h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: TRIOLET - A1028693
Author: Researcher 219914 - U219914

Obscure verse forms deserve a place in H2G2, and may well prevent us from expiring of an overdose of LImericks.

Chaiwallah

A good entry, which does what it says on the tin. My one suggestion is to use capitals to indicate the repeated lines, and lower case to indicate the ryming ones thus: ABaAabAB.

I would like to see more about formal verse forms on h2g2, so keep up the good work!

Ben

Dear Ben,

Thanks for your encouraging words. I should apologise for having invaded your conversational thread with Herelou in Oz, but I wanted to contact you, and couldn't think of a better way. I'm still finding my way around the Guide, and slowly learning the etiquette, so please excuse my rude interruption.

Back to business. Thanks for giving me the link to your Geocities page. A couple of the poems really caught my fancy, the Kyrielle "Don't worry/ He's yours," and the wonderful Double Viator "Equilibrium." How excellently you worked the colliding first and sixth lines. Wow!

My own poetry falls into two pretty separate camps, neither of which has literary pretensions: humourous verse and spiritual/erotic/romantic. Over the latter I have little control. They arise when they choose, and usually arise with the form, or lack of it, already present. But internal rhyme, half-rhymes and so on tend to sneak in. I also try to avoid overtly "poetic" language. The problem with the more spiritual/mystical stuff is that abstract words are almost unavoidable. For the humourous verse I delight in really formal forms. My friend, and former work-partner Recumbentman has invented an inverted Limerick form called the Rimickle. I have diagnosed a sub-set, the Clerickle, being a cross between the Rimickle and the Clerihew; Here's a sample:

SADDAM HUSSEIN

Saddam Hussein
is incredibly vain,
his picture's all over Iraq,
but faced with a focussed attack
he's vanished again.

Also, for your amusement, here's a light triolet that popped into my head while I was making some soup for lunch:

STRESS

Now my hair's in a mess
and I'm half an hour late.
I said, "Take off less"
Now my hair's in a mess.
Where's the top of this dress?
Will he cancel our date
Now my hair's in a mess?
And I'm half an hour late!

Hmmm. The preview will not let me indent the lines as I wish. Oh well, back to the pottery and the rain. Hootoo has added yet another addictive hook of procrastination, the downfall of the self-employed.

Oh I know that downfall...

If you want to talk to me go to my user space (click on the name above this post) and start a conversation there. Hootoo is very relaxed about topic drift in most conversations, but the ones in Peer Review are supposed (ha ha!) to stick to discussing the entry itself.

Thanks for your kind words on the poetry - maybe we can pick that discussion up elsewhere. Your space or mine?

Oh - and I would love a cup of Chai, my friend Neil used to make wonderful Chai.

Ben

Dear Ben,

Judging by your personal space page, you are having an extremely busy time of it right now with zillions of replies on a plethora of topics buzzing around your place. Still procrastinating, me, and quite unable to leave an itch unscratched, that triolet became a trio:

"BAD HAIR NIGHT."

Her:

Now my hair's in a mess
And I'm half an hour late.
I said, "Take off less,"
Now my hair's in a mess.
Where's the top for this dress?
Will he cancel our date
Now my hair's in a mess
And I'm half an hour late?

Him, meanwhile:

Oh, where is my girl?
Sure, she couldn't forget.
My heart's in a whirl
Oh, where is my girl?
How I cherish each curl
Of her "toute jolie tete."
Oh where is my girl?
Sure she couldn't forget.

Them, eventually:

"I'm sorry I'm late."
( But your curls are all cut!)
"It isn't quite eight,
I'm sorry I'm late.
Did you have a long wait?"
(Like a furred coconut!!)
"I'm sorry I'm late."
"But your curls are all cut!!!"

Why not update the entry to explain the difference, and use this as the example?

I cannot spout doggerel at will - my stuff is all straight from the heart - you can tell when I am happy, I don't write poetry! But then, saddness has its compensations. I wrote three in one day once!

B

Well, since I last wrote, I've actually been working for a change, and shopping, cooking supper for my family, watching moderatley interesting stuff on the telly, managing to keep away from the computer and hootoo for a bit. Just about to head to bed, it being after midnight.

So, "explain the difference". Do you mean between verse and poetry, between inspiration and contrivance? Forgive me for being a bit slow, or simply dense, but I'm not sure which difference you specifically intend, despite looking back over this thread.

As to when one writes poetry, as I said, the nearest I come to actual poetry, ( by which I mean something touching on the visionary, some intuition of a deeper meaning or truth perhaps, which can be expressed in no other way ) is usually totally beyond my control, a spontaneous, sporadic arising. So far I have never published or shown any of it to anyone outside of a very small circle of close friends.

With the exception of the following, which I wrote ( which got written ) the day the Iraq war began.

It's called "3/20"

It will rain flowers in Baghdad today.
The magnolias bloom at the end of the road
as the peacemongers shower camellias
on the bright red streets. Daffodils burst
over the city in bunches, and the elite
guard reply with snowdrops, white
in the delicate dawn, tulips blazing.
Mimosa burns yellow in a vivid cascade
over cherry and almond flares.
The first bluebells will arrive shortly
in the faces of children,
and long-range anemones will spatter the skies
with premature pink. Clematis stars
will rise to meet them.

It will rain flowers today,
as spring colour shrieks
through the dark blossoming.

20 March '03

So it seems poetry can arise for me out of sadness too. ( How quickly the Iraq war is no longer even newsworthy. I still wonder what the long-term implications of Bush's "pre-emptive strike" policy will be.)

And so to bed.

Yeouch. That is GOOD. Painfully good. Really painfully good.

B

Interesting entry. I can't write poetry. I haven't the muse.

*bookmarks*

Sorry, ChaiWallah - I forgot to say that I meant the difference between a triolet and a trio.

Zarquon - be grateful you don't have the muse. For me she manifests as a particularly unpleasant form of mental indegestion resulting in verbal vomiting, which sometimes rhymes.

B

Smiles shyly, tugs forelock, registers gratitude for appreciation.
Thank you so much, Ben.

Alas that it's all too rare that intensity of emotion , in this case anger/dismay/horror, finds an appropriate expression/metaphor. And one might have some claim to be a real poet if one could actually harness the muse. But, as you said to Zarquon ( Hi, Zarquon ) it's more like vomiting.

Decades ago, when I did my English degree, there was an interesting theory ( from I.A.Richards, I think ) that poetry was a means of returning the disturbed human psyche to a state of homoeostasis. In a word, an oyster making a pearl out of an irritating sand-grain. That seems pretty close to my truth, though the pearls may be utter trivia, or the occasional flash of something better, like "3/20", which literally popped up, virtually fully formed, as I walked past a magnolia tree in glorious bloom at the end of my road, on the morning in question.

In fact, after years of beating myself up for being a hopeless procrastinator and generally disorganised layabout, it has dawned on me that there is a definite cycle, a rhythm to one's ability to create, in whatever area. I am, very slowly, learning to accept my tidal ebb and flow, and to go with it. The work produced by force of guilt in the slack period is invariably mediocre. This seems quite unfair to me, especially in the field of pottery ( the day job ) where one would have thought one could just get in, get on and do it. But, if the energy-of-making isn't there, it just bloody well isn't there, no matter how mundane and uninspirationally demanding the work in question ( like throwing 100 mugs.)

Trio/triolet? Does trio need defining?

Anyway, the day job beckons. Maybe this conversation is getting too far from the subject of Triolets, and more into the psychology of poetry, so maybe we should be emailing, rather than washing our creative linen in public? What do you think? Or should we be starting a new thread with a title referring to the sources/causes of poetry?

I am also intrigued by your home-page reference to being a Buddhist sometimes.

Verbal vomitting? Hmm. It's probably a very healthy discharge of emotions. Someone said the other day that children are brilliant at getting out their emotions and that when we get older, we lose the ability to discharge our emotions, hold onto them, and become sick.

Oh well, even if I can't write poetry, I can appreciate it. There used to be someone at work who wrote doggerel on almost any occasion, but didn't bother to make things scan sometimes. I used to cringe with embarrassment - he did one for me on the birth of my baby. Neither of yours is like that, thank goodness!

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