Recommended to prove

2. Haiku
The haiku is a type of Japanese poetry that is derived from the longer renga form. You might have encountered haikus in the following format: three unrhymed lines of poetry in which the first and third lines have five syllables, and the second has seven. The brevity and immediacy of the haiku make it one of the most well-loved forms today, and it lends itself to specific, isolated images, moods, and instances.
For a masterful use of the haiku, I recommend reading Chinaka Hodge’s “Small Poems for Big,” which is a series of 24 haikus in memory of Notorious B.I.G. or Langston Hughes’s “Suicide’s Note,” which is a beautiful, heartbreaking haiku — you’ll be amazed what just three lines can make you feel.
3. Ode
The ode is one of the oldest types of poems there is, and it’s also very straightforward: Any poem written in praise of something or someone can be an ode. You could write an ode to the ocean, an ode to your pet, an ode to your good friend, favorite shoes, or a delicious snack!
Contemporary poet Kevin Young has written many odes, including this poem in praise of the Midwest. A really great ode can change the way you think about something you tend to take for granted (like Angel Nafis’s “Ode to Shea Butter”) or shift your perspective on something painful (George Abraham’s “Ode to my Swollen, Mono-Infected Spleen” does this well) or finally, just let you revel in a specific type of nostalgia (see José Olivarez’s “Ode to Cheese Fries”).
4. Sonnet
The sonnet originated in Italy and derives its name from the Italian word “sonetto,” which literally means “little sound” or “little song.” There are many different types of sonnets, but the form I’m going to focus on here is the one I learned first: The English sonnet (also known as the Shakespearean sonnet). The English sonnet is a single stanza, with 14 lines that consist of three quatrains (four rhyming lines) and a final rhyming couplet. Traditionally, each line of this sonnet should be written in iambic pentameter (for a great definition and breakdown of iambic pentameter, click here). Finally, the rhyme scheme for each line is as follows:
William Shakespeare
If you’ve dealt in sonnets before, then you might already be familiar with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d like to offer Claude McKay’s sonnet “America” as a modern example of the sonnet form at work.
Once you get really comfortable with the sonnet, you can experiment with the sonnet crown, which is made up of 15 sonnets “linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous; the last sonnet consists of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets, in the same order in which they appeared.” Marilyn Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till” is a powerful, heartrending series of sonnets about the murder of Emmett Till, and you can read an excerpt of it here.