Last month we held onto our burdens; this month let’s lighten them a little with diminishing verse.
Ordinarily I’d put a big ol’ explanation of where diminishing verse comes from right here, but honestly there really isn’t one. It’s just a bunch of poets playing with an idea. Which frankly is one of the most exciting things to have happen. If you’re not friends with a bunch of poets, go out and become friends with a bunch of poets, because they give the best compliments.
And then try to be the poet you want to see in the world.
So what are the rules?
You can make a diminishing verse poem as hard or as easy on yourself as you want, and I’ll list a few ways to increase the challenge level at the end of this post, but the only base rule is:
- The last word of each line in a verse must be the same as the last word of the line above it, minus one or more letters. Don’t change the order of the letters in the word. When you run out of word, the verse ends.
That’s it. There’s no syllable counting, no line length requirements, no number of lines in a verse requirements, no verse count requirements. If you want your poem to keep going after you run out of word, you have to start a new verse with a different word. You can make your poem as long or short as you like.
Can you give me an example?
I sure can. Let’s write a verse together.
I’m going to start with a nice, medium-long word full of common letters. I could use one of my favorites like liminal but liminal doesn’t have a lot of words inside it. Let’s use “hidden” instead.
Now, there are two ways to approach writing this poem. I could write a line ending in “hidden” and see where that takes me, or I could come up with my diminishing set of words and write lines that fit them. Since my go-to poetic form is the sestina (or its little sister the tritina) I’m more comfortable doing the latter.
So I’ll start with hidden, and look for ways to take letters out without rearranging to make a second word that’s as long as possible. I see hide, ide, hid, and den. Since hid is part of hide, I already have three words! Hidden, Hide, Hid. They’re all related, so it should be possible to make a three line verse. It does feel a little bland to only have related words. What’s in hid? Id, and hi. Ooooh. Either one of those would make a nice contrast; I could use id as the hidden part of oneself with desires and needs (and even throw on another line using “I” as the word), or I could use “hi” to give the poem a hide and seek feel. I’m not feeling particularly emo as I write this, so I’ll go with the word that has more potential for humor.
My words are hidden, hide, hid, hi (and maybe I). See how each word removes one or more letters or sounds from the previous, but doesn’t rearrange? We’re not playing anagrams, folks. Just deleting. Anyway, let’s see what I can do with that.
Somewhere, past the stream where I had hidden
the flowers of my youth, but before the mountain where old age and treachery hide
you will find the forest of second thoughts where I hid
from you, from this day, from the potential of “hi.”
So that’s a verse. If I want to end my poem here, I can throw a name on it (I like Terra incognita) and hit the publish button. If I want to go on, I pick a new word (finding might be a good contrast, also containing find, in, I) and start a second verse.
It’s as simple as that.
How can I make this harder on myself?
Like going out and looking for additional prompts for a story that already has prompts, you can always make writing harder on yourself. If one rule just isn’t enough for you, try one or more of these on for size:
- Make all the “start” words the same length
- Make all your verses the same length
- Only remove one letter per line
- Remove the same number of letters per line
- Only remove letters from the end of your word (hidden, hid, hi, but not hide, because you have to remove a D in the middle)
- Make your poem rhyme (to do this you’ll have to only remove letters from the beginning of your words)
- Make your poem scan
- If you speak a language besides English, feel free to use that language! Just include a translation so that English speakers can give feedback (you’re about to learn how hard translating poetry is, sorrynotsorry – don’t just transliterate but try to put together a version that captures the sense of your original poem; don’t worry about making the end words follow the rule, we can all see that in your original version)
Good luck, and we’ll see you on the grids!
