Tuesday, April 25, 2017

PAD Day 25: Those Lusty Librarians

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) write a love and/or anti-love poem, and (2) write a poem about a small space, particularly one of significance to you. Well, my poem is pure fiction about the small space of a cubicle (or cubby) in the corner of a library where some hi-jinks might have gone on. I wrote it as a sonnet, but some of the lines seemed to want to be longer than the standard iambic pentameter, so I came up with something I call a "mixed fourteener sonnet". In this case, lines 4-7 and 11-12 are 14 syllables (iambic heptameter). In some lines there is an extra syllable too, due to the unstressed final syllable (known in some quarters as a "feminine" ending). Anyway, you're welcome to try it too - I haven't established any rule on which, or how many, of the lines should be longer, as long as it makes sense to the flow of the poem.

[poem deleted]

1 comment:

Vince Gotera said...

Excellent sonnet, Bruce. Perhaps you could call this form the "hi-jinks sonnet." You could also say it's pentameter á là Hopkins ... sprung rhythm! Which I've always thought meant you could say where the stresses are and call the rest unstressed if ya wanna.