Poetry Development: Introducing the Cinquain

One of the projects I’m working on involves writing a lot of poetry—actually, several of the projects I’m working on involve writing a lot of poetry—so I thought I’d share some of the things I learnt about poetry along the way. This journey will be a regularly scheduled feature for Mondays. Join me if you dare.

When I started, I already wrote poetry—freeform, haiku, whatever rhyming form appealed to me, but nothing truly disciplined outside the haiku. I’d heard of cinquains, but had no idea what they were, so I went looking. Here’s what I found out:

A cinquain belongs to a group of poetical forms known as quintains. Quintains are poems that are five lines long, and some alternative types are listed below. This section focuses on cinquains, which tell a small story and are made up of both adjectives and verbs, feelings and a conclusion.

Cinquains were created by an American poet called Adelaide Crapsey, who was said to be inspired by the strict rules governing the Japanese poetry forms known as haiku and tanka. She included 28 cinquains in her 1915 collection, Verse.

Another poet, William Soutar also wrote cinquains, but he labeled them ‘epigrams’, although the epigram has a slightly different form.

While cinquains consist of only five lines, they have titles, which can act as a sixth line. Cinquains communicate mood or feeling using a strict structural form and physical imagery.

Another thing I discovered about cinquains is that they come in a number of different forms. Yes, there is more than one type of cinquain, who’da thought? So, instead of just one post on cinquains, I’ll do this quick introduction, and then a single post for each form. The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write one poem of that form each day of the week until I post the next one.

The different forms of cinquains are:

• Crapsey Form 1: which has one syllable in the first line, two in the second, three in the third, four in the fourth, and only one in the fifth;
• Crapsey Form 2: which has two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six in the third, eight in the fourth and only two in the fifth;
• Reverse Cinquain: which reverses the line order;
• Mirror Cinquain: which is a two-verse cinquain, the first being either a Crapsey Form 1 or Form 2 verse and the second being a Reverse Cinquain;
• Butterfly Cinquain: consisting of two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six in the third, eight in the fourth, two in the fifth, eight in the sixth, six in the seventh, four in the eighth and two in the ninth line;
• Crown Cinquain: which is built from five cinquain verses;
• Garland Cinquain: which is a series of six cinquains, with the sixth verse being made up of lines from the verses that came before it.
• Didactic Cinquain Form 1: has no title, but has a single noun in the first line, which forms the title, two adjectives in the second, a three-word adjectival phrase in the third line, four words describing feelings in the fourth line, and a single word that is synonymous with the title-line noun’
• Didactic Cinquain Form 2: has a noun in the first line, two adjectives in the second line, three ‘-ing’ words in the third line, a phrase in the fourth line and a synonym for the title in the fourth.

Next week, we take a closer look at Crapsey Form 1. In the meantime, feel free to experiment.