Before appointments, when a meeting hasn’t started, when a bus hasn’t come, when a friend is late, when you have finished something and still have time before the next thing in your day, when you arrive early to work — do you write or reflexively check your email or text a friend or leaf through a magazine you aren’t especially interested in? What if, whether you are a poet or a prose writer, you reflexively turned to tricks of poetic form to help find your way into your feelings and thoughts useful to your writing?

This week during my trip to Denmark, I have kept my commitment to write in some of the forms I am finding in A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, a birthday gift from my youngest grandson. Instead of working at night, though, after the kids are asleep, I’ve taken the book with me during the day while I fulfill my duties as nanny, duties which often mean sitting on a bench at playgrounds. I favored opening the book’s pages to verse forms that are short, since though I have had hours in the parks, uninterrupted time was often brief.

Most important of what I’ve learned this week is a repeated lesson: it doesn’t have to take a lot of time to access the writing mind. Accessing it, even in short forms, keeps a writer feeling like a writer no matter what else is going on. Writing in the short form means, too, that the inventive mind stays sharp and appears quickly. With short forms, the writing mind works even between pleas for ice cream and cries over scraped elbows. In short, these forms seem to supply an instant messaging service to the writing brain, a route back to what one is writing, despite interruptions.

Think of the short forms as miniature frames you can carry with you and fill from almost anywhere. They don’t weigh anything and they are reusable. You can keep the syllable count for the lines and the number of required lines per frame on your phone, a Post-it note on your computer or written on the inside cover of your notebook. Using the forms keeps the analytical brain occupied so the design mind can come forward to supply images that the analytical brain will then fit nicely into the frame. Whatever catches your attention in what is going on around you, you can be sure that the design mind knows how to present images that will help you delve into the moment. What is required most is that you trust that what occurs to you will become something meaningful when you mold it to fill the particular form (frame) you choose.

Here are the forms I played with and the results now in my notebook:

Haiku: You probably know this one: three unrhymed lines that describe nature. The first line has five syllables, second line has seven syllables and the last line has five syllables again (5-7-5), if you go by the book, though that is not strictly necessary in English. Haiku master Michael Dylan Welch teaches that haiku does its work “through implication, through trusting the image, through writing about what caused a feeling rather than the feeling itself.” This happens when the images in the third line read in opposition to those in the first two lines. 

While the kids played in an indoor jumpy house because it was pouring outside, I sat in the concession area that made coffee free to grandparents. On my second cup, I saw through big skylights that the skies had cleared. The change in the weather and the fact that we would still remain inside because the kids were enjoying themselves came together as inspiration for something deeper. I saw that after I had written my lines. I also knew that the image of falling leaves was fresh for me because one grandson had made a funny video of a leaf talking about being the most awesome at falling. I used my fingers to count out syllables as I wrote and trimmed to meet the perhaps-unnecessary-but-fun-anyway count requirements:

Haiku on a Rainy Afternoon

After sudden storms
blue skies, amusing white clouds;
but sad leaves still fall

****

Senryu: This one follows the same pattern as haiku, (so three lines again with 5-7-5 for the syllables) but it is more about human nature than drawing images from the natural world outside of us.

When I tried the senryu, my backpack was sitting next to me on the bench near where the kids were playing that day. I don’t usually carry a backpack, but it is useful when spending hours a day away from home; it held my attention as I set out to write in the senryu short form. After writing, I saw that the images that occurred to me evoked how I feel I can benefit as a traveler in a country I don’t know much about.

Traveling Day Senryu

Backpack in Aarhus
with everything I need
an open pocket

 ***

Tanka: Here we have five lines, each one needing to have a specific number of accented syllables: 2-3-2-3-3

The weather has certainly changed in Denmark this third week of my stay. The sunny-all- day days seem to have really left us. Even when it starts out clear and warm, winds come up suddenly and it isn’t long before a fresh sprinkle becomes a downpour. One afternoon, this happened as the boys were enjoying their season’s passes to the little Tivoli in Aarhus called Tivoli Friheden. I wrote this one when we arrived home:

Leaving the Fun at Tivoli Friheden

Rain storm
one coat for three
of us
wet flowers
still smiling

I am not sure if you’ll hear the same number of stressed syllables per line as I do, but it is the exercise, not the absolute perfection, that works.

****

One day the boys saw my notebook open when I asked them to watch our stuff so I could go to the restroom.  I came back and saw this writing on the next page:

Senryu

Toby just teased me,
then Grandma and Toby laughed.
I am really sad.

I was sad about the message but so happy my grandson knew the usefulness of poetry to say what hurts.

****

Today, I am off duty, and I finished reading a novel I’d gotten deeply into. I took a walk just after another storm and got a little lost. But I didn’t mind. I found my eyes taken with the raindrops on rose bush petals and the gleam on the wet, very large, almost black rose hips. Without a particular form in mind, after passing more of the rosebush hedges, I stopped at a bench and took out some paper:

It’s Like When

You know, just after it rains
and the sun is out enough to make
the drops on rose petals sparkle
like quartz that surprises you
on beach walks and the bushes’
rosehips gleam like new rubber boots.

It’s like, you know, when you
finish a novel you loved reading
and the world seems what you
always thought it was, traffic going
somewhere but you walk,
lost in your thoughts, aware of everything.

****

I hope you’ll give the short forms a try. Play with keeping the correct syllable count and number of lines. Let the exercise in doing this help you trust the meaning in your images as you use them to fill the form. Enjoy the way your mind works when you do this.

Then someday soon find time for a walk alone and without thinking about form, build a poem from what you see and feel. Practicing with the short forms will have tuned your writing self up and allowed you to trust that your impressions are important and will lead you somewhere in your writing.