Scrabbling for words

Part of the reason I love poetry is the joy of playing with words and different poetic forms, alongside being able to express myself in totally, my personal style.

It is Scrabble Day on 13thApril, the link being that in poetry you have to use words in a huge variety of ways. I haven’t actually played a game of Scrabble for many years.

When composing poetry, you often have to find alternative words, because if not careful, you repeat the same word too often; you have to search for words that rhyme and words that express different senses and atmospheres, because you are ultimately, painting with words.

I have different approaches for writing poetry, depending on the subject, or in fact the day.  Sometimes, the idea just pops into my head and I write. At other times, I am using a specific form, so I know I need to find a determined number of rhyming words. On other occasions, I’m working with a very succinct form, so I have to choose my words very carefully to make sense of the finished poem.

Different forms:

One type of form is a Lipogram; a form where you choose to omit a certain letter or letters of the alphabet in whatever it is you are writing.

This poem is missing the letter ‘t’.

Removing certain letters of the alphabet can be quite challenging, because they are used so often in our language. The top 6 most used letters in the English language are (from the top down):

  • E
  • A
  • R
  • I
  • O
  • T

Another form of poem I love writing is a Monorhyme. These are poems where all the lines have the same end rhyme.

When writing these, I often start out by searching for good words that rhyme around my theme, and then compose the poem around those end rhymes – which is what I did with this poem. 

The prompt for the poem was Cheese. I found words that rhymed, they sparked ideas, and my story grew from there.

On the 17thof this month, it is Haiku Poetry Day.

Haiku poetry is a very succinct form of Japanese poetry where you have to choose your words very carefully, as you only have 17 syllables to create the entire poem. Always 5/7/5.  In Japan, Haiku were originally only used to write about nature. Nowadays, the form can be used to express ideas freely.

Whether you write poetry or not, you can still have fun with words when writing blogs, social media posts, or playing word games.

Enjoy scrabbling around with words!