(image: courtesy of postivesharing.com)
I've been playing around with an invented poetic form--a simple one in which the poem has 9 lines, and you simply count words per line in the following pattern: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You end up with a poem that has a profile like that of a portly man, but there are other virtues to the form as well.
Unfortunately, I haven't produced very good poems using the form yet. I don't blame the form. Of course, I'm probably not the inventor of it. No doubt many have tried it. I simply haven't seen it around. Give it a try, if you like. I'm calling it Form 9/25, which sounds like a bureaucatric form, so there's that. (Nine lines, twenty-five words.)
Here are some examples, not that you need them, and not that the products are very good, as noted.
A 9/25 Poem
There
is a
kind of drama
in meeting each person
we meet, a space of
light or heavy tension
as one life
intersects with
another.
Starlings
Starlings,
dark grey
and speckled, gather
in a group--thirty
or so--on wires above
my abode. They whistle,
chatter, burble, and
flit. They're
garrulous.
[A bird-watching book I once read described starlings as "garrulous." I thought that to be a charming description.]
Literary Feud
One
drunken boaster
with a reputation
of some kind didn't
like another self-consumed writer,
and they squabbled over
the years, very
jealous: so
what?
(Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom)
