Poster poems: Language games - Billy Mills

Some of the things Raworth gets up to put me in mind of two other schools of (lower-case) language writing, sound poetry and concrete poetry. One of the most familiar examples of the sound poem is The Loch Ness Monster's Song by Edwin Morgan. Morgan has also written visual or concrete poems, but did you know that shape poems are a form of poetry that can be traced back all the way to the ancient Greeks?

In fact, the whole idea of poetry as playing with language is a very old one. We can see it in medieval street vendor rhymes like Turkey Rhubarb, in Shakespeare's Where the Bee Sucks from The Tempest or, to think of a more recent songwriter, in John Lennon's analphabetic An Alphabet. It seems to be some kind of basic human instinct. So to get us started into a new year on a good footing, it is the poster poems challenge for this week. What I'm calling for are your language poems, which is to say your poems that celebrate the material itself and the pleasure to be had from playing with it. Have fun.