I ran a contest of this nature over on StoryWrite because I didn't have enough points to do it here, and also because I was enamored of the idea of a pantoum/story combination. I got only five entries, and while they were all good ones, now that I've got enough points to do an AP contest, I expect I'll get a more enthusiastic response here on AllPoetry. 
Since this is AllPoetry, I'll drop the story part, although I really did like that aspect. Your task, then, is to write a pantoum or pantoum-like poem.
For those who don't know what one is, Wikipedia is your friend: Pantoum Definition. Or, if you don't feel like leaving AP, I'll explain. Basically, instead of having a repeating rhyming or syllable scheme, it repeats whole lines verbatim (unchanged,) such that the meaning of the repeated lines changes subtly throughout the poem, while still making sense and flowing overall.
If you need an example, here's one of my own, with line lettering provided to help you detect the pattern of repetition.
A Pawprints in the dust
B Hunger shivering the air
C The pack is on the move
D Ghost light in their eyes
B Hunger shivering the air
E Beneath the verdant canopy
D Ghost light in their eyes
F The prairie wolves are hunting
E Beneath the verdant canopy
C The pack is on the move
F The prairie wolves are hunting
A Pawprints in the dust.
"Pawprints," intoothandclaw/jack romero
Now, since a "standard" pantoum (according to Wikipedia, at least) is rather short, and I don't want to allow multiple entries per person so I don't accidentally give the same person more than one trophy, I'm going to give you some options about form as well as about content. First, however, the Rules. There aren't many of them, don't worry, but they're important.
1.) No "dirty-pretty". Please use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
2.) If you choose Form Option C, please, no pedestrian rhyme. It's almost turned me off rhyming poetry completely, and while I can appreciate a particularly clever turn of phrase in rhyme and don't dislike the form in and of itself, I'm *very* sensitive to cliche, so try to inject your own unique personality into your very vocabulary and imagery choices regardless of the content prompt you choose to keep things as fresh as possible. You should do that anyway, really, but it's especially important for those of you who enter a rhyming piece.
3.) I am currently allowing prewrites, on the off-chance that people might have some nice pantoum which fit the contest options lying around, but please don't just dump any which one you might have -- enter your best. For this reason, only prewrites less than one month old will be accepted.
4.) Please note which options you selected in your Author's Notes. This isn't absolutely mandatory -- that is, I won't DQ you if you don't -- but I'd like to know, especially for prewrites, what category it's intended for. If you don't do this, however, and I can't tell that the entry actually fits into any of the contest options, I will comment and give you one chance to tell me what option it fits. If you can't, I'll have to DQ the entry. (Note that this *only* applies if I can't tell what option the entry is supposed to fall under. If the option(s) you used are obvious, no worries.) Remember that you need to have both Form and Content options noted.
5.) If anyone who entered my SW contest also enters my AP contest, please note that fact in your AN. This one is not optional. I want to give the people who didn't win there another shot, not give gold (or silver, or bronze) to the same person twice. That said, you're all still welcome to *compete*, you're just not going to get the same color trophy from me twice. (HM excepted.)
6.) While the pantoum is a flexible form and I've given you options to adjust it, it's probably only practical and functional below, say, 30-50 lines. If you can pull off an uber-pantoum I will be duly impressed, but I strongly recommend a lower line count. If you want to submit multiple poems of six lines or less in a single entry and have it count as one entry, that's acceptable, but I'd rather you do one longer piece comprised of shorter parts as described below. The minimum line count of any one single pantoum is six lines; even that is very, very easy, and fewer lines than that essentially eradicates the concept of the form -- there just isn't enough room for it to really show itself.
7.) This isn't necessary, but what I love about the pantoum is that it's very conducive to layering hidden/multiple meanings, metaphor, and subtle symbolism throughout the poem, IMO. Poems which contain that density of significance will catch and hold my attention longer than others, as a general rule.
-Form Options-
If you do not use one of these options and simply write a standard pantoum as shown in the example above, you don't have to make a Form Option note. If you choose one of these, however, please be sure to note which one so I know whether to count syllables, check your lines, et cetera. Remember, you cannot change even one letter of a line when it repeats within the poem, and the whole poem must be internally consistent; no line can feel "out of place" or "forced". Fortunately, most ideas can be adjusted until they flow properly.
a.) Write two or three separate pantoum about a specific topic or around a given theme, then string them together as one larger poem with an overall theme, story, or message.
b.) Take the concept of a poem created using a repeating-line scheme rather than a syllable or rhyming scheme and invent your own repeating-line scheme based on the template above. For example, instead of having a twelve-line pantoum with lines arranged as above, you could do a six-line pantoum that goes A-B-C-B-D-A. Or a 20-liner arranged... well, however you like. This option is mostly for people who are either experienced with the concept of a pantoum or else confident about their ability to experiment successfully with form in general. People used to writing free verse should probably stick to either of the example schemes so as not to get lost or overwhelmed trying to find a many-line arrangement that works.
c.) For the advanced and/or masochistic contestant, take the basic pantoum template and blend rhyming and/or syllable-count schemes into the repeating-line scheme. Note that rhyming, especially, increases the challenge tenfold, so be careful about this option, but if you specialize in rhyming and/or syllable-count poetry, you're welcome to try to blend your specialty into the pantoum form if you like.
-Content Prompts-
a.) Secrets. Your own secrets, the fact of secrets, other people's secrets, how secrets have affected you or others, how you feel about secrets... anything pertaining to the topic.
b.) Mental illness. If you've suffered from it, compress it into imagery and metaphor, as dense with layered meaning as you like, and express it in pantoum. If you haven't, but you know a lot about a particular disorder, feel free to write about it the same way as if you had been a sufferer yourself. If you haven't been, and don't know much about it, I suggest another option; it's nothing personal, but I'm looking for detail and depth of a level that requires either personal experience or deep, dedicated study. The pop-culture-level understanding of psychology isn't deep enough for my purposes in this particular contest.
c.) Animism. If you are an animist, pantheist, or share similar philosophies/beliefs, channel your sensual and emotional experiences with the living non-human world. Don't debate the philosophy, or even illustrate it; animate it. Your poem should thrum with life like everything it represents if you choose this option.
d.) Autumn/Winter. Choose one of these seasons, then condense it into a poem. I'm looking for a less literal interpretation, but not so abstracted that the source is unrecognizable. Don't only convey the season as it affects or relates to humans -- include the whole Earth, the biosphere, the rocks, the weather itself. How does a storm-cloud feel the present autumn, the coming of winter? What does the old pine tree think when a pack of wolves, thin from hunger, kills a stag that was already dying of frostbite and starvation? Does it help the coyote stay warm in winter to eat ripe peppers in the field in autumn, as he thinks it might? What does the snow say as it melts into a snow owl's feathers?
e.) Predation. Convey this primal act of death-in-life symbolically and meaningfully; don't just describe an animal killing prey -- that's a two-dimensional image. Give it three dimensions by injecting hidden/double meaning, et cetera, as described above in the Rules.
f.) Music. Pick a song that never fails to induce some kind of emotional reaction in you. Doesn't matter what kind of reaction -- anything. Express that emotion in imagery, metaphor, story, and/or however else feels appropriate.
g.) Violence. This one is tricky. I'd be very interested if someone could pull off a voraphilic, lustmord/serial killer, cannibalistic, werewolf/demon, or other explicitly gory theme in their pantoum. This requires effectively conveying the mood and feel of your subject without sacrificing imagery, vocabulary, metaphor/simile, and the other tools that make a poem a poem and not just a collection of general ideas or images. If you have any doubts at all about your ability to pull this off, I recommend a different category. I'd love to see some good entries in this one, however.
h.) Darkness. There's a specific mood/feel I'm going for here but I'm having trouble describing it succinctly. The only way I can think of to communicate it is with a string of images -- spirals, syringes, razors, mirrors, chains, barbed wire, dry bones, spikes, smoke, and shadows, all intermingled, with occasional splatters of blood. A gritty, intense, exploring-one's-dark-side kind of feel. Do you indulge your destructive side? How? Do you use it on yourself, on other people, on non-human living things, or on inanimate objects? Or do you only indulge it in your imagination? Indulge it here and now in pantoum form.
i.) Wilderness. Give me a sense of primal freedom and purity. Run wild. This option can take many forms. I'm interested to see where you go with this.
j.) Dragons/Dinosaurs. This isn't a joke option, but I'm not expecting many people to want, or be able, to pull off what I'm looking for. Similar to the Animism and Wilderness options, I want some really evocative, primal, non-corny, non-cliche stuff.
If I think of anything else I'll add it, but that should cover things. Good luck, everyone!
Since this is AllPoetry, I'll drop the story part, although I really did like that aspect. Your task, then, is to write a pantoum or pantoum-like poem.
For those who don't know what one is, Wikipedia is your friend: Pantoum Definition. Or, if you don't feel like leaving AP, I'll explain. Basically, instead of having a repeating rhyming or syllable scheme, it repeats whole lines verbatim (unchanged,) such that the meaning of the repeated lines changes subtly throughout the poem, while still making sense and flowing overall.
If you need an example, here's one of my own, with line lettering provided to help you detect the pattern of repetition.
A Pawprints in the dust
B Hunger shivering the air
C The pack is on the move
D Ghost light in their eyes
B Hunger shivering the air
E Beneath the verdant canopy
D Ghost light in their eyes
F The prairie wolves are hunting
E Beneath the verdant canopy
C The pack is on the move
F The prairie wolves are hunting
A Pawprints in the dust.
"Pawprints," intoothandclaw/jack romero
Now, since a "standard" pantoum (according to Wikipedia, at least) is rather short, and I don't want to allow multiple entries per person so I don't accidentally give the same person more than one trophy, I'm going to give you some options about form as well as about content. First, however, the Rules. There aren't many of them, don't worry, but they're important.
1.) No "dirty-pretty". Please use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
2.) If you choose Form Option C, please, no pedestrian rhyme. It's almost turned me off rhyming poetry completely, and while I can appreciate a particularly clever turn of phrase in rhyme and don't dislike the form in and of itself, I'm *very* sensitive to cliche, so try to inject your own unique personality into your very vocabulary and imagery choices regardless of the content prompt you choose to keep things as fresh as possible. You should do that anyway, really, but it's especially important for those of you who enter a rhyming piece.
3.) I am currently allowing prewrites, on the off-chance that people might have some nice pantoum which fit the contest options lying around, but please don't just dump any which one you might have -- enter your best. For this reason, only prewrites less than one month old will be accepted.
4.) Please note which options you selected in your Author's Notes. This isn't absolutely mandatory -- that is, I won't DQ you if you don't -- but I'd like to know, especially for prewrites, what category it's intended for. If you don't do this, however, and I can't tell that the entry actually fits into any of the contest options, I will comment and give you one chance to tell me what option it fits. If you can't, I'll have to DQ the entry. (Note that this *only* applies if I can't tell what option the entry is supposed to fall under. If the option(s) you used are obvious, no worries.) Remember that you need to have both Form and Content options noted.
5.) If anyone who entered my SW contest also enters my AP contest, please note that fact in your AN. This one is not optional. I want to give the people who didn't win there another shot, not give gold (or silver, or bronze) to the same person twice. That said, you're all still welcome to *compete*, you're just not going to get the same color trophy from me twice. (HM excepted.)
6.) While the pantoum is a flexible form and I've given you options to adjust it, it's probably only practical and functional below, say, 30-50 lines. If you can pull off an uber-pantoum I will be duly impressed, but I strongly recommend a lower line count. If you want to submit multiple poems of six lines or less in a single entry and have it count as one entry, that's acceptable, but I'd rather you do one longer piece comprised of shorter parts as described below. The minimum line count of any one single pantoum is six lines; even that is very, very easy, and fewer lines than that essentially eradicates the concept of the form -- there just isn't enough room for it to really show itself.
7.) This isn't necessary, but what I love about the pantoum is that it's very conducive to layering hidden/multiple meanings, metaphor, and subtle symbolism throughout the poem, IMO. Poems which contain that density of significance will catch and hold my attention longer than others, as a general rule.
-Form Options-
If you do not use one of these options and simply write a standard pantoum as shown in the example above, you don't have to make a Form Option note. If you choose one of these, however, please be sure to note which one so I know whether to count syllables, check your lines, et cetera. Remember, you cannot change even one letter of a line when it repeats within the poem, and the whole poem must be internally consistent; no line can feel "out of place" or "forced". Fortunately, most ideas can be adjusted until they flow properly.
a.) Write two or three separate pantoum about a specific topic or around a given theme, then string them together as one larger poem with an overall theme, story, or message.
b.) Take the concept of a poem created using a repeating-line scheme rather than a syllable or rhyming scheme and invent your own repeating-line scheme based on the template above. For example, instead of having a twelve-line pantoum with lines arranged as above, you could do a six-line pantoum that goes A-B-C-B-D-A. Or a 20-liner arranged... well, however you like. This option is mostly for people who are either experienced with the concept of a pantoum or else confident about their ability to experiment successfully with form in general. People used to writing free verse should probably stick to either of the example schemes so as not to get lost or overwhelmed trying to find a many-line arrangement that works.
c.) For the advanced and/or masochistic contestant, take the basic pantoum template and blend rhyming and/or syllable-count schemes into the repeating-line scheme. Note that rhyming, especially, increases the challenge tenfold, so be careful about this option, but if you specialize in rhyming and/or syllable-count poetry, you're welcome to try to blend your specialty into the pantoum form if you like.
-Content Prompts-
a.) Secrets. Your own secrets, the fact of secrets, other people's secrets, how secrets have affected you or others, how you feel about secrets... anything pertaining to the topic.
b.) Mental illness. If you've suffered from it, compress it into imagery and metaphor, as dense with layered meaning as you like, and express it in pantoum. If you haven't, but you know a lot about a particular disorder, feel free to write about it the same way as if you had been a sufferer yourself. If you haven't been, and don't know much about it, I suggest another option; it's nothing personal, but I'm looking for detail and depth of a level that requires either personal experience or deep, dedicated study. The pop-culture-level understanding of psychology isn't deep enough for my purposes in this particular contest.
c.) Animism. If you are an animist, pantheist, or share similar philosophies/beliefs, channel your sensual and emotional experiences with the living non-human world. Don't debate the philosophy, or even illustrate it; animate it. Your poem should thrum with life like everything it represents if you choose this option.
d.) Autumn/Winter. Choose one of these seasons, then condense it into a poem. I'm looking for a less literal interpretation, but not so abstracted that the source is unrecognizable. Don't only convey the season as it affects or relates to humans -- include the whole Earth, the biosphere, the rocks, the weather itself. How does a storm-cloud feel the present autumn, the coming of winter? What does the old pine tree think when a pack of wolves, thin from hunger, kills a stag that was already dying of frostbite and starvation? Does it help the coyote stay warm in winter to eat ripe peppers in the field in autumn, as he thinks it might? What does the snow say as it melts into a snow owl's feathers?
e.) Predation. Convey this primal act of death-in-life symbolically and meaningfully; don't just describe an animal killing prey -- that's a two-dimensional image. Give it three dimensions by injecting hidden/double meaning, et cetera, as described above in the Rules.
f.) Music. Pick a song that never fails to induce some kind of emotional reaction in you. Doesn't matter what kind of reaction -- anything. Express that emotion in imagery, metaphor, story, and/or however else feels appropriate.
g.) Violence. This one is tricky. I'd be very interested if someone could pull off a voraphilic, lustmord/serial killer, cannibalistic, werewolf/demon, or other explicitly gory theme in their pantoum. This requires effectively conveying the mood and feel of your subject without sacrificing imagery, vocabulary, metaphor/simile, and the other tools that make a poem a poem and not just a collection of general ideas or images. If you have any doubts at all about your ability to pull this off, I recommend a different category. I'd love to see some good entries in this one, however.
h.) Darkness. There's a specific mood/feel I'm going for here but I'm having trouble describing it succinctly. The only way I can think of to communicate it is with a string of images -- spirals, syringes, razors, mirrors, chains, barbed wire, dry bones, spikes, smoke, and shadows, all intermingled, with occasional splatters of blood. A gritty, intense, exploring-one's-dark-side kind of feel. Do you indulge your destructive side? How? Do you use it on yourself, on other people, on non-human living things, or on inanimate objects? Or do you only indulge it in your imagination? Indulge it here and now in pantoum form.
i.) Wilderness. Give me a sense of primal freedom and purity. Run wild. This option can take many forms. I'm interested to see where you go with this.
j.) Dragons/Dinosaurs. This isn't a joke option, but I'm not expecting many people to want, or be able, to pull off what I'm looking for. Similar to the Animism and Wilderness options, I want some really evocative, primal, non-corny, non-cliche stuff.
If I think of anything else I'll add it, but that should cover things. Good luck, everyone!
Contest is Over
- Contest was judged on January 5
- Rewards: Gold: 400, Silver: 100, Bronze: 50, Honorable mention: 4 people
- Final notes: All right!
First, I want to note my appreciation and gratitude to the mods for being as kind and understanding as they were helping me get all this sorted out. Second, I want to apologize to everyone for all the confusion. Long story short, the message system glitched and I didn't get messages warning me about the deadline that I was supposed to get. I had been ill and didn't realize it was up so long ago, nor that I couldn't just edit the date ahead to fix it anymore.
I don't remember how the mods judged things anymore, but I particularly want to apologize to those people who may have gotten trophies originally who may not be getting one or be getting a different one from my judging. I tried my best to be fair, but I can only go based on my idea of what I was looking for when I made the contest and my own personal preferences and ideas about what kind of poetry I like. The fact that I didn't give you a trophy does not mean I disliked your poem or think it sucks. I just thought someone else's was a little bit better -- or, more likely, just more fitting to this particular contest.
I was hoping to get more entrants in this contest. On the plus side, there only being seven of you made it possible to give all four non-shiny places an HM, at least. I wish I could have done that for all three contests that got caught in the confusion. Oh well. In any event, as with the other two, I chose those three poems which most appealed to me, which best fit what I had in mind as the theme of the contest, and who seemed to accomplish the prompts most interestingly. Note I said 'interestingly' and not 'skillfully'. My taste is too idiosyncratic for me to claim to judge based on objective quality. If such a thing even applies to creative work beyond a certain point.
In any event, I plan to run more pantoum contests in the future. You're all welcome to enter any future contest I may run and I hope to see you then!
Contest Winners
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I first saw you at a table, shaded by a white umbrella,• Commented on by judge. [remove]
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The empty shadow of the night
A rush of air from overheadby cricketjeff 61 lines, 6 comments, on Nov 1 9:32 PM 2008. In Fantasy, Dark, dragons
Silver trophy winner
• Commented on by judge. [remove] -
by rainyday woman 16 lines, 1 comment, on Oct 20 2:53 AM 2008. In Contest, Weird, Thoughts
Bronze trophy winner
• Viewed by judge. [remove] -
by AliceinPoetryLand 18 lines, 4 comments, on Oct 23 8:07 AM 2008. In Contest, Pantoum
Honorable mention
• Viewed by judge. [remove]
Gold trophy winner
Entries [7]
1 - 7 of 7
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Comments
1 - 9 of 9
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Hmmm... I'll have to try this one. I'm not a form-writer by any stretch, but I've seen it done and I may very well try my hand at it. If not, then good luck, and I hope you get what you're looking for
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I do not consider the pantoum to be an obscure form... it was one which - in my schooldays - we were expected to know for GCE...
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Sadly, the standards have lowered considerably since you did your generals. Nowadays, general college English is all about basic grammar and punctuation. You're lucky if you get any poetic forms beyond the most basic, at least at most of the schools my friends have gone to, unless you're actually majoring in English or Creative Writing.
EDIT: I shouldn't blanket all colleges and universities that way, so I take that back. But I will note that it's a fact that standards of education in general have fallen lately, a lot, due to budget problems. When they can barely afford to teach you Algebra, they stop wasting precious paper on things like non-typical poetry forms. All I was taught about Haiku, at the COLLEGE LEVEL, is that they're of Japanese origin and use a 5-7-5 syllable counting scheme.
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I considered this ...
but am ill and don't really feel like writing. Also, there are far too many rules. I do agree with Vera that the pantoum is not really an obscure form, even though I write very few of them, and most are smudged forms anyway. -
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Uh... too many rules? The only rule that's actually mandatory is "no dirty-pretty/use proper grammar and spelling". Even the thing about line count is just a firm suggestion, as the rules clearly state. The options are just that -- options. Optional. And clearly stated as such.
Also, just because you and/or those in your social circle tend to know of it doesn't mean everyone else in the world does. I had never heard of it in my whole life when I stumbled across it, and I'm not exactly uneducated. I'm not an expert on poetry, though. And neither are 99% of people who write poetry. FYI, you two are the *only* people who've told me you don't think it's obscure. At least fifteen (IIRC, though I might be overestimating... several, anyway) people have said, in AN, comments, or notes, that they've never heard of a pantoum before. And, moreover, thanked me for introducing it to them. No offense, but I think it's a more obscure form than you realize. Perhaps you and I have a different idea of what 'obscure' means'.
I'm sorry you don't feel well. I hope you feel better soon. -
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Well ...
I must admit that I am not usually attacked when I donate points to someone so you've already set yourself in a "social class" that's very elite indeed.
I see that I neglected to check your age before commenting. Vera and I have spent better than half our lifetimes dealing with poetry in one way or another. More than likely you are much newer at this, and consequently haven't really been exposed to poetry as extensively as we have. So, in that sense, perhaps you are correct.
It is intriguing to know that I belong to a "social class" since I wasn't aware of it. I guess I just hadn't noticed.
Happy Holidays. -
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If that sounded like an attack I sincerely apologize. It wasn't meant as one, just as a reply. Sorry.
Incidentally, I agree that 'social class' would be odd phrasing... but I said 'social circle'.
And yeah, age certainly will have a lot to do with it. I'm a voracious autodidact, but I still haven't completed college yet, and neither have most of the people on the site. It's definitely oriented more toward people my own age and younger. Though I would be very pleased to see the contributions of people to whom the form isn't so new!
(To be perfectly truthful, part of the point is that I wish it *were* better known amongst people my own age.)
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Laurenova
You might also like this form, just throwing it out there for you to look at in your spare time http://allpoetry.com/column/1844396
-here's an example- http://allpoetry.com/poem/2075459 -
Congratulations to the winners and thank you for the HM
Gaylene
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