No Next Item No Next Conference Can't Favor Can't Forget Item List Conference Home Entrance    Help
View Responses


Grex Enigma Item 248: Free Poetry Lesson
Entered by md on Tue Apr 18 17:09:38 UTC 1995:

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.



#1 of 3 by kami on Tue Apr 18 19:08:02 1995:

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.


#2 of 3 by md on Thu Apr 20 12:45:57 1995:

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).  


#3 of 3 by remmers on Thu Apr 20 22:43:18 1995:

Hey, I've used it, or something like it.  (And I'm not Robert Frost.)

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

No Next Item No Next Conference Can't Favor Can't Forget Item List Conference Home Entrance    Help

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss