#writing constraints

[momoguido]

Aurynelle Form

This is the most constrained and difficult verse form I've come up with. I have only ever written one poem in this form, and it's honestly not my finest work, because at some point it becomes as much sudoku as poetry.

An Aurynelle is a ring terzanelle that is also constrained to be chiastic: each tercet has a theme, and the sequence of themes in the first half of the poem is mirrored in the second half of the poem. Schematically this could be written ABCDCBA, with each letter corresponding to the theme of one tercet.

The first half of the poem lays out a progression of ideas leading up to some central idea, and then the second half of the poem works backwards through those ideas, offering some commentary, elaboration, or counterpoint to each one. The correspondence can be simple, like two expressions of the same feeling, or more complex, like a thesis-antithesis pair.

The marriage of chiastic and terzanelle forms is fascinating to me. Recontextualization connects neighboring verses, while thematic links tie more distant verses together. The interweaving of two different structures is why I named it after Auryn, the tangled twin ouroboros from The Neverending Story.

This is an idea I had quite a while ago, but it took a very difficult crisis of faith to give me the material and motivation to complete one. The result, Do I Yet Love Her, came together in two steps: a frenzied bout of writing in the middle of an anxiety-fueled crisis, followed by a slow and careful process of filling in missing lines and re-wording things to complete the poem.

[cap-saturn]

I'm currently writing an Harry Potter fanfiction for my political science class (this is the actual assignment, I shit you not. The class focuses on the politics of Harry Potter), and it would be going perfectly fine of it weren't for the fact that it has to be less than eight pages, and I'm at about seven and still have so much more to write ...

[tarintowers]

In my writing practice, I write both by hand and on the computer. Sometimes I'm seized by a poem walking across the campus at City College, or a line comes to me on the bus, and I always have a little notebook stashed in my purse or backpack for these occasions, and these little notebooks get filled with poetry alongside to-do lists and phone numbers and the names of books or bands I want to look up later.

Sometimes I bring a larger notebook on a retreat or to a coffee shop and really, the size of the page sometimes dictates the shape of the poem that comes out of the pen. 

I do find the computer most useful for longer works, but there are certain constraints -- the Facebook status box, the look of the New Message window in mail -- that similarly shape thought. A "blank page" in Microsoft Word presents a sort of challenge to fill it with "real" work. 

In this essay on Brain Pickings, Maria Popova parses an essay by Mary Gordon on the joy of writing by hand. Gordon, it turns out, is similarly triggered or enabled by certain notebooks as tools to produce certain flavors of thought. She uses fancy books bought in specific places and a hefty pen. Links in the article point your way to other essays on tools for writing.