Catalogue Poem

Today’s poem of the poetry challenge is called a bestiary or catalogue poem. A catalogue poem tends more toward prose than verse, listing a catalogue of things, thus the term catalogue poem. A bestiary is a type of catalogue poem, usually listing fantastic beasts, dragons, demons, unicorns, and other beasties, and was popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that outlined natural, and unnatural, history. A catalogue poem is based on anaphora, a poetic device that calls for repetition of structure, which basically means a certain phrase, theme, or line is repeated. Neither have to rhyme and there’s no rule about length.

Weird weather here in Michigan. Tornado warnings yesterday and the temperature alternated from cold to muggy all day. Spent most of the day in the parlor. Guy I was milking with was on his fourth shift in a row, so pretty slaphappy after 20 of 24 hours in the cow barn and only an hour and a half of sleep. FYI: two five-hour energy drinks do not equal ten-hours of sleep.

F-f-f-free verse!

Okay, I’m tired today and feeling pretty basic after all the form poems. So today I’m giving everyone, including me, a break. Cows didn’t give me much of a break today, but that’s a whole other issue.

The form of today’s poem in the April Poetry Challenge is free verse. There’s no set structure, no meter, no rhyme scheme, no rules whatsoever really. A free verse poem can also be called a prose poem and usually is recognizable as a poem due to its line phrasing, prose composed in the form of lines rather than paragraphs and sentences.

Poets.org has more on the prose poem.

Here’s an example of free verse by poet Nikki Giovanni. Enjoy. I’m out.

Winter Poem – Nikki Giovanni

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

Awl what?

An awdl gywydd (double dd’s make a “th” sound) is a Welsh form of poetry. It’s pronounced owdl gow-widd, or at least that’s the closest my non-Welsh speaking talent can get it.“Awdl” means ode and when I figure out what gywydd means, I’ll let you know. Unless we have some Welsh speakers among the readers, which feel free to correct my dumb American ass. :p

The stanzas are quatrains, meaning four lines to a stanza. Each line has seven syllables with end rhyme and couplet binding. So it looks like this:

* * * * * * A
* * A * * * B (A could shift to 3rd or 4th syllable)
* * * * * * C
* * C * * * B (B could shift to 3rd or 4th syllable)

Guidelines: Mid-line rhymes can be half- or off-rhyme, using various elements of consonance and assonance, but the main rhyme (B) should be perfect.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.

Again, this was from PoetryBase, but Celtic Poetry offers lots of good stuff.

There’s a ton of Welsh poetic forms out there and while I haven’t read much Welsh poetry, I’ve liked what I have read, if that’s any endorsement. At risk of starting to sound like an advertiser for PoetryBase, at their page they have a function to search poetic forms by origin and again, Celtic Poetry offers a wealth of resources for Welsh forms. Maybe I’ll try to branch out tomorrow and do sestinas or something. But anyone can do a sonnet. How fun is it to work with a form you can’t pronounce? (I just became a geek, didn’t I?) Oh well.

Happy poeting.

Ghuzal, qasida, and musaddas oh my!

Today we’re looking at the ghazal form. It’s pronounced “ghuzzle” and originated in Persia, the Iran, formerly India, area. It’s a form of poetry over a thousand years old and that’s just cool. The ghazal has rules, as does form poetry, as opposed to free verse. It’s written in couplets, and couplets mean rhyme so break out the rhyming dictionary. There are five to fifteen couplets per poem. The lines must have the same rhythm (don’t confuse that with rhyme) and the couplet end-rhyme is very specific. The first couplet has the same end-rhyme. So:

Axie had a Little Sheep.
Little Sheep took a leap.

That’s the first couplet. In the second couplet, the second line rhymes with the first couplet. So:

Little Sheep looked and hopped and jumped all day
Axie seized a crook and on the sheep began to creep.

Shoot me, this is straight off the top of my head.)

The refrain is repeated in the second line throughout the poem. The last couplet can contain a poet’s signature, or a line connecting them to the poem somehow. Not all have these, but kinda cool when they do. Check out poets.org for more on the ghazal and look for an example there also. There’s also the Ghazal Page, a webzine devoted to the ghazal form in English.

Related to the ghazal, are three additional forms, the qasida, the musaddas, and zejele. They all belong to the family of Urdu poetry, something vaguely Arabic, Persian, and Pakistani in origin. I’m just learning about it myself so this is by no means an extensive list. It’s a crash course for me in non-Western poetic forms. So here we go.

The qasida is Arabic and consists of couplets, up to a hundred couplets, with the same rhyme. So the rhyme scheme is aa aa aa etc. Pretty boring, but to each their own. Wikipedia has links to prolific 12th century poets who mastered this form. Go there for a list and links to their work.

The musaddas has some disagreement surrounding the form. Arabic in origin, some say the the musaddas has three feet in a line, a light syllable an optional addition. Others call for a six-line stanzaic form with an aaaabb rhyme scheme. Another version uses a ghazal rhyme scheme through the final couplet making an aa ba ca da ea fa ga ha ii rhyme scheme. Use whichever one you want, combine them, make the form your own. I couldn’t find any examples of a masadda in my quick search, but I’m sure they’re out there.

The last related form to the ghazal is the zéjele. According to PoetryBase, it showed up in Moorish Spain sometime in the tenth century. This was a zenith in terms of Spanish-Moorish history. Culture was at an all time high there while China faced serious political upheaval and Europe, always a backwater culturally speaking, entered the early days of the dark ages. The zéjel holds the equivalent of a limerick. The content is meant to be light. Eight syllable lines are typical, but longer or shorter is perfectly acceptable. Verses, likewise, can be any length. The rhyme follows an aa bbba ccca ddda etc pattern with an eight syllable meter, though, again, guideline for this form more than a rule.

For more on Urdu poetry, try Wikipedia Or Urdu Poetry.com

Happy ghuzzeling! :p Or qasida-ing or zejele-ing…

Easter Weekend Prompt

Nightsong, a prayer meant to be said at midnight. It’s related to a blessing, a canticle, charm, evensong, liturgic, morningsong, or just a general prayer, at least according to PoetryBase/PoetryGnosis. Mostly morningsongs, evensongs, and nightsongs are religious forms, and yours can be too. It’s usually formal, but for this exercise, that’s not mandatory. It’s usually Christian, but even that’s not mandatory. I’m not Christian strictly or even really loosely speaking, but the bare bones of the religion has some validity and I’ll utilize anything if it makes sense. So a nightsong, as far as I can tell, if a form of prayer used to focus your thoughts, a meditation of sorts. Ask yourself where your life is headed, what does your life mean to you, what are you doing with it, what are you sorry for, happy about, grateful for, etc. What are the positive factors in your life and what are the negative and how can you manage them?

This exercise doesn’t have to be as serious as all that. Let’s have some fun with it. I appreciate cows. They make me smile, they make me happy, and they give my life purpose. They also provide me with a steady paycheck. So if I could write a nightsong poem praising the cow gods for their generosity. (Horses and sheep have gods too, I just don’t hang with them as often :p) But find your own topic, religious or otherwise. If you’re a pagan, make it a song to nature or whatever god or goddess presides over that time of day. If you’re of another religion, tailor it to your god or gods. If your agnostic or atheist, use it to give homage to whatever you feel is worthy of praise.

No matter what your religion, we all appreciate something in life. Praise it, as you would getting up, going to bed, and at midnight. After all, what goes around comes around and the energy you put out into the world rebounds on you. Why not put out something positive? It might be amazing what you get back.

Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes, you say. That’s poetry? Yup, I say and it’s usually the first poems any of us learn. But like fairy tales, nursery rhymes can have interesting origins, but seem to lack the violent imagery common to fairy tales.

Take this for example:

“Little Bo Peep Story”
Little Bo peep has lost her sheep
And doesn't know where to find them.
Leave them alone and they'll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating,
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were all still fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook
Determined for to find them.
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could,
As a shepherdess should,
To tack again each to its lambkin.
From: Nursery Rhymes www.rhymes.org.uk/little_bo_peep.htm

Check out www.rhymes.org.uk for more nursery rhymes.

Also RhymeZone www.rhymezone.com is a very cool rhyming site

www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclassdetail.aspx?LessonPlanID=15 has hints for rewriting Mary Had A Little Lamb and writing nursery rhymes in general.

www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclassdetail.aspx?LessonPlanID=39 And if you’re still wondering, what is a poem, check out this link.

Poetry Month Kickoff

What is a poem? Why poetry? I’m metrically challenged, what about me? Poetry never makes any sense, how am I supposed to understand it?

I majored in English and took more than a few poetry classes and I still bitch about this shit.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I am not a poet.

Period.

But I do write poetry.

So what is poetry to a non-poet? Unlike verse, a poem is more plastic, more like song lyrics (which is a type of poem, by the way) so each time you come to a poem or song, the meaning might have subtly changed based on what you bring into the experience. The same occurs with novels too, thought to a lesser degree, at least in my experience.

I’m not here to make you like poetry. I hate it myself, on most occasions. But as a writer, I recognize its uses. Like flash fiction or the short story, it’s a form to understand and respect. A writer can sprawl out in a novel, kind of like in marriage. You can let everything hang out and evoke strong emotions, positive and negative. You can evoke strong emotions in other forms as well; you just have to be briefer on a one-night stand. To me, poetry is a one-nighter, as well as a method of discipline. You have mesh the right words at the right time and implement them the right way. You don’t get pages to explain, unless you’re writing long line ballades or something, but we’ll get to that. Poetry acts as an exercise in brevity, in tight, condensed writing, and, most of all, in patience. So join me here for poetry month and we’ll see what kind of poetic disasters we can spin. :)

The first form I chose was one I’d never heard of. I found it on poetry base/poetry gnosis. They have more poetic forms than I’ve ever heard of, so plenty of stuff to choose from and experiment with if you don’t like my prompt. Also Poetic Asides through Writer’s Digest is a great resource.

So, since I love cows and that’s no secret, we’re kicking off poetry month with a form called Mad Cow. Closely related is Mad Calf so I thought I’d put them together for easier explanation. Both are alexandrine forms, which means twelve syllables a line. It’s a French creation and the French are as proud of it as the English are of iambic pentameter. Both are a pain in the ass, I’m not gonna lie, but worth the exercise. So, for Mad Cow, start with twelve syllables a line, with an end rhyme scheme of ababc cdede fgfgh hijij klklm mnono eieio.

So it looks like this:
-----------a
-----------b
-----------a
-----------b
-----------c
The next stanza goes:
----------c
----------d
----------e
----------d
----------e
And so on.

Each stanza has five lines, with a total of thirty-five lines.

Mad calf is a shorter version, with an abcde fghij klmno eieio rhyme scheme. The syllable count is shorter as well, the lines being six syllables instead of twelve, so a half-pint alexandrine. Again, five lines to a stanza, but only twenty lines of poem.

Since syllables are so annoying, at least to this metrically challenged writer, my mad cow/calf poem might come later as a comment. But relax, have fun. Poetry can be a blast, the play with words and sounds. It’s a great exercise to get the creative juices flowing, so long as you don’t take yourself too seriously.

Happy Poetry Month! :)