Guest Post: Chicken or Egg? Marilyn Singer on Reverso Poems

Photo © Steve Aronson

Marilyn Singer’s reverso poems make for lusciously happy picture book reading, so I invited her to tell us more about this jewel of a poetic form that she has created and made her own. Here’s what she wrote.

Chicken or Egg?

Sometimes I wonder which was my first love:  words or music, songs or poems.  Mostly I think, much like with the chicken and the egg, it doesn’t really matter which came first.  My parents read to me every day, and I especially liked poetry collections and fairy tales.  They also sang the American Songbook to me at bedtime.  So, I grew up appreciating not only melodies, but lyrics by the likes of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and many others.  My grandmother, who lived with us, told me Romanian folk tales.  So my childhood was full of those words and music, those songs and poems.  Add to all that an enduring sense of curiosity and a fondness for games and puzzles and you have the ingredients for why I became a poet.  For a long time I wrote mostly in free verse and, occasionally, in rhyme.  But then I got interested in poetic forms.  That interest—plus all the other stuff I mentioned—led to my reversos. 

            What’s a reverso?  It’s one poem with two halves.  The second half reverses the lines of the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization.  But—and here’s the trickiest part—that second half has to say something quite different from the first.  Mirror Mirror (Dial, illustrated by Josee Masse), my first book of reversos, was based on the fairy tales I loved.  But it actually started with my cat.  One afternoon, he was sitting in a chair across from me and what popped into my head was this:

A cat without a chair: Incomplete.

Incomplete: A chair without a cat.

            That little poem got me excited.  Could I possibly write more poems like it?  I decided to try.  I wrote a bunch of poems on a bunch of topics and showed them to a wise editor.  She pointed out that a number of those poems were based on fairy tales and suggested I write more of those.  I thought that for the poems I could find two sides to one fairy tale character, two points in time for a character, such as Cinderella before and on her way to the ball, or two different characters often with opposing points-of-view.  Mirror Mirror was the final result.  It was eventually followed by Follow Follow, featuring more fairy tales, and Echo Echo, based on Greek myths.

            Most of the time, I love writing reversos—but sometimes I most emphatically DO NOT.  They can make me whoop with joy.  They can also make my brain hurt.  I’ve learned many things from writing them:  Challenge is rewarding; inspiration can come from all sorts of things—and when you least expect it; stuff you enjoyed as a kid stays with you, so use it!   And maybe most of all, whether it’s the poetic image or the line, the idea or the form, the words or the music, like the chicken and the egg, it doesn’t matter which came first as long as they both get there in the end.

Marilyn’s tips for writing reversos:

Find a story, subject, or character with two sides:

Start with a few lines that can be flipped so they make sense in reverse.

Select phrases that can be turned into questions and interjections.

Use a lot of participles, infinitives, and single word sentences.

The reversos have changes only in punctuation and capitalization, so get to know punctuation—how can you use a comma, period, dash, colon, semi-colon, etc.? 

Write the poem on the computer so you can move around the lines until they make sense.

Don’t get discouraged—reversos are hard to write.  Play and have fun!

Chicken to egg. Egg to chicken. Thank you, Marilyn, for the swirling joy of these little gems!