Rhyme or free verse \u2014 which one actually works in an American birthday card?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nRhyme, most of the time, and not because free verse is worse. A rhymed quatrain announces itself as a made thing: she can see that somebody counted syllables, and the effort is half the gift. Free verse inside a card tends to read as a paragraph that someone hit the return key on, and the reader cannot tell whether the line breaks mean anything or not. If you want the effect of free verse without the risk, keep the rhyme and break the meter once, on purpose, in the line that matters most \u2014 a short line in a run of long ones lands harder than any amount of white space. Save unrhymed verse for a letter, where there is room to earn it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every verse I write falls apart in the last line. What is going wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAlmost always the same thing: you picked the final rhyme first and then built a line to reach it, and the reader hears the reaching. Fix it backward. Decide in plain words the last thing you want to say, then choose the rhyme that lets you say exactly that, and rebuild the earlier line to match \u2014 if nothing fits, change the earlier rhyme word, because that is the line nobody remembers. The other common failure is a closing line that explains the poem: and that is why you mean so much to me. Cut it. End on the concrete thing \u2014 the chair, the phone call, the corner slice of cake. The explanation is what the reader was going to supply anyway, and she would rather supply it herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you keep a heartfelt verse from turning into a eulogy?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nKeep it in the present tense and keep her doing something. A poem tips into eulogy when every line is a summary of a finished life: she gave, she was, she always did. That is how people write about somebody who is not in the room. Put her in motion instead \u2014 she is on the phone, she is taking the smaller half, she is about to be late again. Second, name at least one thing about her that annoys you. Affection with no friction in it reads as memorial, because real people are inconvenient and the dead stop being so. Third, end forward: the year ahead, the visit you are planning, the seat you are saving. Not a verdict on everything up to now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One long poem or a handful of short ones \u2014 how much do you actually send?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOne, on the day. A run of verses looks generous and reads as a wall; she skims to the end of the third and loses the first. Pick the single poem that fits where it is going: four lines inside a card, four lines in a message first thing in the morning, sixteen to twenty for something read at a table where everyone has already sat down. If you have three you like, use one and keep the others, because sisters have a birthday every year and a verse already written is worth more next fall than a second one is today. The exception is a card several people sign, where short verses from different hands make sense, since each one carries a different name under it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is it strange to give her a poem every single year?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is the opposite of strange. By the fourth or fifth one it has become a small private tradition that costs nothing and cannot be bought, and it is the thing she starts waiting for. Two rules keep it from going stale. Change the shape from year to year: a four-line card verse, then something longer read out loud, then a funny one after a heavy stretch. And date them, on the back or under your name, because the real value of a run of poems is that read together they track a decade, which no single poem can do. If you miss a year, do not apologize in verse \u2014 write one plain sentence about why, then carry on as though the run were never broken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your sister’s birthday is the one you can’t phone in. She has every card you have ever sent, she can quote last year’s, and she will read whatever you write twice. So you sit down to put something in verse and what comes out is either a rhyme about sunshine that could go to anybody, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":5801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2383],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5804,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5800\/revisions\/5804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5800"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5800"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5800"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bronx.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}