Welcome to day 18 and happy Saturday! Today's prompt is an idea of what to write about: a reply to a poem. This could be replying to one of your own earlier poems, to put a different spin on something you wrote before or approach it from another angle, or replying to someone else's poem – perhaps a poem you love, perhaps a poem that annoys you, or perhaps a poem you think is mostly right but gets a few details wrong and you'd like to set it straight.
For a type of poem to write, replying to a poem sets up a heap of possibilities. If you're replying to one of your own poems, you might want to match or contrast the original form or style. Here's a poem I wrote and a reply to it, about Aphrodite's Pool, where the one is all loosely flowing and romantic and the reply is all heavy syllables and short bold words. If it's a poem you're mocking, you might want to mimic its form closely: I've lost track of how many parodies and pastiches I've seen about that damn I-ate-the-plums poem and "Roses are red, violets are blue" is always up for another spin.
Copying/contrasting aside, there are a couple of forms specifically invented to respond to other poems: a coupling poem and a glosa. Both of these incorporate the lines from the original poem, so you're best using either your own poem or a poem that's out of copyright (ie its author has been dead for 70 years). Here's a comprehensive list of poems out of copyright.
For a coupling poem, you write a line of your own between each line of the original. You can read more about coupling poems here, and here's an example of a coupling poem I wrote replying to Shakespeare's sonnet 116, with my added lines in italics.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
alone aspire: let summer have its sweat.
Admit impediments. Love is not love,
some mystic noun – it’s promises, a threat
which alters when it alteration finds
as moths’ probosces stretch for nectar’s cleft,
or bends with the remover to remove
because it must. That doesn’t mean it’s left –
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
a stain like rust or brightening dye. But love
that looks on tempests and is never shaken?
Handle that with tongs, a viton glove.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
adrift and craving wind, the glint you meet
whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Before you sink, my sweet, admit defeat.
Love’s not Time’s fool. Though rosy lips and cheeks
may crumple, no-one whom you love can age.
Within his bending sickle’s compass, come
and yell: you’re young while blood and life rampage.
Love alters, not with his brief hours and weeks,
but years. The coastline shifts, the rock is bared
but bears it out. Even to the edge of doom,
the fossils know where rock-pool colours flared.
If this be error and upon me proved,
if love’s unchanged, however pushed and shoved,
I never writ nor no man ever loved.
Its agates show us how its crystals moved.
You could also try a glosa, which I suggested on Day 4 as well, where you finish each stanza of your own with a line from the borrowed poem. To recap: the loose form of a glosa is that you borrow any number of lines from the other poet, you can write stanzas of any length, and you can use any rhyme scheme: copy theirs, invent your own, or none at all. If you have some time to spare, want to stretch your poetry legs, and fancy writing a more traditional glosa, the conventions for that go like this:
- Borrow four lines from another poet
- Each stanza is 10 lines long, ending with their line as the 10th
- Lines 6, 9, and 10 rhyme. Other rhymes are up to you.
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
