POETRY

Poetry is all around us - if you know where to look. A newspaper headline, an advertisement, a few sentences in the booklet that tells you how a video works: any of these may have a poetic quality or, at least, some of the things associated with poetry.

For example, take alliteration. This is the use of the same sound or letter(s) at the beginning of a series of words. We often find this in poetry but it's also widely used by the people who compose newspaper headlines and by advertising copywriters.

Some fowls are fouler than others

From President to preacher

Rhyme can be found too in newspaper headlines:

Art from the heart

Blue rinse prince

Hod's Clods

FOUND POETRY

It's possible to rearrange almost any piece of writing so that it looks 'like poetry' on the page. This, for example, is a warning from a video recorder booklet:

"Rapid temperature changes and storage or operation in extremely high humidity environments may cause 'dew' to condense inside the VCR cabinet."

Nothing very 'poetic' about that, it would seem. But if the sentence is cut up and arranged on the page so that it has the look of a poem we get a piece which we might call 'Rapid temperature changes' or perhaps 'Dew':

Rapid temperature changes

ond storage or operation in extremely high

humidity environments

may cause

'dew'

to condense inside

the VCR cabinet.

Now find an unpromising sentence or two, from a car maintenance manual, a cooking recipe, a text book or even a public notice, and then give it a 'poetic' lay-out. Does this process cause you to look at any of the words or phrases in a new way? If it does, you are showing one of the things that some 'real' poetry will do: enable you to look at words, and the world, in a slightly different way.

SO WHAT IS POETRY?

Does it have to rhyme? No.

Does it have to have a beat, a rhythm, a metre? Not necessarily. Should it be about something serious and 'poetic'? Not at all.

If that seems to lead us further away rather than forward, don't worry. Think about poetry as something that you can write without bothering too much about precise rules.

ALPHABET POETRY

Start off by producing an 'alphabet' poem. Write a line in which 'A' is the dominant letter at the beginning of the words, then 'B' and so on. Choose a particular subject or theme to run through your poem. If you took 'animals' as the subject you might start as follows:

Aardvarks amble across amazing plains,

Buffalo bellow in Belsize Park,

Creeping cats confer in corners ...

Other possible subjects for alphabet poems might be 'food and drink', 'transport', 'sports', 'countries of the world'. No doubt you can think of other topics that you would like to write about.

Remember that you are putting words together for their sound quality. So, a 'g' can sometimes have the sound of a 'j' or 'ph' will be pronounced as 'f'. And be ingenious when you come to the trickier letters of the alphabet: there may not be many suitable words beginning with an 'x' but you should be able to find something that starts 'ex

ACROSTICS

Another type of poem that relies on its initial letters is the 'acrostic'. Here the first letters of each line of the poem make up a word or words as you read them downwards. One of the best-known acrostics is this one, although it's perhaps not really a poem. It's in Latin and was discovered in Pompeii.

R O T A S

O P E R A

T E N E T

A R E P O

S A T O R

The meaning may be 'Arepo the sower holds the wheels carefully'! This one is particularly clever because it is an all-round acrostic where each word in one direction crosses itself going in the opposite direction; in addition, the words give mirror-images of themselves.

Now take your own name (or names) and, writing it vertically down the page, try to make up a 'poem' in which each line begins with those letters in sequence. If you can't make a full line for each letter then find two or three words which describe you or, alternatively, two or three foods, activities, and so on, which you like.