Graceyn Kitchel

There are three main structures of poems — haiku, free verse and limerick.

In this column, I will show examples of each type and explain tips and tricks on how to write your own.

Haikus follow the pattern of five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. If you don’t know what a syllable is or how to count them, simply clap your hand to the beat of the words. For instance, the word “one” is one syllable, but the word “radio” is three syllables.

You can divide the word like this — ra-di-o, clap, clap, clap.

Simply put:

You start with five beats

Then seven more come after,

Five syllables end

Clap along to the beat as you say the words out loud and see if you can hear the rhythm to them.

The second type of poem is free verse. This is exactly what it sounds like — any topic with any format that you would like to write about.

I like to start with a word or phrase I find interesting and then add onto it in any way I see fit. There is not really a good way to explain how to do this, as most of the time I think of free-style poems in the middle of the night and write them down really quickly before I forget, then add onto them and edit them in the morning.

The best advice I think is to not stress about the format or spelling until you like how it sounds, so you can focus on the poem, not the technicalities.

Change is coming!

Don’t you see it? Far away yet — painfully close.

Remember the days when everything was so simple? When the big thing

was to make sure whether your friend could play?

Alas … or maybe not, change is coming.

You can see that the spacing I put in might not be grammatically correct or make sense in somebody else’s eyes, but to me, it makes sense, and that is what matters. When making a poem, you should NEVER think about or even consider what other people might be considering.

A limerick, simply put, is a five-line, often nonsensical poem following this pattern — AABBA. This is when you take the first, second and fifth lines and have them be longer, but make sure they all rhyme together.

Then write the third and fourth lines. Make sure to have these lines rhyming with each other but not with the first, second and fifth lines.

Then put them all together, and there you have it, a limerick! I suggest you make a limerick this way — first, find a common topic. This can be anything at all, just make sure it is broad enough to have enough to make a story out of, for instance, it would be harder to make a limerick about a specific way of brushing one’s hair, not impossible, but hard.

Once you know what you are going to write about, you can write two lines about that topic. Just make sure they rhyme! These first two lines represent the “AA” in the AABBA format. Then, using the same topic, write two more lines related to the same topic. They do not have to directly correspond to the topic, though it is OK to have them correspond more loosely, which will confuse the audience and also add some fun to the poem, because, as I said earlier, limericks tend to be nonsensical rather than sensible.

Finally, you pull out your “AA” lines and write a third line that rhymes with these two lines. This represents the last “A” in the AABBA format. Then smoosh it all together, and voila, you have a limerick!

One thing to make sure of is that it is in the correct format, otherwise it will not be a limerick. If it helps, you can write each line on a different scrap of paper and do it that way or just label as you go; you wouldn’t want to accidentally have an ABAAB format if you were trying to write a limerick! Here is an example of one of my limericks:

Leaves are pretty cool, I think.

Yep. They even look awesome above my sink!

Hanging up there as the sun comes in.

I like to watch them as my siblings make a din …

Leaves can be red, yellow or orange. But I personally think they would look better in pink.

Don’t be afraid if you think your limerick sounds weird; they all do! That is just how they are supposed to sound — funny, quirky, and cool.

Poems are a cool and unique way of expressing thoughts, feelings or experiences. I personally think that everybody should write at least one poem in their lifetime, because I think it is good to have the experience of words coming in many different forms.

Graceyn Kitchel is a teen-ager residing in Marquette. Graceyn loves to cook, practice martial arts, and of course, write poems.