I swate the lorft that clutes atwain,
And swaves asheggle glem,
Mol rabs are stengled, also bein,
Fadanse when stav be yem.

Why gonze before the nith of jee?
Retrop and zeise a pin,
Decast of wozen sippestry!
So poetrate agin.

For some insane reason, I've written something. I've even pushed the Submit button.

Why does this happen? No one knows.

I don't really know a lot about the long-form variants of haikus, but what I can say is that I really like the back-and-forth feeling that this one builds up. From 'dull monotony', to 'ansty', to 'maybe I'll go fish', there's a real sense of a lazy, spiraling train of thought that does a good job of evoking the doldrums of summer.

If I had to lay some critique, I'd say that I was initially a little confused on how the mood of these worked. To what I understand, haikus usually have some kind of revelation or 'cutting' aspect in their third lines, but here, it's less about new insight and more about building the mood. Not necessarily bad at all, but worth noting, I guess.

Thanks for entering!

I really like the sense of structure and rhythm this has. Even without a rhyme scheme, it reads easily out loud and feels like it calls back to itself with its beat. I'm not 100% sure what's going on in the meaning of the words, but based on mouth-feel alone, I think this is probably one of my favorites from this round.

One itty-bitty nitpick: to my knowledge, you're not supposed to read line breaks without punctuation with full pauses. Since the piece is clearly organized at the line-level, I'd suggest some line-ending commas and periods (at least in the first stanza) to signal how important the rhythm is.

Thanks for entering!

I'm usually not a big fan of meta stuff, but I ended up enjoying the subject matter of this one quite a bit. So, kudos for that!

Well, I think that I need to admit that I had quite a bit of trouble parsing the first stanza. All of your lines are about 10 syllables, but outside of that, I couldn't find a prevailing beat pattern, so there's not much of a feeling of structure.

By the time the second stanza comes around, the poem really starts coming into its own, with the alternating beat/stress pattern between the lines. It's satisfying to read, both silently and out loud. So you definitely do end things off on a high note!

Thanks for entering!

I really liked your creative use of uncommon/unexpected words to form the imagery, here. The ideas really pop out of the text and engrave themselves in my head in a way that no other entry this contest manages to do. So, really well done with that.

Now, feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but I'm the kind of person who thinks that poetry should always have some kind of structure in it, even free verse. But with this piece, it's difficult to parse out a pattern or repetition. IMO, a poem almost should teach a reader how to read it, by setting up expectations through meter, repetitions, parallelisms, or some other way, even if you're not using rhyme. The fact that I can't really get myself into a flow (either spoken out loud or read silently) kind of hurts my overall enjoyment. I hope that kinda makes sense.

Thanks for entering!

This is… clever. There's some gritty aftertaste in my mouth because of the syllabic ambiguity with the “-eal” ending; if you read those as disyllabic then you get a straightforward iambic pentameter, but that feels like a sour stretch in a way that the “assurèd” doesn't. “squander out” also feels like an awkward stretch-out; I don't think I've ever seen that phrasal verb before, and “squander” already has the implication of dispersion.

I admit the sentiment expressed is one I've felt before. On occasions when tides of free verse swing through places of poetry, I tend to get a slight sinking feeling and have to put in more effort to read them fairly. I'm reminded of having encountered people who have a distaste for seafood because they could never get it fresh enough—in less constrained verse taken as verse, everything else has to shine and cohere even more to avoid the whole thing collapsing.

The imagery and tone come through quite well, with the back-and-forth of conceptual conflict and what feels like the stock cantankerous viewpoint character throwing down versus the upstarts to keep them from getting too full of themselves.

I see what you did with the acrostic, and also the self-referential allusion both from that and from the first stanza to cheekily hiding the rhymes mid-line. In fact, it's almost too cheeky for me, but only almost, which helps push this toward the upper side of my slate this round.

>>Bachiavellian
Can I just say I love that you talk about mouthfeel at all? Because that's what it's like for me too—in general, not referring to this particular piece. It's probably why I make so many food and taste analogies when describing my reactions, even with prose…

Ha!

Self-fulfilling prophecy for my slate as such, but not without a chuckle.

Is this what renku is like?

Very atmospheric triptych, managing to cohere through the simplicity. Three presentations of either the same event or similar events, but with one element (the weather) and its effects changing, leaving it ambiguous whether they're part of the same day, spread across multiple years, spread across alternate imaginations…

And the fish at the end feels like it ties the clouds and rain in with other parts of the water cycle, giving a delicious glimpse of expanded perspective.

I think this is my favorite this round. I wouldn't have expected it to be, based on the past quality of surface-similar works, and I think that only makes it more my favorite.

(Pokémon!)
It's killer bee
You know it's my bourgeoisie
…
A heart fish glue
Our courage will stomach flu
You teach me, and I'll ooze through
Genghis Khan!
Gotta lemon ball!

Source: unknown author on Tumblr, repeated from memory; sadly, I think I lost the original link years ago…

Anyway, I don't know. Scattered thoughts:

* The chaining gimmick took me a reread to work out.
* I'm a little concerned about what might be paired with “horse”. “force”? “Morse”?
* The second line sticks one appendage over the rating boundary and waves it, and that makes me uncomfortable in a way that's hard to distinguish from just getting squicked at the attitude implied.
* If “assignment” is meant to go with “alignment”, then that's getting kind of MC Frontalot all of a sudden.
* Is the title a pun referring to the viewpoint character's mental state? But then where's the last part of the word, if so?

That said, it does have a good mouthfeel overall. Mm. There's some gristle in it, like the third syllable of “palatals”, or the H's in “hex-heretic” coming in such quick succession. “goes gasping”: weird wording, not sure whether more or less forgivable for the constraint used being so intense. The participles are on the edge of repetitive.

Is this actually primarily in antibacchic tetrameter? I had to look up what that foot was called.

It's dense. I like the little story, but the word choices are hard to chew sometimes. You have to piece together a number of ambiguous meanings to make some lines work, and the hints at background information are murky and come at you fast.

A few extra points for having the title be modeled after the text.

It's pretty good, but might be another “almost too clever by half” like “If Rhythm Be The Food Of Thought”. I'm on the fence about this one.

Oh, lovely folky casual style with the loose'n'sloppy trochaic/iambic/well, I don't actually know which would dominate in a serious analysis given the amount of optional beginning and ending syllables, but this isn't a serious analysis because I don't think it matters here, the rhythm is like what you'd sell on the sidewalk, this is like a hot dog stand, a hot dog stand in summer, the kind we can't have right now because the world is on fire but a hot dog stand nonetheless, the kind that makes you write comma splices to describe it because that's the sort of lazy structureless day that would contain that kind of hot dog stand. I should probably have waited until after breakfast to write these.

Bonus points for pounding on “American” with a very American hammer until it fit in the car.

This mainly lands as charming, ambiguously self-preening/self-parodying fun to me, ending with a fourth wall crash landing that stops before it can outstay its welcome. It feels like it overplays its hand in trope-y-ness by a few points, but it also leans on the social role of poems rather than falling into “nerds are always alone”, segueing into relationship slice-of-life. That aspect is lukewarm to me if I pause and think about it: I read it as implying a plot arc about a poet finding love and looking back on it, but the elements used don't quite connect up in the whirlwind of images.

That said, part of me is also wary about “writing for an audience of authors” becoming too much of a default, and I wonder why this one troubles me that way when the prompt was actively about writing, and when the other entries that were also about writing didn't get the same emotional reaction from me. I think I have murky worries about the effect of the self-preening interpretation; this specific work doesn't sound like it has its headwords up its own rhyme scheme to me, and the undercurrent of visceral honesty overpowers the “take that, anti-intellectualism!” side note, but there's this mental flag of “would I want to see every entry be like this?” that goes up.

Still, very nice.

Okay, you got me to roll my eyes. Especially that second line; it comes out of the blue just fast enough to amuse. There's also definitely a bit of fun in figuring out what some of the tougher substitutions were meant to be.

Other than that, though, I feel like there's not much else that this piece is trying to do. You've definitely succeeded in making the kind of piece that deliberately throws off its own rhythm, but since the overall payoff of every line is basically the same, the shtick does feel a little worn out by the end.

Thanks for entering!

I like the use of repetitions and word choice that give the flow of the poem a sense of familiarity, despite having no rhyme or meter. It, along with the three line organization, does help give the whole thing a sense of structure.

In terms of emotional payoff, I do have to admit that I'm a little confused about what the takeaway is supposed to be. The decision of the 'blob' to lose weight didn't quite feel impactful to me, maybe because it only has the last line. Or it could be that since the prior descriptions of his life are painted in such a monotonely negative light, the idea that he should lose weight appears almost self-evident.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why I'm kind of bouncing off the payoff here, so I'd definitely be interested in seeing what other reviewers have to say.

Thanks for entering!

Unfortunately, I'll have to reiterate again that meta entries (especially entries about the Writeoff itself) tend not to be my cup of tea. I'm probably a lot more sensitive to it than the average around here, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

In terms of construction, this is a well put-together limerick. I liked your use of the limerick's well-known structure to gently change the emphasis on certain stress syllables, especially in line 3. It helps give the whole thing more of a spoken-word feel.

Thanks for entering!

I like the fact that you went for something that depends so much on its own cadence/flow to carry it, and I do think that the break from rhythm at the end was a nice touch.

But, well, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what >>Light_Striker says about how this piece kind feels pandering. I mean, like, nobody is truly and seriously going to argue that "poems are for wimps", so it kind of feels like the poem is almost patting itself on the head. In the end, the poem comes off a bit cutsey, with the whole sing-song nature and the subject matter.

Thanks for entering!

>>Bachiavellian
I've been more lenient than usual with meta this time because I think the prompt put something of a wrench in it. Most of the time, the prompt gives at least a hint of a topic, but in this case, if you take it as a topic then you're writing about writing from the very beginning. If you want to make it reliably not read as having meta implications, then you have to actively push against that, and doing that kind of detailed stage-setting without bogging down is harder for poetry than for prose. Contrariwise, if you take the prompt as structural, especially with the obvious interpretation of “any format with no rhyme scheme”, then you have much less to start with than you usually do, because that's so broad.

For a one-day event when people have other things to do, that's a lot of extra steering to ask the author to do. This crop of entries reads strangely to me overall, and I think that might be why.

Sadly I think I'll have to throw in the towel on writing anything useful about “Plagued Poem” and “Lose Win Now”. My main issue with both is that I can't seem to interpret them properly, and I'm not sure where to cut the author/reader responsibility cake in either case. And now I'm being pulled by other things and won't have time to get at them again before the finals close.

Sorry! Good luck to both, though, and I'll be interested if there are retrospectives…

Nice sonnet structure without the rhyme, and you've even switched up the meter. It'd be easy to start taking that as female rhyme, but you're not using iambs and it occurs far too frequently. So it took me a minute of awkward fumbling with the rhythm to realize you were using amphibrachs, but with the final syllable trimmed off for the 2nd and 4th lines (or using an iamb for that foot). The wordplay is fun, but I can't quite discern the rules. You repeat opening sounds, but it's not consistent in how. In "I've ironed," you start consecutive words with the same sound, even if one of the words has multiple syllables, but in "barbaric," you're stating consecutive syllables within the same word. I guess it's that you repeat the opening sound for the first two syllables of each foot.

Not only is the form clever, but there's even a narrative behind it, and one that's not too hard to follow. Someone's trying to compose a love letter and getting frustrated with the lack of success.

I think this poem will fall into one of three categories for people. Some won't really care to analyze the structure, so the phrasing will sound odd, but it flows well enough. Some will dislike the amount of work it takes to see what you did. Some will appreciate the amount of work. I fall into that last group. Nicely done. It doesn't feel deep, but it's not really fair to expect poetry always will.

Interesting how you set up each line to have a rhyming word then swapped it out for a synonym. I didn't spend too long thinking about it, but I didn't immediately see what the original word might have been for the last two lines.

Cute, but it's just the gimmick, with no story or meaning behind it. It would be boring if everyone wrote serious pieces, though, so thanks for something funny.

I'm going to agree with >>Light_Striker in that this prompt feels less like inspiration and more like instructions, so it's going to be harder to find any sort of message related to the prompt. You can be meta and refer to the non-rhyming, or you can just avoid rhymes and write whatever. There's really no insight to be had.

Limericks often get mangled in the meter, and this one's no exception, but for a bit of observational humor about the prompt, it's fine. It's also clearly not something the author would have any intention of spiffing up afterward, so there's also not really any critique to be made.

These Japanese forms have some subtle differences that I don't know much about. Everyone here has probably had this happen: call something a haiku and get a paragraph back about why it isn't one. It fits the syllable count, at least.

What I like about this one is the change of attitude. Summer bores the author at first, but once the rain starts and takes away his ability to do something outside, he suddenly wants to, and then once he has the opportunity, he's happy to take it, but still doing an activity that's slow-paced and relaxing. I think that was the right choice, as haiku never feel right when they're very active. They're supposed to be more observational and insightful, so this evolving mindset of the author is nice. It reminds me of how children will have no interest in a particular toy until another kid shows some, then suddenly it's the only thing they want.

The thing with poetry is it's very easy to ascribe a lot more intent to it than the author ever had, so I have no idea how much of the effect was planned and how much was serendipitous, but I love this simple, understated, gradual change from boredom to enjoyment.

I'm more confused by this one. I like the overall mood to it, but there's not enough context to feel like the overweight person has really changed. He makes a decision with someone's help, but we never see what that other person did to convince him. It just seems like the problem solves itself with little struggle, which is never that engrossing, even though the mood of the piece suggests it should be a struggle.

Structurally, the first three stanzas share an opening line with one word swapped out each time. I thought you were going to do something with that, but you don't do it with the other lines, and it stops after the third stanza. It could have been a pretty cool scheme for making a pattern. It's a rather stark one when you did use it, changing "happy" for "sad" right away, but it's hard to get too invested when there's nothing about how that change occurred, other than some obvious things I could presume. The changes would seem to be tied. Note how he's still "overweight" when both happy and sad, so the "bored" gives the immediate context of what changed to make him sad. Yet the problem is clearly still his weight, so it left me with a disconnect.

This one has more of a story than some of the entries. I'd just like a little more about why the story is impactful.

An acrostic, huh? It comes close to having a rhythm, too, but it's never quite there. Until the second stanza, that is. It has a regular rhythm.

The word choices are interesting, but I'm not sure I get the meaning. The first stanza seems to be saying the poet needs things like rhyme and rhythm to help convey meaning, and he struggles against those non-requirements. In the second stanza, where the rhythm does become more formal, I get that he's saying it's too easy to throw away those structural requirements, and it's worth putting in the effort to work within them. I think? It's a poem that took me a couple readings to decide I understood it, but I didn't mind rereading it. Rhythm confinements often cause unusual word choices or phrasings (plus the rhymes in the middle of the lines), and the poet keeps using those even in the first stanza, where it's still relatively formless. Ironically, as the rhythm becomes formal, the rhyme starts to go away. It feels like it's getting pushed later in the lines, until in the last pair, one rhyme is on the final word, and the other is nonexistent, shoved out of the line altogether.

Kind of a devil's advocate or reverse psychology piece, but then you're preaching to the choir, right? Posting that in a poetry round isn't going to convince someone to change their mind, after all.

Still, it's an easy read, with no advanced structure to find or deeper meaning to dig for, no fancy word choice to decide whether it contains a nugget of wisdom or was there just because it sounded unusual. All the intended meaning is clear from the first stanza, so the rest doesn't add anything deeper, it just continues what's a pretty fun tone. It falls under that category of "not difficult to write, but fun to read."

I like the evocative word choices, but the further you push a word out of where it would normally exist, you lose some likelihood that the reader will take it the way you meant. For a couple things here and there, that won't change much, but when the poem is chock full of them, it can create a very different overall image. I feel like I'm a little off with this one, that a couple more of them needed to click into place for me to get the overall effect and know what the poem is actually about. I think it's about a woman in a feverish and delusional state and a husband who's worried about her. I'm not sure about that, though. While i really like the language use, I'm afraid a lot of this just went over my head.

air shimmers, light dance
above clear blue pool
take the dive

cool shock in
splash like flower
wrapped in small words

All alloyed, words worming, pro's prose for form,
Like lights strung strangely by branches, way winds.

Who knows the ends that scattered words evoke?
A bard transcends by climbing rung by rung.
No words are frayed when set within their ranks,
With thoughts arrayed with forces salient.

Chaos, assonance absent,
Prompted breadth of excerpts
Whilst glimpsed depth is spoilt.

What you hear is not a challenge,
I'm seeking for the meter.

The rotund verse seeks hold
Strives to better, seeks to slim down,
Words unwrapping from waist.

When poems are self referential
It's best that the sense is sequential,
With tercets rehearsed
And verses coerced
To enhance their tangential potential.

In each and every round,
I write a coffee ode,
Expressing through the ground
Where brassy brew has flowed.

To author I shall offer
A bracing cup of joe,
And pause now for a breather,
Since none are left to go!

Actual short retrospective coming later if I have time. In the meantime, to answer >>Pascoite first, yes, it's “repeating the initial sound of the first two syllables of each foot”, with some leeway for vowel matching but other than that with the written letters of the sounds being of only secondary concern. Also I'm curious what >>Bachiavellian thinks/thought the narrative was about, since some of it seems to be getting lost in transmission…

I continue to be positively dismal at guessing poets, evidently!

Like this one. Reminded me of this one by Bo Burnham. Not in subject matter, but the way the narrator distances themselves from something they really care about.

Thanks for the reviews. Didn't expect this one to do well, just needed to get the gimmick out of my head. I'd love to see a serious poem with this format, but it's really friggin hard to write like this (especially editing).

Thanks for the reviews, I appreciate it.

>>Pascoite

it's very easy to ascribe a lot more intent to it than the author ever had

I like that about more abstract art, it's really in the eye of the beholder. It's a nice interpretation you've got.

>>Light_Striker
>>Bachiavellian
>>GroaningGreyAgony

I had a theme in mind when writing. Death of the author & all that, but if you're interested, the rain is a metaphor.

>>Light_Striker
Well, from the first stanza, I thought that some kind of witchcraft was going on. But I was pretty lost when it came down to the second and third stanzas. In the end, I just vaguely kind of thought that it was about a love spell or something.

... I can be really bad at reading comprehension sometimes.

Thanks for the reviews, everyone!

Yeah, I really could have done a better job with the meter, here, even with just a little bit more effort. Like, I was reading this the morning after submissions closed, and I noticed two or three places where I could have just instantly made things much better with a couple of substitutions. That's on me; I was being lazy.

Also, I continue to try to unabashedly ape the style of Shel Silverstein.

>>Light_Striker
Thanks for your thoughts!

In terms of the imagery, I was really just trying to capture a bunch of unrelated things in life that could inspire poetry. I originally envisioned each of those stanzas having a reference to a well-known poem, but I kinda gave up after "compared to summers' days" and made things up as I went.

>>Pascoite
Yeah, this really does come off as self-congratulatory, ha. As for it being a simple piece, that's probably another thing I borrow from Silverstein. I tend to like poems that are immediately and easily readable, because I have the attention span of a small child. :P

Thanks for your review!

>>GroaningGreyAgony
It's ironic that this has a more robust rhyme scheme than I bothered to use in the poem, ha. Thanks for leaving your thoughts!

>>Spectral
It must not be coincidence that I watched Bo Burnham's comedy special on Netflix just a little while back. I do like that man's sense of irony/sarcasm. Thank you for the comment!

>>Bachiavellian, >>Pascoite, >>Light_Striker

Plagued Poem

Congrats to Spectral and Light_Striker, and thanks to everyone else for participating. I appreciate the comments!

This one was based on a gimmick, and if the author fails to make the gimmick guessable... well, my bad. I had thought the presence of the words "orange" and "silver" were good hints.

Apart from prepositions, articles, etc., this is composed of words that lack a single-word rhyme in English. Thus, not only does the poem not rhyme, it is also mostly unrhymeable. I drew largely upon this page in composition.

This was to be my fallback piece in case I somehow wasn't able to complete my stealth-rhyming sonnet. It's probably about where it belongs in the results, but my thanks to the person who top-slated it.

>>Bachiavellian, >>Light_Striker, >>Pascoite

If Rhythm Be The Food of Thought

Yes, I was being cheeky with this one; I freely admit that the prompt irritated me. Once I made that passing comment in chat about getting a medal while using rhymes anyway, I really wanted to make it happen. (It seems that Light_Striker was operating on a similar wavelength.)

I'll work on the janky meter in my revision; I was paying too much attention to making the hidden rhymes work.

My thanks to all who helped this little semantic knot to take silver!

>>Bachiavellian
I think that thinking I'm probably getting this sort of thing through when I'm not, in poems, is a weak spot of mine, so it's good feedback when people are unclear on it.

Here's a description of the intended micro-plot with the details as I imagined them. Not all of the details were actually represented in the text at all, in the end, but a lot of them were meant to be at least partially exposed:

* First stanza: Our viewpoint character, a seer/witch-type lady (at least, that's how I imagine her, though she's not explicitly gendered in the text), is finishing a day of duties, proud of what she's accomplished as she looks over having put a lot of text into the “correct” forms.
* Second stanza: The VC's suitor comes to her, to try to reconcile and perhaps win her affection this time after having displeased her before. He's brought a love poem as part of this, but he's not really a sophisticated writer.
* Third stanza: In fact, as it turns out, he's written a poem that rhymes—which she considers to be in very poor taste. In the first stanza, our seer was setting up more individual-phoneme pairs (mirroring the phonetically alliterative form of this poem), and the implied cultural belief and/or actual world behavior is that this is a good form to use for written prophecy or magical text, whereas rhyming lines tend to cause… problems. Those operating within magical tradition are supposed to avoid rhymes completely in their work, which spills over into lay life as a social taboo—it's like farting in church, especially if you're trying to make a personal connection with someone who's much more closely bound to it. Oops.
* Fourth half-stanza and title: So she chews him out for it, throws his poem away, and sends him packing. But she still wants a boyfriend eventually! Just not this loser.

One of the big confusing parts, I think, might've been that I mixed up oracular and spellcasting sorts of tropes without providing enough backup for them being in the same domain…

If and when I enter more poems with little narratives in them, I'm going to have to pay more attention to this and see if there's something about the arrangement of words that's… well, as you saw in my self-review, I think it got murky and obtuse.

Thanks for the feedback!