Long Thin Poem

If you change the shape of how you write, it can change the way you think and it can change the effect that the poem has on the way you read it and the way that other people read it.

One way to do this, is to try writing something with one word per line.

Now you can do this with any piece of writing but let’s think for a moment about what might be the best kind of writing for putting one word at a time below each other on a page?

Maybe it would be something that goes slowly step by step? So that might be describing yourself walking along somewhere.

Or it could be you thinking slowly about something.

Or it could be doing something very carefully and slowly.

Or it could be you trying to figure something out, step by step, perhaps trying to figure out what happened, or how something works.

Here’s me imagining that I’m talking very slowly about a nice snack I had. Perhaps I’m talking to my wife or my children. Sometimes when we talk to people in our family we say things that are very, very ordinary. The fun of writing them down like this is that somehow or another, the ordinariness becomes more strange or important. When you read it out loud, you can read it very slowly as if you’re saying something very serious and very important.

That’s what’s known as ‘ironic contrast’ – the contrast between being very ordinary and sounding very serious.

So here’s mine:

I
had
a
chocolate
hob
nob.
Two
actually.
I had
two
chocolate
hob
nobs.
The
second
chocolate
hob
nob
was
as
good
as
the
first
chocolate
hob
nob.
If
not
better.

Why don’t you have a try at writing like that?

Experiment with it and see what it sounds like!