You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [34]
3. Write a draft explaining why the sky is blue. Your explanation must be completely untrue and as convincing as possible. You may invoke ancient Greek gods, the Judeo-Christian God, aliens, a child with crayons, or whatever other explanation you can invent. Include precise images showing how the sky became blue and two instances of synaesthesia.
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FORMAL GARDENS
& WILDFLOWERS:
FORMS & FREE VERSE
When a poem begins to take shape, it tends either toward formal structure or toward improvisation. Poetic forms come with ground rules laid out, the requirements a poem works to meet, the frame it works within. Free verse improvises, making its own ground rules as it goes. Your own personality and aesthetics will lead you to one or the other, but each poem has a mind of its own. One may want to be a sonnet. The next may want to be longer than the sonnet form can contain, or less formally structured. Your poems will assume their own shapes. Each will tell you what it wants to be, formal or free verse.
The Challenges of Formal Verse
Joan has cultivated her flower beds for several years now. Each spring she takes stock of which flowers look best where. She doesn't hesitate to dig up perennials and move them elsewhere. Given the limited space, she strives for perfection in each flower bed: the right number of flowers, combination of colors, depth between the rows, and the right varieties so the beds are in bloom from spring through autumn. My favorite flower bed runs along a white picket fence in our backyard. At each end of this bed, within circles of yellow violas and pink hyacinths, stands a tree—at the right a dogwood with its pink blossoms, at the left a Japanese maple with its scarlet leaves. Joan decided that bright colors would look best against the white fence. Between the trees she planted lavender daylilies at the back, in front of those are red tulips, in front of those are purple delphiniums, and at the very front are little bells of blue-grape muscaris. It's a formal flower bed, arranged in tiers, balanced from side to side and varied enough that every time I look at it a different color, a different shape, a different flower catches my attention.
Poetic forms work with pattern in much the same way Joan's flower beds do. Forms make use of patterns of meter, line length, poem length and rhyme scheme (a set pattern of end rhymes). For clarity's sake, when we talk of a rhyme scheme, we assign each rhyme sound a letter. Here's a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 32 from Sonnets From the Portuguese, and an outline of its rhyme scheme:
(a) The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
(b) To love me, I looked forward to the moon;
(b) To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
(a) And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
(a) Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
(b) And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
(b) For such man's love!—more like an out-of-tune
(a) Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
(c) To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
(d) Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
(c) I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
(d) A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
(c) 'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced—
(c) And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.
The letters in parentheses indicate the rhymes, each letter corresponding to a particular rhyme sound. The letter a indicates the rhymes of oath, troth, loathe and wroth. The letter b indicates the rhymes that echo moon. Discussing the rhyme scheme of this poem, we say it's rhymed abbaabbacdcdcd. (Some forms don't require rhyme for every line. In that case, a line that doesn't rhyme is denoted