by Tom Adam
Repetition is one of the pillars of poetry. Sometimes the repetition is of words and phrases (as in sestinas, ghazals, or villanelles), sometimes it’s a repetition of sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), sometimes the rhythm of the words (which we most clearly see in formal meters like iambic pentameter). All these types of repetition are used to reinforce certain elements in the poem or to bring greater cohesiveness.
Most poetic forms are based on some form of repetition and use it to create specific movements through the poem. Along with the villanelle, the pantoum is one of the most highly repetitive poetic forms.
Harmony of Evening by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by A. S. Kline
Now those days arrive when, stem throbbing,
each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
sounds and scents twine in the evening air:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
Each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
the violin quivers, a heart that’s suffering:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar.
The violin quivers, a heart that’s suffering:
a heart, hating the vast black void, so tender!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar:
the sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing.
A heart, hating the vast black void, so tender:
each trace of the luminous past it’s gathering!
The sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing…
A vessel of the host, your memory shines there.
The pantoum is a series of quatrains rhyming A-B-A-B where the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza. As in “Harmony of Evening,” pantoum traditionally feature lines that are fully end-stopped (the poem above does not rhyme because it is a translation from French, but it does rhyme in French!) and the repeated lines are repeated verbatim. They can be of any length and generally just end without any special envoy or closure. Some modern authors of the Pantoum have loosened these constraints, as they have with most forms, but it is often written in the traditional way.
But, why write a pantoum at all? What is a pantoum going to do for my poem? What makes it special? I had said the villanelle was an excellent form to use when writing about obsession because the constant refrains always bring you back to the beginning of the poem, leading to a circular form. The pantoum, on the other hand, continues making forward progress throughout the poem. Each stanza brings new lines and new rhymes but the close repetition has a constant backwards pull. This makes the pantoum have a feel of “two steps forward, one step back.” Some poets use this halting progress to generate a feeling of ambivalence, some use it nostalgically. Regardless of the feeling it is used to generate, the constant repetition does force the pantoum to stay close to one idea; it has very little room for divergence.
The pantoum, though it often is, does not have to be ambivalent or dark or depressing or blah blah blah. Cecilia Woloch’s “Bareback Pantoum” has a wild exuberance to it. But Donald Justice’s “Pantoum of the Great Depression” is one of the most iconic pantoums in the English language.
Learn more at the poets.org page on the pantoum and A.E. Stallings “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs” at poetryfoundation.org.
by Tom Adam
I suppose I should start by apologizing for the cliché, but your prompt this week is to repeat yourself poetically. Repetition is one of the most important concepts in poetry. Songwriters understand this with their catchy choruses and repetition is very common in verse forms. Villanelles, sestinas, rondeaux and pantoum are all built on repetition. The very existence of rhyme scheme and meter are a form of repetition – an aural one.
Tiel’s comment on my post about the villanelle left me thinking about repetition and what effect it has. Tiel was absolutely correct to say “the challenge of the villanelle is to make the repetitions not just be repetitions — the poem should move ahead with each stanza.” No repetition in a poem should be just repetition. It is vital and important that the repetition explore a new possibility, otherwise, it’s just dull. Repetition is often used in an obsessive fashion, hence my statement — a broad generalization — about the obsessiveness of the villanelle.
The element of repetition forces the poem to come back to the beginning no matter what. The pantoum (the subject of my next column, published tomorrow) forces a halting motion through the constant backtracking of lines. Triolet are too short to go anywhere, even without using one line three times over. Sestinas talk about the same six things through seven verses.
The constant repetition in these forms says to the reader: This is what I want you to remember. Just like a catchy chorus, when someone thinks of a poem in a highly repetitious form, they are going to remember what they read or heard three or four or six times over.
It’s your chance, as a poet, to get something stuck in the reader’s head. The trade off is that you have to make it interesting enough to read over and over again.
Come back Monday night (just after midnight Central Standard Time) and post (a link to) the work you did for this prompt, or post (a link to) the work you did.
by Carolee Sherwood
At least half of those who responded to the current “read write poll” believe that “growing poetically” is the hardest part of being a poet. I am thrilled about that!
I am not happy that you’re struggling to grow poetically, but I am happy that you want it. It tells me that this community sees room for growth in its work and that we recognize poetry as craft, as hard work.
I want to “grow poetically,” too, but I didn’t check it off as one of the hardest parts because I see paths to improvement all around me, even in my daily writing practice. Maybe it’s a syndrome of having so far to go that all I can see in front of me is pavement. All I can see is the way ahead, the way to expand my imagination or practice certain skills.
Whether “growing poetically” is hard for you or not, I recommend approaching it playfully. Yes, study other poets diligently. Yes, be serious about putting in the time. But have some fun with the growing and stretching! Visit resources for kids, such as Scholastic where you’ll find U.S. children’s poet laureate Jack Prelutsky, a poetry workshop by Karla Kuskin and a myth-writing workshop by Jane Yolen. Why “kid stuff”? Because that’s when we knew how to play and it can be a hoot to take a step back, strip away pretention and start with the basics.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the experts. I also enjoy reading what other poets have to say about being better poets, and the Web is full of great tips and essays, like “The art of finding” by Linda Gregg and “On Writing Poetry” by U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic.
Other ideas to work your muscles include collaborative work, as is sometimes suggested here at RWP and other sites, including – forgive me for shamelessly plugging my pal Jill – Patchwork poetry.
You may also like challenges. There are challenges in small containers: try haiku or acrostic poetry. There are challenges in large containers: try 30 poems in 30 days, for example.
Outside of growing poetically, responses were distributed fairly evenly at “press time” between finding time to write (check out Judy Reeve’s “Keep the fire burning”), titling poems (help! I think titling poems is hands-down the hardest part of writing poetry, and the only thing I found was this: eHow’s “How to develop a title for a poem or song”), editing and organizing (a previous poll dance lists some resources for this).
Isn’t it interesting to think of our poetry lives and talk about our writing practice? Much more enjoyable than, say, suffering through endless conversations about children, health and weather. Right? (Except for a recent writing prompt on weather. That was scintillating.)
So where do you find your greatest challenges? And do you have tricks to share?
Here’s how the poll dance works: We post a poll and let it ride for a week and a half, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the topic and the results. The poll will stand for a few days after that to allow additional participation. The rotation gives each poll two weeks in the white-hot spotlight.
by Carolee Sherwood
From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution to poems related to the weather, or any other poem or poem-like writing you’d like to share this week.
Be sure to check back in the week for new links; some participants take a little longer to get going – for lots of reasons – and you’ll miss some gems if you’re only looking at the site early in the week.
Please, link back here in your posts, either with a hyperlink to Read Write Poem or by using the badge in your post. Sidebar links are great but it helps our “internet health” when you link in every post you contribute to the project. And please add “Read Write Poem” in your tags, if you don’t mind.
For the new folks: Please take a few moments to read the About pages, including our Copyrights page. If you have any questions about the project after reading through those pages, email us at info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
by Christine Swint
Casting call — unique types wanted!
As poets we feel the need to write, but what do we write about? We surf the net looking for prompts, read newspapers, look at paintings or listen to music, but ultimately we end up writing about ourselves. How then can we turn our own lives into poems?
If your life is like mine, there’s not a lot of surface drama going on. It’s the hidden world we are trying to reveal. In her essay, “Creating a Personal Mythology,” poet Diane Wakoski writes, “… it is not autobiography you are writing, but your life you are using in order to write about life as other people experience it too.”
As Diane Wakoski suggests in this essay, a way to present recurring themes, ideas and images in your poems is to create a cast of characters who appear across several pieces. Some poets turn to mythology, others find inspiration in pop culture icons and still others turn to dreams and paintings. It is the poet’s task to search for characters who symbolize or represent certain feelings about the poet’s own interior life. In this way the writer must invent.
I list here some possible sources for characters – or even talismans — that can take on added meaning in your poems, either as minor players or as stars in their own right.
• World mythology: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a classic book that combines the study of Jungian psychology with mythology, explaining the symbolic meaning of many common mythological characters.
• Archetypes: The Hero Within by Carol Pearson outlines six predominant archetypes that show up in the way many of us live our lives.
• History: Diane Wakoski’s key word is “emblematic.” Is there a certain historical figure who is “emblematic” of an aspect of your own life?
• Comic Strips: Batman, Robin, Superman, Wonder Woman and others have become icons in modern life. One of these characters might serve as a useful person in a poem, embodying a trait you want to express.
• Animals: Humans have recorded their relationship with animals and the natural world since the beginning of culture and society. Think of cave paintings, masks, fables and legends. Native Americans have developed a system of totemic animals, each one representing different aspects of the human psyche. Personification of inanimate objects can also work as a tool for character building.
If you keep a writer’s journal, jot down ideas about possible characters as you read, watch TV or when you’re on the bus. Each interaction in life provides the poet with a way to tell a story. It might be an event that truly occurred, but even so there’s a need to fictionalize, to embellish, to draw a reader in. To reveal your own hidden view of life, the reader needs to find common ground within the poem.
A recurring character might be a way to connect your feelings with your reader’s.
Source: “Creating a Personal Mythology,” in Toward a New Poetry, The University of Michigan Press, 1980, pp. 106-19, by Diane Wakoski.
|
read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
|
thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
|
