| April 14 The number 14 is not as culturally interesting as 13, it would seem. One connection between them is that, when the 13th floor in a building has been renamed for superstitious reasons, it becomes the 14th floor. Which creates a linguistic if not mathematical equation: 14 = 13. False in math, but true in the "real" world of superstition. Because today's the 14th, Robert Lee Brewer suggests we "write a sonnet" in his blog Poetic Asides. "For those who are not familiar with the sonnet, it’s a 14-line poem that rhymes. Some contemporary sonnet-eers even ditch the rhymes and just write a 14-line poem. Go with whatever feels right." On the "other side," Maureen Thorson prompts in the NaPoWriMo site, "I challenge you to write a persona poem — that is, a poem in the voice of a particular person who isn’t you. But I’d like you to choose a very particular kind of person. How about a poem in the voice of a superhero (or a supervillain)?" Since I had already written a superhero poem on the 10th, I decided to compose a poem from the perspective of a dragon — anyone who knows me well will tell you I have a keen interest in dragons. To satisfy both prompts at once, my dragon speaks a sonnet, and since sonnets have been traditionally used for love poetry, today's sonnet focuses on my dragon's romantic love for a tiger. Actually, a familiar dragon and tiger, old friends of ours, but more on that in a few moments. First, we have some cultural underpinnings to tease out. According to Wikipedia, "The tiger is considered to be the eternal rival to the dragon, thus various artworks depict a dragon and tiger fighting an epic battle. In a poem I wrote last year, I played with this paradigm by having a dragon and a tiger be in love rather than eternally opposed. However, although they desire each other, the two sweethearts are unable to consummate not only because of the species difference but more importantly because of the cultural baggage they each carry, even embody. Okay, here's that poem from last year, written in hay(na)ku stanzas, which have a The Tale of Everyone Today's April poem is a sequel to this earlier piece. In hay(na)ku like "The Tale of Everyone" but as an unrhymed sonnet: four hay(na)ku stanzas followed by a closing hay(na)ku shoehorned into two lines, like my Day Three poem this year. For more on this sonnet form, which I invented during last year's National Poetry Month, see 2012's Dragon Solves the Problem: That's all for today, O gentle readers. Why don't you try writing some hay(na)ku? If you're feeling particularly adventurous, try a hay(na)ku sonnet. Won't you comment below? Thank you. Ingat, everyone. |
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