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Sound before sense, shape before meaning. Arrange a line in such a way that it makes a pleasing "shape"; then hang a series of sounds on it. Imagine voices heard indistinctly from the next room. The sounds don't have to make sense at first, as long as the shape is there. Frost called it "the figure a poem makes," and he was absolutely right. No other way to do it. Look at this: Oft have I planched the rillit to detame 'Neath Harrowwood's biliteral forbish flame, Only to find, ere stipely flew the dart, The nareful tramplet of a noddling heart. Oh clommid fate! that heverlessly flies The lorifuddled lotes of pangly skies: Thine is the fussymussy, thine the clope, When priddle-dees to pazy lotters vope.
3 responses total.
cute! a good exercize, I think. Actually, structure (shape, sound, etc.) became so excruciatingly binding on the Welsh bards in the middle ages that they were reduced to about that state.
Glad you liked it. Robert Frosts bit about imagining a conversation taking place in the next room - you can't quite make out what they're sating - and starting your poem with it, always struck me as one of those ideas that's perfectly true and perfectly useless (unless you're Robert Frost).
Hey, I've used it, or something like it. (And I'm not Robert Frost.)
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