Tiny Forest

Christopher Shaeffer

I see on stern stone

Eons of erosion

Stress of frost

Serenity of rest

It sires itsy rifts

Its inner iron sifts

Stone - ore, is it?

Or, is it fire?

Intensi-fier of ions

Testi-fier of irony

Not sentry nor fortress

For stone is site to softness

Roots riot in it

Feisty ferns set nests to sit

Irises rise in neon fits

Roses tint if noses sniff

Too soon for trees

To roof off noon

For its terse first firs

One tiny forest frets

(E, F, I, N, O, R, S, T, Y)

Larches

This is where the aether starts

Tae heat the wan white heather

Hear with ears, and bear with hearts

The water, wind, and weather

(A, B, D, E, H, I, N, R, S, T, W)

Acceptance

I choose this sharp heart for me

Oh irregular jungle machine

Spinning coarse cloth from jute

(A, C, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U)

I'm Chris, the Graduate Program Manager for Linguistics here at UW!

A "lipogram" is a form of constrained writing in which you exclude one or more letters. Many of my poems are extreme lipograms that only use letters from a short "seed phrase". That phrase could be the title itself (as in Tiny Forest), be the whole first line (as in Larches), or not appear in the poem at all (as in Acceptance). The constraint naturally leads to sound repetitions like alliteration and rhyme, and to interesting choices for words and phrasing.

It's challenging to search for words from such a small set of letters and then try to fit them together in a way that creates a coherent narrative or theme, or follows other constraints like meter and rhyme. Like a lot of creative work, it's often more about what you choose to exclude that can make a piece great.