A Formal Excercise
Research is easy with the internet. When I decided write a poem for NaPoWriMo in the most difficult form I could find, google quickly threw me a TRIOLET. A form popular in the seventeenth century and derived from the form of traditional French folk songs. It is a form considered hard to do well, and prone to doggerel. Arthur Rimbeau was apparently fond of them, although as he only did them in French, so I don’t know how stilted they might be.
Although research is easy on the internet, particularly straight forward things like formal poetic conventions, it is also a minefield of confusions, lies and sheer bullshit.
After ploughing through myriad internet-borne variations of what a TRIOLET is, I cobbled together my own interpretation, a working formula for writing a TRIOLET. Unfortunately by this time my imagination and creativity had been worn thin, and I ended up writing a poem about writing a poem – YAWN!
Here is the definition of TRIOLET that I used in day 6 of NaPoWriMo.
TRIOLET – In it’s English form consists of eight lines of iambic tetrameters,
with a repetitive rhyme scheme ABaAabAB
The first line being repeated in lines 4 and 7
The second line repeated in the eighth line.
The resultant poem is HERE
Credit – OK Google for the image of Arthur Rimbeau.
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