Recommended to prove

8. Ghazal
The ghazal is an Arabic form of verse poem that was adopted by medieval Persian poets like Hafez and Rumi, but has been written in many languages, including Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Hebrew. Often associated with love (both requited and unrequited), the form consists of a series of no fewer than five “syntactically and grammatically complete couplets” where both lines of the first couplet end in the same word, and second line of each following couplet also ends on that word. Traditionally, the final couplet included a proper name — usually the poet’s, though not always.
For two different takes on the ghazal, I recommend Agha Shahid Ali’s “Even the Rain” and Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal”. Zeina Hashem Beck’s “Broken Ghazal: Speak Arabic” breaks one of the rules of the ghazal form — her first couplet doesn’t end with the same word twice — but the poem’s subject, a struggle with language, reflects this departure from form in a really beautiful way.
9. Duplex
A subversion of the sonnet that takes cues from the ghazal, the duplex was invented by poet Jericho Brown. Of writing in form, he says: “I write in forms because formal work helps to push me toward saying what I couldn’t imagine I would say in poems.”
A subversion of the sonnet that takes cues from the ghazal, the duplex was invented by poet Jericho Brown. Of writing in form, he says: “I write in forms because formal work helps to push me toward saying what I couldn’t imagine I would say in poems.”
The poem is 14 lines, separated into couplets. The last line or words of each couplet becomes the first line (or part of the first line) of the following couplet, and the very first line of the poem should also be present as the last line of the poem.
Jericho Brown called the form a duplex “because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses.” You can read two of his duplex poems and more about his process in this feature from the Poetry Foundation.