Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

One of Facebook’s more popular applications, Pick 5 by Living Social shares much of the appeal of writing poetry in reproducible forms (new or traditional). Pick 5 starts with a sometimes user-generated (and occasionally sponsored)  category or question. To choose your five answers, you start typing in a text box to generate a list of words or phrases with images; if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can upload your own picture. You can post your answers to your profile and compare your answers with your friends’.

The pleasure of Pick 5, then, is in seeing what your friends have selected within this form—how the lists your friends and acquaintances create differ from or resemble your own. This isn’t all that different from a group of friends comparing their sestinas, abecedarians, or Spenserian sonnets. I do not mean to suggest that creating a sestina is as easing as filling in the blanks (though my most successful preteen poem, a line-by-line transformation of The Raven into The Swim Coach, certainly followed a similar procedure), only that at least some of the joys of writing formal verse are similar to the joys provided by applications such as Pick 5.

Still, there is another level to this. Some of the best Pick 5s, like much of the best formal verse, stretch the form. A category may be taken in a snarkily literal way: according to the application, very few of my Facebook friends leave the house without their heads. Sarcastic answers to the favorite parts of the Fourth of July category included variations on things burning down. Imagined dinner party guests have been chosen on the basis of who would have the best arguments rather than who would be most interesting to meet. The rules of the form are broken when someone chooses the same item for all five slots. This latter case is most similar to Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, of which Juliana Spahr noted:

…despite constant allusions to the tradition of the sonnet, Mayer’s are not within the box. One of Mayer’s sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. 

Mayer’s work, however, required much more background reading before it could be written and much more attention to craft to make it work.

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