Form Poem Contest

[Pendragon]

Let us precede as if nothing had happened. I had my say, both here and to individuals.The Past is the past, we walk not there again. Now is the time for healing and going onward. Are we not poets? Then by gosh, let us prove that no moment of vexation cannot be turned into a ray of brilliant sunshine. Petra, give us a form, and let the quills of Avalon stir and quiver eagerly to produce a piece of poetry suitable for framing!

[barbara0207]

That's the spirit, Pen! And I'm very glad you put your poem back in the picture poem contest. I loved it.

[Petrarch's Love]

I'm glad that everything seems to have been smoothed out. I'm still waiting until after Christmas to start up a new round with a new form. I figure everyone's attention including mine will be wrapped up in holiday stuff until then.

[Petrarch's Love]

O.K., I've finally gotten around to cooking up a form for the next round of this contest (there was a death in my family on Christmas Day, so I've been more than a bit distracted up 'till now). I got a suggestion from Il Penseroso that we might try some sort of prose poetry form, which proved the inspiration for a form I'll call a Dramalet.

Inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, which alternate between various kinds of verse and poetic prose, the Dramalet is a three part structure which consists of 4-24 lines of either rhymed or blank verse followed by a segment of poetic prose (it is up to you to determine what you think fits in the category of poetic prose), and concludes with another 4-24 lines of rhymed or blank verse. I haven't placed a length limit on the middle prose section, but would like to discourage anything much longer than a reasonable sized paragraph, since your judge's attention may wander past that point unless the writer is Shakespeare himself.

The subject of the poem is entirely up to you. It might be fun to use this drama inspired form for a poetic monologue or dialogue, but anything else you think would be suitable to the form is fine by me. Below I have penned the first ever (as far as I know) Dramalet, which I have every reason to believe will soon be surpassed by the excellent poets of Lit. Net. Have fun all!

We came from the northern lands and the cold
We came across the sea to a strange, strange shore
We left behind the sounds and the sights and hearths
Of our fathers' and our mothers' land
Where lies the dust and the bones of those before
Whose once quick blood flowed into our live veins.

I came from across the street to the familiar aisles of the supermarket. The sound of sirens quickens the pulse as I set forth on the way to work and errands with a light but tedious burden of daily cares. A list of words, each one a food, curls into the depths of my coat pocket next to a gleaming gilt gum wrapper and a handful of dull pennies. The weather report predicts another sun filled day for the California southland area. The prices of homes are going down. I flip a switch..."and a man comes on the radio/ And he's telling me more and more/ About some useless information/ Supposed to fire my imagination"...as the checkout clerk scans the price of the bounty passing before him he says, in passing flirtation, something about California blondes. I say my blonde roots are from my Swedish roots. I carry my plastic sacks to the parking lot.

We carry our songs and our old stories:
The ones we tell as those before us told,
As those after us will tell those after them.
We sing about journey, about longing,
About homes left in search of new bounty
And homes found in search of old meaning.
We carry our belongings, though they are worn and few
We carry the blood of our veins to a world that is new.

[Pendragon]

Heck I don't know. Call me crazy. I like to think of it a "the triumph of hope over a long history of bad experiences. I go where I have gone before, to do yet another noble thing: I go first in a poetry contest!

A Warrior’s Tale

They came upon us much sooner than I had dreamed feasible,
Meaning that their Leader is one well trained in warcraft.
I had, in my pride, thought at least another day quite reasonable.
Well. No use in second-guessing, And no giving way to wrath.
I called my Captains to me in order to set the battle plans.
“We must not be driven from our water supply, double guards there.
“If they have so easily read our sign, we must use no signals easily read”.
One of my men gave signs. “Long shot, my friend. Beggar sign seems fair,”

I took the time while my men were positioning themselves, to climb to a high rock and observe the other Commander. He was a fine strong man, whom I judged to be at least a head taller than myself, and I am no small man, standing over four cubits. He had skin burned by the sun and a black mane of hair. He was well muscled and agile as a great ape, and bore a great battle-axe. The fire of the battle was already in his eyes, but his men were not as ready as he. Could I turn this to my advantage?

I heard a roar from the great warrior’s throat that shook the very trees.
I live for battle but those first moments are hard to work into any poem.
The men come crashing together with enough force to send them to their knees.
Then the blades flash for a moment and there are screams and blood begins to foam.
He and I fought our way though the blood and confusion to face to face.
And my great sword sparked beneath the fury of his battle-axe.
He drew first blood, across my chest; I escaped by the barest trace,
And shouting forth my loud defiance, I redoubled my fierce attack,

And how doth this story end? A drink, please. There is my notched and scared blade.
And were I to remove this shirt of mail, you could see the scar the barbarian made…

Pendragon
© 1/1/08

[Petrarch's Love]

A courageous start to the next round and the new year. Thanks Pen. And now I expect all the rest of you poets to get tapping!

[Pendragon]

It's bloody hard being first, I don't know about being green...

[schadenfreude]

This is how we begin, with light in our eyes,
A hand, a tree, a house and the sky,
This is the sun, and those are the stars
Scoring the sky in blue and gold bars.
This is the earth, where the mountains stand,
Tall as soldiers in a Crayola green land,
And this is you: your face, your hands, your feet,
And if you listen closely, you can hear your heartbeat.

These are the years of feigned nonchalance. In December, I was swept up by a whirlwind of scattered paper, and the wind and rain blurred the black lines into an unreadable mess. I didn’t mind the least. In a bizarre frenzy, I collected aphorisms by the dozen: happiness is the key to success, live every day as if it were your last… and filed them away in alphabetical order. They rotted in the bottom of my drawer, grey-green with mildew, and when I touched one, it crumbled into dust. He called and said he forgot, that he could not make it, and again, I told him it did not matter. I wished I were an oak tree- anything that was warm and solid and still; I wished I did not have paper-white skin, and I wished that my heart was not made of ice. But I didn’t really care about all that. I just dreamed of simplicity again.

This is how you begin: a hand, the stars and the sky,
But in the end, it all just passes by.
So you wait, yearning for the cloudless truth
that you left behind in the vivid colours of your youth.

[Petrarch's Love]

Hoorah for Schadenfreude! Hopefully this will start a trend for submitting entries. Since we know have two, and thus the absolute minimum to enable competition, I'm setting a deadline for midnight, Pacific Standard time on January 31st. Hopefully we'll get some other submissions by then, but otherwise I've already got enough of a job cut out for me chosing between the two fine entries we already have.

[Pendragon]

Pathetic to have a contest and only two have the courage to enter...

[Pendragon]

Bump!

[Petrarch's Love]

Apologies to my brave participants, Pen and schadenfreude, for not getting to the judging sooner. Life has been more than usually hectic the last week or so. At any rate, I now am in fuller health and able to turn my attentions to judging the two wonderful entries we've received for this round:

Pen--I liked the choice of a battle account as subject for this form. It lent itself well to both the formality of the rhyme and the more matter-of-fact style of prose. I also think you did a really good job of using the prose section to express a moment of pause in the action when he's sizing up the opponent. It's like the effect of a well done slow-mo shot in a film when you get a break to take in the set up: who is who and what is what. I also like the end lines, bringing the story back to the present as though the warrior himself were in front of us. The only thing I would change is that I don't like the antiquated "doth" in the penultimate line. The rest of your diction has an old fashion feel without being actually out of date, but that word jumps out.

Schadenfreude--I really enjoyed the imagery of this poem: the crayon-like colours and the childish drawing worked well. The line "this is how we begin" is wonderful and works well with the description that follows. Your language is simple but evocative. Parts of this poem really conjured the opening credits of the film, To Kill a Mockingbird, for me, and I imagine that you are going for a similar sense of innocence connected with childhood drawing in juxtoposition to a loss of innocence alluded to in the poem. My only problem reading this poem is that I get a feeling of what you're trying to convey but not a good idea of what sort of story exactly is being told. Is the drawing metaphorical or a significant real memory? Is this person dealing with a break-up or just growing up? While ambiguity can be a good thing in poetry, I feel that perhaps you are being too ambiguous with your reader, leaving him or her with little to hang a hat on. We know that this person is contrasting an innocent childhood period with "years of feigned nonchalance," but we don't really have a sense of why things have changed or why this is significant. It might only take a few deftly placed concrete details to pull this together, but I think you need that. You have some great lines here, just wish there was a little more logical structure to fit them into.


So, we have a compelling story and a nicely crafted mood piece, and I nearly had to flip a coin to decide the winner, but I've decided to go with PENDRAGON!

Congrats Pen. With such a fearsome poem on your side I'm sure you'll have no trouble rounding up more participants for the next round than I did for this one.

[Pendragon]

Thank you Petra, and good poem, Schadenfreude! You were at least not frightened off by the challange of the form, which was a dandy!

I always thought that if it came back to me, I would impose a villanelle upon you, the form for which you always compliment me. It is a 19 line French form, broken into 5 tercets and a quadtrain. The first and third line are very important for they must repeat throughout the poem.

Rhyme is lines 1 and 3 of each tercet. The center lines all rhyme with each other. In the quadtrain, lines 1,3,4 will rhyme, while line 2 will rhyme with the center lines. I give you this sample poem to go by:


Dirge III

In all that I have ever been a shadow always blots the sunshine—
could grow a garden if my tears did not contain the taint of salt.
Somewhere out there, there has to be a life, a purpose I can call mine…

The years roll on by. Like the prisoner in his cell I just mark off the time—
Someone will always be there to remind me anyway that it’s all my fault.
In all that I have ever been a shadow always blots the sunshine—

The cold seeps in to my body, and I remember all the days of auld lang sine—
Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, get out and do something, I know I ought—
Somewhere out there, there has to be a life, a purpose I can call mine…

Well, I would probably have turned to drinking but I know cold comfort in the wine—
It’s just killing yourself slowly, drowning in the depths of a battle never fought.
In all that I have ever been a shadow always blots the sunshine—

People ask me how I am and so I lie again and tell them that I’m doing fine—
Then I’m praying, “God forgive, I know that I’m not living as I ought!”
Somewhere out there, there has to be a life, a purpose I can call mine…

They tell me to take a brighter look at things, but all I see is just a waste of time,
I’m no God, I’m no magician, and I can’t make it all better with a thought—
In all that I have ever been a shadow always blots the sunshine—
But somewhere out there, there has to be a life, a purpose I can call mine…

Pendragon


When I get a few entries, we'll set a due date! Good Luck!

[Pendragon]

Perhaps I should change that to "if I get any entries." That's the problem with me winning, I almost always start the flood with the first poem. Who will start my constest?

[schadenfreude]

Congratulations, Pendragon!
And thank you for your comments Petrach, and I'm glad that you are in better health now.
I will make an attempt at your villanelle as soon as I can think of something to write!