Cinquains

Yesterday in our poetry class one of the things we looked at was a form called a cinquain, which is a short five line stanza with a syllable pattern that goes 2,4,6,8,2 - so really very short!

Our tutor went through what sort of thing each line should contain -
2 an image/thing
4 describes/qualifies
6 action
8 feeling
2 concludes/refers back

I have found that these are really great fun to write and have been obsessively counting syllables on my fingers. I even woke up this morning thinking 'that's a good idea' (I rarely do that for poetry...). Cinquains were originally invented by someone called Adelaide Crapsley (seriously, go check out cinquain.org for more info) and are really fun.

Here's the one I wrote in class yesterday, we had to start with a place and the person next to us had to give us a last line.

Outhouse
Impossibly cold
Forgotten and abandoned
Walls falling in and the door
Locked up.

Off to write some more cinquains now...