With the new poetry prompt having started this past Monday, (Prompt #1), I thought I could share more about the Cinquain style, and more specifically the American Cinquain.

If you know a little about languages you’ll probably realize that ‘Cinqua’ means five.

Cinquains are, in their simplest form, poems of five lines or stanza. Yes, that’s a Quintet for you know-it-alls. We like to put formulas and rules to what we do, but the truth is that it’s as simple as that… Five Lines. But we like a challenge so we put constraints on what we do to get those creative synapses going. If that’s the right way of thinking about it. I’m not looking it up.

There are various types of cinquain, one of which is the didactic cinquain taught to school aged children.

If we were writing a cinquain instead of the American Cinquain, we would be using a rhyming scheme. You could do that with the American Cinquain, but it’s not how Adelaide Crapsey developed it. In some ways, the American Cinquain gives us more freedom to be creative.

If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you might know that Haiku has been a big part of its history. Guess what Adelaide Crapsey liked? The five line haiku poetry form called Tanka. Like a Tanka, the only true requirement of a Crapseian cinquain, yes that is another title for an American Cinquain, are the syllables.

2/4/6/8/2

 

Or is that the requirement?

 

You see, Adelaide Crapsey never wrote down what her style required. We only have a structure based on what others have come up with from studying her work. Not that they’re wrong. Some have stated the line lengths should be based on counting iambs or stressed syllables. How does that change the length from being syllables? It would instead be 1/2/3/4/1.

There is some evidence for the iambs idea, such as the following poem.

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen . . .

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees

And fall.

 

Basically, use what you like. That’s what Adelaide did.

Read How to write a Cinquain poem – Part 2.

 

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