Tag Archives: poetic form

If there were no wind, cobwebs…

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Photo credit: Der Tobi via Pixabay


Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.


It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.


I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.

Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.

The Golden Apple collection is a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles that Popa himself selected from various anthologies of Serbo-Croatian folk literature.

Writing Prompt


A few more proverbs and riddles. I will share answers next month!

Proverbs

  1. Get your moustaches together, you’re going on a journey.
  2. If you put him on a wound, it would heal.
  3. When did fog ever uproot a tree-trunk?

Riddles

  1. In one room both bone and flesh grow.
  2. I stretched a gold thread through the wide world and wound it up into a walnut shell.
  3. I shake a tree here, but the fruit falls half an hour away.

New poetic form: 821 – a competition

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The 821 is an 11-line, 3-stanza poem created in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Northern Poetry Library. This is based in Morpeth, Northumberland and has the largest collection of post-WWII poetry in England outside London: over 15,000 volumes.

Why 821? It is the number allocated to English poetry in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) System. The form also uses the “volta”, the turn, a concept traditionally associated with sonnets, and this is used to create a subtly interconnected series of stanzas that turn, or riff of one another.

The poem consists of an opening octet (8 lines), line break, a couplet (2 lines), line break, followed by a single line. There is no set meter. It could use a rhyme scheme or be free verse.

The Northern Poetry Library is sponsoring a competition for 821 poems. International entries are welcome. The poem needs to have a connection to the “North”; how you interpret this is up to you. The judges will select a total of 50 poems: during a five-month’ period 10 poems will be picked each month to form a canto which will be published on-line.

Include with the submission a statement (max 100 words) about your connection to the North. The closing date is 17 June 2018. Some sample poems are on https://poemsofthenorth.co.uk

I am grateful to poet Pam Thompson for introducing me to the form. I am definitely going to submit: I have been in the North West for almost 40 years so I have the connection, but I don’t yet have the poem – I’m not finding it easy to get a balance between the opening octet and those final three lines…