Raise your hand if you’re tired of spending more time trying to find the right rhyme than you did coming up with the idea for your poem in the first place. Keep it up if you hate trying to check your scansion.
For those of you who die a little inside every time you see “left” and “bereft” rhymed, who cringe at the words “iamb” and “trochee” – have I got a poetry form for you!
What’s a cinquain?
If you took Latin, or any of the romance languages, really, you probably can guess from the “cinq” root that a cinquain is a poem with five lines. Technically, that’s the end of the definition. Five lines.
But like any poetry form, there are a lot of subsets of cinquains. We’ll be focusing on the 20th century form developed by Adelaide Crapsey, but let’s take a look at a couple other forms just for fun.
Medieval French cinquain
Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you.
16th and 17th century cinquains
The cinquain in 16th and 17th century English poetry (continuing through the 19th but much less popular in later years) was a rhymed poem that scanned and usually followed an ababb, abaab or abccb rhyme scheme.
Adelaide Crapsey and the 20th century cinquain
In the 20th century, a poet named Adelaide Crapsey revived the cinquain in a new format. She took inspiration from a form of Japanese poetry called the tanka. Like a haiku, a tanka has very specific structure requirements. Unlike a haiku, however, the tanka can be assembled as a long form poem to tell epic stories. Or porn. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and the Tale of Genji are the tanka most Westerners are familiar with.
Crapsey’s modified cinquain is built on a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. She tended to focus on imagery and the natural world, but you don’t need to be constrained by those subjects when you write your cinquain.
Didactic cinquains
Because Crapsey’s cinquain form is so simplified and stylized, similar forms with a few additional tweaks or requirements have developed as teaching tools. For example, instead of 2-4-6-8-2 syllables, some didactic cinquains have 1-2-3-4-1 words. Others follow a “one noun, two adjectives, three verbs…” pattern. These short, simple poems can be useful in the classsroom and versatile outside of it.
Okay, how do I write a cinquain?
It’s as simple as counting syllables. Really. You don’t have to worry about rhyme or scansion, although many people feel that a cinquain flows more readily if you write in iambs. (Don’t remember what an iamb is? Check out the post on sonnets for a refresher on scansion.)
Structure your poem so that the first line has two syllables, the second has four, and so on. When you get to five lines, stop.
You can treat your cinquain as a complete poem, or as a building block for a longer poem, the way a tanka is built from moras. You cannot, however, flow between cinquains if you’re building a longer poem. Each cinquain must be complete unto itself, like a sentence. Let’s look at one of Crapsey’s cinquains:
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
That’s a complete thought, and a complete description. You could stop there, or you could go on to tell us what happens next.
If this all seems a little familiar, you’ve probably joined our microstories challenge at some point. Like a good microstory, the cinquain’s title gives context without actually being part of the text. Re-read the cinquain above without the title; it’s still a complete image. However, the title gives you a more exact sense of where and when you are.
Branching out
Once you’ve mastered the cinquain, there are a number of variants you can experiment with, such as the lanterne, the mirror cinquain (two cinquains, the first of which follows the 2-4-6-8-2 pattern and the second of which follows a 2-8-6-4-2 pattern), the crown cinquain (five verses of five lines each which form together a complete poem), and so on. If you choose to use one of these forms for the March poetry slam, leave us a footnote or comment, or drop us a line, so that we know what form you’re experimenting with!
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