee
stanza
strophe
tercet
terza rima
tetrameter
triadic line
true rhyme
variation