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  • Clerihew
  • Four lines, two rhyming couplets. The first line is the name of a person. The rhymes and the line lengths are allowed to be - supposed to be, even - a bit rubbish.
  • Golden shovels
  • A golden shovel takes another poet's poem (or extract) and uses its words as the end words of the lines of a new poem. So if you read down the right-hand side, just the last word of each line, of the golden shovel, you will be reading the poem that inspired it. The golden shovel expands, develops or even changes the meaning of the original.
  • Haiku
  • First: five syllables Next line: seven syllables Last: five syllablesThere are some other rules too, but I'm ignoring them.
  • Limericks
  • Five-line poems, usually funny or light-hearted; the first, second and fifth lines rhyme with each other; the third and fourth lines also rhyme with each other, and are shorter.
  • Pantoums
  • A form of poetry comprised of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza being repeated as the first and third of the next, until the last stanza, where the second and fourth lines are the third and first lines of the first stanza. Got that? Good.
  • Sonnets
  • Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. The two most usual rhyme schemes are ababcdcd-efefgg (English/Shakespearean) and abbaabba-cdecde or abbaabba-cdcdcd (Italian/Petrarchan). The move from the first eight lines (the octave) to the remaining six lines (the sestet) often sees a turn in the poem's theme or 'argument'. Plus some fourteen-liners that are not strictly sonnets.
  • Triolet
  • Eight lines. The first and second lines repeat as the seventh and last lines, and the first line also repeats as the fourth line. The rhyme scheme is  ABaAabAB, capital letters representing the repeated lines.

Trickle-Down Economics

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Give handouts to the City not the town Award the top the most, the bottom least and in the end, the wealth will trickle down So feed the finest to the howling hound The sparrow pecks the droppings of the … Read more

Villanelle: A Step or Two

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Autumn falls and storm clouds brew The post each day brings season’s chill The queue moves on a step or two The last demand is overdue It stands unopened on the sill As autumn falls and storm clouds brew They … Read more

End of the Line

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Walk down locked and empty streets alone, arrive for start of shift, it’s bear-the-brunt time to serve some others’ families not your own Going from the home front to the frontline Frozen pay, now tiny, ice-cold ‘offers’, red-bordered bills alert … Read more

Clerihew: Andrew Haines

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Andrew Haines carefully explains That his £593,000 pay is not a perk – He really is worth twenty of the people who do the actual work — *Chief Executive Officer of Network Rail

Clerihew: Jeremy Westlake

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Jeremy Westlake has the second best take He’s in charge of the cash and makes sure he gets a big stash

Fallen Idol

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after Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley   I met a bruised and smiling activist, elated, vindicated in their deed, who’d tossed into the harbour’s swell at Bristol the form of Portland stone to fishes feed Of one whose eight-foot statue’d … Read more

Us and Them

Peterloo monument, Manchester

A golden shovel based on the final stanza of The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley. They hold us down but still we rise, deference dies, we bite them down to size. Like Jayaben roars, we are the lions, … Read more