| Tax day, everyone. Hope you didn't forget! From NaPoWriMo HQ, we get Maureen Thorson's challenge: "write a pantun. Not a pantoum." From his blog Poetic Asides, the poem-a-day HQ, Robert Lee Brewer suggests, "write an infested poem." Although there are surely many ways to merge these two prompts — zombies! — I decided today not to follow the prompts, as promising as they are. An ironic decision because I published an essay on the history of the pantun and the pantoum in the book An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes. You can see part of this essay in the Google books preview of this anthology. Anyway, here is today's non-pantun, non-infested poem After Dashing Home Through This love sonnet is, more specifically, a terza rima haiku sonnet, a form I invented in 1978 or thereabouts. The 14 lines are made up of four linked haiku followed at the end by a couplet of 7-syllable lines, so that the last two stanzas together are, at least in syllabics and lineation, a tanka. I should say that haiku and tanka are invoked here only in shape, not in spirit. Only in form, not in meaning. With regard to the sonnet per se, there is no volta or turn, which in a traditional sonnet occurs either at the beginning of the 9th line or the 13th line. Anyone have a suggestion for what I might call this form? Some name more graceful than "terza rima haiku sonnet." All right, 15 poems down, 15 poems to go. Won't you comment below, please? Look for a blue link that says "Post a comment"; if you don't see that, look in the red line that says "Posted by" and click on the word "comments." Ingat, everyone. P.S. I forgot to announce last week that the North American Review Blog published my colleague Rachel Morgan's interview in The Next Big Thing poetry series. Congrats, Rachel! |
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Lavender, Filoli Estate, Woodside, CA
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