Phase 02 — Pre-Project
Plan a Poem.
Pick the form. Tell Grey your subject and the image you want to land. The structure guide and line-by-line scaffold come next.
Grey.
Your writing partner. Form is the wall the meaning leans on. Tell me which shape you're working in and what you're after, and I'll lay out the rules of the form alongside a line-by-line scaffold so you can hear where each beat has to land.
Step 1 — Choose Your Form
Free Verse
No fixed meter
Rhythm and line breaks set by ear. The discipline of the unmetered line.
Sonnet
14 lines, iambic pentameter
Shakespearean (3 quatrains + couplet) or Petrarchan (octave + sestet). The volta turns the argument.
Haiku
5 / 7 / 5 syllables
Three lines. A seasonal image, a perceptual shift. Compression to the bone.
Villanelle
19 lines, two refrains
Five tercets and a quatrain. Two repeating lines weave through. Obsessive, incantatory.
Ballad
Quatrains, abab or abcb
Storytelling stanzas. Alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The form of folk memory.
Ode
Variable, formal address
A sustained, elevated address to a subject. Praise, complaint, meditation. Length earns its weight.
Step 2 — Your Poem
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