Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

Playing with the poetry deck
Poetry country

In poetry, words, syllables, and letters are like playing cards. Form poems are the games you can play with them. With cards, we have gin rummy and poker and go fish and many more. In poetry we have forms you know or have heard of, like the haiku, acrostic, bouts-rimés, and sonnet. And there are others you may or may not know, like the pantoum, tritina, triolet, and villanelle.

Poetry can be divided into form poems, which are guided by rules, and free verse, which flies that flag of freedom—unrhymed, with no regular rhythm, no required number of lines, no set repetition, no prescribed approach. I enjoy the openness of free verse, and I relish coloring inside the lines of form poetry. I’m willing to lower my flag for the effects I get with form poems.

In support of form poems, I have to confess that sometimes when I finish writing a free verse poem, I’m not sure I’ve really written a poem or just a paragraph that I broke into lines. I’m not even always sure about the free verse poems I read in books and magazines. With those, I figure they must be poems because a publisher published them!

But form poems are more likely to feel poem-y to me, so let’s try a form poem called a persona poem, which is a poem written in someone else’s voice. This should be familiar territory, because we do it all the time when we write fiction from a first-person POV.

I once wrote a persona poem in the voice of Jughead from the Archie comics. You’ve already read my Cinderella persona poem, and I’ve also written fairy tale poems in the voices of Rapunzel and the youngest dancing princess from “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Here’s the beginning of a persona poem that I wrote from a dog’s POV, which appeared in an anthology called The Poetry Friday Anthology:

YOU MISBEHAVE

Dear Human,

When you came home today, you let me lick you

and you scratched me behind the ears

for just two minutes before you left

for soccer practice with your real friends.

Then, later, you ate fried chicken and scraped

the bones into the trash where good dogs don’t go,

and you filled my bowl with Fido’s Friend,

which tastes like mold.

You get the idea. So let’s start writing time with one or more persona poems. My poem happens to be in the form of a letter, which makes it also an epistolary poem, but yours doesn’t have to be. If you’re writing from the persona of someone you know, make the poem sound as much like that person as you can. For example, if he says “Listen!” often, work the word into the poem once or twice. If your persona is a historical figure, imagine how that individual might express herself. Don’t rhyme unless your persona would speak in rhyme. Along those lines, it might be fun to write a persona poem with Dr. Seuss as the persona.

Write a poem in the voice of one or more of these:

• A friend or someone in your family or a teacher. You don’t have to be nice. If you’re not nice, however, or if you’re downright mean, keep the poem to yourself or read it (softly) to your cat.

• An animal, as I did. Could be your cat. Since cats and other animals don’t usually speak, this poem can rhyme.

• An inanimate object, maybe something that has a history. Or not—could be the sandwich you’re about to eat. This poem, too, can rhyme.

• A historical figure or a celebrity.

• A character in one of your stories.

• A character you love in a book, a movie, or a fairy tale.

A delightful aspect of persona poems is that you can reveal secrets. Suppose you’re writing in the persona of the Loch Ness monster; you can tell what it feels like to be him (or her or it). Or the poem can take place in a phone booth, and Clark Kent can report his thoughts as he becomes Superman.

Now let’s try another kind of form poem, this one called a triolet (pronounced TREE-uh-lay). It’s from France, which I bet you already guessed. One of the charms of the triolet is that we have to write only five lines to get an eight-line poem, because two of the lines repeat. I made up this example, which has just a few words so you can see what’s going on pretty easily:

STOLEN

Ancient book,

magic spell.

Don’t look.

Ancient book

I took.

Don’t tell.

Ancient book,

magic spell.

Notice that the first, fourth, and seventh lines are the same, and so are the second and eighth lines. The triolet rhymes, too: the first, third, and fifth lines rhyme; and the second and sixth lines rhyme. Naturally, the repeated lines rhyme with themselves (identical rhyme, as you may remember).

This is a longer, scary triolet I wrote:

BAD DAY