Thursday Rush Update

I'm rushing to publish an update before putting up the A Girl's Open Thread post; and yes, I know technically it is already Friday -- the open thread start date -- but for me, a day starts with the first blush of dawn.

I have a couple of updates -- let me start with my hair: It's vain and admittedly shallow but I love my hair; I love the feel of it, the length; I love taking care of it. It is time-consuming yet oddly fun. I've been natural for a while but I have never embraced it in its totality until recently. Choosing all natural products has left my hair silky, strong and long-long-long!!! Not (Black girl) perm long but kinky curl long where the twists hang enough to pull into pony tails, create full bangs or stylish 'bumps'. It's strange to me now, the idea that our natural hair is considered "hard" to style or "limited". It's not! The hair styles are half the fun! Yesterday I cornrowed my twists and I'm looking mighty cute if I do write so myself, LOL. Initially I attempted to do a 'faux-hawk' by cornrowing the sides but, with twists, the middle falls too limply. I still want to blowout my hair to get an accurate measurement of length but I'm terrified of the heat, literally. As a small child I couldn't stand the hot comb or the blow dryer. I winced and whimpered so much under their use my mother thought I suffered from sensitive scalp (nope, it's as tough as the Rock of Gibralter). Now the fear is under control (somewhat) and my fear is based more on the damage heat can do to hair.

Next on the update list -- poetry. I've continued to write. I resumed reading 'The Book of Forms' by Lewis Turco(?), once more from the start, and it has made me feel bad about myself. LOL, I kid. No, really, Turco writes there is no such thing as "free verse" because verse requires meter, measurement, a foundational pattern of a kind which it either holds to or breaks but a pattern nonetheless. Yeah, I rarely... Never. I never do that. Sigh. Without that it's all just prose, pretty prose perhaps, but prose. It also explains why my rondeau, though it fits a basic, prescribed structure still sounds wrong. I dread the redo but it must be done. Currently I'm working on sapphic verse -- it's a Greek form relying on a strict format of (in this order) two trochees, a dactyl, and two trochees per line for three lines, then an adonic line, which is a dactyl and a trochee, for the fourth and final line of the stanza. It's a blank quatrain; blank means unrhymed. Dactyls and trochees are different units of paired stressed and unstressed syllables.

Let's say this little guy [ ' ] represents a stressed syllable and this little guy [ - ] an unstressed syllable, trochees and dactyls look as follows:

trochee ' -
dactyl ' - -

So, a sapphic line looks like this: ' -..... ' -..... ' - -..... ' -..... ' -
And an adonic line looks like this: ' - -..... ' -

My creative brain is still frustrating me; it took me three days to crack that first sapphic stanza, three damn days to finish the first two and a half lines! I just completed the third line's latter half and the adonic today! Then I lit through the other quatrains as if on fire! It's as if my brain needed time to click onto the syllabic pattern because suddenly the dactyls which had troubled me so much troubled me no longer. I have one last stanza (I hope) and then I will submit the poem for critical review on the site, The Critical Poet. It's an excellent board full of knowledgeable writers and poets. It's also partially the reason why writing this poem has been so difficult. You see, this is in answer to a ten word challenge, an exercise in which ten random words are provided and must be used, in one form or another, within a freshly created poem. So on top of trying to obey a metrical pattern I also had to factor in ten odd words. Maddening! I really, really, really wanted to give up; I nearly did. However I realized quitting would only further complicate my writing path since the next form I try will probably be just as difficult if not more so. So I stuck with it and I'm glad I did. Of course I'm pretty sure once I submit the thing those who post on The Critical Poet will 'red pen' it to death but I'm cool with that -- how else does one learn? How else does one get better?

That's all for now!