World Class Poetry Blog

In honor of National Poetry Month we are posting one religious poem per day. We’ve already posted a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem - “God’s Grandeur,” a sonnet. Tonight we’ve got another Hopkins poem, but this time the poem is a shortened, or curtailed, sonnet. Hopkins called it a curtal.

The curtal has only 10 lines instead of 14 and the rhyme scheme is ABCABC ABCAc. You’ll see it in action below. The poem is “Pied Beauty”:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.	

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.

Again, Gerard Manley Hopkins uses his sprung rhythm to create a unique form and pace throughout the poem. You see the beauty in the language as much as in the music. “Pied Beauty” is a gift, a curtal, from one of the best religious poets in history.

This short story contest had no winner and some entrants are plain pissed off about it. Oh, well. Better 10,000 pissed of losers than one mediocre writer thinking he deserves some kind of credit.

Stumbling Verse, a form for a new millennium.

Bill Moyers asks, “What books should the next president read?” I don’t really care as long as he reads more than the summaries of news stories presented to him by his press corps and the Sunday comics. I’d like him to have more than a fifth grade reading apprehension level.

VQR solves for the X factor. But if your submission is one of those that is automatically deleted then you’d be on the reverse side of this equation. That 4.6% wouldn’t mean a thing to you except that your submission would be included in it. Honestly, I’d have thought that figure would be higher.

When will the children’s fable be considered serious literature?

Street poetry is a “major art” and therapy for the homeless.

Is it erotic to have two vaginas?

The Princess of Black Poetry celebrates black history.

Asking what the poem wants. I just always assume my poems want to make love. You know want it, Baby! You know you want it!

Write a poem today. Then revise it tomorrow.

Indiana Review is sponsoring a poetry contest and Naomi Shihab Nye is the judge. I’m a huge fan of Nye. I’ve seen her read a couple of times in my home state of Texas and she has a wonderful voice. I highly recommend this contest if for any reason, not because of Nye, but because of this policy:

Further, IR cannot consider work from anyone currently or recently affiliated with Indiana University. In addition, IR cannot consider work from anyone who is a current or former student of the prize judge. We also will not consider work from anyone who is a personal friend of the judge.

I’m glad to see such policies explicitly outlined. I hope they enforce them.

It looks like Virginia Quarterly Review has a lot of time on its hands. If you got that pun, you’re hopeless.

OMG! What’s going on at Blogsboro? Billy’s talking about going both ways. Don’t worry. It’s just word play. It won’t hurt you.

And if you like sestinas as much as I do, here’s one for you.

I’m a little late in blogging about this, but poet Anne Stevenson wrote poetry for 40 years before getting swamped with recognition. After 18, count ‘em, 18 books of poetry, this marathon runner has won three very important American poetry prizes totaling $260,000 in payout. It just goes to show that patience is still a virtue and good things do come to those who wait.

In other poetry news: Doug Holder wrote a brilliant piece in The Somerville News and encourages poets to “build a community wherever you may reside.” That’s a good word, and I second the motion.

Baudelaire and Mallarme: Inventors of poetic style and voices. If you can get past the endless repetition, this prose piece shows why Baudelaire and Mallarme are important voices to study for modern poets.

And here’s my favorite: Poet Taylor Mali defends the teacher …

I’ve never heard of a rictameter, but I like the idea. The form is a nine-line poem where the first and last lines are the same and each succeeding line in the poem carries an even number of syllables, like so:

You can read the original poem, “First They Came,” here.

So when will they come for you?

My Gorgeous Somewhere - cool name for a blog. Started in September with a promise that posting will last only for one year, Ceridwen has already made a big splash with some interesting ideas.

One such idea is collaborative poetry. I’ve considered collaborative writing before, but never with poetry. I’m impressed by the solid ideas for collaborative poetry writing that the anonymous poster operating under the pseudonym Ceridwen has offered, among them:

• Send a chainpoem where each link in the chain writes a line and sends it to someone else
• Take turns with your collaborator through IM by writing alternating lines or stanzas
• Write a poem and take out all important words, then send the poem to your collaborators asking them to fill in the blanks
• Put together a group of words you like and ask your collaborator to use them in a poem
• Send a poem to your collaborator so that he or she can write a “companion piece”
• Cut a poem into single words and phrases and send them to a collaborator to piece together like a puzzle

All of these are excellent ideas. Games like these can spurn wild bouts of creativity. Remember, some famous poems in history were written as a result of their authors being involved in similar challenges. One that comes to mind is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote the poem as a challenge.

Another interesting idea from Ceridwen is the American Sentences form created by Beat great Allen Ginsberg. American Sentences are a take on the Haiku form and are simple sentences written out like a normal English sentence but limited to 17 syllables. Paul Nelson elaborates on this more at his website.

What would happen if we combined these two useful exercises? Can we collaborate on an American Sentence? I’d like to try. I’ll write the first nine syllables. You follow up by completing the sentence and the other eight syllables. I’m anxious to see what we come up with.

Here’s the first half of our American Sentence:

Don’t blame me, I’m below belief; low …

I found this morsel of Auden while reading today:

(Source) “The poet who writes ‘free verse’ is like Robinson Crusoe on his island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, darning, etc. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor: empty bottles on the unswept floor, dirty sheets on the unmade bed.”

I like the analogy. Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was from a formalist poet who told me to study the classic forms along with rhyme and meter. It would improve my own free verse, he said. He was right.

While in college, I took to free verse right away because up till that point I had only been exposed to the classic poems of high school literature. Contemporary poets and their breaking away from traditional forms cleared my mind and freed my imagination. But what I wasn’t aware of then was that my poetry lacked the focus that metrics brings to the poetic table. Later, I took to studying the forms - sonnets, sestinas, villanelles - and learned that the meter and rhythm of formal poetry can be used in free verse too. Frederick Turner was right. It made me a better poet.

Last month I wrote about the kyrielle. I told you at that time about four different rhyme schemes the kyrielle can take. I’ve learned of some new ones since then.

There are kyrielles that are written in quatrains - most of them in fact. Then there are some kyrielles that are written as couplets, like this:

aA
aA
aA

Of course, a kyrielle has no set number of stanzas, be they quatrains or couplets. They could feasibly go on forever.

The interesting thing about the kyrielle is where it gets its name. Originally, this form was written by Christian Troubadors during the Renaissance. Because of their religious faith, they named the form after a popular Christian liturgy, the kyrie. Kyrie is actually a derivation of the Greek word kyrios, which means “Oh Lord.” Therefore, many of the early kyrielles used that phrase, or the phrase “Lord have mercy,” in the poems.

For more on the kyrielle, and a sample kyrielle written by Thomas Campion, head over to World Class Poetry, and don’t forget to check out Hyperbole.

Discovered a new poetic form today - well, it’s new to me. Called Kyrielle.

The kyrielle is a French form utilizing four-line stanzas. The unique aspect of the kyrielle is that the final line in each stanza is a refrain, repeating itself in each stanza. Also, and I like this, it can be as long as you want. Like a ghazal, the kyrielle can have as many stanzas as the poet decides it should have, but they usually have at least two.

Think the kyrielle gets by without a rhyme scheme? Think again. There is one. It isn’t fixed, however. There are actually four different schemes that it could have, including:

aabb
abab
aaab
abcb

I learned about the kyrielle from Nancy Breen and Robert Lee Brewer at Poetic Asides.

Learn more about poetic terms, forms and the types of poetry at World Class Poetry, a growing resource for poets who aspire to improve their craft and get published.

Petrarch is credited with the creation of the Italian form of the sonnet, perhaps the widest read and most beloved of poetic forms. No doubt, you’re probably familiar with the sonnet, at least of the Shakespearean version.

The sonnet is far from being a dead form. Many poets still use the form and have crafted a new formalism based on the old forms, sonnet included. The sonnet - particularly the Petrarchan sonnet - has a rich and varied history and has been used by some of the most prolific poets through the ages. A sampling of poets who have written in the Petrarchan sonnet form include:

• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• John Milton
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• William Wordsworth
• Charles Tennyson-Turner, brother of Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Sir Philip Sidney

Shakespeare himself, it is said, was influenced by the Petrarchan sonnet and it’s easy to see why. One read of any sonnet written by the above poets and you’ll love the form. I highly recommend the Petrarchan sonnet for studying forms, rhythm, rhyme, and meter. Once you master the basics of a form like the Petrarchan sonnet, your poetry will improve no matter what kind of poetry you continue to write.