Here’s a fun game: Get a poem you like, break down it’s rhythm and rhyme, contemplate the various contours of the poem, and then write a response poem in the same rhythm and rhyme.
Classic Poetry Response Poems
- Riffing on “Battle Pieces & Aspects of the War” (Melville, 1866)
- The Portent / Brooklyn in the Light.
- Misgivings / Maryland, 1795
- Goofing around with Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
- A limerick, sonnet, and villanelle after reading “Villanelle for our Time” by FR Scott.
- Rewriting “King Lear”–because it was too tragic!
- The Lonely Light / Can’t recall what poem this was based on
Copyright:
Except for the smash-up translations where we pair a public-domain few story with a public-domain translations, and for the public-domain poems we sometimes copy, everything on this site (including the poems in response to public-domain poems) is authored by Bartleby Willard and/or Amble Whistletown and are copyright Andrew Mackenzie Watson, all rights reserved.
For the smashed-together translations, the copyrights on the originals and translations are, to the best of our knowledge, no longer in effect in the USA. However, we’d like to claim a copyright on the smushing-together of the texts. Granted: it wasn’t that hard and didn’t take that long, but, well, still–it did take some doing.
Signed,
Bartleby Willard (pretend person)
Amble Whistletown (pretend person)
Andrew M Watson (real person–at least from a legal point of view, and thus where possible and not unseemly, the copyright holder)