Accessible forms of poetry for journaling?
I journal sporadically, and have sometimes wanted to record a thought as a poem. I like idea of using constraints to further my grasp on the thought I'm trying to express, and it'd leave me with something I'd feel proud to come back to.
But I don't really know where to start? I'm hoping to find a form of poetry can be short enough to not feel daunting to start, but still forces enough structure to make the exercise worthwhile.
I imagine this effort means I'll also need to read more poetry and find stuff I like. My only real experience with the medium is from school, and thinking back to that time only reminds me of how confused I was while guessing if a foot was stressed or unstressed. I do remember liking Arthur Rimbaud's Le dormeur du val though. If anyone has any recommendations for poems they like, I'd take those too
Find a copy of Perrine's Sound and Sense. It's a textbook, so it's a bit more inconvenient to get than a regular book. But it's easily the best introduction guide to learning how to read and understand poetry from scratch. It goes over all the mechanics and tools, with a helpful selection of classic poems to explain the concepts. It's not a very long book either but pretty dense in terms of coverage to help get one started to reading and appreciating poetry.
One of my favourite things about poetry is there really aren't any rules. Some rhyme, others don't. Some have a particular structure, like haikus, others use spacing on a page to emphasise something. To me, a poem is a painting made of words.
I'm currently reading Let The Light In by Lemn Sissay. He did a project to write a 4-line poem every morning for 10 years and compiled the best ones into this book. Here are a couple of my favourites so far: