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This is my playground for poetry written for children with ideas and inspiration for writing your own poems. Come on in. Sit for a spell, have a cup of words to swirl around and make your own cup of poetry. I'm so glad you are here. I hope you'll find the Kingdom of Poetry a fun place to be.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

WORKING WITH RHYTHM

     On yesterday's post of my poem SNAKE SNACKS I mentioned that the meter was off in a few places.  I said I'd show you a nifty way to work on that.  Does your computer have a spread sheet program?  If not you can make yourself a grid sheet of boxes like a spread sheet.  Use one row of the grid for each line of your poem.  Put the un-accented syllables in lower case and the accented words in UPPER CASE.  This will quickly let you see if you are forcing any of the words into unusual accents and you'll see if your line lengths are uniform.  It also makes it a lot easier to count the metrical feet in each line.

Here is what I did using the spread sheet with my poem.  See where the problems are?  Then once you can see the problems, it is a lot easier to fix them.


my PET snake if this is an iambic line snake is unaccented.


i CALL him DRAKE IAMBIC

he LIKES to EAT my SNACKS. iambic







he EATS my CHEESE See how this line matches line2?

he EATS my NUTS


he EATS all



my PEA nut BUTT er CRACK ers.







my SNACKS he SAYS


are de LISH us See the problem?

lip SMACK ers




So your challenge for today is to take one of your poems and try putting it into a spread sheet.  If this sounds like too much trouble for a Sunday, write a poem instead and save this idea for another day.  But I must say it is fun to put the words into the little boxes.  Sooner or later you have got to try it.

3 comments:

  1. Dear Joy,
    This is awesome. Thank you very much for your chart. It helps me see the rhythm! You're great!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for joining in Poetry Friday!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joy,
    Tools for poetry--I need 'em. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete