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Last year at this time I wrote these seasonal poems in the form of a clerihew. A
clerihew is a four-line verse written in an a/a/b/b rhyme scheme that is biographical and humorous.
Frosty was a man of snow
who liked it ten degrees below.
He feared for days that were too warm,
for melting ruined his boyish form.
The shiny nose on Rudolph's face,
gives the 'deer a special place.
Leading the sleigh through fog and snow,
he's grateful that his bum don't glow!
I thought it might be fun to revisit this form again. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I still find it hard to believe that we are rushing headlong towards the end of the year. I have papers to grade, cookies to bake, packages to mail, cards to send, and more. I am counting the days until my mom arrives (2!), the days until grades are due (8 and 10), the days until my sister's birthday (13), and the days until school ends for William (11).
In the midst of this year-end chaos, I am acutely aware of time, how little I have and how much I need. So, for this week's stretch I propose we write about time, in any form, in any of it's incarnations. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I've been reading a lot of books about magical and mythical creatures as of late, so I thought it might be fun to write some poems about these creatures. Not sure what to write about? Check out a few of these links.
So, what kind of creature will you write about? Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I've found another new form that I would like to try this week. It's called hay(na)ku and was created in 2003 by poet Eileen Tabios. Here are the guidelines.
Hay(na)ku is a 3-line poem of six words with one word in the first line, two words in the second, and three in the third. There are no other rules and no restrictions on number of syllables or rhyme.
Need some examples? You can find some Hay(na)ku poetry contest winners at the Hay(na)ku Poetry blog. There is also a thoughtful essay about the form at Dragoncave.
As you'll see from the examples, some folks create poems comprised of several hay(na)ku strung together. So, what kind of hay(na)ku will you write? Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I'm writing sonnets right now and seem to be forever tapping out meter and stresses, so this week I've picked a form that requires some syllable counting. Rictameter is a nine line, unrhymed poetry form in which the 1st and last lines are the same. The syllable count is 2/4/6/8/10/8/6/4/2.
You can learn more about this form and read some examples at the group site
Rictameter.
What kind of rictameter will you write? Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I've been reading seasonal poems as of late and was so struck by this poem that it gave me the idea for today's stretch.
No!
by Thomas Hood
No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon!
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no "t'other side this way"—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing 'em—
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all—no locomotion—
No inkling of the way—no notion—
"No go" by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!
Since my poems often try to capture what I see and hear, smell and touch, I thought it might be interesting to write a poem about something that describes it by virtue of what isn't there.
So, there's your challenge for the week. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
A few weeks ago at my poetry workshop I was challenged to write a double dactyl. I still haven't managed to do it, so now I'm giving myself a deadline in the hopes that I'll think of something.
A
double dactyl consists of two quatrains in this form:
1 - double dactyl nonsense phrase (like Higgeldy Piggeldy)
2 - double dactyl of a person's name
3 - double dactyl
4 - one dactyl plus a stressed syllable (/ _ _ / )
5 - double dactyl
6 - double dactyl
7 - double dactyl
8 - one dactyl plus a stressed syllable (/ _ _ / )
Here are some other helpful notes.
- A dactyl contains three syllables, one stressed followed by two unstressed (/ _ _ ).
- Somewhere in the second stanza is a double dactyl formed by a single word (usually).
- The last lines of the quatrains (4 and 8) must rhyme.
- Like the clerihew, these are generally written about famous people and are meant to be humorous.
Phew! I hope this makes sense to you. Writing it in this way helps me to see what the poem should
sound like. Here is an example.
Higgledy-Piggledy
Hans Christian Andersen
Wrote of a mermaid who
Swam up on shore.
There she became somewhat
Less than amphibious;
Drowned in the sea-foam 'mid
Morals galore.
If my notes aren't helpful, you can find a description of double dactyls at
Poetry Base and
Everything2.com.
So, there's your challenge. Write a double dactyl (or two) and leave me a note about your poem. I'll post the results here later this week.
Rupert Brooke wrote a poem entitled
The Great Lover in which he listed "the hundred and one everyday things that gave [the poet] joy (
Poetry Foundation)." Here is an excerpt.
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns....
Read the poem in its entirety.
Now, I could easily write a list of all the things I love, but it would be far from poetry. So, the challenge for this week is to write your own love letter to the world highlighting all the things you love, from the exotic to the mundane, the ugly to the beautiful, and everything else in between. Don't worry, it needn't be 101 items long! Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
My poetry Friday post included a link to the poem
October by Jacob Polley. I fell in love with the language of the poem, as well as the image of autumn it conjured. Since I'm thinking fall, Halloween, and all the other great things that come with this month, I thought it would be fun to write a poem to/about October.
Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
Tricia (The Miss Rumphius Effect) challenged us to write haiku riddles based on the book If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky. I shared that book on this blog a while back.
Here are two I wrote this week:
thin spaghetti legs
neck, limber long gathers fish
graceful in flight
grey scarf of dawn
weaves diamond dewdrops in, out
top fir boughs vanish
Do you know what they are? Did you guess Blue Heron and Fog? Lots of great poetry can be found at Susan Taylor Brown.
Happy Reading.
MsMac
If Not For the Cat, written by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Ted Rand, is a collection of poetic riddles about members of the animal kingdom. Here's an excerpt.
I, the hoverer,
Sip the nasturtium's nectar
And sing with my wings.
Poem ©Jack Prelutsky. All rights reserved.
For some additional examples,
browse inside the book.
Since we haven't been writing to form in a while, I thought this would be a good time to begin revisiting them. So, the challenge this week is to write some haiku riddles. Leave me a note about your poem(s) and I'll post the results here later this week.
I was quite taken with the Friday post at
How A Poem Happens. The poet
Idra Novey shares her poem
Trans and describes its creation. She uses the prefix trans- as the title of her poem and has created sections that begin -late, -
gress, -
mogrify, -form, and -
scend.
I love the idea of taking a prefix and using it to form a series of words, each their own piece of a whole. So, your challenge this week is to write a poem around a prefix. Leave me a note about your work and I'll post the results here later this week.
P.S. - If you need help generating a possible word list, try
More Words. Enter your prefix or word of choice and click search for words. Scroll down the page (past the definitions) until you find the link for
list all words starting with __. You'll find this a helpful tool. I'm thinking about the word down and the link generated a list of 114 words, including downhill, downcast, downpour, downtown, downtrodden, downwind, and more.
The Poetry Stretch prompt at The Rumphius Effect was to write a poem about work. Here is my contribution for the week:
Library Lady
library lady
what have you read lately?
need a book to take me places
library lady
do you have?
need a book to make me soar
library lady
what’s the book with a boy name Jack?
need it to write a report
library lady
why did my dog have to die
need a book to hug
library lady
Wild Rose Reader is hosting Poetry Friday.
I didn't sleep a wink last night. That's because today is the first day of school. Even after all these years, I still get the first day jitters. I toss and turn thinking about what I'll wear, what my students will be like, and how that first meeting will go. I still get excited about school and all the great things I have to look forward to each year. Last night I imagined a can of talking pencils preparing the rest of the school supplies for their jobs. (Yes, that was strange.)
I love school, always have and always will. I still love shopping for school supplies. One of my favorite things to do on the first day was to choose a desk in the front row so that I could be the first person to breathe in the smell of freshly minted ditto pages. So, in honor of my first day back, and for all the first days still yet to to be celebrated, let's write this week in honor of school.
Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
**Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Summer is officially over for me. Yes, you read that correctly. Faculty are back, first year students arrive on Wednesday, and classes begin next Monday. I am perfectly happy with this. You see, I was the kid who was ready for school to begin about one-week into summer. I love school! And while I do need a break from it every so often, I relish the end of summer. For some this is a sad time, but for me it marks the passage into fall, my favorite season of the year.
Yesterday I was savoring Wallace Steven's wonderful poem,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I began to think that looking at summer in this way might be an interesting thing to do. Now, you don't need to come up with 13 ways of looking at summer. Perhaps we could write this as a modified
renga, each contributing a verse or two. However you want to approach it, the challenge this week is to write a few stanzas (or more!) about summer.
Here are the stanzas I'm starting with (I think).
I
Leaning in
at this point farthest
from the sun
we still burn and sweat
while waiting patiently
to tilt away
II
Nights glow and sing
thick with fireflies
and crickets
Leave me a comment about your pieces and I'll post the results here later this week.
On my two week vacation my reading time was largely devoted to reading aloud to my son. We finished HP2 and started HP3. There was little down time during the days, but when I did have a chance to read, I found myself immersed in Sage Cohen's book
Writing the Poetic Life: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry. In it she introduced me to Lohren Green's work and his
Poetical Dictionary. The poems in this gem of a book are written in the form of a dictionary entry (pronunciation, etymology, and definition). Here is an excerpt from the entry on glee.
I've been thinking a lot about this form and have a list of words I want to try. Will you join me in trying to write your own poetic dictionary entries? Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
Confession is good for the soul, or so they say. I find it quite liberating, though the thought of confessing my sins as a child was often quite disconcerting. (Really, at ten or twelve, what did I have to confess beyond disobedience to my parents and the admission of a using a few well-chosen curse words?!)
I thought it might be fun to write poems of confession. These are NOT poems of apology, but real confessions. Perhaps you might want to confess to a crime you didn’t commit, or an obsession you have. This one is wide open for some creative fun. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results later this week.
Shhh! Don't tell the Poetry Friday police! I'm posting a day early because I leave tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. for the airport to head to Chicago for ALA.
This week's Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect is all about recipe poems. On Monday and Tuesday, I wrote recipe poems for my daily poems.
Recipe for a Waterfall
(Best served outdoors on a hot day)
Pour water into riverbed—
Don’t measure, don’t level—
Drop in boulders
Mix until frothy
Scrape sides of banks clean
Add one cliff
Toss in gravity
Stretch sheets of liquid glass into bottomless bowl below
Sprinkle hawks overhead
Season with summer sun
Splash with a dash of wonder
Combine with mist
Let sit until you’ve had your fill or until evening's chill cools dish
How to Make a Bad Mood
Toss and turn all night
Combine broken alarm clock with morning detention
Roll your eyes at the ever-cheerful Ms. Lovejoy
Grind your teeth during music class
Measure each insult thrown your way
Peel back politeness
Pinch the piccolo player next to you on the bus
Stew over having to share a bedroom—not fair!
Scald your little sister by ignoring her “Guess what!”
Simmer when your parents don’t notice you're mad
Bring your mood to a full boil
Melt down
Beat yourself up
Cover yourself with blankets and turn on your iPod
Chill out and hope tomorrow is better
--poems by Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
It's not too late for you to cook up your own poems! Check out the Poetry Stretch info here, and see the results here. They're delicious!
And the wonderful Jama has the Poetry Friday roundup at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup!
Lately I've been spending my evenings outside with a few trusty companions--my son, our dog, a notebook, my new fountain pen, and the book
A Crow Doesn't Need a Shadow: A Guide to Writing Poetry From Nature.
In the section
Creating a Landscape, Lorraine
Ferra shares a recipe poem and guides readers through the process of writing their own. Here's an excerpt.
Look through a cookbook. As you read the directions for several different recipes, write down the verbs which tell you what to do with the ingredients. Make a list of about ten or twelve different verbs. Keep in mind that you probably won't use all the verbs you find. Be selective for your poem.
Some possible subjects might be a recipe for a cave, foggy morning, a bird refuge, a season or particular month, a moonlit field, a river, or a sunset. Once you decide on your subject, start listing some ingredients.
Elaine from
Wild Rose Reader is a master at recipe poems. Here are the directions she shares for writing them.
Directions for Writing Recipe and How to Make… Poems
- Write each direction in a separate sentence.
- Begin each sentence with a carefully selected verb.
- Try to use a different verb in each sentence.
You can read more at her post
Recipe & How to Make ... Poems, Part II. This, of course, means there is also a post entitled
Recipe & How to Make ... Poems, Part I.
So, there's your challenge for the week. Write a poem in the form of a recipe. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
Last week when writing abecedarian poems
Laura Purdie Salas mentioned she liked them because they reminded her of one big acrostic to solve. This sentiment resonated with me, so I thought it might be fun to write acrostic poems this week.
During the April
Poetry Makers series a few folks weighed in on the acrostic form.
Steven Schnur said "Though some have called my acrostic books poetry, I think of them as word play, as solutions to problems of verbal geometry."
Avis Harley shared a number of acrostic poems. One example was from her new book
African Acrostics: A Word in Edgeways.
ABOVE ALL
Celebrate these
Long-standing giraffes,
Opening
Up clouds and eaves-
Dropping on the wind!
Far
Removed
In airy
Elegance,
Nibbling on high, they
Decorate the
Sky.
Poem ©Avis Harley
This is a fine example, far removed from the school-assigned poems to write an acrostic using your first name, or some vocabulary word being studied. What kind of acrostic will you write this week? Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
It's time this week to revisit and old (i.e. - one we've already played with) form. An abecedarian poem is one in which the verses or words begin with successive letters of the alphabet. Here is an excerpt from a poem found in
The Monarch's Progress: Poems With Wings by Avis Harley.
Wintering Over
by Avis Harley
Amazing
Blazing
Clusters
Decorate
Entire
Forest
Groves.
Hanging
In
Jeweled
Kingdoms
...
So, the challenge this week is to write in the abecedarian form. Leave me a comment about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
I cannot teach you how to be a great poet or even a good one. Dammit, I can't teach myself that. But I can show you how to have fun with the modes and forms of poetry as they have developed over the years.
I find writing in rhyme particularly difficult and so have been working my way through the samples and exercises on rhyme. Here's the one I want to try this week.
Take your notebook and wander about the house and garden, if you have one. If you are not reading this at home, then wander around your office, hospital ward, factory floor or prison cell. If you are outside or on a train, plane or bus, in a café, brothel or hotel lobby you can still do this. Simply note down as many things as you can see, hear or smell. They need not be nouns, you can jot down processes, actions, deeds. So, if you are in a café, you might write down: smoking, steam, raincoat, lover's tiff, cappuccino machine, sipping, flapjacks, cinnamon, jazz music, spilt tea, and so on -- whatever strikes the eye, ear or nose. Write a list of at least twenty words. When you've done that, settle down and one more see how many rhymes you can come up with for each word. You may find that this simple exercise gets your poetic saliva glands so juiced up that the temptation to turn words into poetry becomes irresistible. Yield to it. A random, accidental and arbitrary consonance of word sounds can bring inspiration where no amount of pacing, pencil chewing and looking out of the window can help.
So there's your challenge for the work. Come up with a series of rhyming words inspired by your surroundings and turn them into a poem. Leave me a comment about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
This week's Poetry Stretch over at Miss Rumphius Effect is about fairy tales. My WIP is actually a collection of poems all with a certain hook and related to fairy tales, but I can't share one of those here. So here's a different one, for an older teen audience.
Obsession
by Prince Charming
I thought the glass shoe
Was just a quirk
It got my attention
Certainly
And had all the kingdom talking
But my wife really harbors an unhealthy passion for shoes
Slippers, mules, pumps, boots
Velvet, leather, fur, tapestry
She whispers the words in her sleep
gentle
terrifying
She would rather shoe-shop than
Dine with me
What is food compared to the sleek sweetness of a perfect heel?
She would rather shoe-shop than
Play with our children
What is laughter compared to the metric knocking of heels on slate floors?
She would rather shoe-shop than
Breathe
What is life without the right shoes to live it?
I have found her
Reclining on our closet’s stone floor
Ruining a silk gown
Admiring
Towers of soles and heels looming overhead
And I wonder:
How many pairs of shoes does it take to make a princess happy?
--Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
Thanks, Tricia! You have some fantastic poems in your comments. Wow!
It's not too late to join in--just click on the link above!
Jane
Yolen has a poem in this book as well. It's entitled
Fat is Not a Fairy Tale.
Other poets you'll find in this volume include Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Carol Ann Duffy, Barbara
Hamby, Randall
Jarrell, Amy Lowell, Gregory Orr, Anne Sexton, Joyce Thomas, and many more.
I have been on a steady diet of fantasy and fairy tales in recent weeks. Since these themes keep recurring, I thought it would be a good time to use this topic for a poetry stretch. So, your challenge this week is to write a poem inspired by a fairy tale, legend, bit of folklore, or fantasy. Use any form you like. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.
We're coming upon the time of year when I could eat a tomato sandwich for lunch every day and be perfectly happy. My son would eat corn on the cob at every meal if I allowed it. Lately I've had to cut him off at three ears at dinner. If I let him go on there would be no corn left for the rest of us! We've had grilled vegetables three times in the last week, and as soon as the tomatoes come out, it will be
Panzanella at least once a week!
Summer is my least favorite time of year, so it is only the seasonal goodness of the fruits and vegetables that helps me through the heat and humidity. Obviously, I've got food on my mind! I thought it would be fun to write poetry about food this week. It could be an ode to your favorite or most despised food. It could be a memory about food. Well, it could be anything and take any form, as long as some type of food is the focus.
Have fun. I can't wait to read the (hopefully) delicious results! Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results later this week.
View Next 25 Posts
Counting Rhyme<br />by Lawrence Schimel<br /><br />Robert Frost<br />turned and tossed,<br />unable to fall asleep;<br />he was counting iambs instead of sheep.
Emily Dickson loved to dash.<br />It lent her poems a strange panache.<br />If she'd just learned to use the comma<br />She might have married and been a mama.<br /><br /><br />R.L.Stevenson loved the sea.<br />He was much shorter than thee or me.<br />If he had walked on wooden pegs<br />He would have had much longer legs.<br /><br /><br />Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hide,<br />One was out and one
Pity poor ol' Santa Claus,<br />Who has a thing for Häagen-Dazs.<br />He tries to be a jolly soul,<br />But cookies make his belly roll!
Skydrops of rain skating down,<br />Grateful earthworm buries a frown,<br />Thinks, "Oh wow, oh woo, oh wee...<br />I do so love a mud smoothie!"
Tricia,<br /><br />Here's a clerihew I posted at Political Verses last week:<br /><br />A Clerihew about Max Baucus<br /><br />Senator Max Baucus<br />Of the “slap and tickle” caucus<br />Considered Melodee Hanes<br />To be one of his Capitol gains.
The Joy of Handmade Gifts: An Autobiographical Clerihew<br /><br />'Tis the week before Christmas; I'm frantically knittng.<br />My skills 'gainst your holiday wishes I'm pitting.<br />Next year, if for hand knits you happen to thirst,<br />Better tell me before December first!<br /><br />Easter
After finishing the last cookie on his plate,<br />Santa declared, “I resolve to lose some weight!<br />When he opened the jar and took out two more,<br />His wife shook her head, she’d heard it all before.<br /><br /><br />I couldn't get it to format right, but here's my attempt.<br />Linda
Pity Edgar Allan Poe,<br />his life and work a tale of woe.<br />When he came drunken through the door,<br />His young wife scolded, "Nevermore!"<br /><br />Scrooge said "Bah humbug" to his clerk<br />and growled that life was just for work.<br />When he was spirited away,<br />he learned to relish Christmas Day.<br /><br />--Kate Coombs (Book Aunt)
Oops! Should be "his young wife..."--without the capital H.<br /><br />--Kate
Fieri's Camaro convertible in red<br />takes him to joints where he is fed<br />foods that feed his growing addiction<br />for grub that he says, "Ummm, tastes like chicken!"<br /><br /><br />Confession time: I'm addicted to food porn.
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Mine is a clerihew written using dactyls:<br /><br />Emily Dickinson<br />wore her hair in a bun,<br />made notes throughout the day,<br />then wrote the night away.
Busy week, so this is all that came out:<br /><br />Well Tiger Woods, it’s safe to say,<br />You sealed your fate some shoddy way,<br />By playing girls the way you did,<br />Your pedestal just took a skid.
Trica--<br /><br />Here are a couple of Christmas-themed clerihews:<br /><br />Ruldolph the Red-nosed Reindeer<br />Led his team into the aerosphere<br />As they pulled Santa’s sleigh<br />Up, up and away.<br /><br /><br />The Grinch hated the Whos.<br />They gave him the blues.<br />He tried to steal Christmas away—<br />But they sang and celebrated that day!
Elaine, you are the champion of clerihews - I bow down in amazement at the Baucus! Here are my two latest: <br /><br />Senator Joe Lieberman<br />is a true believer when<br />he says, "Well, if you're not wealthy,<br />just try harder to stay healthy."<br /><br />and <br /><br />Fightin' Al Franken <br />gave some Senators a spankin' - <br />Tonight watchin' the T and V: