These are the ones that didn't make the front page, for one reason or another. I show them anyway, the way I put a wrong solution on the overhead and let the class find the error. Sometimes the error is the most useful part of the problem.

It's twenty-two years, actually, but the meter wouldn't have it, and this is the only lie on the site. Line 6 has a syllable too many and I've decided I can live with that. The district put whiteboards in two of the new rooms this summer. Mine is not one of them, and I didn't ask.

This one obeys every rule and still doesn't quite work, and I have spent a while trying to say why. I think it's that a pantoum wants its lines to change meaning when they come back, the way "I stood there in my socks like I was ten" does in the snow day poem, and too many of these lines come back meaning exactly what they meant the first time. A proof can be correct and still not be elegant. Open House was Thursday the 16th, if you're wondering. The father in the back row is real. He filled two pages.

The cinquain is an American form, invented by a poet named Adelaide Crapsey early in this century, and it is the only form here that is pure counting, which you would think would make it my favorite. It is close. The whole poem turns on the last two syllables, which is a lot to ask of two syllables. Some teachers use a different kind of cinquain with the elementary grades, one word, then two, then three, and so on. That's a perfectly good exercise, but it isn't this.

In the summer of 1996 I tried a sestina about teaching conic sections, with the end-words circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola, focus and point. I thought I was being clever. You can see the problem. "Focus" and "point" were fine; they mean several things and I could move them around. "Circle" was all right. But "parabola" has to end six lines plus a place in the envoi, and there is only one thing a parabola is, and by stanza three I was writing sentences no human being would say, just to get the word into position. My wife read stanza four and asked if I was feeling all right.

The lesson, which I pass on for free: the sestina is not a puzzle about the six words. It is a puzzle about what the six words can still mean the sixth time. Choose words that can change.