Hi everyone,
The poem a day goal this week is on schedule although I admit that today’s beauty struggled mightily to make a decent showing for itself. I seem to need enough words on the page before something finally clicks into place, like one of those Magic 8-balls you hold in your hand, ask a question, and wait for an answer eventually to bob up from the murky deep. Works the same for me whether I’m writing poems or fiction.
On occasion the form itself comes bubbling to the surface. In the early going of today’s effort, I scribbled a string of similar statements about my subject, looking for a path into it. It occurred to me that I might use those similar statements with a different rhyme at the end to introduce each stanza, which would be a nice little bonus for the poem. However there weren’t enough rhymes available that made sense. Instead I ended up repeating the same word at the end of each first line although the rest of each line was arranged differently to move the story forward. I cast the poem in three stanzas.
That arrangement alone, though, was boring, and I found I needed two additional stanzas to tell the story right. By using a different rhyme to end line #1 in stanzas 2 and 4, the final form fell into place and smiled back at me. The end result is a 5-stanza poem. Each stanza has three lines (tercet) rhyming abb/cdd/aee/cff/agg.
Sometimes we just have to muddle through.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 