Tag Archives: trick poetry

Egg Timer

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This form was apparently invented by Dorian Peterson Potter.
All the poems I found were written by her, and although you can see some variance below the following seem to be the specifications.

The Egg Timer is:
A decastich (10 line poem)
Syllabic 5/4/3/2/1/1/2/3/4/5
Unrhymed
Formulaic: The last five lines are the mirror image of the first five line.
Centered or not, at poets discretion.

 

~Spring~

(Egg Timer)

Spring arrived just sprung

Hear birds singing

Butterflies

Ladybugs

See

See

Ladybugs

Butterflies

Hear birds singing

Spring arrived just sprung

Grass is growing tall

Need to trim it

Rid of weed

Keep green

Nice

Nice

Keep green

Rid of weed

Need to trim it

Grass is growing tall.

Dorian Petersen Potter

aka ladydp2000

copyright@2014

Learning (Egg Timer)
Learning is great fun
Just learn each day
Something new
You can
Yes
Yes
You can
Something new
Just learn each day
Learning is great fun
Right under the sun
In the moonlight
You can have
New goals
Dreams
Dreams
New goals
You can have
In the moonlight
Right under the sun.
Dorian Petersen Potter
aka ladydp2000
copyright@2011

Time And More Time (Egg Timer)

From this recover

Need time to heal

Stand my ground

I’ll be

Strong

Strong

I’ll be

Stand my ground

Need time to heal

From this recover

March 7,2014

Pasted from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/time-and-more-time-egg-timer/

See also Trick Poetry.

My example

Failing Frequently (Form: Egg Timer)

I alliterate
when I’m able.
I cannot
sometimes
though.
Though
sometimes
I cannot,
when I’m able
I alliterate.

© Lawrencealot – January 19, 2015

Hourglass

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Hourglass
The Hourglass contains eight syllables per line, three stanzas, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef.  Once written, the poem is then written ‘upside-down’ from the last line to the first line, and must make sense when read both ways.

Pasted from http://the.a.b.c.of.poetry.styles.patthepoet.com/index.html
Many Thanks to Christina R Jussaume for her work on the Poetry Styles site.

For many related forms, see Trick Poetry.

My example

School Daze (Hourglass)

I tried to write a simple verse,
I’m capable of simple thought.
My mother thought I could do worse
With all the schooling she had bought.

I’d been in school for years and years
Ideas had time to germinate
I overcame my silly fears
I said to mother, “You just wait!

I would not a good doctor make,
a physicist was out of reach,
how many more years will that take?
Perhaps I’d better plan to teach

Perhaps I’d better plan to teach,
how many more years will that take?
A physicist was out of reach;
I would not a good doctor make.

I said to mother, “You just wait!
I overcame my silly fears
Ideas had time to germinate
I’d been in school for years and years.

With all the schooling she had bought
My mother thought I could do worse.
I’m capable of simple thought,
I tried to write a simple verse.

© Lawrencealot – October 11, 2014

Visual template

Hourglass

Trigee and Cleave

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Cleave Poetry is a poetic genre in which 3 separate poems are intertwined into one woven poem.
“The word cleave is a contranym, a word with 2 opposite meanings: verb 1) split or sever along a natural grain or line. 2) divide; split. verb 1) stick fast to. 2) become strongly involved with or emotionally attached to. ” Old English Compact Oxford English Dictionary There seems to be a movement to promote the verse form at Wordpress.

The 3 poems are written with meter, rhyme and number of lines at the poet’s discretion. The one requirement is to create side by side poems that can be merged into one poem.
 

Trigee poems can be found on the internet but the description of the genre came from a forum member who encountered it on another poetry forum. It appears to be the same as the Cleave, a nonce verse in which side by side poems merge into one poem.
 

Author’s Note:  A characteristic of both is the separation of halve by a string of periods.

 

Alliterative Acrostic Trigee takes the concept of 3 poems in 1 to another level. It was presented as a challenge on a poetry forum. A three in one poem (Trigee), alliterated and the first letter of each line spells a word. Number of lines, meter and rhyme at the discretion of the poet.

Titan by Judi Van Gorder
Tall tasks talk to me . . . . . . . . . .. . . Ten times over I try
in tantamount with the tax . . . . . . . . to temper tradition
tame and trip thought. . . . . . . . . . . . tell a timeless tale
and tender a tome . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . testament of truth
not terse nor tentative but . . . . . . .. . to be tenable to a tempest
 
Pasted from <http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?/topic/1196-three-poems-in-one-verse-form/>
  Many Thanks to Judi for the wonderful resource PMO provides, and for the excellent  extention of the form with the above example.

Related Form:  See Trick Poetry.

My example   

Done  (Alliterative Acrostic Trigee)

Don’t do it darn it Dad……………….. Darn it Dad, you did it.
One darn drink leads to more; ….. Daddy drank Drambuie
Now smooth and strong is sad, … good sense should forbid it.
Enjoy it on the floor! ………………….. Mommy moaned “Oh phooey.”

© Lawrencealot – September 1, 2014

 

Alliterative Acrostic Trigee poetry form

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○ Alliterative Acrostic Trigee takes the concept of 3 poems in 1 to another level. It was presented as a challenge on a poetry forum. A three in one poem (Trigee), alliterated and the first letter of each line spells a word. Number of lines, meter and rhyme at the discretion of the poet.

Titan by Judi Van Gorde

Tall tasks talk to me . . . . . . . . . .. . . Ten times over I try
in tantamount with the tax . . . . . . . . to temper tradition
tame and trip thought. . . . . . . . . . . . tell a timeless tale
and tender a tome . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . testament of truth
not terse nor tentative but . . . . . . .. . to be tenable to a tempest

Pasted from http://www.poetrymagnumopus.com/index.php?/topic/1196-three-poems-in-one-verse-form/
My thanks to Judi Van Gorder for years of work on this fine PMO resource.

Related forms:  Trick Poetry

How to write one:
1. Pick a word which will become the acrostic seed.
The letters of that word will become successively, the first
letters of each line in the poem. (Usually, also the title.)

2. Select a line-length, and if you are so disposed, also a meter.
3. Divide that line into two more or less equal lengths.
4. Choose rhyme pattern if desired
5. Write away.

My example

Done (Alliterative Acrostic Trigee)

Don’t do it darn it Dad.                       Darn it Dad, you did it.
One darn drink leads to more;            Daddy drank Drambuie
Now smooth and strong is sad,          good sense should forbid it.
Enjoy it on the floor!                          Mommy moaned “Oh phooey.”

© Lawrenealot – September 1, 2014

 

 

 

Xenolith

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Xenolith

People have been telling me for quite some time now that because I love poetry forms so much I should invent one of my own. So I did. 🙂

When I started out I had no idea what I wanted to do for my form, other than I wanted it to be unique. Once I decided base my chapbook on poetry forms following the letters of the alphabet I knew the name of my form had to start with the letter X. Why X? Because no one else has done a form starting with the letter X.

After consulting several dictionaries, I finally settled on a name for my form – Xenolith. A xenolith is fragment of extraneous rock embedded in magma or another rock. I kept coming back to this while I was playing around with syllable counts and rhyme schemes – a rock within a rock. How about a poem within a poem? And so my form was born.

The Xenolith is a 15 line poem. Seven of the lines have twelve syllables per line and are mono-rhymed. Eight of the lines have eight syllables per line and are written in rhyming couplets. You can separate the 12 syllable lines from the 8 syllable lines and have two complete poems.

Schematic.

1 xxxxxxxxxxxA
2 xxxxxxxB
3 xxxxxxxxxxxA
4 xxxxxxxB
5 xxxxxxxxxxxA
6 xxxxxxxC
7 xxxxxxxC
8 xxxxxxxxxxxA
9 xxxxxxxD
10 xxxxxxxD
11 xxxxxxxxxxxA
12 xxxxxxxE
13 xxxxxxxxxxxA
14 xxxxxxxE
15 xxxxxxxxxxxA

 

No Guarantee

A poet does not always use his eyes to see
The beauty in a thought or deed.
Inspiration is found wherever it may be –
Beauty to make the heart concede –
Whether moonlight reflected on a midnight sea,
The white curl of the ocean spray,
The glitter of a summer’s day.
Or, with the deft touch of the poet’s master key,
Reshape the mind into a lie –
Show instead a new path to try.
Like cobwebs dim, clear from the mind the soul’s debris,
Invite in the beauty unseen
And unveil imagination’s dark devotee
To keep the questing mind e’er keen.
I know now a poem, like life, has no guarantee.

12 syllables, mono rhyme

A poet does not always use his eyes to see.
Inspiration is found wherever it may be
Whether moonlight reflected on a midnight sea
Or, with the deft touch of the poet’s master key,
Like cobwebs dim, clear from the mind the soul’s debris,
And unveil imagination’s dark devotee.
I know now a poem, like life, has no guarantee.

8 syllables, rhyming couplets

The beauty in a thought or deed,
Beauty to make the heart concede –
The white curl of the ocean spray
The glitter of a summer’s day . . .
Reshape the mind into a lie; 
Show instead a new path to try;
Invite in the beauty unseen
To keep the questing mind e’er keen.

Pasted from http://randomwriterlythoughts.blogspot.com/2011/09/xenolith.html

Great Thanks to Carol R. Ward

Related forms: See Trick Poetry

My example

Hold Fast and Long Your Heart (Xenolith)

To all young men intending to be kind and wise
Never give all the heart, for love
those same attentions rendered, coyly improvised
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
when with another man your lass wears a disguise
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
But knows the hook is set, thus needs no alibis.
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
Perhaps a beauty built by your expected prize,
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
Until you know her actions are devoid of lies
O never give the heart outright.
Regard you heart on trial while trying out her sighs.

© Lawrencealot – August 31, 2014

12 syllables, mono rhyme

To all young men intending to be kind and wise
those same attentions rendered, coyly improvised
when with another man your lass wears a disguise
but knows the hook is set, thus needs no alibis.
Perhaps a beauty built by your expected prize,
Until you know her actions are devoid of lies
Regard you heart on trial while trying out her sighs.

8 syllables, rhyming couplets

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright.

Here for the couplet rhyme portion of this poem I have copied the
first lines of Wm Butler Yeats’ “Never Give All the Heart”,
intending indeed to enclose something OLD within my own NEW work

Visual template

Xenolith

Trick Poetry

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The poems that I have documented for this category  include
Trick Poetry                                   (four in one – OR many more)
and  Amera’s Style                        (2 in one ), both on this page
Alliterative Acrostic Trigee     (three in one)
Egg Beater                                (2 in one)
Hourglass                                       (2 in one)
The Trigee and the Cleave        (three in one)
The Faceted Diamond              (three in one – formatted)
Multidirectional Sonnet         (2 in one)  In Everysonnet blog.
Sephalian Reverse Sonnet    (2 in one) In Everysonnet blog.
Constanza                                     (two in one)
Forward/Backwards Poetry   (two in one)
Palidrome  (two in one)
Tuanortsa  (two in one)
Xenolith  (three in one)
 
 
In First Loves, Margaret Atwood describes this “trick” poem (“I Saw a Peacock” by an anonymous British poet) as “the first poem I can remember that opened up the possibility of poetry for me.” The trick is the two ways it can be understood; read a line at a time, or read from the middle of one line to the middle of the next. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes notes that it appears in a commonplace book dated to around 1665; it seems to have been first published in the Westminster-Drollery in 1671.
I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail,
    I saw a Blazing Comet, drop down hail,
    I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round,
    I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground,
    I saw a Pismire, swallow up a Whale,
    I saw a raging Sea, brim full of Ale,
    I saw a Venice Glass, full fifteen feet deep,
    I saw a well, full of men’s tears that weep,
    I saw red eyes, all of a flaming fire,
    I saw a House, as big as the Moon and higher,
    I saw the Sun, even in the midst of night,
    I saw the man, that saw this wondrous sight.
Write a “trick” poem using this technique.  
Each line must be able to be read separately, as well as from the middle of one line to the middle of the next.
Note: I made a simple template simply dividing your line in two parts.
Its advantage is simply that you can see separate parts and visualize how with will combine.
Note: in this poem . . each half is a complete rhyming poem,
each line can be read either way with the lines in the other column on the same line, or on the line above or below it, with rhyme in at lease one sequence.
In addition one can each of the different colored lines in a column, (either up or down) as a distinct poem.
Here is an AMERA STYLE where the bold words create a poem within a poem.
Secret place for Elves
Something we know how to do
Is build a place to hide from you
High up in the trees we climb
For scattles of years; in elfin time
So the king of elves came to me
Said build a house up in a tree
All he had to do was ask
Then the elves set to the task
A house in a tree, that’s what he said
To hide from humans that we dread
So we huddled we to whisper
To keep our plans much crisper
We need a name; what to call it?
A Tree House! That name will fit
So now our work has just begun
Hammering, singing elfin fun
A secret place high in the tree
A place where no one else can see
A place to hide for another scattle
To avoid a nasty battle
A cozy place, a place to love
High up in the tree above
Secret creatures, Elves are we
Now living high up in the tree

Forward/Backwards Poetry

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Simply poetry that reads as a coherent verse from top to bottom or when read from bottom to top.
See also:  Trick Poetry.
Example poem:
The Search / The Capture
Well  okay dammit I give up.
You’re smarter than a Cheshire cat,
more stubborn than a Pit Bull pup,
there’s no escaping all of that.
You talk to beasts within the bog
the beasts choose to leave you alone
perhaps because Rambo’s your dog,
and your own dog weighs eighteen stone.
No hiding from the two of you
you have such access in the bog;
it seems all life there takes the view
they’re friends with you and Rambo dog.
It’s not your job to poke around
where police have already failed,
where not a trace was ever found,
no one has been detained or jailed.
Since that’s the case I shall relent.
The bog’s your turf, now that I know,
Enjoy the hunt that’s your intent
You’re granted my okay to go.
The Capture
(c) Lawrencealot – April 19, 2013
Simply for your reading out-loud convenience
I have printed it switched below.
The Capture
You’re granted my okay to go.
Enjoy the hunt;  that’s your intent
The bog’s your turf, now that i know,
Since that’s the case I shall relent.
No one has been detained or jailed.
where not a trace was ever found,
where police have already failed,
It’s not your job to poke around .
They’re friends with you and Rambo dog
it seems all life there takes the view
you have such access in the bog;
No hiding from the two of you.
And your own dog weighs eighteen stone
Perhaps because Rambo’s your dog,
the beasts choose to leave you alone;
You talk to beasts within the bog
There’s no escaping all of that;
more stubborn than a Pit Bull pup,
You’re smarter than a Cheshire cat,
Well  okay dammit,  I give up.
The Search

Faceted Diamond

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The poems that I have documented for this category  include
Trick Poetry                           (four in one – OR many more)
and  Amera’s Style                (2 in one ), both on this page
The Trigee and the Cleave  (three in one)
The Faceted Diamond         (three in one – formatted)
Multidirectional Sonnet     (2 in one)  In Everysonnet blog.
Constanza (two in one)
 
 
  • Faceted Diamond is a verse form that is probably as complicated to read as to write. It is an invented form found at Poetry Base and was invented by American poet Cory S Sylvester. Like the Cleave and the Trigee there are 3 poems in 1 but unlike the others, the reader may need clues to understand how to read the 3.
    The Faceted Diamond is:

    • 3 poems in 15 lines.
    • syllabic: 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1. The even # lines break half way. (Poetry Base suggests the poem could be longer as long as it is an odd number of lines, but I am not going there. You can check with Poetry Base if you are curious.)
    • unrhymed.
    • centered on the page.
      x
      x — x
      x x x
      x x — x x
      x x x x x
      x x x — x x x
      x x x x x x x
      x x x x — x x x x
      x x x x x x x
      x x x — x x x
      x x x x x
      x x — x x
      x x x
      x — x
      x
    • The poem can be read in whole and…
    • A second poem can be read by reading the odd numbered lines and the first half of the even numbered lines and ….
    • A third poem can be read by reading the odd numbered lines and the second half of the even numbered lines. All 3 poems should make sense.
 
My Thanks to Judi Van Gorder of PoetryMagnumOpus for the above.
 
Example Poem
 
Only I     (Faceted Diamond)
Wait
my dear
lovely one
can you pause and
observe men that stare
openly without shame
wishing it were they, not me
tending to you, taking you home,
and ending the evening
in your arms,kissing you.
and all of the time
I know they know
they can’t have
my dream
love.
© Lawrencealot – September 23, 2013
Visual Template

Constanza

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The Constanza, created by Connie Marcum Wong, consists of five or more 3-line stanzas.
Each line has a set meter of eight syllables.
The first lines of all the stanzas can be read successively as an independent poem,
with the rest of the poem weaved in to express a deeper meaning.
The first lines convey a theme written in monorhyme,
while the second and third lines of each stanza rhyme together.
Rhyme scheme: abb acc add aee aff… (abbaccaddaeeaff…)
Isosyllabic: 8 syllables
See Trick Poetry
The Desert

To venture forth in desert lands
Most city folk would likely shun
but wonders grow beneath that sun.
To trek with cheer on arid sands
requires a sense of how  things fit,
for God has made an art of it.
To ramble where the cactus stands
and know that life support is found
for man if he should walk this ground
and pick their fruits with your own hands
gives one respect for synergy
which can’t be random, seems to me.
This joy a cowboy understands.
The hospitality exists
most everywhere, and life persists.

(c) Lawrencealot – April 7, 2012
Visual Template