The Terza Rima. There's no predetermined rhythm for this, but the rhyme is strict. The rhyme helps the narrator remember the words. Looks like we'll need to read these poems aloud. Just pretend you've a Blackberry stuck in your ear.
It works like this. Each stanza has three lines. You can choose how long to it goes, but at least two stanzas is a good thing.
And then the rhyme. a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d etc. To end this poem, use a single line, or a couplet that rhymes with the second line of the immediately previous line.
Examples are harder to find than other styles. Here's a contemporary one found just last year in the New Yorker. The author is Richard Wilbur.
Terza Rima
by Richard Wilbur
In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell
How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,
And then flew on, as if toward Paradise.
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Comments: 12
Nancy, I don't know why this style didn't return many good hits when I looked online. Maybe I was looking for the wrong key words?
But then, that might just be me. I find counting syllables easier than rhyming so I'd opt to teach haiku for first learners. Let the content be damned, at least there's the framework, non?
Haiku and related straight-syllabic-count forms have their own challenges, place, and time. But I feel that we do a dis-service to any poet-student if we choose to avoid any of the forms or styles merely because we -- as teachers -- find them difficult. (Ya want difficult? Go find a decent example of the Welsh "Four-and-Twenty" rendered in English, and then compose your own examples of all twenty-four styles.)
Pax ... Kihe
Forms I've featured in Mindful Poetry so far include: pantoum, sestina, sonnet, and haibun. I don't shy from the difficult stuff, but that doesn't mean I think those fresh to poetic form should cut their teeth on a tough piece of gristle or worse, steel wool.
Since I'm an intense poet who desires others, particularly the average joe/jane to find poetry accessible and inviting, I want to consider the newbie to poetry as well as vets like yourself.
There's also this minor little bit that I should admit to: my poetic output has been so low the last two or three years as to be a little embarrasing.
I'll be amending that "flaw" in the next few, however, as part of my SCA A&S 50 "Depth" Challenge: by May 1st, 2015ce I expect myself to have completed at least 37 new poetic pieces -- and performed at least ten of them as nearly as possible in a pre-1600 style, in my best approximation of pre-1600 costuming. (Three pieces complete but not yet performed since I began this segment of the Challenge.)
Pax ... Kihe
NOTE: for any not familiar with the organization, SCA = Society for Creative Anachronism ( http://www.sca.org ), a 501c3 nonprofit organization with more than 30 thousand participants worldwide; we study and re-create the life, skills, and themes of pre-1600ce humanity -- mostly with a western European focus, but inclusive of those cultures with pre-1600 contacts to Europe (for example, we have members who choose to portray Japanese, Aztec, and Mongols, among others)
hadn't thought of this form -- known by this name, anyway -- in a long while. here you go, a quick response:
it was the ringng of a bell
that afternoon
which broke the spell
we had fallen in, too soon
earlier that day
writing the tune
and now it's time to play
Kihe, I don't know how you happened to wander across my GatherPath, but you're full of curious and interesting details. Too bad you won't be performing in MN. Doesn't it get too hot in TX for all that costuming?
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