Metre and Rhyme in your Poetry

**Fenny West** Thu 30 Oct 2008, 4:58 am

Do you love to read great poems which are perfect in both metre and rhyme? Don't they stand head and shoulders above some of the mediocre poetry that you see doing the rounds today?

I have just discovered a wonderful book called "The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry, which explains with much fun, how to get perfect metre into your poems. My poetry has improved one hundred per cent as a result of doing a few of the exercises in this book.

I'm just going through the book for a second time and I wondered if anyone would like to work through it with me, with discussions on here as we go along, and put our practice work together etc. It would be fun to have practice partners. It is really very simple to improve your poetry in this way. Great writers such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and all of them studied metre continuously and wouldn't have considered their fine works complete without structure and technique.

In addition to learning about the form of poetry, you will learn how to write a Petrarchan sonnet, ballads, kyrielle and much more. Great fun and challenging.

So - would anyone like to practise together in a fun way?

PS The book can easily be obtained through libraries if you would like to try it first of all. Other than that, you can find out a little about metre in poetry via Google, but this book, with its simple exercises is so much better.
Josie
Voicenet.com

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