I am a film animator and educator by vocation, poet, lyricist, musician, and photographer by aspiration—in that order, on the days when all four are competing for the same hour. My friends have taken to calling me a polymath who doesn’t math, by which they mean I am a dunderhead once outside the humanities—for many years I was genuinely uncertain whether a hypotenuse was a geometric principle or a cryptid from the American Southwest, like the Jackalope. My reels and abbreviated professional biography on the animation side live at IMDB, so I won’t burn daylight here covering the mechanics of that career, though it surfaces in sidebars throughout the site. What I will say is that there is a through line connecting every medium I work in—visual, audial, lexical—and that through line is story. Not theme, not technique, not sensibility: story. The one constant that infiltrates every substrate of what I do, regardless of the instrument in my hand or the form on the page.
The biggest thing fourteen years at Disney Feature Animation drove into my DNA is that story is not one element among many—it is the whole operation. Their mantra was not subtle: story, story, story. It is why animated features often take six years to make, because at least four of those years are dedicated to getting the story realized into a workable animatic before a single frame of final animation is approved. It is also why I reach for film analogies throughout this site, and why my explications of form and structure borrow freely from narrative vernacular alongside the more traditional lexicon of prosody. To be clear, I was a traditional 2D VFX animator—one might therefore assume my relationship to story was tangential, adjacent at best. But you spend more than a decade inside any profession and the pipeline and culture get into the bloodstream through osmosis, whether you sought that education or not.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I made the mistake of telling strangers what I did for a living. Without exception, a script the size of a telephone book would materialize and the pitch would begin—waiter, cab driver, random patron at a bar, it made no difference. The story was the entry point into Hollywood, and everyone who came to the city came carrying one. I did not study screenwriting as a medium, but I was already an aspiring playwright, poet, and incipient novelist, so I understood instinctively what stories I would want to develop if the opportunity ever arrived. Film is an attractive medium precisely because it is a polyglot craft—it absorbs all the other arts into its process. But as I will demonstrate throughout this site, the overlap with poetry is more substantial than it might appear: establishing shots and camera maps translate directly into certain compositional strategies, the truck-in and the close-up have their equivalents in tonal and imagistic escalation. What film cannot do—and what poetry can—is oscillate not just between visual metaphors but between states of being, registers of consciousness, ontological conditions that have no image equivalent and cannot be rendered in frame.
I have contributed to story on several animated shorts, and now that I am moving through the later stages of my career, I work only on projects that either carry a compelling story or allow me to extend my skill sets into storyboarding, editing, co-writing, and co-producing. Two of those projects have been fortunate enough to find significant audiences: Shelter in Place was screened at the Palais in Cannes, and The 21 was shortlisted for an Academy Award (I was only a VFX animator for this project). For these opportunities, I must give a gracious nod to directors Clare Chun and Tod Polson, respectively.
The aspiration—the reason this site exists—is to publish my second book, Hallucinations, and this site is first a proving ground for assembling it, analyzing it, and providing along the way what I hope is genuinely useful information on prosody, rhetoric, and form. If the work itself is not to your taste, no harm done; the more mechanical pages dedicated to those subjects were built to stand independently of the poems. As the site develops, I intend to explicate the work of other writers—established and emerging—and to expand the homage section beyond my father, whose invisible presence can be sensed throughout this collection. The site will evolve into a broader examination of formal poetic systems. For now I am sticking to the European classical tradition, but I intend eventually to write and explicate forms from other traditions—the ghazal, the haiku, the pantoum, the tanka—because I believe you cannot honestly explicate a form you have never attempted, however badly. You have to have written a sonnet, even a failed one, to understand what it costs to make one work in a modern context. Tom Brady is a better analyst than someone who only watched the game from the stands, not because he is smarter but because he has lived the internal logic of the system at its highest pressure, and that residue does not leave the body. Attempting these forms, regardless of the outcome, gives you what I think of as the skeleton key for taking them apart in formal analysis—and more importantly, for understanding why they resist being taken apart at all.
As of this writing, I am still developing the Rhetoric section and have not yet begun the Edit section, both of which are coming. You may notice that comments are disabled throughout the site, and that the Home page—which presents the book in chronological order—operates less as a blog and more as a trade paperback laid flat; this is deliberate. The site is not a workshop and was not designed to solicit feedback, though I welcome it through other channels. The book itself was begun in 2000, and the first working draft was copyrighted by 2004; about 30% of the material presented here is newer, written between 2018 and 2026. If you count the transposition of Fountain Street, my first collection, from blank verse into formal verse, the work stretches back to 1988—pre-internet, pre-Google, pre-everything that now makes the provenance of a literary work a subject of anxious scrutiny. Those existential realities will be addressed in the Edit section, when the time comes.
Over the six months of building this site—finishing the poems the 2002 manuscript demanded without knowing it yet, and explicating the full collection—I have acquired a thirty-thousand-foot view of my own work that I could not have gotten any other way. There is a quantum difference between doing what is in your wheelhouse and breaking it down for someone who has never been near that wheelhouse. We develop systems, winning formulas, methodologies that operate below the level of conscious articulation—and when pressed to explain them, we discover that we have been articulating the fan belt, maybe the carburetor at best, but never the full engine. Explicating this collection has required dismantling that engine and putting it back together with the parts labeled. What follows—the manifesto, the glossary, the section essays—is the result of that disassembly.
What follows are conceits, governing principles, structural ideas that run through both Hallucinations and Fountain Street—arrived at through the process of explicating my own work and fusing those findings with pedagogies explored through research. Chief among them is the plasticity and interconnectivity of all the arts. Like synesthesia—tasting a color, smelling a letter—I find no fundamental difference between these conceits expressed lexically, musically, or visually. There are nuances of medium, to be sure, but far more connections than divisions. Following the manifesto, I have provided a glossary of terms that surface throughout the site: some straightforward (pressure, load-bearing, basic architectural analogies), some genuinely abstruse (paraphrand, anadiplosis, which do sound like dermatological conditions). I did not invent these words, and once you start wading seriously into prosody and rhetoric, they become inescapable. That is one of the less-advertised benefits of this kind of formal analysis: you end up re-affirming devices you have used a hundred times and discovering, sometimes with genuine surprise, that they have names. Apostrophe, certainly. But prosopopoeia? I had been using that device for years without knowing it had a name that inscrutable, or that ancient a pedigree.
THE FIVE PRIMARY CONCEITS
THE PALIMPSEST LAYERS WITHOUT ERASING.
Every serious piece of art is haunted by what came before it—not as influence but as pressure. A palimpsest is a manuscript page scraped clean for reuse, imperfectly: the earlier text was never fully erased, only written over, and what was written over keeps pressing through. Cézanne returned to the same mountain until his winter paintings held the ghost of summer inside them. Eliot’s Waste Land bleeds the voices of Dante and Shakespeare through a London that doesn’t know they’re there. In this collection, that layering is structural, not decorative—the ghost sonnet running its invisible architecture beneath continuous lineation (meaning the lines run without stanza breaks, the skeleton concealed inside uninterrupted forward motion), the Ghost Blazon cataloguing one subject while a second inventory runs silently beneath it, the persona poems holding two temporal registers—two different moments in time—simultaneously in the same body of language. The earlier inscription never disappears. It determines the weight of everything written over it.
A THING CAN BE SEVERAL VERSIONS OF ITSELF WITHOUT COLLAPSING INTO ANY ONE OF THEM.
Miyazaki understood this better than most literary theorists: in Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie moves between young girl and old woman and something between the two without the film ever quite telling you which she is. What persists is not the mask but the pressure beneath it. In this collection, a motorcycle is also a man’s nervous system; a woman entering water is also the water’s memory of her; a lock turned in a door opens not a room but an ontological condition—meaning not a physical state but a condition of being itself, the kind of change that happens at the level of what you fundamentally are rather than where you happen to be standing. A father driving an empty bus is also Charon ferrying the dead across the river Styx. Nothing resolves into a single reading because the transformation moves across registers—psychological, physical, temporal, mythological—faster than the mind can name the transition, arriving in the body before it reaches language. This is not ambiguity. It is the structural condition of the work.
RECURSION FOLDS BACK THROUGH ITSELF.
Recursion means a process that loops back through its own logic—a structure that contains itself, a path that retraces its own steps. Dante’s terza rima—his interlocking three-line stanza form, in which each stanza’s middle line rhymes with the first and last of the next, an engine that pulls the reader forward and cannot stop—is not a container for a journey into hell; it is the journey, the chain of rhymes enacting the descent rather than describing it, turning at the universe’s lowest point and climbing back out transformed. Grief works the same way: it does not progress, it rotates, finding the same obsessions again and again without relief. In this collection, recursion is everywhere—formally, in the Mirrored Sestina that doubles back through its own terminal words, in the Sestonnet that reopens its own sealed couplets as thresholds, in the villanelle’s refrains that return with gathering and devastating weight. But it is also the deeper rhythm of the book itself: the same father, the same damage, the same Midwestern landscape, the same gap between recognition and change—approached from different altitudes across nine chapters, each pass revealing something the previous one missed, none of them arriving at resolution.
SUPERPOSITION HOLDS CONTRADICTION WITHOUT RESOLVING IT.
In quantum mechanics, superposition describes a particle that exists in multiple states simultaneously until the act of observation collapses it into one. These poems refuse that collapse. When Oscar Wilde speaks from Reading Gaol, when Walt Whitman dictates from Brooklyn in 1856, when Lucifer files a grievance memo and the Holy Ghost responds—two temporal registers and two subjectivities occupy the same linguistic space without either canceling the other. But superposition in this collection is not only a rhetorical device. It is the condition of every poem that holds guilt and love for the same person, damage and gratitude for the same inheritance, the knowledge that the machine was destroying everyone and the longing to have been called into it anyway. The poem does not resolve these. It holds them at full voltage simultaneously, because that is the only honest account of what it is actually like.
THE DREAM DELIVERS COMPLETED STRUCTURE.
This is not romantic mythology about inspiration—it is a structural fact about how a significant portion of this collection arrived. Some of these poems came as literal dreams: the entirety of Dante’s speech in The Threshold, the ontological condition that is The Key, deposited whole from the dreaming mind with the form already set and the language already weighted. Others arrived at the hypnagogic threshold—that narrow corridor between dreaming and waking where the dreaming mind still runs but the conscious mind has just enough traction to take notes—the volta snapping into place from a half-waking state, the skeleton doing its work in the dark before the conscious mind knew what it was building. Julian Jaynes argued that what we experience as inspiration is the older system breaking through—the right hemisphere of the brain delivering its cargo to the left across a border that full waking consciousness keeps closed. What the dream delivers, when it delivers anything worth keeping, is not raw material but finished architecture: the ghost form in its purest state, invisible structure arriving ahead of any conscious intention to build it. You cannot receive dictation in a form you haven’t mastered—but you also cannot manufacture by will alone what the dreaming mind will sometimes hand you whole, if you have done the work that earns the dictation. Dante did not choose to dream in terza rima. The structure chose him.
FORM AND STRUCTURE
THE INVISIBLE STRUCTURE IS LOAD-BEARING.
Every building has walls you cannot see—the ones that hold the roof up, the ones whose removal brings the whole thing down. The ghost sonnet runs fourteen lines of continuous pressure with its entire rhetorical skeleton—rhyme scheme, argumentative turn, closing compression—concealed beneath the surface, doing its work without announcing itself. You feel it before you find it. In this collection, that principle extends beyond the ghost sonnet into every invented form: the Double Form Sonnet’s two competing rhyme engines pulling in opposite directions beneath a surface that looks like a classical sonnet; the Ghost Caudate’s three simultaneous vertical spines writing a hidden three-line judgment inside the visible poem; the Sator Square Sonnet’s rectangular field of rotating pressure—derived from an ancient Latin word square that reads the same in every direction—invisible to any reader who doesn’t know to look. The gap between sensation and recognition is not a flaw. It is where the poem lives.
EVERY FORMAL DECISION IS EPISTEMOLOGICAL.
Which is to say, it is a decision about what kind of knowing is possible, not just what kind of shape is pleasing. The container changes what can be held. The villanelle, with its two refrains that return again and again with gathering weight across nineteen lines, does not describe obsession—it enacts it, the form itself unable to let go of its own lines the way the obsessed mind cannot let go of its subject. The sestina, rotating the same six end-words through thirty-nine lines without resolution or escape, does not illustrate trauma—it performs it, forcing the language to keep finding new use for the same wounds without ever arriving at relief. When the emails of a dying man in a flooded house in Wichita arrived already structured in terza rima’s interlocking chain—Dante’s form, in which each stanza’s middle line rhymes with the first and last lines of the next, an engine that pulls the reader forward and cannot stop, that can only run out of links—the form was not chosen. It was recognized. Because the form that cannot stop, that can only run out of links, was the only honest account of that particular mind in that particular darkness. The form is the argument. They are not separable.
THE CONSTRAINT IS THE PRESSURE, NOT THE CAGE.
Free verse—poetry without fixed meter or rhyme—is not freedom. It is a different distribution of pressure, less visible, harder to feel. The sonnet’s fourteen lines, the villanelle’s nineteen, the sestina’s thirty-nine: these are not prisons. They are the walls of a pressure cooker, and what they produce under sustained containment is unavailable to the open field. This collection bends inherited forms, reverses them, layers them, and occasionally builds them from scratch—not for novelty, but because the wound required a specific bandage and no existing bandage fit.
THE WOUND DETERMINES THE BANDAGE.
Every invented form in this collection arrived the same way: a poem demanded something the inherited architecture could not provide. The Road to Anandamarga—a poem about a man riding through 1973 Kansas on acid with his three-year-old son on the back—required a reversed sonnet with two simultaneous ghost inventories running beneath it, because that story cannot be told forward. A poem about a man’s predatory orbit through the Russian court required two rhyme engines working against each other in opposite directions, because the counterclockwise pull—the inauspicious rotation, the widdershins motion that every tradition from Hindu circumambulation to European folk cosmology associates with forces working against the natural order—had to be felt in the form itself. The mechanic is the meaning. They were never separable to begin with.
THE GHOST IS LOAD-BEARING.
The code that runs your word processor is invisible. It does its work and you read these words. The ghost form makes the same claim on poetry: the architecture you cannot see is the architecture that holds everything up. This is the subtitle of this collection—A System of Ghost Forms, Inherited and Invented—and it is not metaphor. It is a structural description of how these poems are built, how they mean, and why the reader so often feels something arriving before they can name what it is.
LANGUAGE AND SOUND
LANGUAGE OPERATES THROUGH CONTAMINATION.
Julian Jaynes, in one of the most maddening and brilliant books of the twentieth century, showed how metaphor actually works: the vehicle you use to describe something arrives carrying hidden cargo. He called the thing being described the metaphrand—love, say, something too large and unstable to hold directly—and the vehicle laid over it the metaphier—the rose, a known and sensory object. The rose does not arrive empty. It carries what Jaynes called paraphiers: secondary associations that cling below the level of the explicit. The rose is fragrant, it has thorns, it withers. These become paraphrands—qualities that love acquires by contamination, without the poem having to state them. Love is now capable of wounding, capable of withering, capable of filling a room before it is gone. In this collection, that contamination is the mechanism—the ghost poem pressurizing the visible poem through the same language, the motorcycle parts mapping silently onto the chakra system—the energy centers of the body in Hindu and Buddhist tradition—the blazon of a woman’s body in an acupuncture session carrying beneath it the stations of survival under the Khmer Rouge. The secondary meanings are not ornamental. They are load-bearing.
SOUND IS NOT ORNAMENT—IT IS THE MEDIUM.
A poem may be read silently on the page, but it is structured in the ear. Bernard Herrmann built his score for Vertigo on Wagner’s Tristan chord—an unresolved harmonic gesture, a chord that refuses to complete itself and has been generating a sense of longing and suspension in Western listeners since 1865—so that every listener who has absorbed Western music feels a weight they cannot name pressing up through the film from a century before. The subliminal structure becomes the dominant form. That is what sound does in a poem when it is working: the pressure of a plosive consonant—the hard stop of a b or p or t against the breath—the sustain of a long vowel, the way a hard stop after a soft passage changes the emotional temperature of a line. In this collection, the prosody—the full system of meter, stress, rhythm, and sonic texture that gives a poem its pulse—is the argument’s nervous system, shaping sense through pressure rather than explanation, through patterned recurrence rather than assertion.
WHAT IS WITHHELD HAS MASS.
The omission is the confession. In The Documentarian, a locked briefcase sits in the corner of a boy’s formation for a year—numbered lock, loaded gun nearby, the answer to every question a shrug the way a monk seals up a tomb. The case begins to open in the closing couplet, click by click—but the opening itself happens offscreen, after the poem has ended, the contents never arriving on the page. In Kettenbiel, a package arrives at the fence from a man who has been hunting a family across the American interior—and it stays sealed the same way the Ark of the Covenant stays sealed, opening offscreen, the force entirely in the arrival: that it knew the door, that it knew the shape of them. Named, the contents become inventory; unnamed, they retain the force of something that reorganizes everyone near it without requiring inspection. A red pulse beat, and silence did the rest. There is an iniquity in The Vow pressed against but never named, an unnamed thing in Two Rosaries that both the rosary and the mala—the Hindu and Buddhist prayer bead—were counting toward but that naming would reduce. Truth is weighted, edged, capable of incision, and the governing editorial principle of this collection came from the man it is largely about: there is too much truth in this; any hand should hesitate to dilute it.
PROCESS AND INFLUENCE
THE FUGUE STATE IS BUILT ON ARCHITECTURE.
The dream delivers completed structure—but only to a mind that has done the prior work. Coleridge woke from an opium dream with Kubla Khan fully formed and lost half of it to a visitor at the door—finished architecture, already load-bearing, already gone. McCartney heard Yesterday whole in a dream and spent weeks certain he had stolen it, because the experience of receiving a finished thing bears no resemblance to the experience of making one. The fugue state, the hypnagogic delivery, the line that arrives whole—none of this is mysticism. It is the unconscious mind finishing what the conscious mind had been circling for years. You cannot receive dictation in a form you haven’t mastered. The dream is the reward for the prior decade of grinding work, and the spontaneous scroll is always the marketing.
INFLUENCE LIVES IN THE SUBSTRATE, NOT THE SURFACE.
To have learned from Dante is not to write like Dante. It is to understand how terza rima generates forward momentum from obligation—each middle rhyme pulling the next tercet into existence, the chain unable to stop—and to ask what other structures might generate comparable pressure from different premises. In this collection, influence is structural before it is atmospheric: Dante’s descent-and-return in the recursion of the Mirrored Sestina; the Greek strophe and antistrophe—the matched metrical units of the ancient choral ode, which advance through a theme and then revisit it from an altered vantage—in the Sestonnet’s mirrored reversal; the Sator Square’s bidirectional containment translated into the rectangular field of a bull ride in Nowata, Oklahoma.
INHERITANCE AND THE SELF
DAMAGE TRANSMITS THROUGH ABSENCE, NOT SPEECH.
The grandfather who sailed the USS Indianapolis—the Navy cruiser torpedoed in 1945 whose survivors spent four days in shark-infested water before rescue, one of the worst naval disasters in American history—and came home to die drunk on a rock at a family picnic. The uncle who answered the door with a loaded gun and Paint It Black on eternal repeat. The father who went from Green Beret to commune-builder to graveyard shift at a molybdenum mine. None of them explained what happened. They passed it forward through silence—through early rising and banked fires, through what was never said and never named. Silence is not containment. It is compression. The pressure does not dissipate; it passes forward, and this collection is in large part the record of a man trying to read the pressure he was handed and discovering that reading it changes nothing about the fact of having received it.
THE SPEAKER DOES NOT ESCAPE THE SYSTEM HE DESCRIBES.
Seeing the pattern clearly does not dissolve it. The adult at elevation—with the long view finally available, the genealogy of damage visible as a system rather than a sequence of incidents—looks back and watches the formation installed in childhood running continuously, uninterrupted, right up to the present moment. And the recognition changes nothing. Self-knowledge accumulates and changes nothing. The knowing has never once been enough to make him stop. This is the condition that runs through the Diversions chapter in particular, through Stone Prairie’s lattice of consequence hardening around a life until it becomes indistinguishable from the life itself, through the speaker of Grassy Bald observing solipsism—the condition of being sealed inside one’s own perception, unable to receive the world as it actually is—from the outside without being exempt from his own variety of it. Mordancy and self-exposure are not unrelated, and the poem that pretends otherwise is lying.
THE BODY IS AN ARCHIVE.
The final site where institutional violence lands is never the institution—it is the flesh. The colon surgically reduced by amoebic dysentery contracted in covert operations. The bones broken in a fall from a lift that ended a career and began a forty-year contraction. The cartilage that has learned it cannot heal. Whatever the culture, the army, the family system did—it is stored in posture and grip and the particular way a man holds himself when he is about to speak. The body in these poems is never merely a body. It is the evidence.
MYTH, LANDSCAPE, AND THE SACRED
MYTH IS WEATHER, NOT METAPHOR.
A metaphor you can choose to use or not use. Weather you live inside of. The mythological systems running through this collection—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the oldest written friendship in recorded literature; Dante’s cosmology; the Ananda Marga chakra system, in which the body contains a map of spiritual energy running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head; the Bardo Thodol—the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the forty-nine days the consciousness spends between death and rebirth; the Ofrenda, the Mexican Day of the Dead altar on which food and objects are left for the returning dead—are not decorative references. They are the actual atmosphere of the poems, operating whether the reader recognizes them or not. In Two Rosaries, the number 108 connects the Vedic mala to the regulation baseball to the astronomical relationship between the moon and the earth—not because the poem is being clever, but because the cosmos has been leaving the same clue everywhere all along, and the poem is simply the place where the traditions finally sit down together without being asked to choose sides.
WATER IS LITURGICAL, NOT DECORATIVE.
Liturgical meaning ritualistic, ceremonial, belonging to the formal grammar of the sacred—not holy water specifically but water as the element that every tradition has reached for when it needs to mark transformation. It runs through this work the way it runs through every serious mythology—as the oldest cleansing agent and the oldest destroyer simultaneously. The Missouri Basin. The Pacific current navigated through the Bering Strait. The rosary bead held to the light until it occludes the lamp the way the moon occludes the sun. The baptismal font in The Threshold. The flood between the dikes in Wichita where a man is going under week by week. Water in these poems is never just water. It is the element in which transformation is possible and drowning is always the other option.
THE FATHER IS A MYTHIC CO-PRESENCE, NOT A CHARACTER.
He does not appear in these poems the way characters appear in fiction—arriving, doing things, departing. He is present the way weather is present, governing the atmosphere of everything whether named or not. Green Beret, commune-builder, Climax miner, dissertation writer, Ananda Marga practitioner, co-author of Fountain Street: all of these are the same man, and none of them is the whole man, and the collection is the place where all of his simultaneous versions occupy the same space without being asked to resolve into a single biography. He is already ash and already present. He is the ghost the whole system is built to hold.
THE AMERICAN MIDWEST AND SOUTH ARE COSMOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES, NOT SETTINGS.
Cosmological meaning they function the way ancient peoples used the cosmos—not as backdrop but as the total explanatory framework for existence, the place where the human drama acquires its largest possible scale. The gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere. The graveyard shift at a molybdenum mine eleven thousand feet up in the Colorado Rockies. Moses Lake at dawn with a crow angling over Washington, indifferent to everything the speaker is carrying. Dead Man’s Slide in the Cascades where the speaker brings the ash of his own catastrophes to scatter along the Iron Goat Trail. These places are not backdrops. They are the cosmological terrain of the collection—doing what Olympus did for the Greeks, what the underworld did for Dante, holding the mythology the culture needs but will not admit it needs, the darkling plain on which all of it, finally, is adjudicated.
ELEGY AND GRIEF
ELEGY AND EULOGY RUN SIMULTANEOUSLY.
The Aztecs did not mourn their dead; they fed them. The Ofrenda is not a monument erected against forgetting but a table set for a guest who has changed address. The elegies in this collection—for the father, for Troy Gustafson, for Eric Swangstu, for Uncle Don, for the six people carried to Dead Man’s Slide in a single pre-pandemic year—operate on the same principle: the poem does not mourn so much as release, the living completing a transfer the dead have already begun. The elegy that inflates absence into cosmology—that turns a father’s death into a theological statement, a friend’s into a universal truth—has already betrayed the subject. Terrain is terrain; the mountain is not a symbol. The ash is personal before it is anything else, and the poem earns the larger resonance only by refusing to reach for it.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
All links are from this site, so the terms remain in my own ecosystem. This is because I use certain terms in a more contextualized format than the standard definitions allow, and because the major external glossaries cover only a fraction of what appears here—and some of those entries, where they do exist, lack the depth the forms require.
Poetic Forms — Inherited
Blazon / Anti-blazon |
Caudate sonnet |
Diptych |
Ghost sonnet |
Sestina |
Sonnet |
Terza rima |
Triptych |
Villanelle
Poetic Forms — Invented
Acta Iterata |
Chiastic Helix Sonnet |
Double Form Sonnet |
Ghost Blazon |
Ghost Caudate Sonnet |
Mirrored Sestina |
Mirrored Sonnet |
Octavana |
Sator Square Sonnet |
Sestonnet
Prosody and Sonic Texture
Alliteration | Anacrusis | Assonance | Caesura | Consonance | Enjambment | Meter | Plosive | Prosody | Refrain | Sibilance | Slant rhyme | Volta / Counter-volta
Rhetorical Modes and Figures
Anadiplosis | Anaphora | Apostrophe | Carpe diem | Chiasmus | Complaint | Conceit / Extended conceit | Effictio | Encomium | Epistrophe | Invective | Metonymy | Persona | Polyptoton | Prosopopoeia | Syllepsis | Synecdoche | Zeugma
Structural and Formal Concepts
Container | Dramaturgy | Load-bearing | Pressure | Register | Strophe / Antistrophe
Philosophical and Critical Concepts
Bicameral | Cosmological | Epistemological | Ontological | Palimpsest | Recursion | Superposition | Temporal | Zeitgeist
Language and Metaphor
Metaphrand / Metaphier | Paraphrand / Paraphier
The Conceit System
Conceit | Ghost principle | Liturgical | Mutability
States of Composition
Fugue state | Hypnagogic