Many readers wrote to express their interest in and ask questions about the poetic form called the villanelle, after I printed a couple of examples last month. So the haunted and magic quality of that kind of formal repetition in poems must have struck a chord. One reader suggested that I print a pantoum. The pantoum has a curious history. Its a Malay song form and it was adapted by French poets in the 19th century one of the more obscure fruits of the Age of Imperialism and came into English from poets who imitated the French. The pantoum has a fourline stanza; the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza.

Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/features/19980920.htm