Quatern

A quatern has four stanzas with four lines. One line goes down a slot in each stanza, meaning it’s the first line in the first stanza, second in the second, etc. Here’s one of those forms that looks so easy but can be a challenge. You can fill out this form without much trouble, but what does your poem really say? It’s best to start with one really good line, one that means something to you as the poet. This line is important because it appears four times in a sixteen-line poem as both the first line and the last line.

There is some room for confusion here with the word quatrain which just means a four-line stanza, just as a tercet is a three line stanza, and a couplet has two line. A quatern has four quatrains.

Here is an example of a quatern I started that hasn’t gone anywhere yet. I like the line “I miss our back and forth.” I often get prompted to write a poem by a line that sticks in my head whereas for some people it’s an image or a memory. This line is something I said to a friend recently. We’d gotten busy with our work and hadn’t kept in touch as usual. The poem took it someplace else, as if there were something wrong.

I Miss Our Back and Forth

I miss our back and forth

for all the good it did

for us or anyone else

as we settled things out.

 

We had some good times but

I miss our back and forth

with chats and pleas, valued

insight, only we appreciated.

 

How did you get so busy,

so important, now that

I miss our back and forth

and wonder if you do too.

 

We may be distanced,

off doing other things,

but I remember you whenever

I miss our back and forth.

 

This is a fun form, but there are not a lot of examples. I only wanted to post poems that I could definitely attribute to someone, but that was getting tricky, so here is a link with a few more examples.

 Quatern Poems | Examples of Quatern Poetry (poetrysoup.com)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 sen
Read more

Up Home Again - the book itself, at last.

Image
·         Up Home Again is the story of a woman who examines her haunting childhood in a beautiful place when she returns to Maine to resolve ongoing personal dilemmas. The book I started in 2006, and finished in 2022, will make its debut as a real book in January 2023. Writing a memoir isn't easy; for me it became excruciating. Parts I and II have been done for a long time, but for the last bit, Part III, I had to pull myself together in order to do the same for my book.  In 2004 I returned to Maine, my life eroded after cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, and then cancer again. In 2006, living alone and painfully lonely, I started this book in a memoir class at the Belfast (Maine) Senior College. For years I've said I'm writing a memoir. I tried lots of ways to finish it. New notebooks and pens, changing the way my desk faced, writing retreats, and writing other things including poetry - a lot of poetry. When my poetry manuscript started the process of publication, I mentioned
Read more

As a Swan

Image
  As a Swan Unlike the heron, landing quietly, slipping into the weeds, setting the example of minding our own business, swans can sound like gunfire when they come in for a landing, can take a real man’s arm off, but, once landed, flow into view as if their graceful swimming weren’t akin to strutting, as if something so lovely couldn’t be so mean. They mate for life, swans do, although I wonder is it her choice or is she stuck with the partner that (apparently) protects her?   Nothing wrong with being an ugly duckling, if that duck is free from a man behaving as a swan — lovely to look at but also loud and dangerous, only seemingly protective.    This poem and picture were recently included in the wArts: Merrimac Mike Anthology VII. 
Read more