In Your Own Words | The Kingston Poetry Project
Kingston is a very creative city and local residents are invited to submit short poems to be published as part of In Your Own Words: The Kingston Poetry Project.
Residents can pick between four different forms of short poetry: haiku, couplet, free verse or Twitter poem.
You can submit your poem online now. Twitter users can send poems as tweets to @kingstonmuseums.
Some definitions and examples have been provided below. Participants submitting their poems through our online form can select the colors in which they'd prefer to see their poem if printed. Be creative!
Submissions will be reviewed and selected by the Poet Laureate for publication and public presentation.
Note: As shown in the examples below, the project is looking for short poems — they may have to fit on a poster or sign! Entries sent as tweets will be 123 characters or less (due to Twitter's 140-character limit and the need to include the @kingstonmuseums reply text). When using the online form, let the space available for typing your poem be a rough guide to its maximum length.
Poetry-Writing Inspiration
Start by picking one of the following forms of poetry:
- Haiku
- Couplet
- Free Verse
- Twitter Poem
Haiku
A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five.
Example:
Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)
Couplet
A unit of verse consisting of two successive lines, usually rhyming and having the same meter and often forming a complete thought.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee
End of Sonnet XVIII
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Free Verse
Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Fog, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Twitter Poem
A Poem written within Twitter's text limit of 140 characters.
Teeny tiny poem/just enuf 2hold/1 xllent big word/Impluvium/open-eyed courtyrd/collectng rain/as all poems do/ skylife, open/birds do:/ tweet
Elizabeth Alexander
