Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo suggestion: “Today’s prompt Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a what they never tell you poem. I'm not sure who 'they' are, but 'they' talk a lot, and there are things people tell you, and there are things you just have to learn on your own, because 'they' (them again) never tell you ahead of time.” Today's poem merges the two prompts again, though I've modified both of them. With the Thorson prompt, I don't have the alter ego speak. With the Brewer prompt, rather than the generic "what they never tell you," meaning what people never say, I've altered the prompt to something a particular person never said. Also, the word tita in line 3 means "aunt." In addition, this poem is again an installment in my novel-in-poems about aswang, mythical Philippine monsters. It alludes to, and is a mirror of, an earlier poem in the novel, "Creation of an Aswang," which was written for NaPoWriMo in 2017, and was published in Philippines Graphic a year later. In the chronology within the novel, this goes between the poems I wrote on Day Five and Day One. Alter Ego
Thia poem is a hay(na)ku sonnet, written in Bruce Niedt's rhyming style. The hay(na)ku sonnet is a form I invented, based on Eileen Tabios's hay(na)ku form: a tercet whose lines contain one word, two words, three words; in the sonnet variation, there are 5 hay(na)ku where the last one is squished to three words per line, in order for the total lines to add up to 14. The very first hay(na)ku sonnet appeared in this blog here. Later, the poet Bruce Niedt devised a way to rhyme the form, with the ends of stanzas one and two rhyming, then stanzas three and four, and finally both lines of the ending couplet. In November 2021, Bruce described this rhyming method in his blog Orangepeel. Incidentally, tomorrow I am teaching "Writing in Short Forms" in Writers' Digest University's Poetry Writing Virtual Conference. I will be talking about hay(na)ku and curtal sonnets, forms I use quite a lot, as you may know if you follow my work in this blog and elsewhere. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone. ヅ |
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3 comments:
Thanks for the shout-out! I like this one, how it’s brief but ties in with the rest of the mythology. And that illustration perfectly reflects how I pictured the scene in your day 5(?) poem.
Bruce, thanks. Did you notice I used your rhyming?
I just realized that I had "bruce needs" in the labels. Probably an auto-correct thing. Fixed it now.
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