Freebie Mondays: Poetry Hour

My good friend Joe, who goes by Jchillyy on twitch recently created a wheel of mayhem for one of his streams. He asked the community to contribute fun ideas for random, crazy antics he could get up to should the wheel land on them.

Since he is a fellow writer, I thought it might be fun to include a few writing challenges. I tried to keep it to short, simple things (mostly). So I submitted the following suggestions:

*Write a romantic haiku
*Write a humorous limerick
*Write a sonnet dedicated to our friend Bardowl
*Write something in iambic pentameter
*Write a love letter to Gh0stpeppr (my husband)

I didn’t realize at the time that suggestions wouldn’t be taken off the wheel after they came up, so the iambic pentameter suggestion didn’t ultimately make it to the stream. (Which was probably for the best.)

Whenever I challenge a fellow writer to write something, I often feel compelled to fulfill the creative challenge myself. I have already tackled love letters to my husband over the years, so I decided to focus on the poetry. And of course since Joe streamed his creations, I streamed mine as well!

Limericks

We started with the limerick, since that was the first challenge to come up on the wheel during Joe’s stream.

Limericks are usually humorous and frequently rude. They follow a strict rhyming scheme of AABBA, and the third and fourth lines tend to be shorter than their fellows. Most are written in anapestic trimeter – but I didn’t worry too much about that for either stream since I didn’t want things to get too complicated.

For me, if the verse feels like it flows and follows the rhyming rules, that’s enough.

Since this started as a challenge for Joe, I dedicated my first limerick to him:

I once knew a man with a glizzy stand
Who fed glizzies to all of the land
If you’ve wiener needs to fill
He’ll fire up his grill
And what he puts ‘tween his buns is grand

Joe has something of a mascot on his stream he calls Bootleg Pikachu. Bootleg Pikachu is a hat that you can redeem for Joe to wear. He also has a funny voice and apparently a long and sordid history. So my second limerick was dedicated to him:

I met a most delightful bootleg gent
With no legs but a rad Boston accent
He likes little pieces
Made by Reese’s
And his stories have many middles but no end

The day we streamed the creation of these poems was our good friend Flannelsaurus’s birthday, so Joe suggested we also write him a birthday limerick. I think my chat came up with way better ones, but here’s mine!

Happy Birthday to my friend Flannelsaurus
I’m delighted to learn you’re a Taurus
Your jokes make me laugh
They cut through life’s chaff
Now let me serenade you ’till I’m hoarse

Haikus

After limericks, I tried my hand at haikus. The haiku suggestion sadly never came up on the wheel during Joe’s stream. But it’s been a long time since I wrote any and I wanted to try my hand at a few.

Haikus are a type of traditional short form poetry originally from Japan. They contain 3 lines and each line has a syllable requirement – in order: 5 / 7 / 5. Traditionally they also contain a ‘cutting word’ and a seasonal reference. But again, we were trying to keep things simple, so we focused only on the lines of 5 / 7 / 5.

My chat came up with tons of amazing haikus that appear in the VoD, but these are the ones I wrote.

The first is dedicated to my husband, whose name on Twitch is “Gh0stpeppr.”

A spicy berry
Stalks growing in my garden
The one I love most

Since focusing on a person worked so well, my second haiku was dedicated to Domerin, the main character in my Aruvalia Chronicles series.

Warrior of skill
Protector of the realm
More than just your scars

Last but certainly not least, we had a brief rain storm during the stream. I’m a huge fan of rain, and especially thunder storms. Often, it seems like they appear during all of the most emotional moments in my life to lead me through. So my last haiku was dedicated to my favorite form of weather (which we don’t experience very often in the current place we live).

Melancholy night
Drum beat of drops on my roof
Bright light and sharp crack

—
That’s it for this round of poetry hour! We didn’t have a chance to get to sonnets during this first session, so we will tackle them in another stream.

If my little doodles inspired you to try your hand at any of these poetry forms, please drop the results in the comments – I’d love to read them!

Incidentally, I streamed the creation of this post in case you want to watch it come together!