First things first, go to this week’s video presentation: https://vimeo.com/464775887. First things first, go to this week’s video presentation: https://vimeo.com/464775887. This week we’re going to try a more playful form of poetry: Syllabic verse.
Syllabic verse is simply based on counting syllables (not musically adhering to a set rhythm like “iambs”).
Your goal is to write TWO syllabic poems: One based on Marianne Moore’s syllabic count in “No Swan So Fine” and another of your own making. At the end of each line, identify the number of syllables. Let’s start with Moore’s poem:
No Swan So Fine
by Marianne Moore
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chinz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers–at ease and tall. The king is dead.
There are two stanzas each with a 7-8-6-8-8-5-9 syllabic count. Your goal is to mimic her syllabic count (which results in a kind of “modern” sonnet) while focusing on one specific place in your life: Your home, your favorite restaurant, a vacation spot… any location that you can paint with words.
Your second poem can take any form and shape you want as long as each line has at least another line with the same number of syllables elsewhere in the poem. Identify your syllables at the end of each line.
Complete this entry AFTER you write your syllabic poems:
So, you just finished writing TWO syllabic verses, one based on Marianne Moore’s model and one of your own creation. In approximately 200+ words, which of your two poems do you prefer and why? Do you find this practice of writing syllabic verse more liberating than sonnets and/or villanelles?
so one page with both TWO syllabic verses poems,(one based on Marianne Moore’s model and one of your own creation) the next page answer the questions
