Different types of poetry

April is National Poetry Month.  It’s the one time of the year that I make a point of writing and reading poetry.  It’s not that I avoid poetry, at least reading poetry, but I’m not a poet.  Not.  A. Poet.  But I do like writing poems (bad, amateurish poems) as warm ups.  More than writing poetry, I make a point to read poetry and to read about poetry.

A book of reverso styled poetry.

Here are some of the types of poems that I have discovered.

Fibonacci poem.  Named for the Fibonacci sequence, this poem was invented by Greg Pinkus.  Like the haiku, it involves counting syllables.  In this case, the count is 1/1/2/3/4/8.

Each

beat

counts in

this narrow,

growing wider,

poem based on mathematics.

 

Reverso.  This is one of my favorites although I’ve never succeeded in writing even a bad one.

I think of this as a pair of poems working together.

Marilyn Singer not only uses this form in her book Mirror Mirror, she actually created the reverso.  

In a reverso, you read the lines in one order in the first half of the poem.  The second half of the poem has the same lines in reverse order.  The only things that you can change are capitalization and punctuation.

Ideally, the meaning is often very different, often ironically so.  It tells the other half of the story.  To see what I mean, read this poem from Mirror Mirror.  

Have Another Chocolate

 

 

False apology poem.  This is another favorite, first written by William Carlos Williams.  You apologize for something without really meaning it.  Think insincerity.  Or sarcasm.  Williams’ poem is three stanzas of four lines each and all of the other false apology poems I’ve read follow this pattern.  Here is my second attempt – much, much better than my first attempt.  This is a frustrated parent poem.  Sorry folks, this is just where things stand today.

They Feel Responsible

You can’t find
your DS?
Seriously?
It’s missing?

It must
have run away
with your
I-pod.

They were so sad
when they heard
you got a D
on a test.

Not great but then I never claimed poetry as a talent!

–SueBE

 

Reversible Poetry

April is national poetry month so I’ll be doing three posts on poetry this week.  The first is on a poetic form that I just learned about — the reverso.  Marilyn Singer not only uses this form in her book Mirror Mirror, she actually created the reverso.  

In a reverso, you read the lines in one order in the first half of the poem.  The second half of the poem has the same lines in reverse order.  The only things that you can change are capitalization and punctuation.

Ideally, the meaning is often very different, often ironically so.  To see what I mean, read this poem from Mirror Mirror.  

 

Have Another Chocolate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personally,  I thought this form looked impossibly difficult but decided to try writing a very short reverso.  I can’t say that this is any good, but I did manage to accomplish the reverse meanings.

 

 

 

 

 

Now, please.  Go read some good poetry and be inspired to write!

–SueBE