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Inventing New Forms of Poetry

April 11, 2003

My Word of the Day today is "clerihew":

clerihew (KLER-uh-hyoo) noun A humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject.

I have to wonder... 1. At what point does the English language become bloated by words like this? 2. How many other obscure poetic forms are that that have actual words to describe them? 3. Doen't this seem to be a pretty vague poetic form? Would you like to see some examples of clerihews?

This site even goes so far as to create a sub-form of clerihew called the "mystery cleriview", which is a clerihew that is also a review of a mystery book.

Basically, this is a poetic form for those who have no sense of meter. It seems directly opposed to the likes of iambic pentameter.

So why can't I create my own poetic form? Ahh, but I can! And I actually did once. I was thinking about haiku, and how haiku had its origin in Japanese culture, where words are often shorter, so you could probably create more meaningful verses that fit in haiku's 5-7-5 syllable confines. I created an unnamed poetic form with a verse of five lines, in the form 6-x-8-x-6, where the number indicate the syllables in those lines, and the 'x' lines share some parallelism: they rhyme, or they have the same syntactic structure, or the same alliteration, or something like that. I had also considered giving the poem a semantic limitation - like how haiku are suggestive of nature - but I couldn't think of anything.

Having had a bad day,
I slept,
And as I awoke, I realized,
I wept,
Having had a bad dream.

I stood at the ir'n gate,
Wondering,
What lay beyond its lock'd shackles,
Pondering,
How I could discover.

Thank you. I'll be here all the week.

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