Author: Paul Szlosek

Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.

Invented Poetry Forms – The Herrickelle

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 4 Comments

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Although the form we are discussing in today’s post was recently invented by myself within the last year, in many ways, it has been around for over 500 years. Confused? Well let me explain just how the herrickelle came about.

In terms of classical poetry, the majority of metered verse has probably been most commonly written in either iambic pentameter or tetrameter. On the other hand, examples of poets who were known to have wrote in iambic monometer are quite rare, except for one major exception (okay, here is a quick aside for those who have never learned or totally forgotten all about poetical meter. A foot is a unit of poetical measure made up of usually two, but sometimes three, or even four syllables, where the sound of one or more particular syllables are emphasized. An iamb is a specific type of foot consisting of two syllables with the last of the pair being stressed. Iambic pentameter is a line of five feet, while iambic tetrameter is four, and of course, iambic monometer is just one metered foot, or, put in another way, two syllables. Get it? Neither do I, but let’s go on):

Robert Herrick was an English poet, priest, and (by most accounts) playboy from the 17th century. Best known for his poems ”To the Virgins to Make Much of Time,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” and “Corinna’s Going a Maying,” , he is probably the only major poet proven to have had a penchant for writing poetry in iambic monometer. In fact, most poetry text books use his poem “Upon His Departure Hence” as the prime example of monometric verse. After coming across this poem in such an anthology a few months ago, I was inspired to utilize it as a template to create a new poetry form which I have dubbed the herrickelle in honor of Herrick.

Because I realize many modern poets are uncomfortable with meter (I know I am), I decided not to make it mandatory to write a herrickelle in strict iambic monometer, although you certainly can if you wish. Instead I decided to have the form use a syllable count as its measure (much like the haiku or the monotetra, both of which I have discussed in earlier posts). So this is a description of my unofficial rules for writing a herrickelle:

A herrickelle is a poem of one or more tercets (stanzas of three lines) with each line consisting of just two syllables. Each tercet uses a monorhyme (which means all its lines use the same end rhyme and rhyme with each other). Thus the rhyme scheme would be aaa for the first tercet, bbb for the second (if there is one), ccc for the third, and so on.

Herrick’s “Upon His Departure Hence”, which rhyme scheme is aaabbbcccdddeee, technically would not qualify as a herrickelle, since he wrote its fifteen lines without any line breaks. However the poem can be easily converted into one by simply dividing its lines into five tercets. So here is what I retroactively consider the very first herrickelle in existence penned by the master himself:

Upon His Departure Hence

Thus I
Pass by,
And die:

As one
Unknown
And gone:

I’m made
A shade,
And laid

I’ th’ grave:
There have
My cave,

Where tell
I dwell.
Farewell.

– Robert Herrick

I find composing a herrickelle to be quite a challenge since one is limited to a vocabulary of just one or two syllable words. Because of this, you find yourself often forced to use a lot of short Anglo-Saxon and archaic words. Normally I strongly disapprove of contemporary poets using words like “Thee”, “Thou”, and “Art”.  Yet because of the 17th century origin of the form and its monometric rhythm which feels a bit peculiar and ancient, I think that in the case of the herrickelle, such usage is more than permissible. As an example, here is a herrickelle I wrote with a definite medieval or renaissance flavor –

Why Art Thou So Serious?

Employ
Sheer joy,
My boy!

Thou chance
To dance
And prance,

Let glee
Set thee
Now free,

Let mirth
Rebirth
The earth!

I have more herrickelles that I wrote to share with you (all which sound much more contemporary), but since this post has gone rather long, I guess that can wait until my next one. Thanks so much for reading!

Another 10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.”

“Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.”

“II think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can’t quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.”

“I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.”

“There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.”

“By clarity I don’t mean that we’re always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.”

“I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.”

“Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.”

“I’m trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I’m trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it’s usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.”

“When I’m constructing a poem, I’m trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines – some hold up better as lines than others. But I’m not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.”

-Billy Collins

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Oscar Wilde

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 4 Comments

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“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.”

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

“There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read (Alexander) Pope.”

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”

“You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.”

“The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all art.”

“I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.”

– Oscar Wilde

Invented Poetry Forms – The Monotetra

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 4 Comments

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The poetry form that I would like to introduce you to today is the monotetra, invented by poet Michael Walker apparently sometime in the early 2000’s. The monotetra consists of one or more quatrains (stanzas of 4 lines) with each line written in tetrameter (4 feet or 8 syllables). Each stanza follows a monorhyme (all the lines rhyme together), thus the rhyme scheme for the first stanza would be depicted as aaaa, the second (if there is one) as bbbb, the third as cccc, and so on. What makes the form totally unique and really stand out is that the first four syllables of the final line of each quatrain is repeated as its last four. Or in other words, a four syllable phrase is repeated twice as the last line of each stanza.

For my personal taste, the monotetra, with its monorhyme and repeated phrases, is better suited for light verse than a serious poem. These qualities definitely make it both a delight to write and read out loud. I also prefer the single quatrain versions to the longer ones. But that might be just me, since most of the examples of monotetra I found on the internet are at least two stanzas. I recommend that you might try writing one of each variation to discover which best fits your taste. To that end, here is one that I wrote to serve as a model (I hope you enjoy it!):

Nude Ascending a Staircase

All the men could not help but stare.
She wore her birthday suit with flair.
As she climbed, she paused to declare
“No clothes to wear, no clothes to wear!”

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Allen Ginsberg

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 5 Comments

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“A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.”

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”

“To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.”

“I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks… or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.”

“Poetry’s role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.”

“One must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others.”

“There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.”

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

“It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless – abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind. You really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.”

“The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal… That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing… The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly… so you can actually be free to say anything you want.”

-Allen Ginsberg

10 More Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

 

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“Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.”

“The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”

“While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.”

“Write the poem only you can write.”

“You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.”

“The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.”

“I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium. I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.”

“I find it strange that – at least in my take on it – the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.”

“Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.”

“The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”

-Billy Collins

Invented Poetry Forms – The Hay(na)ku

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 10 Comments

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The hay(na)ku is a fairly recent invented poetry form created in the Philippines by the poet and artist Eileen Tabios in 2003. It somewhat resembles the haiku in the fact that they both consist of three short lines. But unlike the traditional Japanese form, the hay(na)ku is isoverbal, meaning its lines’ lengths are measured by the number of words instead of syllables. There is one word in the first line, two in the second, and three in the third.. There is also a variation known as the reverse hay(na)ku, in which the lines are set in the opposite order (with three words in the first, two in the second, and one in the final line).

Also like haiku, a hay(na)ku doesn’t necessarily have to have a title, but there is no rule against it having one either. And as far as subject matter is concerned, anything goes.

I personally find this form much freer and thus much more fun and easier to write than the haiku, which I usually have difficulty composing. Although their quality might be dubious, I was able to turn out the following five hay(na)ku within an hour (you might notice my last two are poultry-themed – that is no doubt due to being raised as a child on a chicken farm):

Secret Identity

Nobody
knows that
I’m not me.

The Ache of Unrequited Love

Hearts
don’t really
break, but bruise.

It Will All Come Out in the Wash…

Dirty
laundry – red
hats, white sheets.

Unrecognized Potential

Sometimes
even chickens
can unexpectedly fly.

Barnyard Memories of  My Youth

Pullets
bathing in
basins of earth.

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments

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“I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.”

“I always think W.S. Merwin’s poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.”

“As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.”

“I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.”

“More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree – a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.”

“I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda. I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.”

“Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.”

“When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.”

“High School is the place where poetry goes to die.”

“I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.”

-Billy Collins

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Rita Dove

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920’s Harlem let’s say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it’s really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.”

“I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.”

“At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it’s like analyzing myself.”

“My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it’s so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.”

“Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it’s very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that’s one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.”

“I’ve always felt that the poems I’ve written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let’s write about that. In every case what has happened is that I’ve become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn’t shake it.”

“I think that you certainly don’t have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.”

“My best times are midnight to six actually. I’ll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I’ll write until I get stuck or I can’t go any further or I’m boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.”

“My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it’s going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.”

“If I begin writing a poem that means I’m intrigued in some way by whatever it’s about and that if I’m not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can’t expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.”

-Rita Dove

Presidential Poetry…

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

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In honor of Presidents’ Day, here is a love poem supposedly penned by a teenage George Washington:

Oh Ye Gods

Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart
Stand to oppose thy might and Power
At Last surrender to cupids feather’d Dart
And now lays Bleeding every Hour
For her that’s Pityless of my grief and Woes
And will not on me Pity take
Ill sleep amongst my most Inviterate Foes
And with gladness never with to Wake
In deluding sleepings let my Eyelids close
That in an enraptured Dream I may
In a soft lulling sleep and gentle repose
Possess those joys denied by Day.

– George Washington