Make SFGATE a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI. Add Preferred Source Some people seem surprised by the idea that poets do any thinking at all. There ...

Every poem has structural features that have a bearing on the way the poem sounds or what it means. To comment on the structure of a poem is just the same as commenting on its language – you notice ...

The form of a poem is how we describe the overarching structure or pattern of the poem. Some forms of poetry must stick to very specific rules about length, rhythm and rhyme. Poets enjoy playing with ...

With schools on the verge of opening soon, I'm getting into the didactic spirit too. For poets and for devotees of poetry, here are 17 assumptions about poetry and poetic form that I keep in mind when ...

So far during the course of Poetry from Daily Life we’ve heard about a number of ways in which poets find inspiration for their poems. Taking a walk. Observing. Starting with a single word. Choosing a ...

A melancholy December vision in Liverpool invokes a Dickensian ghost with more worldly but still warm realism ...

Where are the boundaries between adjacent literary forms? When does prose become poetry, poetry become song, song become theater? These bounds are collapsing as contemporary artists experiment. Though ...

Ian Hamilton Finlay, interior of “4 Sails” (1966) (image courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay) Tug, fug, chug, glug — such are the rhyming words used by the writer and artist Ian Hamilton ...