Welcome to Day 2 of your poetry writing month! (Or Day 1 if you've just joined in. Let's not get hung up on perfect records or any of that nonsense.) Today's prompt is an idea of what to write about and in the honourable tradition of colour poems, your prompt is UMBER. If you're unsure what colour that is, have a look at this Google image search for umber – as you can see, it has a wide range of deep earthy tones. And if you've ever rooted through a box of artists' paints, you'll be familiar with its two principal flavours, raw umber and burnt umber.
As well as its range of earth tones to get you poeming, umber has a fantastic history. If you fancy digging deeper into that, try this wonderful BBC article, Umber: the colour of debauchery and revel in its prose as much as its insights. (On top of that tempting title, who can resist an article that begins "Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour"?)
You could write this one as free verse or, if you'd like an idea for a type of poem to write, I have two serving suggestions for you.
For a short poem, you could write an acrostic quintilla. A quintilla is a type of five-line rhyming poem, and to make it an acrostic, you start your five lines with the letters U, M, B, E, and R. You can read about quintillas and see an example of an acrostic quintilla here.
Or if you're in the mood for something potentially longer, why not try some Saphhic stanzas? That's the metre (the rhythm) that Sappho wrote her poems in, and it usually goes like this.
/ • / • / • • / • / •
/ • / • / • • / • / •
/ • / • / • • / • / •
/ • • / •
( / is a heavy syllable, DUM; • is a light syllable, di. The usual notation is – and ∪ but dashes and dots are quicker if you're actually writing a poem!) The third syllable of the first three lines can actually be either heavy or light though, so the metre actually looks like this, with * for "whichever you want":
/ • * • / • • / • / •
/ • * • / • • / • / •
/ • * • / • • / • / •
/ • • / •
You can stop at just one stanza, or keep writing as many as you like. Each stanza has four lines in that metre. If it's your first go at Sapphic stanzas, I'd suggest you keep going for a while; a metre always gets easier once you've written a few and you start falling into the rhythm of it.
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
