Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 30

Thursday is upon us, and with it the start of another week with JP at Olive Garden. Although I have been absent lately you once again find me, CC Champagne, resting in the shade of the olive trees with a nice glass of bubbly in my hand, ready to untangle some poetry forms (or at least get inebriated trying).

This week I've actually fallen in love with a poetry form. Yes, I know! I didn't think it was possible either!!! The triolet is a form I have seen now and then around the blogosphere, but never paid attention to. The good people over at dVerse Poets featured the form a few weeks back, and I know some of the blog poets I read have produced pieces in this form, but I never tried it. Until this week's National Poetry Month 2012 prompt... And it was what falling in love should be like if it were real (cynic present, please beware!)!

To quote Wikipedia a triolet is "a three stanza poem of eight lines" (well, that's simple enough, right?). It continues by letting us know that the rhyme scheme is 'ABaAabAB' and that iambic tetrameter is often used. From my earlier attempts at learning poetry form, this tells me that the rhythm used (iamb) is a two syllable rhythm where the stress is on the first syllable (TA-dum) and that we use four (tetra) such iambs to a line (in other words eight syllables)... Wikipedia further says that "an effective conventional triolet achieves two things; firstly the naturalness of the refrain and secondly the alteration of the refrain's meaning". To fully understand what on earth this means, let's have a look at an example:

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Since first it was my fate to know thee!

Have the slow years not brought to view

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Nor memory shaped old times anew

Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Since first it was my fate to know thee?

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

If you have had the patience to read this through I hope the rhyming has caught you in some way as it did me. Ah, just a brilliant flow! As you can see, the 1st, 4th and 7th line are the same, as is the 2nd and the 8th. It still manages to change though... Somehow... Some more examples of this form - as well as a slightly more expansive dive into the history (dating back to Medieval France, I believe) and evolution of the form can be found here. I will try my hand at this form again in the future, I am sure of it! *smile*

Should you wish to share some poetry with us, whether in triolet form or otherwise, please feel free to join our Poetry Picnic at JP At Olive Garden Week 29, where the theme of the week is Art, Music and Poetry, or join in the always exciting Thursday Poets Rally over at Hyde Park Poetry (Promising Poets Parking lot). Me you will see here again next Thursday, hopefully with some other new found favourite poetry form to talk about!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 27

Leaning up against the olive tree this Thursday CC Champagne is here again to explore the white areas of the poetry form map with you all.

Today I wanted to talk about a form I've been holding back specifically for this time of the year. I didn't find it on Wikipedia either, but still think it deserves a mention since, to me, this is the kind of poetry form that is truly inspirational. We have previously talked about counting syllables and how a specific number of syllables to a line or a poem is often part of the rules of a specific form. With Haikus the traditional seems to be the 5-7-5 line distribution, and today's poetry form uses a similar system.

Pi-poetry (or Π-poetry) is so named because of the 3-1-4 structure, where the first line consists of three syllables, the second of a single syllable and the last line of four syllables. The form seems to be yet another attempt at merging mathematics and the 'hard' sciences with the 'soft' art of poetry. Pi, or the number 3.14, is famously a mathematical constant which is the ratio of any Euclidian circle's circumference to its diameter. Exactly what that really means is something I probably did know for about a week prior to some math test in High School, but have since quite definitively (and happily) managed to forget.

The reason I've chosen to bring it up now is that this form also seems to be connected to the Americanized way of writing the date March 14 2012 (or any year), namely 3.14.2012, which is also known as Pi-day.

So with this little mathematically inspirational nugget I leave you for now, urging you to add any poem you've created, whether it happens to be Pi-poetry or not, to our Poetry Picnic Week 26 where the topic is Seven Deadly Sins, or why not put on your reading glasses and join us at Hyde Park Poetry for Thursday Poets Rally Week 63. With this I raise my glass of bubbly spumante to you and hope to see you back here again next week!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 24

Another week starts here at the Gooseberry Garden and I am CC Champagne, here to delve deeper into the murky waters of poetry forms with you.

A few months ago I caught a pretty bad cold with a fever and all the dizziness that comes with it. I was stuck at home, restless, having nothing to do, and stumbled on this post over at d'Verse Poets Pub for their Form For All about a poetry form called Pantoum. Before this day I had always claimed that there was no point in me trying my hand at formalised poetry, but in my mentally weakened state I decided to actually try to figure out what on earth it was all about, starting with the brilliant information provided by Gay Reiser Cannon in that first post.

The Pantoum derives from the Malay poetry form Pantun and its longer form of intervowen quatrains called the Pantun Berkait. From what I gather this form has developed in translation to the English language and made popular in the early 1800's by, among others, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. I will not claim to completely understand this poetry form, but since it was my first ever attempt at proper formalised poetry and I found it truly inspiring, I wanted to share it with you. It is also interesting since it shows that new poetry forms are born out of old ones and then, with time, become old ones themselves. We should not be afraid to try, as our mistakes may be tomorrows' new poetry forms!

A Pantoum is

• based on quatrains (stanzas or paragraphs of four lines each)
• can be any number of stanzas, but always ends with the first and last line of the poem.
• Plays with repetition of lines in a set pattern.
• ABAB is the preferred rhyme scheme (first line rhymes with the third line, second line rhymes with the fourth line), but ABBA can also be used.

The scheme in which the lines are repeated looks like this:

1. (A)

2. B

3. A (or B)

4. B (or A)

2. B

5. A

4. B (or A)

6. A (or B)

5. A

7. B

6. A (or B)

8. B (or A)

7. B

9. A

8. B (or A)

10. A (or B)

9. A

3. B

10. A (or B)

1. B (or A)

I am sure some of you are probably wondering what on earth I am on about now, so to illustrate I thought I'd give a few examples, starting with Baudelaire's Harmonie du Soir (the apparent starting point for this madness) in translation by William Aggeler:

Evening Harmony

The season is at hand when swaying on its stem
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!

Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
The violin quivers like a tormented heart;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar.

The violin quivers like a tormented heart,
A tender heart, that hates the vast, black void!
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar;
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals...

A tender heart that hates the vast, black void
Gathers up every shred of the luminous past!
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals...
Your memory in me glitters like a monstrance!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Another example, which is not really very Swedish of me to do (but I hope you will forgive my apparent pride), is my own first ever attempt at this form, 'When Mother Earth Shakes':

When Mother Earth Shakes

When Mother Earth in anger shakes,

no man withstands his human fate.

To her succumbs both love and hate!

How can she forgive us more mistakes?

No man withstands his human fate!

No matter what predictions man makes.

How can she forgive us more mistakes?

When faced with all our human hate?

No matter what predictions man makes,

her righteous anger we cannot sate!

When faced with all our human hate,

she rises up for all our sakes!

Her righteous anger we cannot sate!

She knows man’s care for her he fakes!

She rises up for all our sakes,

reminding us our world can’t wait!

She knows man’s care for her he fakes!

To her succumbs both love and hate,

reminding us our world can’t wait

When Mother Earth in anger shakes!

In any case I hope this has inspired you to have a go at this multifaceted form, where you will find that the challenge isn't only to repeat the lines correctly, but also to - somehow - drive the poem forward within the strict confines of the rules it is based on.

If you do feel like sharing a Pantoum with us here at the Gooseberry Garden, or any other poetry you have written, please join us at the Poetry Picnic Week 23, where the topic is New York Times' Headlines. A fantastic idea to keep us poets current and not just veer off into the poetic dreamland we sometimes inhabit. Another suggestion might be to join in the Thursday Poets Rally Week 61, where the engines have just started for this week. I hope to be seeing you back here next week, for more mind-crunching poetry forms.

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 23

A new week here in the Gooseberry Garden, and I have to say it starts to feel just a little bit like spring! I am CC Champagne, and I am your weekly guide on this excursion into the maddening world of poetry forms and all related issues. Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable and let's take a look at something that I had never heard of before, namely OULIPO.

OULIPO is a literary philosophy invented by mathematicians in the 1960. The acronym stands for the French Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (a rough translation would be workshop for potential literature) and defines the term potential literature in this case with 'the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy'. This sounds like something I think I could grow fond of!

This group of writers, current as well as those who are no longer alive, have set out to find new constraints with which to inspire a change in the creative process. Rules that forces you to view your writing from a different angle.

There is much to be said about this philosophy and the work it has already created, but I will limit myself to focusing on one OULIPO constraint today, the S+7 (sometimes known as the N+7). The rules for this form is that you take an already constructed poem and exchange all the nouns in it for the 7th noun after it in a dictionary. Exchange noun for noun and the poem might not make any sense at all, or - even more interesting - it might force you to look at your work in a completely new light!

Want to give one of the OULIPO constraints/forms a go? Please feel free to enter whatever work this post inspires - or any of your other work in The Gooseberry Garden's Poets Picnic Week 22, where the wonderful Kay offers us the theme Spring, Colours, Trees and New Life.

I hope to see you back in The Gooseberry Garden again next week, if we don't come across each other rambling around the blogosphere before then.

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 22

*stumbling hurriedly into the garden, curlers in her hair and still in her pajamas* Hello everyone and welcome to a new week here in our magic Gooseberry Garden! I am CC Champagne (or at least I will be once I wake up properly) back from her holidays to batter your brains with more poetry form talk.

Some of you may have noticed that we are at the beginning of a new year? 2012 it is, and according to the Mayan Long Count Calendar the end time is upon us at the end of this year. Before that though there will be Olympic Games in London, Presidential Elections in the US and all sorts of other goodies depending on where you live and what you are interested in. Personally I look forward to (among a million other things) the European Football Championships and, of course, the 20th anniversary of the Stockholm Tens International rugby tournament at the end of July.

Everything that happens around us in current times will one day be perceived as history - the only question is if someone deems it important enough to be remembered. Have you thought of that? Today is tomorrow's history! Current events, those perhaps unimportant things that we barely notice today may in the future be reported as the starting point of major events that have yet to happen, and the future historians may not always get it right! As poets, we call it poetic license but even scientists can only ever build on theories and here is one place where poetry has been important throughout history. Historically poets and bards helped spread the word on what was going on around them. Songs and fairytales told by everyman would find its way into the repertoire of the bard, or be integrated into the poetry of the times. Poetry is an outlet for the soul, but it is also an important tool for reporting on history in the making, peeling away the need for complete honesty (we are not in a Catholic church) and accuracy (we are not television reporters) and just telling it like it is to you, to the poet!

Historically poetry isn't only about emotions, about love and longing, but also about reflections of the current life and events. Reflections of what people then would think about, would do... Rather than going through rules of some poetry form today (and I might get my head handed to me for this), I would like to inspire you to write a poem that, in some way is related to current events and the New Year. Using the numbers 2012 might be one way of going about it, where they can represent numbers of syllables, numbers of words (though that would be one long poem) or be used as rhyme in the poem. Perhaps you would like to create your own poetry form, based on this new year? What would that be? And what would you, today, as a poet, want people to remember about us living here today when the future turns now into history?

If you want to share a piece you have been inspired to write by this, or any other piece of poetry, please feel free to do so at the Gooseberry Garden's Poetry Picnic Week 21 where the theme is Children's Stories, Riddles, Counting Songs and Rhyming Lyrics for Young Children, or perhaps you would like to rev up your engine and join in the Thursday Poets Rally Week 60? I personally will be attending both this week, and will hopefully come better prepared to our Thursday Poetry Forms meeting next week. *blushing* Until then I hope you all have a lovely week!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 21

Welcome back to the first Poetry Forms post of the new year! Of course I hope that you celebrated with A Glass of Bubbly and that you have started 2012 with good spirit and hope for better days!

Me, I am CC Champagne and I do my best to help guide you through the labyrinth that is poetry forms every Thursday in the Gooseberry Garden. As I have spent two glorious weeks on holiday just now I thought I'd try to figure out a more exotic poetry form this week, and I hope you'll join in and correct me if I get it wrong. I am heading into completely unchartered waters now.

Luc bat is a Vietnamese poetry form, that in its basic form is built on a six/eight syllable count. Since I'm starting to feel more comfortable about the whole counting syllable thing, and because I really liked the example poem I thought you might find it interesting to to go off the beaten track. I will start off by saying that I don't speak Vietnamese, and will therefore completely ignore the various tone rules that seem applicable only in the original language.

• Begins with a six syllable line
• Alternates lines between six and eight syllables.
• Ends with an eight syllable line.
• Last (sixth) syllable in line 1 rhymes with the sixth syllable in line 2 AND
• The eighth syllable in line 2 rhymes with the sixth syllable in line 3.

Does that sound complicated? Perhaps a visual would be of assistance:

1. X X X X X A

2. X X X X X A X B

3. X X X X X B

4. X X X X X B X C

5. X X X X X C

etc.

I enjoy the internal rhymes of this form, and I might very well try it out myself when I have a quiet moment again. You can make the poem as long or short as you like, as long as you end it on an eight syllable line.

The example Wikipedia gives, and that I thoroughly enjoyed was this poem, by an unknown poet:

The grand untarnished sea -

How glorious for me and you

To wander as we do

Along its beach and through the tide!

How can I harbor pride

Now walking here beside the shore?

Can you, my love, ignore

The sigh, forevermore to dwell

Within our glassy shell?

The gleaming stars, which fell to earth -

What was their glory worth

Beside the gentle birth of life?

What need have we for strife?

The two of us, dear wife, are free!

I say goodbye for now, hope you have a great week and encourage you to join the wonderful Kay at the Poetry Picnic Week 20, where the theme for this week is Fairytales, My First Time, Hope and New Year's Resolutions. Perhaps I'll see you there? Or next week back here!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 20

Another week begins, even when the year is almost at an end, and I am CC Champagne here to try to help draw you some sort of a map over the impenetrable landscape that is poetry form.

Today is actually my birthday, and one of those big ones at that. I don't celebrate at this time of the year though, but prefer to have an official birthday in summer (if the English Queen can do it, so can I!) and can therefore be here to keep you company under the gooseberry bushes. Let's, however, try something reasonably short today so I can get back to the arduous celebration I have planned (including swimming with dolphins).

My best source for these posts is, as you may have noticed, Wikipedia, and I have stumbled upon a poetry form that I have actually not seen used. A Copla is a Spanish poetry form where the name quite simply means union or link. It consists of:

• four stanzas of
• four lines each and
• no line is to be longer than eight syllables.
• The rhyming pattern varies, but is typically in the romance meter where the even numbered lines (one, three etc) have a near rhyme (assonance) and the uneven numbered lines are unrhymed.

This form is said to be very common in the Spanish language, and was used by (among others) the influential Frederico Garcia Lorca. I will admit to not having tried this form myself, but perhaps you can provide me with some other examples?

As I head back to the enticing turquoise waves of the Caribbean and my date with the dolphins I would like to encourage you to share you poetry, coplas or any other forms, with us at the Poetry Picnic, which this week has the theme of Forgiveness, Gifts, Holiday Songs and Traditions. Or why not join in the Poets Rally 59 over at the Promising Poets Parking lot?

With this I bid you adieu for 2011 and hope to see you again in the wonderful New Year (which, if some are to be believed, means the end of the world according to the Mayan Long Count Calendar), with loads of new, weird and wonderful Poetry Forms, poems and inspiration! Gott Nytt År and Happy New Year!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 19

Mere days to go until Christmas and CC Champagne is back to try to take your mind off the preparations (for those of you who celebrate) with another dive into the deep blue ocean that is poetry forms.

For me palm trees and turquoise seas are beckoning, but a quick look at acrostic poetry is always fun. An acrostic is a poem where you can read more than just the words as they are written. According to trusty old Wikipedia, an acrostic is 'a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message'. So it is a little bit of a riddle, a very simplistic cipher if you will, and it can also be a form of crossword puzzles! Feel like doing a bit of detective work this Christmas?

Acrostics (or should I call them poems?) occurs in religious writing (in this case Judaism), in the Book of Lamentations, Book of Proverbs and a whole number of psalms, which means we are dealing with an old poetry form (they don't take on new texts to the Hebrew Bible, I have been told). Originally the word acrostics comes from Greek, means 'top verse' and if we are to remain for a moment in the religious sphere, the referrals to fish in association with Jesus and the Christian faith has nothing to do with his purported ability to walk on water (don't laugh, I really have thought that my whole life!), but actually stems from a famous ancient Greek acrostic where the initials of an acclamation concerning Jesus Christ, his ancestry and purpose spelled out the Greek word fish... And for some (strange?) reason it has become synonymous with the Jesus and his religion and is used as a sign for its believers.

So, I am not here to debate religion with you. I really would prefer not to, but I thought these tidbits of information might be interesting, especially since we are getting ready to celebrate the 2000th-something birthday of Jesus. On a more secular note, acrostics can also be used as mnemonic devises, assisting memory of for example the name of planets in our solar system, or to - as so elegantly shown by Edgar Allan Poe - spell out the name of your love:

Elizabeth it is in vain you say



"Love not" — thou sayest it in 


so sweet a way:


In vain those words from thee 


or L.E.L.


Zantippe's talents had 


enforced so well:


Ah! if that language from thy 


heart arise,


Breath it less gently forth — 


and veil thine eyes.

Endymion, recollect, when 


Luna tried


To cure his love — was cured


of all beside —


His follie — pride — and 


passion — for he died.

(Edgar Allan Poe, An Acrostic)

Wikipedia also mentions a more modern acrostic in which the Manager of one of the large international IT companies, in a memo sent out to his subordinates, hid an acrostic that spelled out 'Beat IBM'. True? I don't know, but kind of fun in any case.

If you want to make your life more complicated (and why not?), you can always attempt the double acrostic where not just the first letter of the first word on every line spells out a message, but the last letter on every line too... That should give you something to sharpen your poetic claws on over Christmas. Me, I am off to the beach! *smile*

Feel like you want to share an acrostic (or any other poetry) with us? Please join us at the Gooseberry Gardens Poetry Picnic, where the theme for Week 18 is Snow, December, Winter, Vacation and Wildness. I shall return in a week with some other interesting nugget of gold from the mine of poetry forms.

I raise my glass to you and wish you all a Very Berry Christmas!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 18

Another week begins in The Gooseberry Garden, and as has become tradition (I can call it that after 18 weeks, can't I?) CC Champagne is back with a glass of bubbly and the task of trying to make heads or tails of poetry form.

I do a lot of rhyming in my scribbles. Some of it is good, some of it is plain awful, but regardless of what I try to do, it usually ends up rhyming. So what is rhyme, really? Yes, dear friends, it'll be one of those long, muddled posts about the basics of poetry that you know so well, or think you do.

According to Wikipedia, a rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words often used in poetry or songs. True enough, we hardly go around rhyming in our everyday speech, do we? The word in itself comes from Old Frankish language and means series or sequence. But, and here is the nub of the whole thing, there is far more than one type of rhyming and rhyming is a lot more difficult, at least if you want to master poetry-speak, than just using the words 'hat' and 'mat' at the end of two lines in your poem.

Two words rhyme if their final stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical. Thinking about it that way makes me stressed, so I am not surprised at the poor vowel's stress levels! It also says that two lines of poetry rhyme if their final stressed positions are filled with rhyming words.

For a rhyme to be considered a perfect rhyme it has to use an identical vowel sound in both words and the articulation before the rhyming vowel must differ between the two words ('leave' and 'believe' are not perfect rhymes, whereas 'spleen' and 'been' would be).

There is also a form of rhyming that can be done using homonyms (and I had to look that word up) and homophones, which means that both words use the same stressed vowel sound, these would not have a different articulation before the rhyming vowel and can therefore not be called perfect rhymes. I think an example would be the use of the word 'stalk' (as in stem of a flower) and the word 'stalk' (as in following someone), and these rhymes are called mirror rhymes. Please remember that not every word that starts with homo- has something to do with sexuality. Homo is a Greek prefix that means 'the same'.

Now on to what most of us probably do when we are writing poetry (I know I do, anyway), general rhyming. A general rhyme is any kind of word that has a phonetic similarity to another word. In other words, they have a similar sound. These general rhymes can be classified depending on the extent to which they do rhyme, as follows:

• syllabic rhyme: the last syllable in each word sounds the same, but does not necessarily contain a vowel. (pitter - patter)
• imperfect rhyme: one word contains a stressed vowel and the other does not. (wing - caring)
• semirhyme: one word contains an extra syllable. (bend - ending)
• oblique (slant/forced) rhyme: the words are not perfectly matched in sound. (one - thumb)
• assonance: the vowels of the words match (not necessarily making them rhyme). (shake - hate)
• consonance: the consonants of the words match. (rabies - robbers)
• half (sprung) rhyme: the final consonants of the words match. (bent - ant)
• alliteration (head) rhyme: the initial consonants of the words match. (short - ship)

The funny part (if there is such a thing here) is that if one of the words being rhymed is the entirety of the other (ball - all), it is not considered a rhyme at all, whereas 'gun' - 'begun' would be considered a super-rhyme since not only the vowels, but the onsets of the rhyming syllables are identical.

So why all this talk of rhyming? Can't we just leave the words be and let them come to us? Believe it or not (and I have no scientific foundation for this) but we are coming up on the time of the year where more people than ever engage in the activity of writing poetry. Christmas and the weeks leading up to it have to be our high season, really, and we might want to think about that. Why? Well, many families in many different countries are preparing to exchange gifts over the holidays, and who has not at least thought of adding a rhyme to the Christmas present? Giving dad yet another tie? Something like 'Around your neck, this should go - to once again say I love you so', perhaps? A perfume for your partner/wife/girlfriend? 'I promise and I truly swear - that this will not clash with whatever you wear'.

Are you in a Christmas rhyme writing mood? Or do you just want to share some of your poetry with a community that promotes and supports on-line poets in a friendly atmosphere? Please feel free to join in this week's Poetry Picninc Week 17: Photos, Nostalgia, Memories and Families or why not enter the Poets Rally Week 58 over at The Poetry Palace? I hope to see you back here next week for some more bubbly and a chit-chat about poetry forms.

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 17

Ah... How does one follow up something as wonderful as Kay's Poetry Picnic Week 16: My Life in Free Verse post? *sigh* But it's a new week in The Gooseberry Garden, and though nowhere near as creatively inspirational, it is my job to start the week off with some musings on poetry form. I am CC Champagne, and I bid you welcome among the gooseberry bushes, where the berries are ripe for picking and the sun always shines, even in mid-winter.

Some poetry forms are built by re-curring end-rhymes and some poetry forms don't bother with rhymes much at all. As I have travelled the blogosphere I have come across quite a few forms that only focus on syllables, and I thought (in keeping with the repetition post last week) that we might look a bit more at some of those.

A Nonnet is a nine line poem, whose first line has nine syllables, the second line eight syllables, the third seven and so on in descending order down to the last line, which has only one single syllable. This creates an aesthetically pleasing poem, as well as a challenge for those of us who love playing around with words. The only thing you will need to remember (apart from how to count nine syllables), is to keep the poem in iambic meter.

An example of this form that I found via Google (though I'm sure there are many other examples out there, quite probably even among our creative contributors) is a poem called Sensual Touch, by Doolie:

Heart races from your sensual touch

Your smile sweet, your caress gentle

Loving kiss that melts my heart

Soothing lips like velvet

Body on fire

Desire building

United

Two as

One

See what I mean about aesthetically pleasing?

If you get into this whole counting syllables thing, there are plenty of forms out there for you to try - all you have to do is go looking! I'm especially looking forward to sharing the information about the Pi, but you'll have to wait until March for that one! *smile*

Short and sweet this week, and I hope you don't mind if I leave you to rush out into the pre-Christmas stress of the real world already? If you feel like sharing a nonnet or any other of your poetry with us, please feel free to join the Poetry Picnic Week 16: My Life in Free Verse. Don't stress too much about Christmas now, and I hope to see you again next week.

*cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 16

Welcome back to The Gooseberry Garden! This is our 16th week, and I, CC Champagne, is once again here to start the week off with some musings on poetry forms. Pull up a picnic blanket and join in what passes for fun where poetry form is concerned!

Have you ever suffered from writer's block? Had those days when the words just aren't there? Well, I'm going through a phase of something like that right now. Writer's block-light, if there is such a thing, but we have been doing this for 16 weeks so instead of trying to find something witty and fun to say I thought it might be the right time to do a recap. It would also be a way to gather all the poetry forms (and related information) we've gone through so far, and maybe it will make it easier to find the gaps in the information (if there are any gaps, that is).

Please note that items in italics below are not poetry forms per se, but rather poetry tools or related information. For more extensive (and sometimes more confusing) information, follow the links provided back to the original post).

Alliterative Verse:

• Uses repetition of a specific sound (alliteration) to bind a poem together.

Anacreontic Verse:

• Seven syllable lines
• Subject matter: love and wine
• Rarely used (the original text of 'The Star Spangled Banner' was written in anacreontic verse)

Bouts-Rimé:

• A sonnet (see below) with set end rhymes
• You can basically decide on the - traditionally - eight end words of a stanza and work out the poem from that. Can be (and has been) used as a poetry constructing game.

Carmen:

• A form of chant that does not adhere to any particular meter, though the number three has a special significance and phrases are often repeated three times.

Cinquain:

• Five lines (2-4-6-8-2 syllable count)
• End rhymes

Computer Generated Poetry:

• Uses the computer as a tool to decide the words of a poem.

Free Verse:

• No set meter pattern, rhyme or any other discernible pattern.
• Must have poetic structure.

Haiku:

• 17 syllables (traditionally, though not required. Must be an uneven number though). First line five syllables, second line seven syllables and third line five syllables.
• No end rhymes
• Subject matter should be nature.

Limerick:

• witty, humorous, or nonsense poem, which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent.
• five-lines in anapestic or amphibrachic meter
• strict rhyme scheme (aabba)

Monostich:

• One line only
• Six to twelve syllables (always an even number)
• Similes not allowed, but at least one poetic devise must be used.
• No punctuation allowed, apart from the full stop at the end (and capital letter at the beginning).
• Should be a complete thought (not a fractured sentence).
• Should not be able to be broken up into several lines

Paradelle:

• Spoof form of Villanelle (please see below or link for more information)

Sonnet:

• Fourteen lines
• Each line containing ten syllables
• Iambic pentameter (five iambs (Ta-dums) to each line) is (traditionally) used
• Modern sonnets are not adhering strictly to original rules

Tanka:

• 31 syllables
• Five lines (5-7-5-7-7 syllable count)

Villanelle:

• 19 lines in all
• Set rhyming pattern: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2 (for more information follow the link)
• 2 rhyming refrains
• usually in pentameter (five feet to a line)
• does not tell a story or work for narrative development

Iambic Pentameter:

• A metric foot (not a poetry form) dealing with the rhythm of the poem, dividing words and sentences into feet rather than syllables.
• An iamb has the same rhythm as your heart beating, with the emphasis (or stress) on the first syllable of a word or line (ta-DUM)
• Pentameter means that there are five feet (ta-DUM:s) to each line.

Metric Feet:

• what provides rhythm to the words, how they are stressed when we say them (for a list, please follow the link).

Syllables:

• Look for the vowels in the word.
• Subtract any silent vowels (like the 'e' at the end of the 'Fore!' shouted by golfers).
• If you have two vowels together, creating a diphthong, count only one of the vowels (for example the word 'you' is only one syllable).
• Compound words, words that consist of two other words but is written together (likehouseboat), along with words using prefixes (like prefix) and suffixes (like farmer) should be divided into their component words to count syllables.
• Divide words between the two middle consonants (like bas/ket) to count the syllables.
• Usually divide words into syllables before a single consonant (like e/vil or re/port).
• The '-le' at the end of a word usually forms its' own syllable (like a/ble, or indeed syl/la/ble.

15 weeks of work in one post! Wow, you would have thought we would all know much more than we really do (or perhaps I should speak merely for myself in this case?). I have already spotted some rather large holes in the above information, but we will do our very best to fill those in the weeks, months and perhaps even years to come.

Remember that I'm trying to learn this along with the rest of you, so if you have any input on the above I would be happy to hear from you. This is supposed to be fun but instructive, but I think we all remember how that could be from back when we were in school... *smile* Don't give yourselves a head-ache trying to understand everything at once! There will be no tests on this (thankfully), but hopefully one of the more obscure forms may help inspire you to delve deeper into your creative selves!

If you feel you want to share a poem, new or old, based on this or not, please feel welcome to join us over at The Gooseberry Garden's Poetry Picnic Week 15: November, Winter, Change and Hope, or rev up your poetic engines over at Thursday Poets' Rally Week 57, and perhaps end up with the Perfect Poets Award?

In the run-up to and stress before Christmas, I have to say that being here, in the peacefulness of The Gooseberry Garden really helps me keep my spirits up, and I look forward to seeing you again next week for more Poetry for Dummies and weird and wonderful Thursday Poetry Forms!

*Cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 15

Another Thursday in The Gooseberry Garden and I, CC Champagne, am basking in the imaginary sunshine among the bushes while attempting to make head or tails of yet another poetry form. Please pull up a chair and see what we can find this week.

You may have noticed that I love words? I am, as they would say, rather a verbose person and I believe this is one of the problems I had when I first started my journey in the multi-facetted poetry section of the blogosphere. Haikus! They just didn't seem quite finished to me! As time went on and I found out more about them (and about how to write one myself) it got easier until I now admire those able to write a haiku that packs a punch enormously. Getting a message, the moment or feeling you are describing, across in three mere lines (and a limited number of syllables) is not at all as easy as it might sound, and especially to someone who likes hearing their own voice the way I do, and since last week's post on sonnets was extremely verbose (not to mention slightly confused) I thought we might go the opposite way today.

Monostich is a poetry form that I haven't come across before (apart from on Wikipedia), but the whole idea of writing a poem in only one line sounds fascinating. Could you do that? Say something profound enough, using a single line, conveying an idea, a moment, a feeling or anything else in one single line, and call it poetry... ? The Wikipedia explanation is simpler and gives no rules, apart from the 'sticking to one line' bit, but a few rules could be applicable:

• One line only
• Six to twelve syllables (always an even number)
• Similes not allowed, but at least one poetic devise must be used.
• No punctuation allowed, apart from the full stop at the end (and capital letter at the beginning).
• Should be a complete thought (not a fractured sentence).
• Should not be able to be broken up into several lines.

A quick troll around the blogosphere reveals that there are actual blogs dedicated to this poetry form, like monostich and Monostich Poet (to name the first two a Google search came up with). The history behind this form is that it can be traced back at least to Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (known as Martial in English), via 19th century Russia and Valery Bryusov and into the 20th century where it is said to have been re-invented by Guillaume Apollonaire.

A whole poem in one single line... The thought is staggering! However, I did attend a session of creative writing poetry class a while back, and out of the ten or so people who attended, and all our joint efforts during that evening, I only remember one single piece (and it's not even my own). When asked to do some free writing (of no more than eight lines), one of the participants was having a particularly hard time and by the time the teacher got round to having her read her poem she looked around at the rest of us (all eager to hear what she had come up with), took a deep breath and said:

Telephone cord...

I don't remember any of the other poems from that evening, but I will always remember that one.

If you feel like you want to share a monostich of your own with us, please feel free to visit The Gooseberry Garden's Poetry Picnic Week 14, where the theme this week is "What I am Thankful for". Me? I'm thankful that I have been given the opportunity to take part in not only the sunny Thursday goings-on in The Gooseberry Garden, but the amazing journey that is blogging - and also for any and all comments you may have on the topic of poetry form! Until next week!

*cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 14

Ah! Another gorgeously sunny day in The Gooseberry Garden and we are about to start our 14th week... Stretched out on a blanket enjoying the imaginary sunshine (in spite of the real gray autumn day outside my window), I am CC Champagne and I am here to navigate the stormy and treacherous waters of the ocean of Poetry Forms with you. And today I'm actually diving in at the deep end.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

–William Shakespeare

Sonnets... What's the big deal? The mere word sonnet makes me smile and sigh with longing at the thought of all the beautiful poetry out there, while breaking out in a cold sweat and cringing mentally at the thought of even attempting to scribble anything that would dare to call itself a sonnet. Odes I can fake, haikus I can fake, some of the other forms we have talked about here, or that I have read about at other sites (such as Imaginary Garden with Real Toads or dVerse Poets Pub) I can fake, but the mere idea of faking something as holy as a sonnet... Well, in my mind that is tantamount to blasphemy (once again possibly partly because of all the poetry speak involved)!

I don't want to get into a whole philosophical discussion about whether or not William Shakespeare wrote his poems, and I don't want to get into a discussion on whether he is the greatest poet of all times or not (simply because I have no idea on the first question and the second is - to me - a matter of personal taste), but the man has left behind a legacy of poetry that is seriously daunting. Published in 1609, 402 years ago, the 154 poems that make up his 'The Sonnets' still spark discussions today, regardless of whether you feel you need an English-English dictionary to read them or not. However, Shakespeare is far from the only poet out there who has produced sonnets! There are indeed as many as nine different versions of sonnets out there according to the limitless knowledge that is Wikipedia. What on earth is a sonnet? What tricky, mind-bending rules and regulations do we have to adhere to if we want to call our work a sonnet? Which magic and deceitful words of poetry-speak do we need to conquer to be able to call our poetry by that name?

In simple English, a sonnet is a poem of:

• Fourteen lines
• Each line containing ten syllables
• Iambic pentameter (five iambs (Ta-dums) to each line) is (traditionally) used

What separates the different types of sonnets out there is how you chose to divide the fourteen lines AND how you chose to rhyme (or not) the lines with each other. Some examples:

- Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet: Divides the 14 lines into a 4-4-6 line poem (two quatrains and a sestet) and rhymes adda-adda-cbecbe (or adda-adda-cbccbc). According to Wikipedia (and I do believe them) this works best for poems in Italian. An example (if you want to get a better feel for the rhythm) is John Milton (of Paradise Lost fame) in "On His Blindness". If you really feel you need a challenge, you should have a go at Dante's variation of the Italian Sonnet (if you succeed, you are a far more patient person than I am!).

-English (Shakespearean) Sonnet: Divides the 14 lines into a 4-4-4-2 line poem, but traditionally uses an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme scheme (which means you won't have to find as many words that rhyme with one another as in the Spenserian version). For examples of these, there are literally thousands of them out there. Poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats and even, a bit more modern, E. E. Cummings have produced marvelous sonnets based on this form.

In the older sonnet forms there are rules to everything! You even have rules to how you build up a sonnet (the functions of the various parts of the poem), or what a sonnet should be about (love would be one pretty safe bet), but if you are interested in this I am sure you already know these things (or will be able to find more information through some of the links I've provided).

- Modern Sonnet: As with all types of poetry forms, the strictness of the rules governing them have become more lax over time and the focus seems to have shifted from which line rhymes with which and how you divide the 14 lines into a sonnet being more or less any poem of 14 lines, or even just a poem called a sonnet. You may find contemporary sonnets out there that do adhere to strict rhyming schemes, but you may also find those that are written in free verse. An example of the modern sonnet might be Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnet 6 (though I will grant you that he's hardly contemporary).

After doing a bit of (amateur) research on this extensive topic, my conclusion is that basically anything can be called a sonnet these days! I know many out there might consider sonnets out of date and boring (or will be put off by the language in some of the older sonnets by for example Shakespeare or John Donne), but there are ways to modernize the language, the form and the topics, and if you can overcome these obstacles there is true enjoyment in this poetry form. It would, however, be a pretty safe bet to say that I will not be the one doing any of this (at least not anytime soon), as this post has given me more than my fill of sonnets!

If you feel like sharing a sonnet you have written, or any other poetry for that matter, please feel free to join The Gooseberry Garden's Poetry Picnic Week 13, where this week's theme is childhood, dreams, books and role models, or rev up your poetic engines at Promising Poet's Parking Lot for the Thursday Poets Rally Week 56.

As I swim for the shore, I hope to see you back here next week to tackle some other poetry form, or aspects thereof! Anything, as long as it's nothing to do with sonnets!

*cheers*

Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 13

Another Thursday and welcome to a new week in The Gooseberry Garden! I am CC Champagne, and my role here is to guide and inspire you as we wade through the quagmire that is English Poetry Forms. Hopefully the ground under our feet will feel a little more solid after we try to make sense of various forms out there.

I've been trying to come up with something new and refreshing for this week, but a phrase keeps echoing through my mind and I would like to put it out there to start this excursion off with.

We write what we know.

I am sure someone far more clever than me has claimed this statement, but I am more and more realising just how true it is for blogging poets (or at least for myself). Brought up in Sweden, Eastern poetry is very much an un-known to me, and all the Eastern (Japanese, Chinese, Indian) poetry forms I come across on an almost daily basis does take some time to get into. In a way it is the same with the old European forms, but I somehow feel more related to the way they are constructed - perhaps because their original languages (Latin and Greek) and their cultural backgrounds are more closely related to mine, or maybe because I must have heard of them in school, but I am quite sure, when I was in school, "they" (meaning the teachers of the time) hadn't discovered forms like Haiku, Tanka or Man'yoshu poetry (the last one wonderfully described recently at d'Verse Poets Pub).

I am not saying we were particularly backwards or isolationist in Sweden, but back in the 1980's only a handful of Swedes would have thought to learn Japanese or Mandarin and then attempt to translate any poetry to Swedish - and the market for those translations would probably have been miniscule. Japan and China were just that exotic and far away to us, in a way the internet has assured that they will never be again. The distance between Stockholm and Tokyo/Beijing/New Dehli was somehow longer back then, and ,though Sweden is a small country (a mere speck on the globe, really), I am sure we are not the only ones who have experienced this phenomenon.

We all have different histories and cultural backgrounds and we are all taught history and literature from the point of view of our own country, which will - as it must - affect how we perceive poetry forms and overall poetry from other parts of the world. Some poetry forms are perhaps also not suitable for the English language, even though they may work perfectly well in Arabic or Hindi - or even Swedish for that matter.

It is also not so strange if we do not know as much about poets from 'exotic' parts of the world as we do poets from our own. I feel terribly inadequate when I listen to friends speak of which American poets they are influenced by, since greats like Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman and E.E. Cummings were not required reading as I was growing up (and, again, we had yet to discover Indian, Japanese or Chinese poets at that point). I am slightly more familiar with the 'British' poetic legacy of William Blake, Robert Burns or Samuel Coleridge (mostly from my University days), but still if I were to tell you that my poetic influences are Karin Boye, Gustaf Fröding and Carl Michael Bellman you probably have no idea who I am talking about, right?

Of course it hurts when buds burst.

Otherwise why would spring hesitate?

Why would all our fervent longing

be bound in the frozen, bitter haze?

What is this new thing, which consumes and bursts?

Of course it hurts when buds burst,

pain for that which grows

and for that which envelops

(Karin Boye, Of course it hurts - translation by Jenny Nunn, first stanza)

I purchased my love (how dearly!)

For money - what else could I get?

O jangling strings, sound clearly

The theme of my love-song yet!

For the dream, though the truth were vanished

was the princeliest dream I could get,

and for him who from Eden is banished

is Eden an Eden yet.

(Gustaf Fröding, En Kärleksvisa - translation by C.D. Locock)

(Imperiet performing 'Märk hur vår skugga' by Carl Michael Bellman)

We write what we know and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes trying to force our own cultural and literary heritage into a poetry form mold created for another language, culture or literary style will do us no good and might even hurt our creative process more than help it. Sometimes doing it as a challenge of our own poetic skills can prove fruitful and we will learn, but at other times we will end up with pieces that limp (or make no sense to anyone but ourselves). I believe it may be important to remember this and allow ourself the poetic license to, occasionally, use those poetry forms we feel comfortable with, even though they may not be the trendiest ones at the current time.

I realise this post has, so far, had little to do with poetry forms, and therefore I present to you the alliterative verse. As opposed to using for instance end-rhymes to bind a poem together, poetry written in alliterative verse rely on alliteration to structure and bind them. Alliteration, simply put, means repetition of a particular sound (or as Wikipedia explains it: 'two syllables alliterate when they begin with the same sound') in a poem.

An axe angles

from my neighbor's ashcan;

It is hell's handiwork,

the wood not hickory.

The flow of the gain

not faithfully followed.

The shivered shaft

rises from a shellheap

Of plastic playthings,

paper plates.

(Junk by Richard Wilbur)

The link between the Swedish poets I find my inspiration in and alliterative verse is found in old Norse poetry, such as the Havamal from the Elder Edda, and the oldest piece of English poetry I have ever attempted to read. Beowulf, an epic poem (thought to have been written somewhere between the 8th-11th century), set in Scandinavia but written in the 'English' of the time, Anglo-Saxon written in alliterative verse, all 3182 lines of it... I believe I got as far as line five before I gave up and admitted that commanding the English language of today does not mean that you understand a single word of the English language of about 1000 years ago...

More recent use of alliterative verse (and possibly more inspiring if you don't feel like reading Anglo-Saxon or Norse literature) can be found in W.H. Auden's 'The Age of Anxiety' and Ezra Pound's 'The Seafarer'.

If you want to share some of your alliterative verse, or any of your other poetry with us, please join us at the Poetry Picnic Week 12, where the theme of the week is 'Feathers, Fidelity, Figments and Fables'. I raise my glass of bubbly to you and hope to see you again next week.

*cheers*