Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 11

Another Thursday and in the magic sphere of The Gooseberry Garden (where the sun always shine and the gooseberries are always ripe) it is once again time for our Thursday Poetry Forms, or Poetry for Dummies. I am CC Champagne and I am back again to see if we can't find some more interesting poetry forms to wrap our heads around.

Poetry has been around for a long, long time and will probably not die out anytime soon. We are looking at all these old poetry forms, looking for knowledge and inspiration, but what will poetry look like in the future? Have you ever thought about that? Well, I did and stumbled upon a poetry form called computer generated poetry. Interesting!? I thought so, and even though Wikipedia won't give me any information on this I still wanted to pass on the information I found to you. Some may see it as cheating, but it can also be a challenge and it is definitely something that hasn't been around for too long.

Computer generated poetry, in the form I found it here, uses a set form but leave the words of the poem up to the writer/poet. We don't have to worry about poetic feet, syllables or meters and can focus on just making some kind of sense (which might not be as easy as it sounds).

Line one: Article + Adjective noun

Line two: Verb + Simile

Line three: Prepositional phrase

Line four: 'I' + Verb

Line five: Prepositional phrase

Line six: 'and' + Verb

Line seven: Prepositional phrase

Line eight: Simile

Line nine: 'the' + Noun

Line ten: Verb

Line eleven: Prepositional phrase

I think you will see that you don't need to stick to the line separation since it doesn't make much sense, but the whole idea is quite enticing. For even more of a challenge why not decide on letters in advance (you would need about eight of them) and then use a dictionary where you pick the first adjective noun of the first letter you've chosen for line one, the first verb from the second letter in line two etc. etc.

The trick with poetry isn't always to rhyme, to tell a story or to adhere to some ancient poetry form. Sometimes poetry can be completely jumbled, non-sensical and just weird, but it may still instill an emotion in the readers. A poem doesn't have to be epic, doesn't have to answer big questions about life, death or love. A poem can be exactly whatever you want it to be, as long as it has a meaning to you, same as with art. Look at some of Andy Warhol's work! Maybe today's shopping lists are tomorrow's poetry? The exact definition of poetry, to me and I don't claim to be an expert, is in the feeling it instills in its readers, and judging by how heavily we rely on computers today I am willing to bet that at some point in the future poetry forms will include sections on forms, unknown today, that have been generated by computers to some extent. The question is exactly how, and this could be one of the forms taught in future, space-inspired schools many, many centuries from now.

Until next week, feel free to enter any poems you produce, computer generated or not, with the rest of the creative Gooseberry Garden visitors at the Poetry Picnic Week 10: Nature, Forest, Rivers and Mountains, and please let me know in the comments section if you have come across other interesting computer generated poetry forms.

*Cheers*