Meter Exercise

A QUATORZAIN / IAMBIC / RHYMED / VARIED FEET

I took an angry walk today.
Not very far, but far enough away
to breed a distance from all I knew
-- and sat on the slant of a hill view,
on a lock of concrete overlooking a creek.
The late spring evening was a pleasant feel
against my livid cheek; that and the hustle
and leap of the stream relaxed me. Light shuffled
between the water and the trees,
gleaming like tinsel in a breeze.
If it were winter still,
the light would touch ice, not the rill;
and by this hour have come and gone, with the moon
already donned just like a cap on the sun.

EDIT

Only ageless quiet attends our altars
shrouds our days in motes and in shade, a half-life
lived in half-light. Even our fire can pale in
twilight and gray or
starve in empty temples though instinct never
Wavers, never dulls in the pitch - the God Who
Slumbers in the Waters still sleeps; the sun still
sets in our brother's
bloodless breast. We follow the endless arc to
guard the sun, descend to lustrate in gold-tipped
shrines where chanted litanies hailed the dawn. But
no one reveres us

now: a younger god has transfixed man's needy
eye. Unsung, we leave empyreal climes, slough the
night off (like a barnacle fastened to the
hip of the sun) to
pace abandoned Houses. In temple dusk we
wonder, will we ever again be met at
dawn? Be praised, our manifold Names half-sung? Will
anyone love us?

FOUND

So, I found this written in a book I'm reading -- a little something I had jotted down and forgotten. This isn't the original. I'm too lazy right now to type it out, maybe later? You know (or maybe you don't) I'm on this metered poetry kick, right? So I decided to take a stab at turning this into a metered poem. I'm not sure as of yet where the subject of this poem is heading but the journey should be fun.

The sun set (as it does)
behind the thunderhead,
on a pathway that was
washed with pinks and with reds.
The sky shrank to a bruise.
And I saw this old wound
as something almost new...

{like pulling teeth, the line after this... actually, so were the lines after 'with pinks and with reds'... hm!}
{finally got it!}

The sun set (as it does)
behind a thunderhead,
on a pathway that was
washed with pinks and with reds.
The sky shrank to a bruise.
And I saw this old wound
as something almost new
under the argent moon...

{So I have a bit more to add, came up with that bit more tonight}

The sun set (as it does)
behind a thunderhead,
on a pathway that was
washed with pinks and with reds.
The sky shrank to a bruise.
And I saw this old wound
as something almost new
under the argent moon.
Fingers out, the stars, too,
gaped at the livid bloom
as if to ask, "But who...?"

All Good Things Come In Threes...???

Last post. I swear it. It occurred to me, as I moved to close this browser tab, that I never posted my finished sapphic verse poem (click here for more details). It won't win any awards but here it is:

*



Only ageless quiet attends our altars
Shrouds our days in motes and in shade - a half-life
Lived in half-light. Even our fire can pale in
....Twilight and gray or
Starve in empty temples. But instinct never
Wavers, never dulls in the pitch: the God Who
Slumbers in the Waters still sleeps; the sun still
....Sets in our brother's
Bloodless breast. We follow the endless arc to
Guard the sun. Descend to lustrate in gold-tipped
Shrines where chanted litanies hailed the dawn. But
....No one reveres us

Now: a younger god has transfixed man's needy
Eye. Unsung, we leave empyreal climes, slough the
Night off (like a barnacle fastened to the
....Hip of the sun) to
Pace abandoned Houses. In temple dusk we
Wonder - will we ever again be met at
Dawn? Be praised, our manifold Names half-sung? Will
....Anyone love us?


photo & poem copyright belongs to: Shanee Gbelawoe

*

Shameless plug but do remember to check out the two posts following this one as they are new too! And about music!

Sapphics

Sappho by Charles Mengin [pic source: virgotex.wordpress.com]

I think I finally have my sapphic verse poem down... and still it is grossly inadequate. Sigh. The deeper I get into strengthening this poem, finding new and more detailed sources on the form, the more the poem seems wanting. A while back I found an example of sapphic verse written by (surprise!) Sappho which fulfilled the brief and is lovely to read. 'The Anactoria Poem' translated by Lattimore (an excerpt):

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
.... she whom one loves best
[click on the stanza to read full poem]

Throughout this experience I have come upon various essays on craft and sapphics, each one opening my eyes to my flaws and, hopefully, influencing a better crafted poem in the end. In case someone else types 'sapphics' or 'Sappho' or 'sapphic verse' into a search engine looking for someone to shed a little light on the subject matter, I'll list (with links) the webpages and sites which are giving me a leg up, so to speak.

I started first with examples of sapphic verse and settled on three poets/poems --
* Sappho's 'The Anactoria Poem', trans. by Lattimore;

* Swinburne's 'Sapphics';
* Isaac Watts' 'The Day of Judgement';
These three helped me with the intangibles as it were -- the flow, the sense of the form. They also provided concrete help when my dactyls were kicking my butt. I didn't lift any from the poems it's just that seeing how others handled dactyls talked me "down from the ledge" whenever I over-thought my own.

* An audio track at least an 90 minutes in length, of Allen Ginsberg teaching Basic Poetics, specifically sapphic verse. You can download the track or simply listen to it; I highly recommend it. It is an invaluable listen. He presents the material in an approachable way. Here's his stab at sapphic verse (better than mere mortals) --

Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed
under Boulder coverlets winter springtime
hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends
.... gossip til autumn

* I am currently rummaging through Eratosphere on AbleMuse.com for more insight on sapphics and meter in general. If you use the search function on the site and type in sapphics, as I did, you can find a wealth of information.

After I do some more clean-up; submit for critique and review my piece I'll probably post a draft of it on this blog soon.

A Girl's Been Gone Too Long

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Well, I'm in for an entire helping of love now, aren't I? I have been keeping busy with my writing pursuits. Lots of writing... one poem. Really, weeks upon weeks of intense communion with dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, my personal thesaurus and dictionaries, encyclopedic and pronunciation respectively. All this is supplemented with 'Blurbs of Wisdom' (Poetry Free-For-All on everypoet.com) and critiquing of other's poetry. It's been fun if exhausting. As I wrote in previous posts (I think) I'm making a concerted effort to work on meter and form, and I'm still "stuck" on sapphic. Every revision of the poem so far has ended up adding two more blank quatrains. Four... Six... Will eight' be next?

I really need to put some new hair pictures up. I've been lazy about my camera -- the battery is near-dead and I haven't bothered to recharge it.

*
Listening to... Anjulie, song 'The Heat'
What a hot little summer number!

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!

Yay! Success! Success!

I have completed my rondeau, and quite a run-around the exercise gave me! To remind those kind of enough to read this blog, a rondeau is a French form of poetry which was set to music long ago. It is 15 lines consisting of this specific structure:

a
a
b
b
a

a
a
b
R

a
a
b
b
a
R

The 'R' stands for refrain which is taken from the first half of the first line of the poem. Each line, excepting for the refrain or half line, is eight syllables long; the refrain/half line is only four. When it came to rhyming I used both blatant, internal and/or off-rhymes.

A few things I will admit upfront: the needle of my creative juices is quivering near to nil; I do not write enough and so do not exercise the necessary muscles for poetry and creative writing. That's my own fault. My solution to a case of writer's, or rather, poet's block has always been to read my old poems and commence an editing frenzy. Inevitably this activity stirred my writing brain to produce something even if no more than a phrase. In this instance, I tweaked my customary writing prod and reworked an old poem into the rondeau's construction. The creative prod within this tweak is not all in the original may remain, in fact, the original's driving point may need to be forgotten all together in order to satisfy the rondeau's demands. While the original subject of my poem remains, the overall thrust is different and not simply due to the rhymes and beat count.

The original poem is named 'Ave Maria' and centers wholly on myself and my experience in the Catholic church, how Mary (and the song titled 'Ave Maria') moved my soul. It is a (clumsy) interpretation of my past feelings. This new poem still has the church as a theme but it specifies no one aspect nor focuses on 'I', instead it concentrates on a collective 'we' and how this body is the essence and the light of said church. Or at least that is what my latest clumsy attempt is about.