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The following can also be found in the book Jasonettes. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

The "Jasonette" is a type of formal poetry I invented in 1998. To write your own, start by writing a two-line rhyming "mini-poem" about the subject of the larger poem. For example, concerning a poem about my ex-girlfriend:

Monika left, she left today The grass was green and the sky was grey

Rewrite the mini-poem down the page vertically, so that there is only one letter per line:

m o n i k a l e etc.

Each line of the Jasonette must now start with a word that starts with that letter.

Next, take the numbers from your birthdate (in my case, March 5, 1969 [3569]), and from a date you consider of great personal importance to your life (in my case, the date I moved to Chicago: August 4, 1994 [8494]), and string them together, removing any zeroes or ones:

3 5 6 9 8 4 9 4

and write them vertically next to each letter, repeating the numerical sequence until you reach the end:

m3 o5 n6 i9 k8 a4 l9 e4 etc.

Each line of the Jasonette must now contain exactly those number of words.

Stanzas can be any length and may be bracketed with blank lines arbitrarily. The Jasonette is required to be the exact length of the letters comprising the original rhyming mini-poem. The five in this book were written as a long-form performance project, in March 1998, for the Chicago literary event "Mental Graffiti." It was held at the Wicker Park danceclub Madbar.

Copyright 1998, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved. This was published under a Creative Commons license; click here for details. Contact: ilikejason [at] gmail [dot] com.