I’m not much in favour of setting out to create “new” poetical forms. I have seen too many which are contrived, and which stifle the flow of a poem. I have seen people who, coming after, try to jam words unsuccessfully into the “form”, to the detriment of their expression. However, it’s quite a different matter if one is expressing something in poetry, and a pattern emerges which fits what you are trying to say, and a poem flows from that.
The other day – 23rd of April 2008, to be precise – I was composing this poem: The Four Seasons of Womankind . I stumbled on a structure of triplets, in the following meter: trochee-trochee-amphimacer followed by two lines of iambic tetrameter. Let me dah-di-dah that for you…
DAH-di DAH-di DAH-di-DAH
di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH
di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH
Because I was describing four seasons, I ended up with four triplets like that, making twelve lines in all. For the conclusion to the poem I did not want to use another triplet, nor to add an extra line to the fourth triplet, so I constructed a couplet – one line trochee-trochee-amphimacer plus one line iambic tetrameter.
The rhyming scheme was aaa bbb ccc ddd ee.
Each triplet held a discrete idea, which led to the conclusion. The whole thing – fourteen lines – suddenly took on an aspect a little… well.. sonnet-like.
As with anything like this on which I stumble serendipitously, I want to hand it over to other poets to use freely. Who knows – someone may even have stumbled across the same thing before, in which case I will bow to them.
Meanwhile, after consulting with arch-rhymester Jeff Green (cricketjeff), I have named the form the “St George’s Sonnet”, as mine was composed on St George’s Day, 23rd April.
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