Improve Your Prose With a Practice Poem

Writing is a mental exercise, the same way calisthenics and sports are physical exercise. Good coaches tell you to vary your routine so your muscles don't stagnate. The same is true of your mind. You develop your mental muscles and increase flexibility by performing different exercises, not merely the same ones over and over. Most likely you won't write poems for work very often, but the exercise of writing them builds mind muscles to increase your proficiency at more prosaic efforts such as memos, papers, technical documents, and articles.

The more structured a poem must be, the better the intellectual exercise. Double dactyls are short, heavily structured poems that make a nice brief, intense workout. I imagine you asking,"What on earth is a double dactyl? It sounds like a winged dinosaur or something." (That's a pterodactyl, by the way.)

A dactyl, you might remember, is a poetic foot with three syllables, accent on the first. "Elephant" is a dactyl. Put two of them together and you have a double dactyl. "Jacqueline Kennedy" is a double dactyl. The double dactyl poem has a lot of double dactyls in it.

Here are the rules:

• The poem has two stanzas, four lines each.
• The first three lines of each stanza must be double dactyls
• The fourth line is a single dactyl plus one beat. ("Something to eat," for example)
• Only the fourth lines rhyme.

So far, so good. But there's more:

• The very first line should be nonsense syllables ("Higgledy Piggledy")
• One of the lines in the first stanza should be someone's (or something's) name. This is the person or thing that the poem is about. (Oh no--a sentence consisting of dactyls!)
• One of the lines in the second stanza should be one word. ("semi-romantically")
• The poem is usually lighthearted.

Let's see if I can write one off the top of my head about pterodactyls

Flappety-flappety
Up in a nest I see
Pterodactylic wings
Big as a house

Then unexpectedly
Aerodynamically
Swoop to the ground below
Grabbing a mouse!

Ok, kind of rough, but my memos feel better already. Get out a notepad and try your hand at it.