Top Five, Shadorma, and a Question

I’ve got a top five list for you today:

Top 5 Movies about Poetry

No. 5 – Dead Poet’s Society – It has ‘poet’ in the title so there’s some rule that it has to be included.

No. 4 – Byron – BBC television series. Incest, homosexuality, nudity, sodomy, poetry… it’s got it all.

No. 3 – Dangerous Beauty – gotta love the workin’ girls.

No. 2 – Possession – book and movie were both actually equally good. First time EVER!

And the best movie about poetry of all time:



No. 1 – Shakespeare in Love – I don’t care what you say about it, I have guy friends who tear up over this one. Not quite “I don’t know how to quit you” but melodramatic awesomeness.


Form of the day:

In honor of the Bard, today’s form should be the sonnet, but you can find that anywhere (abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme in iambic pentameter or “oh SHIT” meter), so instead, we’re going with a Spanish form, which I thought was a Japanese form, but no, my bad. No gold star.

The shadorma is a SPANISH form of poetry, based on syllable count (thus my impression that it was Japanese since there’s such an emphasis on syllables there, but no matter). It’s a 6-line poem with a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5. I got it from Writer’s Digest and Robert Lee Brewer talks about it on Poetic Asides. I couldn’t find much relating to origins or history of this form, though one source mentioned the syllable scheme can be used as stanzas. http://allpoetry.com/list/62863-Shadorma. Shadormas are fun to write, but beware! they are addictive.

And an announcement: I’ve nearly completed a chapbook. (YEY!) It’s not new work, but work I revised from college. I’m interested to know how many readers would be interested in a pdf version of it. It’s a self-publishing/self-promotion scheme but since the format of the book is a little unusual with its mix of poetry, flash fiction, and short stories, I know better than to try sending it to a traditional publisher and it doesn’t read as well (in my opinion) broken up into parts. One of those the end is more than the sum of its parts things. So leave a comment if you’d be interested and we’ll go from there.

Leaving Italy: The Terza Rima

The Terza Rima is a classic Italian form, made famous by Dante in his Divine Comedy. It’s a highly syllabic form, which makes it easier to write in Italian than English, or so I heard in college, since Italian and similar Romantic languages have more rhyming words than our mish-meshed English.

Terza rima is written in iambic tercets, meaning a three-line grouping with a unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (looks like xX; or, oh SHIT, not OH shit, with the emphasis on the second syllable). It can be iambic pentameter, but in my opinion, since that’s more famously an English form (thank Shakespeare), it’s not strictly essential. The rhyme scheme is supposed to interlock, looking like aba bcb cdc and so forth as long as you want. Hey, Dante wrote an entire freaking book that way. Apparently, you can end the poem with a couplet, but, again, nothing strict on this. Another source, http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Handbook/terzarima.html, asserts that the ending can look like this: xyx yzy z. Personally, I like that one, but its open. If a couplet works better, use it. For more on the terza rima, check out http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5794.

The terza rima sonnet is a fourteen-line version, sort of a cross between the English sonnet and the terza rima. This would lend itself more to iambic pentameter, if one were so inclined. Also called the diaspora sonnet, the same meter (ohSHIT) applies, as does the stanza length, as in the longer big sister terza rima. All that changes is the length, so the complete rhyme scheme looks like: aba bcb cdc ded ee.

In contrast, the Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet has a rhyme scheme of abbaabba cdecde, while the English or Shakespearean sonnet looks like abab cdcd efef gg, so the terza rima sonnet is like the love child of the English sonnet and big sister terza rima. Can’t wait to see what happens if the terza rima and infinite gloss ever fool around. On the other hand… (fierce shudder.)

Happy poeting.