Thursday, August 23, 2012

Poetry One-Liners

This week, Khara House's Our Lost Jungle Poetry Form Challenge focuses on what I would call poetry one-liners. The challenge is to write several monostiches and American Sentences.

The monostich consists of a single line that should be self contained. Following are a few of my attempts:

Life is the ultimate improvisation.

Creativity has a mind of its own.

The notes played at 18th and Vine drift through the world.

The American Sentence is a variation of haiku invented by Allen Ginsburg. It is a one-sentence poem consisting of 17 syllables. Here are two I wrote:

The soul speaks in words and images even when we do not listen.

Sound may soothe or shock whether it is made by symphonies or cymbals.

While working on this week's challenge, I learned that simple does not mean easy. Give these forms a try! I think they are made for the Twitter generation.


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4 comments:

  1. Definitely Tweetable. 17's my lucky number. I think I'll christen a scratch pad devoted to the inception of American sentences. Worth a try.

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  2. Lovely lines Michelle. Here is another poetry form I didn't know anything about. I love the idea of a haiku in one line. Also, I can see the delusion of "easy", this things are harder than that, aren't they? Nicely done.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, Veronica. I, too, was unfamiliar with both of these forms. I was surprised that Ginsburg came up with the American sentence. I probably have no real basis for that feeling!

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