Big ideas in tiny packages

If you’re a fan of our microprose challenge, you know the joy—and the pain—of squeezing an entire narrative into a very limited number of words. It’s a matter of distilling your stories, reducing them down to their basic elements, to create something beautiful in a very small space.

In some ways, microprose and poetry are very similar. This month, we’re taking a look at a poetry form that has brevity at its heart: the lune.

The lune

At its most basic, the lune (rhymes with moon) is a tercet, or three-line poem, of 13 syllables. It was created by American poet Robert Kelly in the early 1960s.

Because of its simple three-line structure and strict syllabic pattern, the lune is often compared to the Japanese haiku. However, lunes and haiku differ in some pretty fundamental ways. (You can read our Writing Help post on haiku here.) For example, where haiku has specific rules regarding structure and theme, the lune has no restrictions or rules at all, other than syllables per line. The intent is to highlight simplicity; Kelly himself even tended to ignore capitalization and punctuation (except where absolutely necessary), although this isn’t a strict requirement for the form.

Here are two examples from Kelly’s book “Knee Lunes”:

thin sliver of the
crescent moon
high up the real world

And:

they are given to
hold close, not
air, not each other

Note that the second example includes the commas necessary to set apart a phrase, but no end-line punctuation.

Writing a Kelly lune

The basic structure is simple: 13 syllables*, arranged in three lines of five, three, and five syllables, respectively.

5
3
5

That’s pretty much it. Your lines can be fragments, or they can form a complete sentence or thought. They may or may not include metaphors or images; they may or may not have a “cutting word” (kireji) or volta. Subject matter and theme are completely up to you.

When you’re counting syllables, keep in mind that we sometimes pronounce words differently than we write them. For example, does “every” have two syllables or three? Technically, it’s three (e-ver-y), but we often pronounce it with two (ev-ry). When in doubt, check the dictionary—syllables will be clearly broken out for you.

Lunes typically do not have titles, though we understand you’ll need to call yours something in order to post it. While you shouldn’t (for once!) rely on your title to give additional context, please give it a title that will differentiate it from other posts on the YeahWrite grid—don’t make readers memorize which yeah-write-poem-123 is yours!

* If you go looking, you’ll find a variant of this form: the Collom lune, invented by Jack Collom, which calls for 13 words, not 13 syllables. That is, instead of a 5-3-5 syllable pattern, it’s 5-3-5 words. For the purposes of this month’s poetry slam, we’re asking for the Kelly lune.