The old pond:
A frog jumps in—
The sound of water.
Haiku
100
"The black box now resting on the stool, had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born."
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
100
Using a comma (or other forms of punctuation) to slow down the progression of a line of poetry, most often for emphasis or dramatic effect.
caesura
100
My short story about the peculiar annual habit of a sleepy American town set a record for reader complaints when it was published in the New Yorker in 1949.
Shirley Jackson
100
This term refers to a type of poetic practice where words are deleted from the original text in order to create something new.
Erasure
200
I am a nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, as well as two refrains that repeat in a set pattern. Originally a "rustic song," I date back to the rural countrysides of the 17th century France.
Villanelle
200
“The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh, then nothing else will do.”
Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves."
200
References to outside stories, poems, myths, or narratives that heighten the meaning of the text in which they appear.
allusion
200
I like to get cozy between the paws of a tender wolf. If that's your thing, you can find me in this short story by Angela Carter.
"The Company of Wolves"
200
This is an anthropological term used to describe the experience of being in-between stages of development. Someone is said to occupy this kind of space if he or she stands at the threshold of change.
a liminal space (liminality)
300
A short poem, typically personal in nature, and most often written in the first person, I am one of the three original categories into which Greek poetry was organized--the others being the Dramatic (poetry for the stage) and the Epic (lengthy narrative poems).
The lyric
300
"The world had been sad since Tuesday."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."
300
Key to Edgar Allan Poe's theory of the short story, this phrase describes the way in which all of elements of a story (character, setting, plot, and dialogue) are written with its ending in mind.
unity of effect
300
If you feel as though the printed word has lost its aura, and you're looking for someone to experiment with, look me up--I'm a famous french poet from the 19th century.
Stéphane Mallarmé
300
This term describes a short-lived literary movement (1914-1917) that was strongly influenced by the Haiku and that had a lasting effect on lyric poetry. Its principle aims were to ensure clarity of expression, to do away with sentimentality, to present the thing without commentary, and to be as precise (and concise) as possible.
Imagism
400
I consist of an octave, a sestet, and a turn.
An Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet
400
“You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are.”
Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves."
400
A convention of Greek drama, this group of performers describe (and comment on) the action of the play. Speaking as one, they are meant to represent the audience on the stage.
The Chorus
400
I flew too close to the sun and my wings melted. This is the worst dating profile ever!
Icarus (who we talked about in relation to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings")
400
This Romantic poet believed that poetry should be emotion recollected in tranquility. We use this phrase, a sort of prescription for poetry, when referring to his ideas.
The Wordsworthian prescription.
500
I consist of three quatrains and a closing couplet, which is sometimes offset from the rest of the poem. Sometimes my turn appears after the eighth line, and sometimes it appears before the couplet (and sometimes it does both).
I am an English (or Shakespearian) sonnet
500
"The door of the salon, and then, the knife in his hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel."
Julio Cortázar's "A Continuity of Parks"
500
This contemporary poetic technique has a similar effect to negative space in photography, where the poet isolates words or phrases on the page to emphasize their importance, heighten their meaning, or imitate the landscape that they evoke.
white space
500
If you go on a date with me, I promise to keep my ID in check. Now, tell me about your dreams...
Sigmund Freud
500
Erza Pound used this phrase to describe the juxtaposition or "stacking" of images without incidental meditation of explanation; the reader is left to make sense of the images in the poem and the relationship between them.