By Ashley Lister
I’ll keep my linguistic straitjacket short here. Rhyme is too strongly associated with childish verses - and consequently loses much of its literary gravitas. Syllable based poetry becomes complicated by the inconvenience of morae, diphthongs
and triphthongs (as well as the vagaries of pronunciation). And so, I’ve gone
for something short and sweet with my contribution to this week’s excursion
into poetic forms. I’ve elected to tackle the septolet.
BlackBerrying
Nobody
on the
phone,
contact
your provider.
BlackBerries
and
BlackBerries
nothing,
nothing
but
BlackBerries.
The
septolet has fourteen words. It is broken between two stanzas that make up the
fourteen words. Each stanza can have seven words but that is not an essential requirement.
The division can take place where the poet decides.
The Library
Chasing
words
with
one
finger.
Feeling
lines;
smelling
pages;
savouring
books;
seeing,
hearing: reading.
Both
stanzas of the septolet deal with the same thought. Ultimately they create a
picture. Please take a shot at contributing a septolet to the
comments box below.
Treadmill.
ReplyDeleteOne step,
Then another.
Forward, ever onward
We march.
Never reaching
Our Final Destination.
Louise,
ReplyDeleteThanks for that! It's a pretty cool form, isn't it?
Ash
Yes, I quite enjoyed it. It had me scratching my head for a while though. Lol. I have also written one with a fixed amount of syllables on each line. It takes a while to figure out, but hey-ho. Still prefer to write it my own way though, even he it doesn't conform to the "rules". ;-) x
ReplyDeleteI don’t normally play these games but I thought I’d have a crack. I’m not a big one for classic forms—I’ve never written a sestina or a sonnet in my life and only one haiku out of almost 1100 poems—and so I’ve made up my own rule for this poem. I’ve kept the basic premise of two complementary stanzas each containing seven syllables but since the poem is about reflections I’ve made the shape a palindrome : 1-3-2-1 // 1-2-3-1.
ReplyDeleteReflections
I
look at her
and see
me.
She
smiles back
and I feel
free.
I structure all my poems. Few poets these days do; free verse has become It’s-a-poem-because-I-say-it-is and that rather saddens me. Working within a predetermined structure is good. I forced you to stretch yourself. Free verse, as I was just saying on another blog, can be too free. If you can use any word why tax your imagination to think of a better one than one that’ll do the job?
Jim,
ReplyDeleteStylish appropriation of the form. And a good poem too.
I saw your comments on the other page. I thought your analogy, comparing the programming of a 48K Spectrum against the programming of modern day Gb-hungry programs, was one of the most prudent comparisons I've seen in a long time.
Thanks for contributing :-)
Ash