Marcus Ewert has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details.
Send
your poem to TodaysLittleDitty (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the contact
form in the sidebar to the right. All contributions will be included in
a wrap-up celebration on Friday, October 30th, and one lucky
participant will win an autographed copy of his fabulous new picture book:
Marcus Ewert has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details.
Send
your poem to TodaysLittleDitty (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the contact
form in the sidebar to the right. All contributions will be included in
a wrap-up celebration on Friday, October 30th, and one lucky
participant will win an autographed copy of his fabulous new picture book:
Marcus Ewert has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details.
Send
your poem to TodaysLittleDitty (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the contact
form in the sidebar to the right. All contributions will be included in
a wrap-up celebration on Friday, October 30th, and one lucky
participant will win an autographed copy of his fabulous new picture book:
And Rebecca should know, because she has a fun picture book out this year with illustrator Steven Henry calledIt's Raining Bats & Frogs (Feiwel and Friends, 2015).
Rest assured, the bats in this story are relatively harmless. Just look at the adorable front cover!
A little witch named Delia has been looking forward all year to flying
in the annual Witch Parade. When the rumors of rain come true and the
other witches start complaining, Delia takes action. Using her best
magic, Delia changes the rain to cats and dogs. At first this goes over
quite well, but she quickly realizes the animals cause a few issues. She
must change the rain again! This time to hats and clogs. And finally,
she tries bats and frogs. But each new type of rain brings its own set
of problems. How will Delia save the day?
You, too, can save the day by sharing this delightful picture book with all the little trick-or-treaters in your life!
And speaking of treats... Gayle Krause is interviewing main character Delia Witch (and her author, Rebecca) today at The Storyteller's Scroll.
Many thanks to Rebecca for brewing up some storytelling magic for Limerick Alley!
Rebecca Colby is an award-winning picture book author and poet. Her books include: It’s Raining Bats & Frogs (Feiwel & Friends, 2015), There was a Wee Lassie who Swallowed a Midgie (Floris Picture Kelpies, 2014), and the forthcoming Motor Goose (Feiwel & Friends, 2017).
Before writing for children, Rebecca inspected pantyhose, taught English in Taiwan, worked for a Russian comedian, and traveled the world as a tour director. Learn more about Rebecca and her books (including free teacher's resource guides) at www.rebeccacolbybooks.com.
Have you been thinking about the poem you might write for Marcus Ewert's DMC challenge? I'm looking for a few more to share as daily ditties. Marcus has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details. Featured this week were poems by Tabatha Yeatts and Jessica Bigi.
Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has today's Poetry Friday roundup at The Poem Farm.
I could hardly wait in the summer for the bookmobile to stop on my street. I loved listening to stories being told. Then once, on Christmas, I got some books. I wasn’t sure why all the words looped around my breath. Jumbles of traffic jams flipping forward and backward as if diving into oceans of alphabet soup. Letters jumping rope all over the pages. At times I couldn’t even write the words without them tangling like balls of yarn. One sentence, an hour-long highway of loops and zagging words. OH, the stories I could write and tell, but I had wondered if books love me. Until, at thirty-three, I read some poems. At first they seemed to laugh out nonsense letters till my breath sounded them out into perfect rhymes. Rhyme skipped rope into stories and without a doubt, I finally knew, books love me too.
Marcus Ewert has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details.
Send
your poem to TodaysLittleDitty (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the contact
form in the sidebar to the right. All contributions will be included in
a wrap-up celebration on Friday, October 30th, and one lucky
participant will win an autographed copy of his fabulous new picture book:
Marcus Ewert has challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details.
Send
your poem to TodaysLittleDitty (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the contact
form in the sidebar to the right. All contributions will be included in
a wrap-up celebration on Friday, October 30th, and one lucky
participant will win an autographed copy of his fabulous new picture book:
Trail weary from chasing down Rhyme Crime desperados and haulin’ em off to the hoosegow, you slip through the doors of the Tanglefoot Saloon. But before you can sidle up the bar and order a tall cool one, a flicker of something soft and slippery catches your eye.
Dagnabit. It’s Singsong Sal, come to spoil your poetry.
Singsong Sal isn’t a hardened criminal, not like those other pesky polecats we’ve been arresting. She doesn’t break the rules of rhyme but she’s trouble all the same. She can take your rhyme and turn it into such a monotonous misery that any editor worth her salt will run for the hills.
Time to change it up, quick!
If you’ve been following along with our Rhyme Crime articles, chances are you’re feeling pretty good about your rhyme right now. You’ve got the meter solid as a rock, you haven’t let weasel words sneak in and there’s not a close rhyme in sight. It’s clap along, tap along perfection.
And that might just be a little TOO perfect.
Remember those long epic poems you read in high school or college – that went on and on in the same unvarying cadence?
On the shores of Gitche Gumee, Of the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood Nokomis, the old woman, Pointing with her finger westward, O'er the water pointing westward, To the purple clouds of sunset...
Excerpt from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" (Read the rest here.)
I’ll confess I never made it past three or four stanzas. My apologies to all those who were Hiawatha fans. It wasn’t what Longfellow was saying, I love Native American legends to this day. It was how he was saying it, that droning tick tock sameness. When a verse, even the best poetry, marches along in lockstep, never varying – it can fall from smooth right into …
That’s the last thing we want an editor to do. So let’s take a look at a few cures if your verse has the Singsong Sal blues.
Give your verses a dancing partner:
Try the “verse – chorus” two-step.
Ah, the magic of a repeated chorus – the part of the song we actually know all the words to, when everyone chimes in. It can be as simple as a phrase or a couplet. It doesn’t even have to rhyme. (GASP!!) What a chorus can’t be is the exact same line length and rhythm of your verses.
Here’s an example from the great Shel Silverstein, just in time for the Halloween season:
Down in Lou´siana where the black trees grow Lives a voodoo lady named Marie Laveaux. She’s got a black cat tooth and a mojo bone, And anyone wouldn´t leave her alone.
She goes GREEEEEEEEEEEE... Another man done gone.
She lives in a swamp in a hollow log With a one-eyed snake and a three-legged dog. She’s got a bent bony body and stringy hair, And if she ever sees you messin´ around there,
Shel uses just seven words and or six words and one shriek, and snap! He’s avoided the singsong repetition and he gets audience participation, whether they’re singing along (yes, you can find it on YouTube) or young readers are shouting it out. The structure is basic and predictable, but in an entertaining, engaging way.
Sometimes it takes a bit more than just a phrase to keep the story flowing. Maybe you need a regular four or six line chorus. Don’t let that worry you. It’s the change in reading rhythm that matters. And while you’re dancing those verses around, remember you’re not limited to the two step.
You can vary it to a cha-cha:
Verse-verse-chorus. Verse-verse-chorus.
Like this fun old gospel tune:
Down in the town where I was born there was a haunted house and all the folks that passed that way would creep by, like a mouse.
Now Cap’n John who owned that house had died some years before. but neighbors claimed they’d seen him there still standing in the door.
That old house is ha’nted. Folks take it for granted. If you’re down in that part of town don’t you go near that house!
Soon every night the strangest sounds would come from out that way. Those ghosts would carry on all night ‘til roosters crowed for day.
Old Deacon Brown was bold and brave at least that’s what he said. He’d often claimed he’d liked to talk and mingle with the dead.
That old house is ha’nted. Folks take it for granted. If you’re down in that part of town don’t you go near that house!
A prize was offered to the man He might be black or white Who’d stay there in the cap’n house So folks could sleep at night
Deacon Brown was bold, he said, And so he promised us That he would stay out there a week And stop that spectral fuss
Excerpt from "That Ole House is Ha’nted" by Jester Hairston
It’s up to you how often you break up the verses, and how long the chorus lasts. The choices are endless and there are no rules. Well, there is one rule, and Louis says it best:
Let your caboose loose.
Maybe you’re a rebel. You need to spice up that rhyme, but anything as traditional as verse-chorus is NOT for you. Great! Break out of the mold and try something surprising. How about a single line refrain that comes FIRST in each stanza?
I was a teenage creature. I was a junior wolfman, at night there’s a werewolf moon. Come and hold my hairy hand down at the black lagoon.
I was a teenage creature. I’m covered with a lizard scale. I’ve got to cut a hole in my jeans to wag my slimy tail.
I was a teenage creature I was a teenage vampire, a rock and rolling ghoul. Won’t you let a Dracula walk you home from school?
Excerpt from "Teenage Creature" by Lord Luther Music & Lyrics by Ric Masten, Don Stevens Les Cangas Music Publishing, 1958
It’s quirky, but it works. Maybe it works because it’s quirky – you be the judge.
Shake an extra leg:
Change your verse to use nonstandard stanzas.
This solution takes a bit more work, but it can have some startlingly good results. An unexpected stanza structure might seem a bit unbalanced at first, but that’s precisely the point. It keeps your reader from falling into a samey-samey sleepwalk. Take a risk and shorten one line, lengthen one line or even add a line at the end to make a five line stanza. See what it does for the offbeat flavor of this H.P. Lovecraft poem:
The steeples are white in the wild moonlight, And the trees have a silver glare; Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly, And the harpies of upper air, That flutter and laugh and stare.
For the village dead to the moon outspread Never shone in the sunset's gleam, But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep Where the rivers of madness stream Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.
Excerpt from H.P. Lovecraft's "Hallowe’en in a Suburb" (Read the rest here.)
The odd structure adds to the weird feeling the poem evokes, in my opinion. It might not be the right choice for a different topic, but that’s where your writer’s instinct comes in.
There are so many options and so little time to try them all. I’m sorry to say there’s no short cut, the one easy-peasy recipe for this step. You have to feel the rhythm of your story as a whole and tweak it in just the right spots. Sometimes you’ll get your rhyme out on the dance floor and bust a move. Other times you’ll tweak something and bust a leg instead. That’s why we call her slippery Singsong Sal. Getting her to vamoose can feel like one step forward, two steps back.
It’s a little like a cha-cha – or a do-si-do – don’t you think? And on that note, I’ll leave you with a bit of Bugs Bunny square dance inspiration. Thanks for joining me on another Rhyme Crime Investigation. Now get out there and get your verses dancing!
Thanks, Carrie!
(Just so long as I do-si-don't land myself in Rhyme Crime incarceration.)
Carrie Clickard is an internationally published author
and poet whose career also spans graphic design, illustration and
film. Her first picture book, VICTRICIA MALICIA, debuted in 2012 from
Flashlight Press. Forthcoming books are MAGIC FOR SALE (Holiday House, 2016) and THOMAS JEFFERSON & THE MAMMOTH HUNT (Simon and Schuster, 2017). Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous
anthologies and periodicals including Spider, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Clubhouse, Spellbound, Penumbra, Haiku of the Dead, Underneath the Juniper Tree, Inchoate Echoes, and The Brisling Tide.
In case you missed last week's spotlight interview with Marcus Ewert, he's challenged us to write love poems this month– about relationships that seem unrequited, but which end up being requited after all. Click HERE for more details. Featured this week were poems by Janie Lazo, B.J. Lee, and my daughter Miranda.
