Picking a Poetic Form (cont.)

Acrostic: I love acrostics! They work best for words full of common letters, like R and L and T. If your word has unusual letters, it can limit your poem’s content. Acrostics have many moods, but since they’re puzzle-like, then tend not to be terribly serious. If I want to write a poem about a topic that is one word, I often write the word vertically on the page and doodle around, seeing if it works with this form. Then if I run into a sticking point, I just turn to another form. A couple of months ago, I wrote an acrostic about BIRCHES, though the C did give me a little trouble!

Cinquain: To be honest, cinquain is not my favorite form, but I have grown to appreciate it. The cinquain form works best for me when I want to use a poem to ponder a topic. Its syllable counts forces me to be precise, which is a good thing! And it makes me look closely at the topic, since usually you rename the opening object with a different word in the last line. So if I have a topic, like a cat, and I want to write a poem that describes how I see that cat in one particular way—for instance, as a comfort—then that would probably make a good subject for a cinquain. I recently wanted to compare a silky grey mouse running across the ground to a small rushing creek, and I used a cinquain to do it.

<<previous pagenext page>>