Hello! I'm embarking on another poem-a-day challenge courtesy of Robert Lee Brewer, editor for Writer's Digest magazine, on his blog Write Better Poetry (formerly Poetic Asides). The objective is to write at least one poem a day every day for the month of November, and to have enough poems by the end of the month to create a chapbook manuscript. Robert provides daily prompts, just as he does during his other annual challenge in April. It's a good idea to work with a theme of some kind, as chapbooks (which are shorter than full-length collections) often have themes. Three of my seven published chapbooks have had themes: one was all sonnets and similar fourteen-line poems; one was a collection of baseball-themed poems, and the latest book collected poems I wrote last spring on the developing pandemic situation. This month I decided to write all my poems in a form called the "hay(na)ku sonnet". What's that, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked.
The "hay(na)ku" is an invented form created by poet Eileen Tabios around 2000. It is a three-line (tercet) word-count form that is basically very simple: one word in the first line, two words in the second, and three in the third, a structure reminiscent of the haiku. My friend Vince Gotera, a Filipino-American professor and poet in Iowa, coined the name "hay(na)ku" (pronounced ay-nahkoo), which is derived from a Tagalog word for "Oh!" Vince also created a variation which he calls the "hay(na)ku sonnet" - a chain of four hay(na)ku tercets followed by a couplet - two lines of three words each. It's a type of "sonnet" in that it consists of fourteen lines, including a two-line closing "envoi".
I thought it might be fun to take the concept a step further, by introducing rhyme and meter into the form. So I've written several hay(ka)nu sonnets in which the last words of the first and second tercets rhyme, as well as the last words of the third and fourth tercets, and the last two closing lines rhyme as well. So the rhyme scheme, line by line, would be:
xxA xxA xxB xxB CC
As far a meter goes, I'm a little loose with it, but generally prefer iambic, though I won't guarantee perfect "scansion". I may write all my poems this way during the month, or maybe not. I may play with rhyme scheme, or may not rhyme the poem at all - we'll see how it goes. Anyway, a tip of the hat to Vince for introducing me to this fun form, and to Eileen Tabios for inventing it.
Okay, enough with the long-winded exposition. Here's my first poem of the month, based on Robert's Day 1 prompt: "Write an 'enter' poem."
Election Season
we
enter November
full of stress
these
campaign ads:
full-court press
telling
us why
their opponent sucks
when
TV's on,
we're sitting ducks
so much proclivity
for crass negativity
