One of the fun poetry games going the rounds in some blogs is called The Fib. You can find out about them here, at the site of The London Word Festival.
In brief, the idea is to write a poem of 20 syllables in which the number of syllables in each line is the total of the two previous lines - thus 1,1,2,3,5,8.
You can of course continue upwards so that the next line is 13, then 21 after which it gets too silly I think.
But it can make for a good semantic workout. A bit like Haiku. Decided I'd like to try it.
Over a freezing weekend, watching the small garden birds attacking the seeds and nuts, and watching our 16 year old cat watching them longingly from the warmth of our living room window, the following two TIMS eventually got wrote!
Coal
tits,
hungry
in winter,
raid seed silos as
nature’s precision plunderers
Cat
Crouched
cat,
hunter
of bird-food,
now too old to pounce,
yet young in imagination.
Going to try graduating to the 1,1,2,3,5,8,13 structure next time.
Thanks for the nod! It's The Fib though, not TIMS.
:-)
Posted by: Tom | December 02, 2008 at 01:12 PM
Thanks Tom. Mistake duly corrected. ;-)
Posted by: Jim Gordon | December 02, 2008 at 01:56 PM
What a fantastic discipline. I'm going to give it a go. Thanks
Ruth
Posted by: Ruth Gouldbourne | December 02, 2008 at 03:30 PM
What fun! Thanks!
Posted by: chris | December 02, 2008 at 04:17 PM
Interesting poetry. You seem like you have a great deal of experience with animals, have you ever heard of Paula Robb’s Complete Cat Training? Its an interesting book dedicated solely to the training of cats. Thanks!
Posted by: Eathen Richardson | December 29, 2008 at 06:31 PM