The Cinquain

Please read entire post for accurate instructions and submission guideline information.

For the year of 2025, “Poetic Discussions” we will be exploring, learning, and composing various short forms of poetry.  These will be a set of activities that you are more than welcome to participate in.  Information on these forms of poetry will be provided, along with instructions on the poem activity.  Please be sure to read the instructions carefully and abide by them.  Also, feel free to research more information on the presented short form should you need more clarification.  Those who participate poems will be posted here at the Creative Inspirations website.  
 
Please note that when submitting for this activity:

• poems will only be accepted by email at: [email protected].  Please put in the subject line of the email: “Poetic Discussions Poetry Activity Submission”
• poems must follow submission instructions
• poems should not be offensive, derogatory, vulgar, sexual, or the like
• poems must be submitted on or before the deadline; no poems will be accepted once the deadline has expired

 
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Kicking the New Year off is the short form poem, the Cinquain.  Below is some information about this form of poetry via LitCharts (2025). (https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/cinquain#:~:text=The%20American%20cinquain%20is%20an,are%20typically%20written%20using%20iambs).
 
Cinquain Definition
What is a cinquain? Here’s a quick and simple definition:
The word cinquain can refer to two different things. Historically, it referred to any stanza of five lines written in any type of verse. More recently, cinquain has come to refer to particular types of five-line poems that have precisely defined features, such as their meter or the number of syllables they contain in each line. The most common of these specific types of cinquains is the American cinquain.
 
Some additional key details about cinquains:

• Another name for a five-line stanza is a quintet, and five-line poems can also be called quintains.
• The American cinquain was created by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey in the early 20th century.
• A variant of the American cinquain, called the didactic cinquain, is often taught to children in school.

 
Cinquain Pronunciation
Here's how to pronounce cinquain: sin-kane
 
Cinquains as Five-Line Stanzas in Formal Verse
Five-line stanzas are particularly common in formal verse—verse that has both a strict meter and rhyme scheme. They appear in many different languages, and are used for different purposes. Examples can be found dating back to medieval French poetry. Here are some key details about cinquain's most common appearances in formal verse:

• The five-line stanza was particularly popular in English formal verse in the 16th and 17th centuries, when iambic pentameter (a metrical form consisting of five iambs per line) was the most commonly-used meter. Consequently, many of the most well-known examples of cinquains are written in iambic pentameter, though poets also used other meters in cinquains.
• Limericks are a common form of humorous poetry that typically consists of a single, rhyming cinquain written in iambic meter.
• Cinquains tend to follow fairly straightforward rhyme schemes such as ABAAB, ABABB, or AABBA.
• The number of cinquains in a given poem can vary. An entire poem can be a single cinquain, or a poem might have many cinquain stanzas.

 
American Cinquains
In the early twentieth century the American poet Adelaide Crapsey, inspired by the five-line Japanese poetic form of tanka, began to write five-line poems that followed a distinct form. This poetic form soon came to be known as an American cinquain (though it's also sometimes referred to as a Crapseian cinquain, after its creator).
 
The American cinquain is an unrhymed, five-line poetic form defined by the number of syllables in each line—the first line has two syllables, the second has four, the third six, the fourth eight, and the fifth two (2-4-6-8-2). They are typically written using iambs. Adelaide Crapsey's "November Night" (© 1911 – 1913) is a good example:
 
Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
 
Some scholars define the line length of American cinquains by counting iambs or stressed syllables, rather than by counting total syllables. By this sort of counting, the proper line length of an American cinquain would be 1-2-3-4-1, since it would contain one iamb in the first line, two in the second line, and so on. The right way to count the line length is ultimately a matter of interpretation, though, since Crapsey never specified the rules of the form she invented.
 
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For this activity, we will be using the (2-4-6-8-2), like the above example. Your challenge, if you choose to accept this challenge, is to:

• create a Cinquain poem based around the theme of the Winter season, or a Valentine’s Day theme, one or the other
• poem must be individual; no collaboration poems
• poem must be original…no previously published poems for this activity
• the deadline for submission of this poem is: Friday January 24, 2025
• poems will be published on this site on or before February 3, 2025.
• please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and we hope to get lots of poems