How long was this year, anyway?
There is a little cluster of memes going around this internet – maybe you’ve seen one – about how 2018 is the year where linear time stopped making any sense. For example, Black Panther came out this year, but like, does anyone remember anything between November 1 and today? No? Me either. Except that I know October was ten years long.
Just about the only thing that kept me on linear time this year was checking in every month to write the tutorial for the next poetry slam. I hope you enjoyed at least one of them, because we’re revisiting them all in the finest December round-up tradition. That’s right: this month you’re free to investigate any of the poetry forms below. Why not try something new, as we see out the old year?
January Poetry Slam: Erasure
Out with the old, in with the new. Or rather, in January we made something old into something new, as we experimented with erasure poems. These no-meter no-rhyme poems are made by deleting words from an existing text. We also checked out some fun ideas for how to show the difference between the original text and your poem.
February Poetry Slam: Kyrielle
February – the month of lurrrrve – is traditionally given over to sonnets, but someone who shall remain nameless hates sonnets. What’s a poet to do? Well, our answer this year was to explore a different rhyming, metered form, the kyrielle. Taken from old church songs, the kyrielle has not only a rhyme but a refrain, which saves you the trouble of writing at least one line per stanza. Give it a shot and get lyrical in about 12 lines.
March Poetry Slam: Acrostics
In March we took another look at one of the building blocks of learning poetry, playing a new game with the old acrostic form. For extra credit, we integrated the title into the poem with a little bit of nuance and a lot of fun! Get your spellcheck ready and try something probably you haven’t done since you were a kid!
April Poetry Slam: Rime Royal
This year marked YeahWrite’s seventh birthday and we celebrated in April with a seven-line form, the rime royal. This form’s heyday stretched from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but we figured it was time for a revival. With only three rules, what could go wrong? Stretch your poetic muscles a little and give us a late birthday present!
May Poetry Slam: Odes
If you didn’t get enough love in February, our May slam asked “Who (or what, or where) do you love?” We explored the ode, a lyrical poem that uplifts something you care deeply about. With three levels of difficulty to choose from, you’ll be churning out Sapphic stanzas before you know it!
June Poetry Slam: Ae Freislighe
We took a break from metered poetry in June, but who needs meter when you’ve got rhyme? We learned how to work with syllabic quatrains to build an ae freislighe (say “aye freshly”), an Irish poetry form with a straightforward rhyme scheme and a twist at the end. If you love rhymes, but hate meter, this could be your jam!
July Poetry Slam: Chant
The words you choose have meaning based on, well, their meaning. But they also have meaning that’s dependent on the context in which they’re read. In July we explored chants, a kind of singsong poetry with a line that stays the same and keeps changing, depending on where you read it in the poem. See what context does for your writing – this is the kind of poetry that will teach you a lesson you can carry forward to your stories and essays as well!
August Poetry Slam: Diminishing Verse
In August we were feeling the end of summer (or winter) (or hoping for it anyway), and focused on things shrinking away from us – like the last word of each line in a diminishing verse’s stanzas. This is another great one to try if you haven’t written poetry for a while and want to get your WordNerd on!
September Poetry Slam: The Golden Shovel
With Back-to-School in full swing, we spent the month learning about two poems for the price of one because who has time for anything in September? The Golden Shovel requires two things: a line from an existing poem, and a little patience to write your own using those words as a prompt. Dig in!
October Poetry Slam: The Pitch
With September’s golden shovel we learned that one of the best ways to learn to write poetry is to read the work of established poets and see what they’re doing. Danez Smith just became the youngest-ever winner of the Forward poetry prize, so in October we spent a little time with one of their poems, PITCH FOR A MOVIE: LION KING IN THE HOOD deconstructing what makes it work and trying to write our own pitch-style poem.
November Poetry Slam: Sestina
This unrhymed seven-verse poem depends on rearranging the last words in each line according to a set of easy-to-follow rules. If the sestina sounds overwhelming, you can also join us with its little sister, the tritina: a four-verse poem following the same structure with fewer lines. We gave you some hints for picking great words in the slam post, but you can also bug one of our editors (or your friends) for some words in the coffeehouse!
Which brings us to December…
Like I might have mentioned somewhere above all those adorable card catalog cards, you’re free to choose from any of this year’s slam forms to write your December poems for our fiction|poetry grid. Or choose your own form, but remember if you do you’ll need to include at least one of our weekly prompts for that grid!
See you soon!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
