I’ve been enjoying the highly structured form of poetry called the Villanelle. Here’s a new entry. You can also read Villanelle #1 and Villanelle #2. My desire is to plant one more treeAn oak or maple that adds a ring each yearThough under its shade I will never be For my children and theirs I bequest tenderlyA vibrant magnolia or dogwood souvenirMy desire is to plant one more tree...
I saw you standing at the cornerLast night at First and ParkI lagged behind so we wouldn’t meetUntil you vanished in the dark Then you spot me all aloneAt the bar of our favorite jointYou walk out before I turn aroundbecause really what’s the point We never claimed we’d meet once more, by design or circumstanceWho can guess the future, who wants a second chance. We wrote a story the end was sadWe...
As I wrote in my previous post, Villanelle #1, a villanelle poem adheres to a strict form. It comprises nineteen lines—five tercets of three lines each, and one four-line quatrain at the end. There is a fixed rhyming pattern, and the first and third lines of the opening tercet are called the refrain and are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas. In the final stanza, the...
A while ago I wrote lyrics for a friend of mine who’s a singer-songwriter and I’m back at it. The timing is right because I’ve become interested in the most rudimentary element of poetry and lyrics: rhyming schemes. I’ve been spending way too much time playing with language and experimenting with rhyming patterns and how they shape–and are shaped by–theme and...
I’ve recently paid attention to the sonnet form of poetry, and even wrote a modest entry of my own. Now I’ve been studying the villanelle. Like a sonnet, a villanelle follows a defined structural form, and therein lies my interest, which is why I’ve been drawn to Pecha Kucha. As a novelist, I have a lot of creative license with form: you can do anything you want, as long as you keep the reader...
Although my lifelong writing love is the novel, I’m exploring other forms in my dotage. Like my love for Pecha Kucha, where you write and recite a story that takes exactly 6:40 seconds to tell, using 20 slides that each stay on the screen for 20 seconds. Three times I’ve performed that dog and pony show in front of live audiences, and had fun every time. I’ve also dabbled in shorter fiction, just...
At the opposite end of the spectrum from those 100,000-word novels I tend to write are six-word stories I also enjoy. One of the most famous six-word stories ever written, and perhaps the most devastating, is by Ernest Hemingway. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I’ve written six-word memoirs and six-word Covid stories. Now here are twenty new ones. You should try it. Six...
First the freezing rain fell and the world turned to glass until the temperature climbed just enough and the ice became rain, just rain, torrential and unrelenting for hour upon hour under heavy iron skies until the thermometer dropped back down and the rain froze again and the snow soon followed with jaw-dropping ambition, the inches quickly piling up, nature flexing its heavy muscles, and then...
