The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

My version is rather a bastardly abortion I fear, but the key principles are mostly adhered to. The lines of a GHAZAL (pronounced a bit like guzzle, but the ‘g’ should hiccup slightly, Arab-stylie) come in metrical couplets. The rhymes are unusual in that the last phrase of the opening two lines (and second lines of each subsequent couplet) is a refrain (rhadif ), it is the word before the refrain that is rhymed, in the manner shown above. I have cheated with the last rhyme-refrain pairing as you can see. Each couplet should be a discrete (but not necessarily discreet) entity unto itself, no enjambment being permitted or overall theme being necessary. It is usual, but not obligatory, for the poet to ‘sign his name’ in the last line as I have done.

The growth in the form’s popularity in English is largely due to its rediscovery by a generation of Pakistani and Indian poets keen to reclaim an ancient form with which they feel a natural kinship. As with the haiku, it may seem to some impertinent and inappropriate to try to wrench the form out of its natural context: like taking a Lancashire hotpot out of a tandoori oven and serving it as Asian food. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with such attempts at cultural cross-breeding, but I am no authority.

LUC BATLUC BAT is rather cuteIt keeps the mind astute and pertIt doesn’t really hurtTo keep the mind alertly keenYou’ll know just what I meanWhen you have gone and been and doneYour own completed oneIt’s really rather fun to doFull of subtlety too,I hope that yours earn you repute.

This is a Vietnamese form much easier to do than to describe. LUC BAT is based on a syllable count that alternates 6, 8, 6, 8, 6, 8 and so on until the poet comes to his final pair of 6, 8 lines (the overall length is not fixed). The sixth syllables rhyme in couplets like my cute/astute but the eight-syllable lines have a second rhyme ( pert in my example), which rhymes with the sixth syllable of the next line, hurt. When you come to the final eight-syllable line, its eighth syllable rhymes with the first line of the poem (re pute back to cute). I don’t expect you to understand it from that garbled explanation. Here is a scheme: maybe that will be easier to follow.

Luc bat is the Vietnamese for ‘six eight’. The form is commonly found as a medium for two-line riddles, rhyming as above.Completely round and whiteAfter baths they’re tight together.Milk inside, not a yakHairy too, this snack is fleshy

Plates and coconuts, in case you hadn’t cracked them.¹⁶ Proper poems in Vietnamese use a stress system divided into the two pleasingly named elements bang and trac, which I cannot begin to explain, since I cannot begin to understand them. Once more the Internet seems to have been responsible for raising this form, obscure outside its country of origin, to something like cult status. It has variations. SONG THAT LUC BAT (which literally means two sevens, six-eight, although it begs in English to have the word ‘sang’ after it, as in ‘The Song That Luc Bat Sang’) consists of a seven-syllable rhyming couplet, followed by sixes and eights that rhyme according to another scheme that I won’t bother you with. I am sure you can search Vietnamese literature (or van chuong bac hoc) resources if you wish to know more.

TANAGAThe TANAGA owes its genesTo forms from the Philippines.To count all your words like beansYou may need adding machines.

The TANAGA is a short non-metric Filipino form, consisting of four seven-syllable lines rhyming aaaa, although modern English language tanagas allow abab, aabb and abba.¹⁷ I am not aware of any masterpieces having yet been composed in our language. But there it is for your pleasure.

Poetry Exercise 18

Four haikus in the usual mongrel English form: one for each season, so do not forget your kigo word.

X

The Sonnet

PETRARCHAN AND SHAKESPEAREANI wrote a bad PETRARCHAN SONNET once,In two laborious weeks. A throttled streamOf words–sure following the proper schemeOf Abba Abba–oh, but what a dunceI was to think those yells and tortured gruntsCould help me find an apt poetic theme.The more we try to think, the more we dream,The more we whet our wit, the more it blunts.But give that dreaming part of you release,Allow your thrashing conscious brain a break,Let howling tom become a purring kittenAnd civil war dissolves to inward peace;A thousand possibilities awake,And suddenly your precious sonnet’s written.