Day 17b

(a very drafty)
Pantoum of Innocence

Better never to have been innocent.
Better to have been a poppy from the start.
Redhot blood and a black heart.
Just one more cautionary myth, innocence.

Better to have been a poppy from the start.
Love the one you leave the dance with.
Just another cautionary myth, innocence.
The untouched heart that goes home alone.

Love the one you leave the dance with.
Go, harmonize. Better, any old song than
untouched, untouching, going on
nothing ventured, whisper pure.

Better to harmonize, better to have tried.
(Bet you'd sing well with a partner.
(Nothing ventured, Whisperpure?)
Poppy says, say anything but never.

Try a duet with a poppy?
Red hot blood and a heart say:
Say anything, but never say
you're better off innocent.

 

---

A few weeks back, looking for just what I can't recall, I  was transported to the web address  of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. While the thing I had been searching for was not in a form I could recognize, I did find a posting that looked like it might prove useful. Lacking proper knowhow, I did the best I could, and screen captured a duplex calendar of poetry prompts. One house was simply daily forms and the other was pretty decent prompts. 

Since I'm well stocked with do-able prompts for the time being, I'm leaving those for later. As for the daily forms, I give that grid a glance now and then and sometimes consider challenging myself by adding a constraint to my project. This brings me to the above Pantoum.

I do not like the pantoum. It's probably a killer in its proper setting, but 90+ % of the ones I've met in English--don't work. One of the few things it has going for it is that it's shorter than a sestina and takes up less room than a jigsaw puzzle (although while writing a pantoum it is possible to lose track of your parts). There are rules and variations, but at heart it is a very simple form and if you are good at copy/paste it's only half as long as it looks. 

Start with four lines. 1, 2, 3, and 4. A quatrain. If each line is self-contained and you don't really care about making grammatical sense, the rest is a piece of cake. You just keep making quatrains. The second line of the first stanza--Let's call it Quatrain A, Line 2(a)--repeats.  It plugs in to start the next stanza, Q(uatrain) B. And while you're copy/pasting, pick up Line 4(a) and plug it into the third slot of Q(uatrain) B.  That gives you lines 1 and 3.  You only have to come up with two new lines, 2 and 4.  

Repeat that pattern for as many quatrains as you like (four is probably the minimum) . The final stanza picks up the two stanza one lines  that weren't repeated . I flipped them so the poem's last line is its first. 

Anyway. It’s a horrible form, and I can never guess where it will go, which is weird since it’s so predictable. But I finished it, and posted it and now I can go to sleep 💤