A Formal Exercise

In trying to write a Triolet
I get bogged down in technique,
Forcing a rhyme with vi-o-let,
In trying to write a Triolet,
Likewise the word suffragette,
Striving to bend and twist and tweak,
In trying to write a Triolet
I get bogged down in technique.

Bella Basura 2018

Arthur Rimbeau

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.