Toward the sijo, or: Room for weather
I tried limericks first,
because if I was going to rhyme,
I wanted the rhyme
to look me in the eye.
Then clerihews,
villanelles,
terzanelles,
terza rima dragging one stanza
after another
like an extension cord
across the living room floor.
There were haiku,
senryu,
American sentences,
atom poems,
septolets,
ghazals,
haibun,
chลkaโ
even poems made of emojis,
because I became briefly obsessed
with whether symbols alone
could still carry feeling.
At some point,
my friend Sangeetha and I
completed a hundred-verse renga
without ever meeting in person.
That should probably
have been enough.
Instead,
we invented entire alphabets
of new forms together.
Four times.
Twenty-six letters each.
I regret none of it.
I had no formal education
in poetry,
so I built my own school
out of borrowed rooms:
rhyme rooms,
counting rooms,
echo rooms,
rooms where refrains
kept walking back in
without knocking.
I wanted to know
what each form did
to breath.
I wanted proof
that I could do them.
And I did not want
to drift into free verse
simply because no one
was guarding the door.
So I kept experimenting:
tapestry poems,
dialogue poems,
Twitter micropoems,
collaborative poems,
poems that tried to behave
like the things they described.
For a while,
the machinery delighted me.
Then the gears
started showing through.
The scaffolding
leaned into the photograph.
Rhyme sometimes arrived
wearing someone elseโs jacket.
Even invention began
to feel overengineered.
And after all that,
I found myself returning
to the sijoโ
three small rooms,
one turn in thought,
enough air
between the beams.
Not too short.
Not too loose.
A narrow cup
with room for weather.
dโVerse: Unlock with lists
At dโVerse, Bjรถrn encourages us to compose โlist poemsโ.
Letโs write poetry together!
When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone โ itโs possible. But creatively, itโs more like painting: you canโt just use the same colours in every painting. Itโs just not an option. You canโt take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
โ
Ben Harper (b. 1969)
Would you like to create poetry with me and have a completed poem of yours featured here at the Skepticโs Kaddish? I am very excited to have launched the โPoetry Partnersโ initiative and am looking forward to meeting and creating with youโฆ Check it out!
#Collaboration #Discovery #Exploration #Form #FreeVerse #Learning #ListPoem #Poetry #Process #Sijo
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