Dear SunWinkers:

 How’s the wife, you ask? Get it from the horse’s mouth at http://carollineswords.wordpress.com ! We went to Carol’s hairdresser today and—well, I’ll let her tell you.

Interesting story: My good friend and colleague Susan Budig, who writes a column called Mindful Poetry, did a prompt asking for readers’ original forms. Respondents were instructed to submit at least two examples of poems in that form. I submitted the two you see below. Susan’s response was that she didn’t see how the two poems were the same form.

I explained that both poems alternated points of view back and forth between two angles in similarly sized (within each poem) sections. I suggested (well, maybe pontificated) poetic forms are not always about specifications as to numbers of syllables or lines, rhyme schemes, and meter (such forms are called fixed forms). Epigrams, elegies, cubist, concrete, blues, tumbling verse—none of these have such requirements.

I thought this form was my own invention, and we decided to call it alternating spiral, or something like that. Now I find I wasn’t the first. In the Dictionary of Poetic Terms by Jack Myers and Don Wukasch [Denton TX: University of North Texas, 2003], which dwarfs similar volumes by Mary Oliver, Ron Padgett, Babette Deutsch, and others, I stumbled across an entry headed cut and shuffle. It describes the technique of writing two poems from disparate and discrete points of view, and shuffling them together like a deck of cards.

The authors actually characterize this, in the broad category of forms, as a structural technique. They don’t give any examples from literature, because, they say, the employment of this technique can be subtle and easy to miss. So they provide their own simplified example:

Scene 1:

A woman slips into bed.

She turns on some soft music

and lazily reads a book.

She turns out the light

and lets go of her thoughts.

She lies on her back daydreaming.

She gently falls asleep.

 

Scene 2:

A man slides onto his motorcycle.

He kicks the engine over

and guns the throttle.

He skids on the wet pavement

going around a corner.

He hits a siderail and goes over.

 

Shuffled together:

A woman slips into bed.

A man slides onto his motorcycle.

She turns on some soft music

and lazily reads a book.

He kicks the engine over

and guns the throttle.

She turns out the light

and lets go of her thoughts.

He skids on the wet pavement

going around a corner.

She lies on her back daydreaming.

He hits a siderail and goes over.

She gently falls asleep.

 

© 2003 Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch

 

Sounds like a French movie, doesn’t it? It is indeed a cinematic technique frequently employed by filmmakers. Hannah and Her Sisters by Woody Allen employs this technique, and superstar screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Fever Pitch, City Slickers, A League of Their Own) acknowledge being inspired by the Allen movie to structure their movie Parenthood in a similar way.

 

The Prompt

Do just what we did just above. Write a couple short poems of almost identical length (note that scene 1 above has one more line and begins and ends the merged version) , creating two very different scenes or points of view. They don’t have to be anything special, in fact, the more mundane the better. Then shuffle them together. See what you end up with. You might be surprised.

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. If you don’t have a blog, put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to.

Then comment to this post with the link to your response.

I reblog this column at WritingEssentialGroup.com (you should be following that blog, too) and will post the links to your responses there. I will also comment on all responses. Don’t put your responses in a comment here on the SunWinks! blog. It won’t travel to the other group along with the post.

Finally, if you enjoy this, please be a good citizen and share this with your own friends and poetry circles.

Love,

Doug

 

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.