Greeting Card Day: 08-21 Poetry Day

Click here to download your card.

Since we celebrated Bad Poetry Day a few days ago, it seems a bit premature to celebrate Good Poetry today, August 21^st.  A lot of writer's groups, libraries and creative writing classes celebrate by holding poetry write-ins.  There are several poetry groups on-line that will help you set up your own free poetry page on which to publish your good stuff for the perusal of your fellow bards, versifiers and lyricists.

So try turning your hand at a ballads, a limerick, some free verse, blank verse, an acrostic, an abecedarian, haiku, tanka, ode, senryus, sonnet or more. It is Poet's Day, after all, so let's all have a grand old rhyme and writing it on the inside of this classy Poet's Day Card for your lady love. Just click on the caption below the drawing of the generic poet and it will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself.

This is a side fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "landscape" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. This will save you a lot of time.  I didn't cheat for you.  You have to write your own.  Avoid the use of the word "dove" or "shove" as rhymes for love. In fact, to help you out let me suggest you try your hand at an acrostic.  And acrostic uses each letters of a word or name as the first letter of a line of the poem.  To wit:

Lightly the fragrance of flowers in summer wafted
  Over a playful breeze was carried along to me just at the
    Very moment, when I was thinking of you, but then
      Every moment is when I think of you.
        Do you suppose it's.......



It's not hard.  You can spell her name or some special word that describes her. You don't have to be flowery.  Stay away from words like April (it's mid-summer), dawn (She'll probably find it around mid-morning), lonely, alone or pain. Poems that use a lot of those words have become poetic hack writing.  Be yourself. Write like you speak (or at least, like you think you speak).  Trust me the first letters of each line spells a word gimmick will help improve your chances of coming up with something clever. 


If you really can't do poetry, I decided to go ahead and do copy the poem above and printed it on the inside of the card.  If you want to try your own, then only print the outside of the card and leave the inside blank. It's up to you.

If you write something on the inside of your card, that's original, though, this card will be a sure winner.

© 2013 by Tom King