Greetings, fellow poets! It has been more than a little while since my last poetry blog post, and my only excuse is that university and various commitments took temporary priority over writing. However, your local poetry blogger is back with a buzz of energy, and this month’s blog piece is going to be about shape poetry. Hence the attempt at a clever title: Shaping your thoughts: writing shape poetry.
I chose this theme because a shape poem of mine recently got published in a well-known poetry magazine, and I was simply thrilled. This made me want to share a bit about why and how I write shape poetry, so that other people can give it a try.
Writing with a shape in mind can give you something to hang your thoughts on, so can be particularly helpful for beginner poets. For other poetry tips for beginners, see my blog posts Beginner’s tips on editing your poetry and 8 things I wish I knew as a Year 8 poet.
Read on to learn about shape poetry and see a few examples from my own repertoire!
What is shape poetry?
As the name suggests, shape poetry uses the visual layout of the poem to create a shape on the page. The entire poem may fit within this shape, or the incorporation may be more subtle (see the first example ‘The Ninth Wave’ further down).
You might remember writing diamante poems in school, or putting random words into a shape generator online. These sorts of activities definitely help to make poetry writing seem fun and doable for children, but don’t worry, shape poetry is definitely for grown-ups too.
What I love about shape poetry is the versatility and flexibility for writers to adapt their poem in a unique way while also being able to simultaneously use any other poetry techniques they are fond of. Writing shape poetry is also fun! Even if you don’t do it often, it can be a refreshing change to your usual style.
At least, it is for me!
Don’t worry, shape poetry is definitely for grown-ups too.
What are some dos and don’ts when writing shape poetry?
| DO: | DON’T: |
| Choose a shape with a logical relationship to the content of the poem. | Use cliché and overused shapes such as hearts (unless you’re planning to do something exceptionally clever with it). |
| Remember to still incorporate other language techniques in the poem, such as sound devices, similes, metaphors, etc. | Force your poem to fit the shape at the expense of syntax, grammar, or readability. |
| Copy and paste your drafts onto fresh documents while you experiment with shape. | |
| Experiment, experiment, experiment! |
Examples of shape poetry written by myself:
- The Ninth Wave (from Reflections)
This is actually an ekphrastic poem, meaning it was inspired by a piece of artwork (‘The Ninth Wave’ by Ivan Aivazovsky). I followed a writing activity in Victoria University’s annual Poetry Kit document, and am overall quite pleased with how it turned out. However, it has gone through a few iterations. I wrote this poem as a high school student, and entered it into a prestigious competition. However, it was not a shape poem at that stage.
See how there’s a second version of the poem, on the right? Yup, it was that poem which I submitted to the competition. There were no stanzas at all, despite the poem quite obviously being written in rhyming quatrain form. I essentially submitted it exactly as I had first written it on paper. I tried to get creative by repeating the last few syllables of Line 1 at the start of Line 2, with the aim of creating a “ripple” or “echo” effect like waves lapping on the water. However, the poem did not win. I am sure part of the reason was that the poem was clunky, both to look at and to read aloud.
So, when I included the poem in my first self-published anthology, Reflections, I reworked it, and came up with the shape you see in the left-hand version. The simple act of separating the stanzas and staggering the lines within each stanza gives the poem space to breathe, and emulates the feeling of waves, in keeping with the repetitive effect in each stanza.
I like this version of my ‘The Ninth Wave’ poem so much better. Do you?
- The Small and Large Intestine Poems (from What Are You Made Of?)
These two poems form part of a book of medical poetry aimed at school-age children, which I self-published in 2022. The entire purpose of the book was to make learning about the human body fun and easy, so shape poetry was an obvious choice.
I actually came up with the ideas for the small and large intestine poems while standing in the corner of an operating theatre watching a bowel cancer surgery (for context, I’m a medical student in my other life, and was on my first-ever surgical rotation at the time).
I could remember being told when I was in primary school that the large intestine is so named due to being wider than the small intestine, despite in fact being shorter. I thought it would be clever to incorporate this fact not only in the words of the intestine poems, but also in their actual length and width.
However, I quickly realised that a long, thin poem about the small intestine would not fit onto a single page without requiring a change of font size, something which I was keen to avoid. Several versions of Google Doc later, this squiggly poem was finally ready. It’s one of my favourites to read out at schools, so all the effort was really worth it.
- Dysphagia
Carrying on with the medical theme, here is one of my most recent poems. It just got published in the New Zealand Poetry Society’s Student Poetry Edition of a fine line magazine for 2023. If you are a NZPS member, this issue should be in your inbox right now. If not, it will be available on their website in a few months. I highly encourage you to read the entire issue, because the quality of student poetry in there is astounding.
‘Dysphagia’ was a challenging poem to write, because I wanted to keep the poem concise and capture only a very specific moment in a conversation, when a patient in the hospital was telling me why she still eats nectarines.
It wasn’t initially going to be a shape poem. However, while scribbling away on a notepad, I had one of those cartoon-like “lightbulb moments” and split the word “hesitates” to depict the way that food would actually stick in the patient’s throat. From there, it took quite a bit of rearranging on a typed document to get the rest of the poem to fit around this one specific feature which I was determined to keep in the poem. I had to cut out unnecessary words and pick synonyms with particular word lengths to ensure the poem retained an “oesophageal” shape.
I was overjoyed to have my poem selected for a fine line, something which has only happened to one of my poems before. Rereading it after publication, I suddenly thought to myself that it would have looked even better on paper if I had moved the dash after the “i-” to be in front of the “-tates” to further isolate the “i” as the narrowest point in the poem. Well, poems are dynamic things. At some point, we have to stop fiddling with them and send them out into the world to be read.
This is one of my favourite poems I have written. I hope my ‘Dysphagia’ poem is as inspiring to you as that patient was to me.
Shape poems by famous authors
If you are keen to read more shape poetry, I recommend checking out Brian Bilston’s poetry. He writes a lot of clever shape poetry, and clever poetry in general. I always enjoy reading his work.
Another great shape poem is ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ by C. S. Lewis.
Conclusion
I hope this blog post has convinced you that shape poetry is not just a gimmick for school English class, but a tool that you can add to your own writing toolbox. Thank you for reading Shaping your thoughts: writing shape poetry.
As always, feel free to comment below your opinions, suggestions, and favourite shape poems!