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Literature Text
swift blurs part rain sheets
shades haste, ford drenched paths
wait men, form deep roots
time falls where it will.
shades haste, ford drenched paths
wait men, form deep roots
time falls where it will.
Literature
If
We can
draw lines and give them names
like elements
as they are discovered
Or etch into our skins
this soloecal desire
until it is impossible to tell
where words stop
and life begins.
I would
Find a common rhythm that includes
you in my arms, my hands
and lungs and thoughts
tracing the outline of you
entangled with me
colliding like two lost particles
locked in a shared gravity
drifting through the vacuum
of space.
I could.
Exhale, and
remember
sentence structure.
Literature
if she were any more tomato she'd be blueberry
xvii.
i want to write about how this world of
absolute truth, knowledge, and solid food
that which we hold high between two fingers is always
full of watery applesauce and little white half-truths.
and about how utterly strange
it is that all the simple things that people
write about on pages are, in reality,
very few and far between.
xvi.
and i want to write about how there is
peace and war and
poverty and treasure and
cruelty and sometimes,
sometimes,
small and
important
moments
of grace.
xv.
i want to write a poem about why the hell i'm wasting
my time writing poems when i could maybe
actually be doing something produ
Literature
Dormant
Winter is a blank slate,
but not like Rousseau's
it cleanses
sucking out warmth like poison
leaving only windburnt frost
tacked to the window pane
all we remember
is the numbness
the shuddering
skittish steps across the ice
snowflakes pasted to our faces
smoke rising from our lips
dragged across bleak clouds
winter has us captured
bound by fur and walls
drifting in our eggshelled silence
bone cold until we birth ourselves by warmth
emerge from our shells wet and heaving
uncurl our fingers one by one
joints crackling like fire at our backs
until spring comes
drip by tender drip
old wounds thaw
we are found raw,
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Type of Poem: Jueju
Prompt: Parallelism
A jueju is a quatrain (4-lined poem) and more specifically a matched pair of couplets, with either 5 or 7 syllables per line. This is an eastern style of poetry, like a haiku or tanku, and actually started as a shortened version of a yuefu poem. The difficulty with creating English versions of these style of poems is that our language is not tonal, which creates a language barrier in creating the proper flow. Think of it like how a sonnet uses stress/unstress syllables. We don't have tonal language so how do we incorporate it? One suggestion I found was to use only monosyllabic words, which are "imagistic", and not participles (often verbs made into adjectives: "rising thing" or "boiled thing"). There are a whole heaping helping of additional rules, so if you really desire learning the proper way to write this poem, definitely check out that link. I chose to make it more difficult by further applying word for word parallelism in lines 1 and 2 followed by oppositional form in line 3. Even if you choose not to, it is typical to have line 1 introduce a visual scene (a lake, a tree, a room), line 2 extend the imagery, line 3 provide a twist or turning to the scene, and line 4 provide the conclusion. In summary, this is a very difficult form wrapped up in a deceptively simple package.
For the reasons listed above, I don't particularly like writing eastern poetry. Even when I come up with something that feels evocative or flowing, I know there will be something lacking always. It almost makes me want to learn another language! Nevertheless, practicing with forms like this is really good for me, especially, as I lean more towards narrative poetry and less descriptive. It's a fresh breath of air to remind myself that things can be beautiful for themselves and not for any additional meaning you try and give them. Hence the poem above, which is about taking a moment sometimes and just experiencing the life in front of you rather than taking the harder path and losing yourself along the way.
A jueju is a quatrain (4-lined poem) and more specifically a matched pair of couplets, with either 5 or 7 syllables per line. This is an eastern style of poetry, like a haiku or tanku, and actually started as a shortened version of a yuefu poem. The difficulty with creating English versions of these style of poems is that our language is not tonal, which creates a language barrier in creating the proper flow. Think of it like how a sonnet uses stress/unstress syllables. We don't have tonal language so how do we incorporate it? One suggestion I found was to use only monosyllabic words, which are "imagistic", and not participles (often verbs made into adjectives: "rising thing" or "boiled thing"). There are a whole heaping helping of additional rules, so if you really desire learning the proper way to write this poem, definitely check out that link. I chose to make it more difficult by further applying word for word parallelism in lines 1 and 2 followed by oppositional form in line 3. Even if you choose not to, it is typical to have line 1 introduce a visual scene (a lake, a tree, a room), line 2 extend the imagery, line 3 provide a twist or turning to the scene, and line 4 provide the conclusion. In summary, this is a very difficult form wrapped up in a deceptively simple package.
For the reasons listed above, I don't particularly like writing eastern poetry. Even when I come up with something that feels evocative or flowing, I know there will be something lacking always. It almost makes me want to learn another language! Nevertheless, practicing with forms like this is really good for me, especially, as I lean more towards narrative poetry and less descriptive. It's a fresh breath of air to remind myself that things can be beautiful for themselves and not for any additional meaning you try and give them. Hence the poem above, which is about taking a moment sometimes and just experiencing the life in front of you rather than taking the harder path and losing yourself along the way.
This is my third submission for the December Form Challenge from ProjectDFC. You can read the rest of my entries here.
The Jueju was not listed in either of the previous challenges.
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Comments5
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Liked your commentary on the jueju form. I hope to write an essay about it myself sometime soon.