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Otherwise known as the swirling vortex of terror, the pantoum differs from other kinds of formal poems because it does not adhere to any specific line length...pantoums can go on and on ad infinitum, which can seem daunting to poets who prefer strict line length guidelines.

According to The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by contemporary poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, a pantoum, however long, should follow these rules, which appear on page 43 of that book:

1.Each stanza is a quatrain (four lines long).

2.The pantoum must begin and end with the same line.

3.The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third lines of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.

4.The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.

5.The final quatrain changes this pattern.

6.In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as the second and fourth lines.

See? Even the directions can make you dizzy, but once you start to actually compose, the pantoum can be quite addictive. In their book, Strand and Boland list some of the most famous examples of pantoums written in English, including "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice, "Parents' Pantoum" by Carolyn Kizer, "Pantoum" by John Ashberry, "Grandmother's Song" by Nellie Wong, and "The Method" by J.D. McClatchy.

But instead of using one of those excellent examples, I though it might be more exciting to create at least a partial pantoum to give readers an idea of how this form works. I'm feeling silly and didactic at the moment, so here goes:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
The dog's been fed,
But the kids have the flu.

Violets are blue
Like a clear morning sky.
But the kids have the flu
And I think I might cry.

Like a clear morning sky
Turned dark with gray rain
And I think I might cry
Since the kids are sick (again!)

It's turned dark with gray rain,
I'm glad the dog's already been fed.
Since the kids are sick again,
We'll just color some roses red.

And there you have ita simple little sample of, in this case anyway, a badly written pantoum that religiously follows the pattern of this kind of formal poem.

Now it's your turn.

Learn more about this author, Therese Mancevski.
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