Shape Poetry

Shape poetry
This poetry can be fun to put on paper; it relies more on the visual rather than the audio aspect of poetry.  Also called concrete poetry, it developed in the 1950s among both Swiss and Swedish Modern artists who used one word over and over again, arranged on the page to create suggestive patterns or specific shapes. A more popular form of shape poetry is simply a “regular” poem arranged on the page to create a shape that adds to the meaning or illustrates the subject of the poem.  It can be as simple or as complex as you like; for example, a poem about a fish would be printed on the paper to form the shape of a fish.  One way to do this is to draw the outline of the subject of your poem and then fill it in with the poem’s words; you may find that you need to substitute shorter or longer words in some places to maintain the shape of the poem.

Another version of shape poetry involves arranging the words on the paper to suggest the object or action described, rather than making a specific shape.  For example, the words in a poem about the wind might “blow” or scatter across the page, while a poem about roller coasters might loop, spiral, or form hills. This type of poetry can be fun to make, but may require a little more effort to read.
In the following poem, the author suggests the action of the subject (a snowflake falling) by the position of the letters in his poem, even though it breaks the traditional rules of word division.

one

one

t
hi
s

snowflake

(a
  li
    ght
  in
g) 

is upon a gra

v
es
t 

one

-e.e.cummings

For obvious reasons, sometimes this type of poetry is best written by hand!