Instructional Poetry

While I did change from Our Year of Fiery Chaos 2024 to Our Year of Dumpster Fire 2025, I did not come into 2026 with a new fancy title for the year. We're only a few days in and, unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, there are too many possibilities. It will just be Our Year of Dumpster Fire 2026. Other things need my attention. 

I've switched from the story I've been working on for a few months to the one I've slowly been working on for almost a year. It kept getting pushed aside for other projects, but I never let go of the intention to write it. This pushes my Lovecraftian Mythos story to the side for a while, but the writing is going well and I don't want to let this flood of story dry up without me getting the writing done!

Even with all of that story pouring out, I'm still talking myself through daily life by writing poems. I catch stray thoughts that way. I make talking to myself sound fancy. Sometimes, the form of a poem is the framework for setting up a safe space wherever I am at that moment.

I mentioned when I released Little Things that each type of cinquain in that collection has a poem that explains the form. I've continued doing that so that I have an example to follow when I come back if I wander away to play with other structures for a while. I did it when I didn't invent the tricube. 

In sharing some of my poems with various people who weren't already familiar with the formats I'm writing in, I've found this can be helpful as an introduction. It works to see the instructions as the very thing they are instructions for. I don't have any real plans to do another collection anytime soon (watch, it'll happen just because I said it won't), so I'll share some of them here. 

I don't see myself as very good at haiku because there's a lot more to the art than just getting the syllable count. In fact, making it the easily recognized 5-7-5 syllable count is simplifying that detail. I have greatly enjoyed writing them for many years, though. It's probably what kept me from turning everything into limericks in high school. 

Five syllables, then

seven syllables, with five

more on the last line.

Tanka is similar, both in structure and in my feeling like my own are overly simplified. 

A longer version 

of the beloved short haiku. 

After the lines of

five, seven, five syllables, 

there are two lines of seven. 

And now I've learned about the German elfchen. The rules are about word count, not syllables.

word

now build

Tell us more! 

Where is this going? 

poem

It kind of reminds me of the didactic cinquain, which is never likely to be on my list of favorites.

noun

descriptively describable 

verbing verbs verbing

count words, not syllables 

didactic 

It feels like there's more breathing room, more room to play around with the elfchen. It might end up being something of a bridge for me, making it enjoyable for me to create poems in that general way.

I have my reasons for writing poems, but I could just keep them all private. My big reason for sharing them is to encourage other people to write them. People I've shared my free verse poems with over the years have either already been writing poetry, or they read it and said, "I don't know how you do that. I would suck at it."  Short forms can be more welcoming, while the rules can make composition a little word puzzle. Like a crossword puzzle in which you won't get anything wrong as long as the words fit the spaces.

Carry a little notebook, or type poems as notes on your phone. Writing them got me through a lot last year, and I don't see the need letting up this year. If you're too nervous about whatever you create being "bad", now is definitely a good time to get started! It's better to be in that "beginner bad" phase (which is really "unskilled and inexperienced") than to have Autocomplete On Steroids just spitting things out. Write a bad poem! Write twenty or thirty bad poems! Use your words!