What makes a poem a poem? Is it about knowing when to rhyme, and how many feet to a line, and recognising a sonnet when it slaps you in the face?

Last week a bunch of us had some fun with the oddest, made-up poetry forms we could find – and then we made up some of our own.

Pooling our shared experience of the various rules and regulations involved in classic forms like villanelles and sestinas (which go into great details about how many lines in a verse and where the rhymes should come) we saw how all forms are like puzzle-games where you have to do certain things in order to produce a poem of a certain shape.

Then we looked at modern forms made up by the Oulipo group (who had many mathematicians and linguists among them, and so were full of very smarty-pants constraints). The ones we tried out for ourselves were the S+7 (which you can try using this online generator) and the Snowball.

Unhinging our minds still further, we attempted Terrance Hayes‘ famous invention, a Golden Shovel – but also his less well-known and even more fiendish A Gram of &s.

Finally, hilariously deranged by devious devices, we made up our own sets of rules and named a new generation of poetic forms – you’re welcome to test them out, and tell us how you get on!