Ariana shrugged facing Josh’s mocking clap
the stringy harmonica rang acrobatically on the streetlights.
He handed her a firebomb,
eyes sharp as vinegar.
They ran across the hot asphalt,
watching the brass kite rise.
Both caught in the whirlpool of the maze,
they guided the trumpet,
mandolin filling the air, sinking into the smokehouse.
Her jacket flared, body pitching like a haystack, cracked like an explosion.
Cigar smoke swindled
trembling hands at the phone’s text crime. Tightened waist, ribs vacant
Her throat rasped open,
gasping. Stomps flew, trumpets lit,
feathers popped, and breath spilled like bone in the dusk.
Knock, knock! Who's there? A Pen, sharp and keen,
Said, "Paper, my pal, is it writin' time, green?"
The paper sighed loudly, with a rustle and flop,
"Come on in, Pen pal, here's where we can't stop!”
The Pen tapped its foot, with a clickety-clack,
"Got stories and poems, a whole writer's pack!"
The Paper unfurled, smooth as a green sea,
"Let's ink some ideas, just you and just me!”
Scratchity scratch, the Pen danced with glee,
"This story's a-flowin', for all the world to see!"
The Paper whispered, with a happy little sigh,
"Words come alive when you and I fly!”
They wrote through the day, with a swish and a flick,
Creating adventures, with each clever trick.
The sun dipped low, casting shadows so long,
But the Pen and the Paper knew where they belonged.
Curled up together, a perfect pair,
Ready to write more, with love and with care.
So next time you're feelin' a story inside,
Grab a Pen and some Paper, and let your feelings confide!
Old Man Winter grumbled and frowned,
Said, "Spring's taking way too long to come 'round!"
But a robin, so bold, chirped up from a tree,
"Relax, grumpy Gus, change is the key!”
Flowers peeked out, with a shy little smile,
Said, "Winter, don't fret, we'll be here a while!"
The grumpy old man, with a huff and a puff,
Melted away in a sunshiny fluff.
Caterpillars wiggled, "We're tired of this crawl,
Time to transform, and answer the call!"
They spun silken cocoons, hung high in the breeze,
And emerged as butterflies, flitting with ease.
Rivers they rushed, with a gurgling glee,
Carving new paths, to the welcoming sea.
The mountains stood tall, with a wisdom untold,
Whispered, "Change is the story, both young and old.”
The sun dipped low, with a fiery goodbye,
But promised to rise, with a brand new sky.
The stars winked and twinkled, then faded from sight,
Knowing the dawn brings a beautiful light.
Change, it isn't scary, it's nature's delight,
A constant refreshing, both day and night.
So shed what you must let go of the past,
Embrace the new season, that's here to outlast!
*Image of Notepad by Pixabay.
McWhirtle: I Write Because
I write because,
the birds cannot,
the trees, the streams,
the mountaintop,
Had they a voice,
sounds will swap, yet,
add with words, be,
cream of the crop.
2022 August 27
*4th Place*
I write because
~~Anoucheka Gangabissoon: Judged 2022 September 13
*Image of Floor Mat by Etsy.
Aloha also is Goodbye
How do, You do,
(Obama, who?)
Honolulu,
"Gathers," the pro-left best
they stick like cements,
Issues: starved mass,
overcrowdedness;
their gilded penthouse nests
o'er the homeless tents.
2022 August 25
Thundering Blunderbuss!
What is a platypus?
Looks like a beaver, but
Has a duck's bill.
Fairly cute little guy,
Ornithorhynchidae*
Lives in Australia, is
On the no-kill.
Semi-aquatic and
Strangely neurotic, it
Lays eggs like birds and has
Venom like snakes.
Weirdly amphibious,
Bio-fluorescent fur
Webbing between the toes,
Strong swimmers make.
————
Technically, this is a Didactic Double Dactyl
since it’s full of educational goodies too.
A double dactyl is a form of McWhirtle, but
apparently, it is also a form of black death.
Switching to the McWhirtle on a hunch, lol.
*6 syllables, rhymes with ‘guy’ (like or-ni-tho-rin-ke-die)
Hummingbird hardly heard,
airily, merrily
extraordinarily
effortless floating, near
weightless transparency,
seemingly without the
slightest of care.
Urgent persistency,
terribly panicky,
frenzied and frantic, she's
burning through energy
rapidly, hungrily;
precise machinery
executes there.
Mallard so lazily,
buoyantly floating on
glassy flat waters, he
glides on the surface, and
wanders unhurriedly,
conveying contentment,
trivial feat.
Feet like a bicycle
furious pedaling,
splendidly, swimmingly,
chasing and fishing, he's
hungrily hunting and
ready to eat.
A double dact doe dance:
Six deer in a row prance
Merrily, playfully
Dancing so sweet!
Ungulates ruminate
Chewing the cud is great
And most amazingly,
Didactyl feet!
----------
ok, ok, i'm getting carried away with these - almost a tongue twister, but fun, and what I saw on my walk with Missy this morning!
Deception reception:
Horrified audience,
Receivers believing
Satisfies goal
Gaslighting, creating
Altered reality
Verity lost somewhere
Deep in a hole
David once raged against
All the injustices
Voicing his frustrations
Starting each psalm
Working his anger out
Stanza by stanza, then
Reaching conclusion so
Peaceful and calm
Things are not perfect now
Confusion, Delusion
God makes a promise: all
Right in the end
Lawlessness dominates
Presently, sadly, but;
Flip to the back and you'll
see that God wins!
Eighteen and eighty-three
Cinema poetry
Wagons precarious
Bandits? Hilarious!
Not so gregarious
Shooting at me!
Lightning miss yellow hair
Not too bad, pretty fair
Oregon, here we go
Shooting a buffalo
With Sam, Comanche beau
Bison for free!
Poetry, throw-a-three
Dactyls for you and me
Six silly bulls, I see
All in a field!
Myrtle McWhirtley
This is the life for me
No silly names, I see
Less junk to wield.
Dactylly Practical
Superfantastical
Equally Whimsical
More Flexibly
So dactyls or whirtles?
Just tighten your girdles
Throw down some poetry
Effortlessly!
The game of chess
truly bores me
Enough time between moves
for a dip in the sea
There's one more game
that drives me up trees
Time it with a calendar
Its name ~ 'Monopoly'
A Moss Covered Stone Rest
Despite my nature
to absolve evil,
Against all the odds,
stood formidable,
Beseech fortitude
of righteous people,
Prevails my true heart
molding life peaceful.
2019 December 13
*3rd Place*
McWhirtle Me
~~charles messina
Hot apple cider
Cinnamon savors
Gingerbread houses
Sugar and spice neighbors
Peppermint cocoa
Sugarplum favors
Gifting my tastebuds
With Christmastime flavors
12/13/19
For 'McWhirtle Me' contest
Sponsor: charles messina
Holiday Love
As winter takes hold
This time of the year
The holidays help
To spread love and cheer
The lamp lights aglow
snow covers the ground
our families close-
all hearts safe and sound
December 12, 2019
Contest: McWhirtle Me
Sponsor: Charles Messina
Introduction
The pleasure of a McWhirtle begins in the gap between a galloping expectation and a poet's decision not to obey it too neatly. The form invites buoyancy, verbal nimbleness, and quick comic timing, yet its relative freedom leaves room for tonal shading. A poem may race toward a punch line, pause over an absurd portrait, or let humor expose a more serious feeling. As you read the community poems, listen for the moment when momentum becomes personality rather than mere pattern.
Side-by-side reading makes the form's range especially visible. One writer may favor crisp rhyme and a theatrical speaker; another may rely on tumbling syntax, conversational phrasing, or a deliberately awkward interruption. Subjects can be miniature narratives, character sketches, domestic mishaps, linguistic games, or satirical observations. Even poems with similar premises may differ sharply in how they manage suspense, emphasis, and closure. The interesting question is not simply whether a poem sounds lively, but what that liveliness allows the poet to reveal.
Browsing several McWhirtles also clarifies the difference between flexibility and shapelessness. The strongest interpretations create a felt pulse while making each departure from it expressive. Read beyond the first example and compare where poets accelerate, where they let a phrase breathe, and how they prepare the final turn. A single poem demonstrates one solution; a collection reveals a field of choices. That wider view helps readers appreciate the form as a meeting place for rhythm, comic intelligence, individual voice, and concise storytelling.
Reading Guide
Read a McWhirtle first as a listener rather than a rule-checker. Its kinship with highly patterned light verse creates expectations of forward motion, but the revealing moments often occur when a poet stretches, redirects, or briefly resists that motion. As you browse the poems in this collection, compare not only their surfaces but also the work performed by their sound. A buoyant rhythm can build confidence, disguise vulnerability, accelerate a mishap, or make a final reversal feel inevitable.
- Listen for the rhythmic launch. Notice how quickly the opening establishes energy and whether later phrases sustain, vary, or interrupt it. The initial pulse teaches the ear what to expect. Ask: does a disruption sharpen meaning, or does it merely make the poem harder to say?
- Follow syntax across the lines. A sentence may cooperate with the beat or pull against it through pauses, qualifications, and enjambment. That tension can create comic impatience or delayed understanding. Ask: where does the grammar make you hurry, hesitate, or revise your first impression?
- Examine the speaking voice. McWhirtles often benefit from a speaker with a discernible attitude: admiring, pompous, baffled, deadpan, or mischievous. Ask: could these lines belong to any speaker, or does the phrasing establish a particular personality?
- Notice verbal weight. Tumbling names, vivid verbs, and conspicuous multisyllabic words can be delightful, but only when they contribute more than noise. Ask: which word is most memorable, and is it memorable for its meaning as well as its sound?
- Watch the movement from setup to consequence. Even a brief portrait or anecdote needs development. Compare how poets plant information that later becomes comic, ironic, or poignant. Ask: does the ending grow from what came before, or arrive as an unrelated trick?
- Study line endings and closure. If rhyme appears, consider whether it increases anticipation without making the destination obvious. A strong final phrase completes both sound and thought. Ask: how early could you predict the last word, and did that prediction add pleasure or flatten surprise?
After reading each poem silently, read it aloud once. Then compare several poets' approaches. The contrast between eye and ear often reveals where a McWhirtle's wit, control, and individuality truly reside.
Writing Tips
Begin a McWhirtle workshop by speaking possibilities aloud before polishing them on the page. The form rewards writers who can hear propulsion without becoming enslaved to it. Bring in a compact subject with a built-in change: a boast that collapses, a portrait that acquires an unexpected detail, a minor disaster, or an observation whose wording can turn on itself. The draft should have somewhere to go, not merely a lively manner of getting nowhere.
- Choose material with kinetic potential. Actions, escalating misunderstandings, overconfident characters, and sharply observed habits naturally support a quick-moving rhythm. A static idea can still work, but give it an argumentative or emotional shift. Ask what changes between the opening impression and the closing one.
- Find the pulse before counting anything. Speak a few natural phrases related to the subject and notice which one carries usable momentum. Build from living speech rather than forcing prose into a prefabricated bounce. Formal tidiness cannot rescue lines whose stresses contradict the words a speaker would actually emphasize.
- Give the speaker a motive. Decide why this voice is telling the anecdote or presenting the character. Admiration, envy, indignation, embarrassment, and mock solemnity produce different kinds of lightness. A clear motive also keeps the poem from sounding like an anonymous exercise in cleverness.
- Use freedom selectively. The McWhirtle's relaxed construction is most productive when the reader can still sense a rhythmic norm beneath its variations. If every line moves unpredictably, there is little expectation to tease. If every line is mechanically identical, the poem may become sing-song. Establish, vary, and return.
- Make flamboyant diction earn its space. Long, tumbling, or unusual words can intensify speed and humor, but choosing one solely because it fits the sound often produces strained syntax. Prefer a surprising word that names the situation precisely. Verbal display should reveal character or advance the turn.
- Shape line breaks as timing devices. Place a break where it can suspend a consequence, isolate an absurd detail, or let the reader briefly misread the sentence. Avoid breaking lines merely to preserve visual regularity. In light verse, a fraction of a beat can determine whether the joke lands.
- Build imagery into the action. Replace abstract labels such as foolish, strange, or clumsy with an object, gesture, sound, or physical consequence. A single exact image gives the rhythmic play something tangible to carry and prevents the poem from becoming a string of verbal effects.
- Resist the beginner's ornamental ending. An obvious rhyme, pun, or twist can feel attached after the poem has already finished thinking. Seed the ending earlier through diction or circumstance, then make the final phrase alter the reader's understanding. Surprise is strongest when hindsight reveals preparation.
- Test the poem on an unprepared listener. Read at conversational speed without exaggerating the rhythm. Note where the listener loses the sentence, anticipates the payoff too soon, or laughs for a reason you did not intend. If the pattern works only when chanted heavily, revise the language rather than the performance.
During revision, mark the strongest stresses, concrete images, syntactic pauses, and words chosen mainly for convenience. Remove filler that exists only to maintain momentum. Then read the draft in three ways: neutrally, with the speaker's full attitude, and slightly slower than feels natural. The poem should remain intelligible in all three while gaining force from the best performance. Preserve the McWhirtle's lift, but make every lift carry thought.
Interesting Facts
- Flexibility can increase difficulty. When a poet has room to move syllables and accents, there is no rigid template to blame for a dull or awkward passage. Each variation becomes an artistic decision, so control must be heard even when regularity is relaxed.
- The ear often recognizes the family resemblance before the eye does. A poem may look modest on the page yet acquire momentum when spoken. Conversely, visually balanced lines can stumble aloud. Reading community poems both silently and vocally exposes that productive difference.
- A small rhythmic disturbance can carry narrative meaning. A stumble near a mishap, a pause before a revelation, or a sudden compression during panic can imitate the event being described. The departure succeeds because the surrounding movement has prepared the reader to feel it.
- Lightness need not mean emotional shallowness. Buoyant sound can place embarrassment, mortality, disappointment, or vanity at a useful angle. Humor may soften the approach while making the underlying recognition more memorable.
- Conspicuous vocabulary works best as characterization. A tumbling word can suggest pomposity, expertise, confusion, or exuberance. Used only as a technical stunt, it attracts attention away from the poem; used dramatically, it lets sound and personality arrive together.
- Comparison reveals identity through difference. One poet may preserve a strong gallop, while another favors conversational elasticity or strategic hesitation. Reading several community interpretations shows which features create recognizable momentum and which choices belong to an individual voice.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form meet through movement. A McWhirtle favors material that can be compressed into a vivid approach, complication, and turn, while its buoyant sound can either match the subject's playfulness or contrast with something more sober. The possibilities below are literary opportunities, not statistical rankings of what appears most often in the collection.
- Eccentric character portraits. A memorable name, habit, profession, or boast gives rhythm a human target. The swift presentation can resemble a comic introduction, while a final detail revises the character's carefully managed image.
- Mishaps and unintended consequences. Slips, failed schemes, miscommunications, and badly timed confidence benefit from acceleration. The pulse can hurry a character toward the very result that the reader has begun to suspect.
- Vanity, status, and self-importance. Mock-ceremonial diction sits fruitfully beside small human weaknesses. A grand-sounding voice can inflate a minor situation until one concrete fact punctures it.
- Domestic and workplace absurdity. Familiar routines provide immediate context, allowing the poet to spend less space explaining and more space sharpening the turn. Ordinary objects also keep verbal exuberance anchored in recognizable experience.
- Animals and personified objects. Giving an animal, appliance, garment, or tool a strong attitude suits the form's theatrical energy. Rhythmic movement can mimic scurrying, rattling, wobbling, or stubborn resistance without requiring lengthy description.
- Language, learning, and verbal confusion. Mispronunciations, technical jargon, pompous explanations, and ambiguous phrases offer both sonic play and narrative consequence. The best versions ensure that wordplay changes the situation rather than merely decorating it.
- Serious truths under a comic surface. Aging, disappointment, fear, and social awkwardness can gain poignancy when approached through lively sound. The contrast prevents solemn overstatement and lets the final recognition arrive with a quieter aftereffect.
As you read the community poems, compare writers who choose similar subjects but produce different emotional results. One mishap may become affectionate, another satirical, and another unexpectedly sad. The theme supplies the occasion; voice, timing, and rhythmic judgment determine what the occasion means.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a McWhirtle lies between inherited momentum and personal permission. Readers expect an audible lift associated with patterned light verse, yet the form gives the poet enough latitude to avoid sounding manufactured. A technically recognizable draft may reproduce the bounce, the compact presentation, and the closing flourish. A memorable poem goes further: it discovers why this particular speaker, subject, and emotional turn need that momentum. The rhythm then feels less like a costume and more like the mind's way of moving.
Structure becomes necessary when it participates in meaning. A breathless sequence can enact panic or enthusiasm; an overly polished cadence can expose a speaker's vanity; a delayed phrase can make the reader share a moment of dawning embarrassment. Editors notice when sound, syntax, and subject point in the same direction. They also notice purposeful friction. A serious detail carried by cheerful music can produce irony, tenderness, or unease, but only if the tonal contrast is controlled. Random irregularity does not create complexity; the reader needs enough continuity to experience a deviation as expressive.
Common weaknesses arise when the writer mistakes visible cleverness for development. Predictable rhyme can announce the destination too early. Forced inversions and filler words may keep the pulse moving while making the voice unnatural. Mechanical patterning can flatten every sentence into the same emphasis, and conspicuous vocabulary can become a stunt detached from character. At the opposite extreme, excessive looseness may erase the rhythmic expectation that gives the form its pleasure. Over-explanation is equally damaging: if the final lines explain the joke, label the emotion, or restate the irony, they remove the reader's opportunity to complete the turn. A slight premise needs deepening through precise detail, not expansion through commentary.
Individuality remains visible in the choices conventions cannot settle: what the speaker withholds, which image anchors the poem, where syntax resists the beat, how affection modifies satire, and what remains after the comic closure. Some poets favor exuberant performance; others create a drier, almost conversational wit. Neither approach is inherently stronger. Quality depends on whether every decision belongs to the same imaginative occasion. Comparing multiple community poems develops this judgment better than studying an isolated model. Side by side, readers can distinguish effortless sound from merely easy sound, earned surprise from arbitrary twist, and flexible control from accidental roughness.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community McWhirtles before settling on an idea of what the form can do. Compare how different poets establish momentum, shape a speaking voice, manage rhythmic freedom, and prepare a closing turn. When a poem catches your ear, leave a thoughtful comment about the exact phrase, pause, image, or tonal shift that made it effective.
Then try your own interpretation. Choose a subject with movement and consequence, test the draft aloud, and publish it on PoetrySoup when its wit and structure feel inseparable. Your poem can join an ongoing conversation in which shared expectations make individual choices easier to hear.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 16 McWhirtle poems, offering multiple interpretations to read closely and compare. Some poets may follow familiar conventions, while others may adapt or challenge them through voice, pacing, diction, lineation, or tonal contrast. The collection is large enough to show that a shared form does not require identical results: each poem can be considered both as an individual work and as one response within a broader community practice.
Mcwhirtle Categories
Definition | What is Mcwhirtle in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.