Practising Poetic Form

This seemed a suitable occupation for a wet Sunday afternoon. I'm still wading through the modules of a correspondence course about the ins and outs of writing poetry. I'm on the one dealing with Poetic Form, a subject touched upon originally in my far off schooldays, so a refresher is no bad thing by now! The course notes give details of rhyme schemes, rhythm, meter and number of lines for each form, so my only task is to choose which follow.

There is one apparently American invention, called a 'Minute' - twelve lines, sixty syllables in total, which I've never see or heard of before. It seemed like a good place to start.

If I'm writing anything on computer, I tend to use as symbols v and / as a pattern of feet (poetic, not bodily), so in this case the 'pattern' became:-

v / v / v / v /
v / v /
v / v /
v / v/
v / v / v / v /
v / v /
v / v /
v / v/
v / v / v / v /
v / v /
v / v /
v / v/

The rhyme scheme is aa bb cc dd ee ff.
And here is the resultant, first-time-of-trying poem in the form of:-

A Minute

I want to write a verse today,
but what to say?
Aye, there's the rub,
I need a hub
from which to let the words rotate,
to flow in spate
all down the page,
the poet's stage,
from whence I hope to fill the screen
that will be seen
by Bloggers all
who come to call.

Hmm - doesn't immediately inspire me to try more of the same, but at least it got a bit of my homework done...