Micropoetry - A New Version of an Ancient Artform

It feels like the Universe is trying to tell me something right now. I haven't read or spoken about poetry for years but recently the subject has cropped up several times. I was talking to a colleague and she mentioned her own poetry. Within days of that conversation, I was sorting out some of my accumulated junk and I found an old notebook, full of my teenage poems.

I wrote a lot of poems as a teenager, many of them love lost or teenage angst type sentiments but that doesn't take away the hours I spent, crafting and searching for the perfect words to express my emotions at the time. 

Then earlier this week, I stumbled over more poetry on Twitter which has kind of caught my imagination. Someone retweeted a micropoem which prompted me to search the hashtag #micropoetry. I found hundreds of micropoems, all within the 140 character limit of a tweet and some of them really resonated with me.

Not all micropoems are 140 characters though, there's also a 160 character version which fits on SMS messages and gives just a smidge more leeway. I'm not very good at abbreviating my thoughts for Twitter anyway so 160 characters suits me even better!

I've caught myself thinking of two or three lines or phrases that are just crying out to be some form of poetry so here's the first two micropoems, straight from my fingertips!

And I was Freed

That night we danced from dusk til dawn,

etched on my mind for ever more.

Like a master, playing my puppet strings

you taught me to dance til my soul grew wings.

Dance

My own drums

My own dance

The world doesn't hear

Or understand my fear

so I dance, just dance

I did a search for the context of micropoetry - to see if there were rules or structures that were more acceptable than others and I found a whole website, Micropoetry.com, dedicated to all forms of short poems. I've signed up, just to have a place to put my mini 'masterpieces' without flooding this blog with them.

One I particularly felt, I retweeted myself and have included below - beautiful emotion caught in fewer than 140 characters - it always amazes me how so few words can touch so deep. She captures so much feeling in her work, I spent an hour just reading her Twitter feed!

There was just

a little too much

blue in her mood

to let her smile

like she wanted to

(@stormbenedict)

Image © Grace Chan on Flickr under Creative Commons

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