Idea Garage Sale: A Game of Poems

Happy National Poetry Month!

I long ago gave up trying to write poetry because of the universal criticism from knowledgeable people that I could never get it to scan right. I think this is a function of my accent, which is an amalgam of Midwestern and Southwestern that has the emphasis hopping all around a sentence in ways that aforementioned knowledgeable people (whose sense of scansion is tied to the way academics speak on the coasts) don't hear properly at all. The stresses all seem to land fine to me. But the rhythms of my prose work better for my purposes than trying to tell stories or convey ideas or information in verse, so I have stopped consciously trying and only now commit the occasional lyric outburst in the course of some other pursuit. These are generally songs, which the reader can assume has a tune which will fix the scansion problem.

It is not a bad exercise, however, to read a poem a day, or to block out April or some other time as an occasion to write one a day, to keep the wheels properly lubricated and season the labor of turning an idea into a Work with some play. You don't have to show them to anybody, after all, and it's not as if making a living with poetry is a thing these days, so the pressure is off!

It's especially fun to play with poetic forms. A sonnet or villanelle is as much a puzzle as a poem, when you're writing it; and formal poetry can be read as a kind of game in which the reader is catching and the poet is trying to fake her out with a curve ball and surprise her in spite of her knowing roughly what to expect.

In that spirit, why not get out your polyhedral dice and inspire yourself with this random table of poetic forms and topics? Roll d20 once to get the form from the first table, and a second time to get the subject! If you roll an unfamiliar form, you can find the definition at The Poet's Garrett; which you can also use to make your own random form generator.

If you don't have a d20, you might want to rethink your life and priorities; but in the meantime, you can use an online random number generator to simulate dice rolling in a much less viscerally satisfying way.

Poetic Forms:
1. Ballad
2. Blues Sonnet
3. English Sonnet
4. Haiku
5. Heroic Couplet
6. Common measure
7. Hymn
8. Limerick
9. Muzdawwidj
10. Ode
11. Rondeau
12. Sapphic Stanza
13. Saraband
14. Sestet
15. Spenserian Stanza
16. Spanish Quatrain
17. Than Bauk
18. Triolet
19. Villanelle
20. Zani La Rhyme

Poetic Subjects:
1. Cats
2. Death
3. Spring
4. Social Media
5. Childhood
6. Winter
7. Parenthood
8. Dogs
9. Birth
10. Flowers
11. Snow
12. Food
13. The First Thing You See After You Turn Around Three Times
14. Eros
15. God
16. Extinct Species
17. Science
18. Geography
19. Agape
20. Roll twice and cover both subjects. Yes, if you roll double twenties you should roll another two times and have four subjects! Why not?

And if you feel like posting the results in the comments, I have no objection at all!