I love the variety of challenges Writing 201: Poetry is offering us. Today’s assignment was to explore Concrete Poetry, also known as Shape Poetry.
“The idea here is to arrange your words on the screen (or the page) so that they create a shape or an image. The meaning of the image can be obvious at first glance, or require some guesswork after reading the poem. It’s up to you to decide how difficult you want to make it for your readers.”
We were also encouraged to use enjambment.
Enjambment “may sound like a mouthful. But what it describes is a really simple phenomenon: when a grammatical sentence stretches from one line of verse to the next.”
The word prompt we were to use was “Animal.”
“Polar bears, microbes in your cells, unicorns, your pet hamster, lolcats: find a way to include an animal, today’s word prompt, in your poem. Or write about a situation that can bring out the animal in you (or someone else). Or dig deeper into the word’s etymology (anima = latin for breath). One way or another, give us a beast of a poem.”
It was a fun assignment to do, although figuring out how to do the formatting in a way that it held when put into the post was a challenge. I am grateful to the various people who offered suggestions.
So here is my animal shape poem using enjambment!
And here is a photo of my “pets!”
Living, Learning and Letting Go 
I see the effort there! Too good. You nailed it!
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Thanks! 🙂
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That’s a neat worm, and I love the poem that goes with it, too. I get a sense of your gratitude towards worms.
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Gratitude and awe. And they are so quiet. I feel meditative and relaxed in their presence!
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You’re not going to like this – when I was a child (a thousandy ears ago) a lot of gardeners used to kill worms. It’s a wonder anything ever grew.
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We all killed things years ago that we wouldn’t dream of killing now. We used to put worms on a hook for catching fish. And as a child I had a beautiful and beloved butterfly collection; i.e. butterflies mounted on a board.
It is a different world, and many of us have different priorities now.
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All but ignorant people knew even then that worms are good for the soil. I was 10 years old, and i knew it. My parents knew it.
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I love how the poem worms its way down the screen. Nicely done!
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Thanks so much! I had fun doing it. I am loving your assignments. Each time I momentarily think I can’t do it and then I do!
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This worm collage works perfect.
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I’m glad you like it. I do too!
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Very clever it was beyond me. You always throw yourself one hundred percent in to everything you do, bravo x
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The poem part came pretty easily. The technological stuff was a bigger issue. Ben says there is something called preformatting that would make it easier.
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ah ok, would be good to know about the preformatting then, that frightened me the techy side hehe x
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I haven’t looked at it yet, but know Sreejit couldn’t figure it out so I don’t know if I can.
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yes i prob wouldn’t have a clue, is there a link for it? x
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He said it was part of the visual editor I think. I just looked for it and couldn’t find it. I imagine there would be instructions if we googled it. I don’t have time to do it now but if you find it let me know!
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oh ive never seen that, just goes to show how much is undiscovered hehe x
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This is amazing.
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Thanks!
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Way cool!
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