Writing Skill: Play with a cinquain

The cinquain is a concise and wonderfully versatile little poem form. If you're new to writing poems, it's perfect for trying the notion out; if you're an experienced poet, it's a lovely way to hone your concision. It also has some delicious variations if you want to settle in for longer. ("Cinquain" is basically Frenchified poetry-speak for a "fivey".) It's super simple: no rhyme scheme, no set metre, just 5 lines which steadily increase in length, then abruptly jump back down:

Line 1: 2 syllables
Line 2: 4 syllables
Line 3: 6 syllables
Line 4: 8 syllables
Line 5: 2 syllables

For example...

I walk
the Erl-King's wood
of beechmast, berries, ripe
decay, and golden pools of sun
that lie.

It was invented by Adelaide Crapsey around the turn of the century. She used iambic metre (de-DUM) and my example does too, but you can use whatever metre suits you, or none.

Then you can also spin it through all sorts of fun variations, if you don't feel like stopping at just one. You can write a cinquain "chain", where the last line of one cinquain is reused as the first line of the next. You can also write a "cinquain swirl", which is a bunch of them linked together, sharing the two-syllable line as the last/first, and the two-syllable line is the same each time.

Here's a cinquain chain I wrote, from the prompt "falls to the soul" (a snippet from Pablo Neruda's poem, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"). In each stanza, the last line becomes the first line of the next stanza. Right at the end, it ties in a circle by using the first line of the poem as the last line.

Frost-dark
falls. To the soul
tiny stabs of light are
constellations, a sparse dot-to-dot
promise.

Promise
five dots can make
the big dipper, nineteen
are somehow Orion, and that’s
the sword.

The sword
of Damocles,
hanging by a horse hair
above the throne, mocks what you wished
on stars.

On stars,
we pin such shapes,
wildly drawing contours
of beasts and gods, between dots, on
frost-dark.

And here's a cinquain swirl, showing how the same two-syllable line is used throughout. 

Grinning,
arrange the toys
(yes, we have toys) holding
birthday gifts, all excited, all
grinning:
people thought I’d
outgrow my silliness
or gift it to kids, but I’m still
grinning,
carefree, kid-free,
seeing lichen, pebbles,
moss-forests, how the ripples are
grinning
at the sun, all
the grass-blades’ chatter, their
stems squeaking when tugged: my world is
grinning
with things that I’m
supposed to have lost and
only glimpse again through children
grinning.

For something to write about, I suggest trying it out for the first time with a descriptive poem: simply describing what's around you or what you've seen today, as I did in my first example, using that day's walk. If you want to take description further, describe an artwork. (That's called ekphrasis, in poetry.) Minimalism seems a good fit for a five-liner, so this article on Minimalism from the Tate could be useful for inspiration.   

Start with a cinquain or five, try it out, see how it feels, and then chain or swirl to your heart's content!

Note: To respect copyright, my blog posts only use my own poems as examples. On taught courses, I'm licensed to give my students copyright material, so you'll see lots of other people's work.

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If you want to explore writing poems more, the Meddling with Poetry course this Oct–Nov will introduce you to heaps of different poetry forms, approaches, and facets of language, all through playful workshop-style classes.

Join online from anywhere (Thurs evenings UK time) OR in person in Oxford (Wed evenings). Plus each week’s Poem-A-Day booklet gives you everything you need if you want to try the transformative poem-a-day practice, during the course or afterwards.

Click here to find out what you'll explore and to book your place.

Quietly Life-Changing

Writing poems regularly is quietly life-changing, in a way that goes beyond any other kind of writing. I’ve always been a journaler / notebook scribbler, I did “morning pages” for years, I’ve been writing fiction consistently since 2006, and from age 13 on, I’d write poems when they struck.

But when I started writing poems regularly (daily, in fact), it transformed me. And my poetry, and all my writing, but the biggest sea-change was how I lived in the world and in myself.

Why is writing poems so different? Journaling provides the same self-reflection, morning pages the same catharsis, stories the same sense of creative achievement. Writing poems regularly is more than the sum of those parts, though.

Something in the nature of poems lets us explore our feelings without getting stuck in them. The shape of a poem becomes a container, so we can reach into the feeling and still stand outside it: finding the exact image or shade of an emotion, while another objective self is also counting syllables, working out how to start the next line with a “p”, or planning to end this line with the word “exist”. And as I said in You Are Not Ark-Fleet B, afterwards, “where the emotion is, there’s also a poem.” The thing you’ve made continues to hold the feelings.

If writing stories is getting characters to act out our ideas, writing poems is finding imagery to speak them: so at the moment that we’re most focused on an emotion or thought, we’re also thinking intensely about things we can feel, smell, see, touch, hear. It becomes both mindfulness and sensory grounding. We’re not just wrapped in our feelings: we’re alive in our bodies.

We don’t always want to write about our feelings – so we can write about the whole world of marvellous and curious things. We reach out into the world, to write a poem about spores, and the world reaches back with an insight about hope and creativity. We write about clockwork machines and discover our own feelings about having a complicated body, and a way to navigate that.

Those are the poems that resonate, from writing poems regularly, but the beauty of writing them regularly is that you don’t know when that will happen. You’re not sitting down with a knotted throat and a tissue box, ready for the poem like for a counselling session. Some of them are just playing with words, or a strong opinion about a fairytale, or describing a painting you love, or grumping about Ian McEwan’s opinions on sci-fi, or a joke in rhyme, or trying out a technique. Even the resonant quietly transformative poems don’t always seem like it, at the time: I really thought one poem was just about spores, until I typed it up two weeks later. Now its final line shines for me in dark places like the light of Eärendil.

Writing poems regularly means you discover the joyful, light-hearted poems too. When we only reach to poems in moments of urgent need, that need is usually about heartbreak, loss, grief. Poems make excellent containers and carriers for those. But our lives are also full of delight, wit, fun, good food: all of those get to be in poems, too, and they live in our sense of self all the more vibrantly for being written about. Grinning at some bluebells in spring becomes a roundelay of joy that lives on year-round. One perfect June afternoon on the green is framed as a timeless part of your life in its sestina. A hasty haiku is forever your cousins laughing in the firelight. The sheer regularity of writing poems regardless invites our wholeness in, including our happiness.

Writing poems regularly definitely improved my writing. My poetry vaulted in quality and at last was regularly, near-routinely accepted by journals and magazines. My fiction brightened with musicality and more powerful word choices, and sharpened with my newfound concision. But those are fringe benefits, compared to the quietly life-changing process and practice of simply writing poems, regularly.

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If you want to explore writing poems regularly, the Meddling with Poetry course this Oct–Nov will introduce you to heaps of different poetry forms, approaches, and facets of language, all through playful workshop-style classes.

Join online from anywhere (Thurs evenings UK time) OR in person in Oxford (Wed evenings). Plus each week’s Poem-A-Day booklet gives you everything you need if you want to try the transformative poem-a-day practice, during the course or afterwards.

Click here to find out what you'll explore and to book your place.

Writing Skill: Awe and Ah

If you fancy doing a bit of writing but you're not sure what about, or you want to dabble the way an artist might play with mixing colours / making marks, this is the perfect Writing Skill for you: the magic of writing where you discover what it's about, instead of deciding in advance, and some very special creative constraints that'll shape it in surprising ways for you.

So give yourself the gift of a cuppa and ten minutes, grab your notebook and pen, and set off on a mini writing adventure into the unknown. And in the spirit of the unknown, I'm going to ask you to trust me for a bit and not scroll down to read the whole Skill before you start. It works better that way and you'll be able to brainstorm more freely. So do Part One, then I'll explain the rationale, then do Part Two.

Part One

For half your time (five mins if you want to keep this a ten-minuter), brainstorm all the words you can think of with "aw" and "ah" sounds. For example: aw: baulk, caught, Lord, etc. ah: mark, party, harsh, etc. Do that before you scroll further.

Here come the don't-scroll greenery:

🌿 Don't 

🍃 keep 

🌱 reading 

🌳 till 

💚 you've 

🌲 done 

🌳 that 

☘️ bit 

Why you're doing this

The first thing we all learn in linguistics is that words don't inherently mean anything: there's no reason why a pen is called a "pen", and so on. And that's why languages are different. BUT there are some exceptions to this. Certain vowel sounds have instinctive meaning for us, which runs across languages. Awe and Ah sounds, in particular, have associations of things being slow, large, and heavy. So if you use heaps of those sounds in a passage or a poem, it'll create a mood of slowness, largeness, and weight. Even if that's not the meaning of the words you write. Nifty, huh?

Part Two 

Now, for the rest of the time you've got, draw on your collection of slow, large, and weighty feeling words, to write either a poem or a passage of description. Cramming as many of those in as you can will decide your subject matter for you, and also what you say about it. And whatever you're writing about, the words will set the mood for you. So let the words take the lead, write to find out what they end up saying, and have fun!

Want to play with this more?

• For a companion piece of small light sounds, use the vowels /I/ and /i:/ - the vowel sounds in ick and eek.
• And for an interesting exploration, try the same brainstorm-then-write approach with words beginning with "gl". (This one only works in English, but it's super fun to discover.)

Enjoy!

Why this Skill?

Writing to discover new approaches, angles, and even thoughts can be wonderfully illuminating. We get to find things out through the process of writing, rather than deciding in advance with what we already know. Adding creative constraints is a great way to do that: through a group of words we're fitting in, like this, or through another nifty patterns like using specific letters, rhythms, etc. And creative constraints are always great for inspiration.

The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. 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.

A Poem for Every Moment

For years, I waited for poems to come to me. I'd coax their arrival with long walks; I'd catch fragments and phrases, and wait patiently for them to build. When it came to writing stories and novels, I'd long since learnt not to wait for inspiration, but I firmly believed poems were different. They were mystical, magical, elusive. If I had an evening to myself, I'd make a Special Occasion of it: light candles, put on music, pull out my notebook and pen, and Await Poems. They often didn't arrive.

It's not that I didn't take my poetry as seriously as my fiction. I took it very seriously. I spent hours editing my poems; I faithfully entered and re-entered the few I had to competitions; I attended poetry events; I painstakingly assembled a chapbook and submitted it to a few publishers; I got a paid critique from a very experienced and kind poet.

I wish I could say my poems were better for that near-religious respect and all that work, but they weren't. They were stiff and stilted. Their imagery, so painstakingly sought, was dull. While my fiction leapt from strength to strength, my poetry languished behind.

In retrospect, I was like a lonely person hungering for company while keeping myself locked indoors away from people, never so much as picking up my phone. I genuinely didn't know that I could step out, in every weather, to go and meet some poems. 

Then one year I tried the April Poem-a-Day challenge. That was the year that everything changed. Every day, I wrote a poem, regardless, and it turned out all the poems were there, waiting for me, all along. Suddenly my stiff stilted over-worked little oeuvre was swept aside by this bright new tide of lively vivid poems, bursting with surprising imagery and unexpected thoughts. I learnt to stop Taking Poems Seriously and get to know them playfully, instead, trying out new forms with doggerel, seeing what happened if I set myself a particular challenge, letting the words themselves decide where things went. And my poems vaulted in quality.

I continued writing a poem a day for 32 months. Rather than poems being tremulous fragile things that I had to create the perfect moment for, I discovered types of poems for every possible moment. Whatever I wanted to do, there was a poem for that. So here, for whatever moment you're in, is a poem that's waiting for you.

Are you in love? If it’s yearning and secret, try a tanka or katauta. To go more in depth, a sonnet of any kind. (There are many kinds beyond the Shakespearean sonnet.) If it’s obsessive, lustful, or tantalising, the drumming repetitions of villanelles, pantoums, and triolets await. If it’s joyful, go wild with the repetition in a roundelay.

If you’re grieving, haiku are there to hold the frozen moments. The ghazal is ready to be added to as long as you need it.

If you want to write a poem for someone else, try a chant, a charm, an ode, or a shape poem. If you want to write about a place, a haibun, a pastoral, an Old English poem or a Pleiades all fit perfectly. If you want to tell a story, you want a ballad, a terza rima, or anything in anapest. If you’re in the mood for something funny, try common measure, Skeltonic verse, a rubliw, or monotetra – though monotetra’s also quite happy to turn creepy, if you want it to.

If you want to explore an idea that’s clearly outlined in your mind, try a list poem, a fold poem, a sonnet, a cinquain chain, or a quatern. If you just have the starting point of an idea and want to write to discover, see what you find out by writing an  Old English poem, a chain poem, a rondeau redoublé, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, a terzanelle, a treochair – and if you really want to explore it in depth, a sestina.

If you have no idea what to write about or you’d rather rub chilli in your eyes than spend time with your thoughts right now, there are heaps of poems that will still let you write, which only need a word, a phrase, an artwork, or a short extract, none of which need be yours, to kick them off: ekphrasis, a coupling poem, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, an acrostic poem, a glosa, or a Venn poem.

If you’re determined to write a poem but you only have a few minutes, no problem. Dash off an elevenie, a haiku, a lai, a katauta, a nonet, a tanka, a lune, a rubliw, or a cinquain. If you want to spend hours on an absurd poetic challenge, try an acrostic wreathed sestina. (I've only written one. It nearly broke my brain.) And if you just want to write a poem about drinking wine in the evening, there’s even one for that: an anacreontic!

You don’t need to know any of these types of poems, yet. Before I started the poem-a-day practice, I could probably have listed only sonnet, villanelle, and haiku, off the top of my head. You meet them by writing them. You don’t have to wait for them: they’re there, waiting for you.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a san san poem

The san san is a lovely variation on the repeating forms - instead of repeating exact phrases or lines, it repeats the imagery, which can be reworded and reused however you please. Each image appears three times, in any order. With just eight lines, that's rapid repetition! It also has a rhyme scheme of abcabdcd. When I'm writing, I break that down into abc abd cd, to help me keep track, and sometimes write it with those line breaks as well. Later, when I type it up, I remove the extra line breaks. Here's an example san san:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”
arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white
seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

Here it is again with the imagery in bold and colour-coded, and the line breaks added to help you see the rhyme scheme:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”

arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white

seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

As you can see, you can repeat the words or not to repeat the image: "arms overflowing" is repeated exactly; "purple" interchanges with "purple cones"; and the white seeds are "seed-head froth of white", "white seeded" and "white nights".

Have fun with it!

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a sonnet

At school, most of us get taught The Sonnet as a completely fixed form, to be rigidly obeyed, never to be meddled with... so it comes as quite a shock to discover you can meddle with almost every single aspect of it!

If you ever felt frustrated or cross or like you didn't get sonnets at school, read on, because you were probably right, and I'm here to vindicate you. And then when you're feeling thoroughly vindicated, set you free!

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The rules we were taught went something like... iambic pentameter (de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM), rhyme scheme abab-cdcd-efef-gg, something about a twist or whatnot, wraps up in the final couplet. And that's the Shakespearean sonnet. And then we were given Shakespearean sonnets to look at, to admire how well he did it and work out What He Was Trying To Say, and sat there scratching our heads, because even if we could get through the thickets of Shakespearean English at that age, he didn't really seem to follow the rules...

And you know what? School-You was right! Let's look at one of the most famous Shakespearean sonnets. (I've broken it into stanzas so it's easier to analyse.)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

So let's assume we've already got past the stuff like tempest=storm, and bark=ship, and "the remover" is death not Vanish, and all that, and start analysing the form.

Rhyme scheme: finds / minds, fair enough. That rhymes. love / remove? Nonsense! Then the teacher starts talking about "visual" rhyme because it looks like they should rhyme and that's... a thing, apparently? That's even good enough for the final couplet, prov'd / lov'd? If School-You was angry and sceptical, you were right. And what about come / doom? They don't rhyme and they don't even look the same! So much for the rhyme scheme, Shakespeare.

Next up: metre. If you're a native English speaker, you use English rhythm perfectly, naturally. And then you're told this sentence

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

is iambic pentameter: de-DUM x 5. In which case, I'd need to put the stress like this:

Let ME not TO the MARRiage OF true MINDS

which is clearly the speech of an alien. Honestly, just try saying it out loud like that. Anyone with the faintest grasp of English will, quite naturally and correctly, put the stress like this:

LET me NOT to the MARRiage of TRUE MINDS

or even this

Let me NOT to the MARRiage of TRUE MINDS

And then you end up thinking that you don't understand metre, because you can't see how that's iambic pentameter (hint: it's not) and rhyme doesn't even mean anything anymore, and then you're told to write a sonnet "following the rules" when apparently even Shakespeare couldn't get it right.

Here's the thing: Shakespeare's sonnets often don't rhyme and aren't iambic pentametre – but they used to, and they once were. The language changed. The way we pronounce words changed, and the way we stress things changed. There's no such thing as visual rhyme. (Well, there is now, but only because people made it up because they misunderstood.) The words that look like they rhyme? They used to rhyme! (Later, other poets came along and thought, 'Oh, those words look like they rhyme but they don't, so that must be okay,' but they were wrong. I'm looking at you, William Blake, with your eye / symmetry.) Mostly this is because of something called The Great Vowel Shift which was a huge change in English pronunication and no-one really knows why it happened. As for the metre – I believe that was iambic pentameter once, and everyone's still frantically embarrassedly pretending it still is, but it's clearly not.

So! Tl; dr: There is such a thing as a Shakespearean sonnet, which does follow those rules, but Shakespeare's sonnets don't anymore because the language has changed. And that's not the be-all and end-all of sonnets! Prepare to be set free...

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So far I've counted up 28 sonnet forms, and I'm sure there's plenty more I've yet to find. The rhyme schemes vary wildly and they don't even all use rhymes. Iambic pentameter? Pfft! In the sonnet history, that's a modern upstart; the original and older sonnet forms didn't use that, and plenty of the newer forms don't either. We can see it as a phase we went through, in the middle. Ten syllables, at least? Nope: the world's yer oyster. Go wild. Write very short lines, if you want. Or even longer ones.

The only things all the sonnets have in common, the kernel of what-makes-a-sonnet-a-sonnet, are these:

• 14 lines
• some kind of 'twist' in the argument (the pivot, also known as volta) about two-thirds of the way through
• some kind of conclusion (from the neat tie-it-up-with-a-bow rhyming couplet to the slightly vaguer gestured-at suggestions of conclusions in most contemporary sonnets)

That's it. All the rest are variations that people made up. You can copy their variations if you like them, you can make up your own, you can do completely as you please. If you're worried it's not 'authentic', then relax. The first sonnet form was the Sicilian sonnet, which was invented circa 1200 AD. It rhymed abababab cdcdcd, it had no particular metre, and it was supposed to be about courtly chivalrous love. So if 'authentic' is 'going with the original form', then Shakespeare, Petrarch, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning were all writing inauthentic sonnets, so you're in bloody good company!

I happen to love writing Shakespearean sonnets (though I'm starting to play more with other ones) and pretty rigorous iambic pentameter, so the example is a Shakespearean sonnet, which really does follow "the rules", but you do you! (And because I live to let other people copy my homework, if you want my summary of sonnet forms, just email me on megan@thewritersgreenhouse.co.uk and I'll happily send it to you.)

TThe empty post-box down the broken drive
was weathered tin. The gravel cut my feet.
You wrote me daily, bringing me alive –
you touched me, then. Each moment, incomplete
without you, stung. I needed you. At night,
I dreamt of hands which crossed the world to touch
in matrices of meaning, gloves of light –
we wrote so many letters. Bore so much.
The future came. My hands, in blind despair,
through emails, Facebook, website stats pursue
your ghost with data gloves, but clutch at air –
and I have no address to write to you.
I'm lost in losses time and I forgot.
The world moves on, but I, my love, cannot.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a roundelay

There are lots of lovely repeating forms, but this one really goes all out - without being too tricky either. You have four verses of six lines each, rhyming ababab. The lines repeat in pairs: the last two lines of all the stanzas are the same (that's the refrain). Plus, the middle two lines of each stanza get reused as the first two lines of the next stanza. I like to draw this kind of thing out for myself in colour:

ORANGE	a
ORANGE	b
RED	a
RED	b
REFRAIN	a
REFRAIN	b

RED	a
RED	b
PURPLE	a
PURPLE	b
REFRAIN	a
REFRAIN	b

PURPLE	a
PURPLE	b
BLUE	a
BLUE	b
REFRAIN	a
REFRAIN	b

BLUE	a
BLUE	b
GREEN	a
GREEN	b
REFRAIN	a
REFRAIN	b

It also uses a set metre of DUM-di DUM-di DUM-di DUM-di. (If you're feeling grand, you call that "trochaic tetrametre" because DUM-di is a trochee and "tetrametre" means there's four of them.)

Here's a thoroughly joyous roundelay I wrote. The previous day's copla real hadn't captured what I wanted to say at all, or the energy and enthusiasm, so I cheerfully cannibalised it and rewrote the same thoughts as a roundelay, which I was much happier with. Back to the joys of spring, this time with vigour! (In the last line of each verse, I shortened the metre ever so slightly, leaving off the final "di".)

Feel the suckling sap that rises
tiny flowers, bluebells ringing
soft as sky in shy disguises.
All the world is juicy, springing
thick with life and wet surprises:
taste the juice in everything.

Soft as sky in shy disguises,
all the world is juicy, springing
green and thrusting. Life advises
us to whisper bees – the stinging
thick with life and wet surprises:
taste the juice in everything.

Green and thrusting life advises
us to whisper bees, the stinging
sweet as greedy weeds, whose prize is
sunlight. Like a dewdrop singing,
thick with life and wet surprises,
taste the juice in everything.

Sweet as greedy weeds whose prize is
sunlight, like a dewdrop singing,
like the hawthorn tantalises,
we are rising sap and clinging
thick with life and wet surprises.
Taste the juice in everything.

Go forth, sing, and roundelay!

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a Pleiades poem

A simple, flexible form with a perfect touch of constraint: a one-word title, seven lines, and every line starts with the same letter as the title.

The Pleiades is the Seven Sisters star cluster, hence the restriction to seven lines, one for each sister. It's a recently invented form – Craig Tigerman came up with it in 1999. (And had the wisdom not to name it the Namregit. Richard Wilbur, take note!) Hortensia Anderson then came up with another requirement: as one of the Seven Sisters is so pale that it's almost invisible, each line should be just six syllables. (She's a haiku and tanka poet, so tiny syllable restrictions are right up her street.)

I like playing with both variations. In this example, I've used the six-syllable limit:

Perpetual

Plain-song echoes in old
porous stone. Wilting weeds
plead. Thistles fly where once
prayers flew. Roof gone, sky stark,
peel back centuries: the
Passion, or passions, all
places die, immortal.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a quintilla poem

Another nifty quickie: just five lines, each of 8 syllables, and two rhymes throughout – but you can't end on a rhyming couplet. That gives you lots of possible rhyme schemes: ababa, abbab, abaab, aabab, or aabba.

Here's a draft quintilla I wrote about the hodag, using its name as an acrostic. Merriam-Webster's lovely blog introduced me to it, and it's described as "a mythical animal reported chiefly from Wisconsin and Minnesota, noted for its ugliness, lateral horns, and hooked tail, and reputed to be outstanding in both ferocity and melancholy." This one's rhyme scheme is a b a b a.

Howls tear the trees; it lashes
out in horned despair, its tail
dragging, hooked, the sap from gashes’
aromatic pine. A trail
glistens where it slumps in ashes.

And if you put two quintillas together, you get a copla real. (Both stanzas use the same rhyme scheme.)

Off you go quintillering, copla-realing if you fancy it, and beware the ferocious, melancholic hodag and the forbidden final rhyming couplet.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a coupling poem

Like someone else’s words? Use their lines and write your own new lines in between each of theirs. 

You can do this with articles you’ve screengrabbed, fiction snippets, other poems, whatever you fancy. Part of the pleasure is twisting or enriching the meaning of the original lines, playing with or against them and toying with the grammar, especially when sentences run across lines. This is a very new form, invented by Karen McCarthy Woolf.

A quick note on copyright: the person who wrote the original words owns their copyright. If you want to share your poem (online or by publishing it), you'll need to get their permission or pick words that are already out of copyright (in most countries, that means where the author has been dead for more than 70 years). Alternately, you can do a double-coupling poem: write your lines in between theirs, then remove their lines and write your own new lines between yours.

For variation, you can also try a hidden coupling poem, where you pick a poem which you haven't read and cover it with paper. Reveal the first line, copy it out, then write a line yourself, then reveal and copy out their second line, and so on. It's a thrilling way to work, not knowing what's coming next, but a word to the wise: get someone else to pick the poem for you and check its length and suitability. I chose a poem from the index of a book based on its title and that it was out of copyright – it started out well enough, and then I found myself trapped in swathes and swathes of lyrical pastoral description! By the tenth line rhaposidising about mountain scenery, while I tried to add stuff in between, I was losing the will to live.

In this example, I'd screengrabbed three quotes from an article on fugue states which had struck me deeply. The words not in italics are from "How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity" by Rachel Aviv (2 April 2018, New Yorker), reproduced with her permission.

Fugue

dissociative fugues are organised and
I can still drive, as if this metallic blue momentum were
purposeful, operating according to some
enduring physics, though even my hands have lost
internal logic. The person’s thinking is
smeared around a conversation under a tree,
dominated by a “single idea, that
escapes her fingers, trying to reach him, which
symbolizes or condenses (or both)
the event horizon around this singularity, which swallows
several important ideas and emotions,”
nimbused by bereft light particles, partnerless now. Read what
Lowenstein writes.

Furious sun fought air conditioning. I think by then I had driven
for several hours. “I had lost the ability
to park, to decide turnings, but I stopped,
to understand categories,” she said. “I
sat in a deli. I didn’t know what food I liked. I
no longer had a chronological measure
of selves – if that self had gone, the singularity had eaten all
of time. I no longer experienced myself
but thought, once, I had eaten sundried tomatoes
in a specific place. I didn’t have an
idea beyond that, but ordered some.” No-one

understood why someone might forget
her own mouth, or how to move in time, might lose
her identity during the storm. “There
I sat, immobile, with the sundried tomatoes. I knew I
was a lot of trauma,” she said softly. “It
spilled from me, in Hawking radiation. I
cracked things wide open.” A man
had vanished; this anti-particle self appeared.

If you want to give it a go, check your own screengrabs folder for inspiration (remember you'll need the other person's permission if the poem goes public) or try an out-of-copyright poem or book - here's a comprehensive list of poems in the public domain.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a fold poem

A fold poem uses a bit of repetition and very light rhyme (only every second line rhymes) which makes it a wonderfully flowing form to write.

It has 11 lines, and the end of line 1 repeats as the end of lines 5 and 11. (That can be one word, a phrase, or most of the line, as you wish.) All the odd lines rhyme (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) - but because 1, 5, and 11 are the same words anyway, you actually only need four rhymes total. Here's what the form looks like:

1   ~~~~~~ refrain      a
2   ~~~~~~~~~~~    *
3   ~~~~~~~~~~~    a
4   ~~~~~~~~~~~    *
5  ~~~~~~ refrain       a
6   ~~~~~~~~~~~    *
7   ~~~~~~~~~~~    a
8   ~~~~~~~~~~~    *
9   ~~~~~~~~~~~    a
10 ~~~~~~~~~~~    *
11 ~~~~~~ refrain      a

refrain is the repeated bit; a is the lines that rhyme; * means no rhyme. As with any poem that uses repeated lines, you can play with twisting the meaning, or just use it as obsessive repetition

The fold peom was invented by Gillena Cox, who also specifies that there must be a reference to nature (as with haiku) and how it affects you as the poet, moments that are "special, simple and exactly". I take that specification with a pinch of salt: I write more than enough about nature as it is and I think the form is more flexible than that.

Here's the first fold poem I wrote, about choosing a perfume. The repeated bits are underlined and the rhymes are in bold - and yes, there is an invariable reference to nature, but that's more because it's me writing than because I was obeying that requirement! Anyway, is perfume distilled and bottled still nature?

Inhale: English oak and hazlenut,
cedarwood and juniper, cedrat,
amber, oud, and bergamot – the glut
drags you, gasping, country after country,
but… English oak and hazlenut
is home. Your skin says yes and welcomes in
its pheremonal counterpart to rut
in glee upon your wrist: it knows you well,
your smell of onion, sandalwood, and slut,
your lazy warm delight, your greenish gown,
a spell of English oak and hazlenut.

Have fun folding your own poems, with absolute freedom to ignore any rules you wish!

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a wreathed poem

Instead of rhyming the words at the end of the line, each end-word has a rhyme somewhere in the next line. That’s it! You can combine this with any other form of poetry as well – wreathed sonnets, wreathed golden shovels, wreathed anything really. If this is your first wreathed poem, then try it out on its own first, before combining it, or if you're combining it with another form, pick one you already know well.

In this example, the end-words rhyme as well (a b a b a b a b a b), but they don't have to. I've marked the end-words and their matching rhyme in the next line in bold colours.

The balsam bobs. The narrowboat’s paint flakes.
Blackberries glisten, where bramble snakes its way
through the hawthorn, and pray for lips. A breeze rakes
the trees’ reflections; breaking through leaves, a ray

wobbles on ripples. A spider’s ballet makes
geometry of sun and waits for prey.
The hops and hay ripen while the lakes
give up their geese. It takes its time, decay:

while leaves fray, twigs brittle, and wasps hold wakes
by drizzlelight, mud cakes the memories of May.

I've used some half-rhyme in this (makes / waits, rakes / break) and also, because the rhyming word is in the middle of a line, you don't have to rhyme the whole word, just the heavy-syllable bit (rakes / breaking).

Try it out with some free verse, enjoy the freedom it brings to rhyming, and have fun!

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a triolet poem

The triolet is a fabulously compact repeating form, where the first two lines make up most of the poem. If you've got two good opening lines, why not make the most of them?! Part of the fun, too, is seeing how much you can shift their meaning around each time they're repeated, by using words with two meanings, or with the different lines that lead in, or by punctuating them in different places. That said, the lines can also be repeated for the sheer force of repetition, the insistence of it.

FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b
new line, rhymes with first line	a
FIRST LINE	a
new line, rhymes with first line	a
new line, rhymes with second line	b
FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b

The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-a-a-b-a-b, but because of the repetition you actually only need 3 a-rhymes and 2 b-rhymes. For the metre, people often use iambic pentameter, but you don't have to. Here's an example:

At the prod of a finger, a sea anemone closes.
It can’t unfurl its tentacles till danger has passed.
It tickles so lithely at tides, one hardly supposes
at the prod of a finger, a sea anemone closes.
The rockpool is tight and clenched, where just before, roses
were laughing and loose in the water – then sealed, aghast
at the prod of a finger. A sea anemone closes:
it can’t unfurl its tentacles till danger has passed.

It's also known as a French medieval rondeau, and is part of a group of repeating forms that all have almost the same name and slightly different lengths and patterns: the rondeau, rondine, roundelay, roundel, rondeau redoublé...! So if you find repeating lines fun, there's a ton more out there to play with.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a golden shovel poem

A golden shovel is a lovely form of free verse - no rhyme scheme or set metre (rhythm) and a great form when you're not sure what you want to write about or what exactly you want to say about something: the quote gives you something to riff off and explore, and the end words shape your thoughts. As you write each line towards its end word, you follow the flow and discover what you want to say. It was invented by Terrance Hay.

Here's one of my golden shovels, using a snippet from a recipe for its quote.

Always in memory yellow and blue, the drizzle
grey backdrop cropped from last year, from the
year before: always in memory sunshine pooled like oil
around our feet, while this March slides slowly
through the mud. Knocking clots of clay from boots while
staring at the dwarf hyacinths you’ll remember, whisking
aioli in a hunger for scorched days and salt to
tingle the breeze – but this March too will emulsify
in thick folds of gold, as time drips into it.

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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. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.