Make Your Own Adventure

And now it comes to this . . . 

We are at the final day of National Poetry Month 2022. Thank you to all who stuck with me -- writing poems, trying to write poems, reading the blog posts, and especially those who read at our monthly poetry reading on Zoom. New Jersey, New York. and New England were all represented.

Going forward from the end of the month to the beginning of new writing, the next challenge is to make your own poetry, including your own poetic forms. You can actually invent a form or tweak a form. I was once teaching a weekend workshop at a retreat center and there wasn’t a lot of time to write so I came up with the “villanellie”. It’s a shorter version of the villanelle and kind of named after myself, but that part is just coincidence. The villanellie is a villanelle with three tercets instead of five. That gave the participants the opportunity to have a completed work in less time.

A mentor once assigned a prompt that was something like “write a poem in twelve sentences about growing up”. I was determined not to mention twelve grades of school. That seemed too easy. I came up with the following poem, but I’m not sure why I did the indentations the way I did. I liked it though, and repeated the format in another later poem. If it’s a form, it’s one without a name.

 

This Girl

Everybody in Somerville is either

                                    Irish or Italian

                                    and we’re Irish.

Everybody is Catholic except a few

                                    are Protestant

                                    and we are High Episcopal.

Everybody knows we are supposed to be Catholic but

                                    I know my mother

said we aren’t.

 

Everybody tells me my family will be happier

                                    when we move to the country

                                    where things will go more smoothly.

Everybody has a mother and a father unless

                                    your mother dies

                                    like mine did.

Everybody knows being poor means nothing

                                    in a place where

                                    everybody is poor.

 

The most important thing is having

                                    a boy who likes you but

boys don’t like smart girls.

Being one is no help at all if you

                                    are lonely or sick

                                    of raising your hand.

Someday my prince won’t come and

                                    I’ll go off on my own

                                    to see what I find.

 

Everybody knows smart girls go to college and

                                    this one is going

to one called Bates.

Everybody has a mother and a father or

 

a mother or a father

 unless your father dies, too.

Everybody knows 18 is old enough to be

                                    independent and

                                    this girl is ready.                                                                                                         

 

Look at this Robert Frost poem, familiar to most reading this. What form is it? It’s metric poetry written in iambic tetrameter, that is four iambs instead of the five in iambic pentameter. It has a rhyme scheme, it’s own rhyme scheme, not one laid out by a particular form. It’s safe to say this poem has been a success for the poet. Go forth, write your poems, make your own poetic adventures.

 

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening      Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

 

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

 

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.