Burtonelle Poetry

This week’s poetry offering is more a style of poetry writing than an actual poetry form. The Burtonelle was introduced by Wilma W. Burton, who wrote a poem a day in this form in 1976 for the American Bicentennial. She ascribed to the belief that all aspiring poets, and established poets for that matter, should write a poem a day for good poetic exercise and practice.

This is a free verse poem, written in two columns with a pause (caesura), in the form of a uniform space, between the columns. It’s read horizontally, with a slight pause between the columns. Punctuation, capitalization, and meter are up to the poet, and if there is a title, it should also have the space in it.

I'd like to add that while I enjoyed writing my example poem, I did NOT enjoy formatting it to show the spaces in this post!


Fleeting                      Words

They come to me     the words
catching me              unprepared –
they dip                     and swirl,
bob and                      weave,
distracting me            from whatever
I’m doing,                  teasing me
into believing             a poem is
in the offing               and so
I write them               in invisible ink
in my head                 in an attempt
at keeping them         from escaping.
But the ink                 of my mind
is not indelible          and too often
I am left                     with nothing
but the faint               echo of
what might                 have been.