How To Be a Renaissance Sparkler, Part 3: Poetry

This is the third in a series of posts that will basically make you perfect at everything by the end of the summer. Or show you how to fake being perfect. Whichever.

Today's Topic: (Writing) Poetry.

Q: So what's this "poetry" all the attractive celebrities are talking about?
A: Well, for thousands of years, poetry was the art of telling long, rambling stories—usually about sex, monsters, or sexy monsters—in dactylic hexameter or...whatever.

Then, for a while, it was about comparing women to everything in sight until these women gave up and agreed to make out with the poets. These days, poetry is the art of doing essentially whatever you want, as long as you use words, even if they are fake.

Q: Then modern poetry has no rules?
A: Poetry is like fine dining—there aren't exactly rules, but if you dunk your face in the soup and start blowing bubbles, you are not going to fit in very well.

Q. What?
A: Nevermind. Here are some tips to help you get started as a poet...
Poetry Guidelines/Getting Started

1. Go sit down in the least distracting place you can find, like a zen garden or pillow fort. Maybe crawl into your attic's haunted crawlspace. Cover a beanbag chair in torn-out pages of poetry. Any place with no internet is ideal.

2. Decide on a theme or subject. It should be something you actually care and know about. Most poetry is about relationships, meaning, tragedy, and sometimes bees. Very little poetry is about solving quadratic equations or fighting moon aliens.

3. Approach your subject creatively, with imagery and metaphor. Creative language is important, which is why you rarely see poems that are straightforward, like, "My love is like a carbon-based organism,/With whom I want to produce more humans!"

4. Add line breaks
Anything will sound more
poetic
If you just throw in some
unexpected
line
breaks.

Poetic Forms
A lot of contemporary poetry is just Charles Bukowski sitting alone in an empty room and being sad in free verse. We're going to bring up some specific forms anyway, because we think rhyming and counting syllables are neat, which is probably why we rarely go on dates.

Sonnets
Poetry has been tackling relationship issues ever since Gilgamesh ditched Ishtar so he could go hang out with his friends and then Ishtar blew up a city. Two things have changed since then: Babylonian goddesses rarely murder us anymore, and we've invented sonnets, the ideal smoochy poetic form. Shakespearean sonnets use an ABAB rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter, which we have pointlessly illustrated below. The other big form is the Petrarchan sonnet, but who cares about Francesco Petraca? Probably just his mom.

Limericks
Popularized in something called the Book of Nonsense, limericks are basically just filthy jokes about Irish girls from easily-rhymed towns. If you know any stories about people from Kilkenny, preferably ones that involve pennies, you've pretty much already written a limerick.

Haiku
Thoughtful syllables.
(With seven in the middle.)
We all know haiku.

So many haiku!
We cannot improve on them.
Life is illusion.

Faking It
Honestly, few people are going to point out that your iambic pentameter is imperfect. Besides, you can tape "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/No! We're broken up" to someone's locker and still get your point across.

What's your favorite poem or type of poem?

Related Post: How to Be a Renaissance Sparkler, Part 2: Art