With the completion of "The Journal of Caleb Walsh", I was at ten completed works for the year and it was only September. In other words, I was ahead of the game and feeling good about it. The next project I dove into was a bit of an oddity. Basically, I wrote another Sonnets Redouble for no reason other than I like to tear what remains of my hair out. To illustrate, please, attend to the structure requirements I laid on myself.
First for the Sonnets Redouble. In my days long ago when I would pen poetry of questionable character, I would challenge myself to try different forms to see what I could do. This was back in the 1990s when the internet was not so comprehensive as it is now and I would spend time in libraries looking up poetry forms. I thought that if I gave myself a broad base of structures of familiarity, it would broaden my potential and scope. Mind you, the over 1,000 pieces I piddled with over the years were for my consumption. This was my therapy, my meditation, my rage into the night.
In one very difficult semester... they were all difficult as I was a young single father to my eldest daughter then... I signed up for a poetry course in hopes to finding this basis of structure. It was not a class I attended more than once, both due to the time constraints I had on me requiring me to abandon the class as well as something the student teacher said when I asked if there would be any revelations of classical structures. Her response, sniffed out, was "We're only interested in where poetry's going, not where it's been", and to me, that seemed wrong. How can you go somewhere without knowing where you came from? I mean, before Picasso reinvented form on canvas, he studied the techniques traditional. It is from the building blocks of the art from which expansion can be made.
Thus my explorations were my own. I wanted to know the blocks that built because without, what do you have? I would go to readings when the rare chance allowed and what I noticed common through almost all was that no one was venturing into actual verse. Everything was basically a monologue, broken up in staggered patterns and dramatic pauses. I was looking for poetry, not one angry rant after another about some social ill... or in the case of many, every social ill they could blame on the "Man" all at once in full blown overload. I'm sorry, but to me, that's pretty much listening to someone rant indignantly about some social ill in a tone of voice and staggered pattern of speech. All the power to you Spoken Word folks out there, but I was looking for poetry.
I spent a lot of hours in libraries and would copy the patterns into my notebooks. I've been keeping these notebooks now since I began amusing myself so and behind me sits a box, not small, full of nothing but. I would copy these forms from notebook to notebook, reserving one section of said notebook specifically for this. I hunted down classical styles as well as international forms and have nearly tried them all. I love Rondeaus and Sonnets come in a variety of fascinating flavors. Sestinas and Pantums fill my notebooks along with so many Tankas (truly prefer those over Haiku) that I began to think in 31 syllables. I do not have a Villanelle. That eludes me and I suspect it ever shall.
Now, about them Sonnets Redouble...
First you take a sonnet with 14 beautiful lines.
Then you take each of those lines and use them to create 14 more sonnets, each starting from one of those lines.
This means that basically, you have one sonnet that serves, as I like to think of it, as an "Index of First Lines", and then those 14 sonnets indicated.
So that is that and it looks all like fun and games. Sure, no problem even. Just take those lines and work them out.
Keep that attitude... you'll need it.
I do need to pause here in that the formula I recite here is what I discovered in a book at the University of Arizona Poetry Library. All instruction of such mentioned on the internet today seems to indicate a reversal of that by having that Index sonnet appear last, behind the 14. I don't see how either way is valid or invalid. I prefer the introduction to then be explained rather than a summary. Thus all such that I have done have been done that way. It's how I was introduced to the form.
There is such a thing in this world as a Crown of Sonnets. Here you have seven sonnets in a circle. By that, I mean the 1st Sonnet is all nice and jolly. When the 2nd Sonnet begins, it does so with the last line of the 1st. When that 2nd Sonnet ends, it gives its last line to the 3rd Sonnet as its first line. Thus you keep going with each Sonnet finishing with the beginning of the next until you get to the very last line of the 7th Sonnet... which is also the very first line of the 1st Sonnet making the whole basically go in a circle like a crown. These can be fun and they can be frustrating... mostly frustrating. It is hard to marry such lines in a circle like that.
Okay, what is about to happen should be obvious. I wrote a sonnet and then developed 14 sonnets based upon the first lines of that sonnet. Then, because... I really don't know... I "crowned" those 14 sonnets making each begin where the last left off and circling in a big old loop back to the first of those 14. In other words, I foolishly merged those two forms. That's the basic structure of what I was working with and what I did, and then a year later, oops, I did it again.
I do want to state that I did not adhere to the rules of iambic meter with these two pieces, mainly because I am only human and seriously, I was already tackling a large enough structural concept. Instead, I based each line on syllabic count. The first, "Shadows in the Afternoon", finished on the 80th anniversary of Robert E. Howard's death while sitting beneath the pavilion outside the window of the room in which he wrote, contains 10 syllables in each line. The second, "Henry Pickett's Home Brew" was completed in September of the next year and there, each line contains 13 syllables.
"Shadows in the Afternoon" concerns the gallows erected along the western wall of the courthouse and discusses its history and a few of those who met their end there. Do to its nature spanning time, it is basically a rich field in which to harvest. Those noted who swing here in this early piece each has a story to tell and they are each marked in my "to do" list under place-holder names. At least a half dozen Tales may ultimately be culled from this, and possibly more as I remove their hoods and examine their fates.
The second such sequence, my 11th Tale for the year 2017, is titled "Henry Pickett's Home Brew". This was written with specific temporal intent for I knew exactly the day it took place. The idea forced itself upon me. I had learned that a Decennial Celebration had taken place and I wanted to set the scene, mark it on the timeline in this history. That is basically how this functions, drawing in motivations and the impetus for this gala fête and taking it through to the tragedy revealed in the charred remains of the morning.
I have revisited this moment with two stories penned in 2019. These two Tales appear in "A Celebration of Storytelling" by Dark Owl Publishing. The stories are titled "Permissible License" and "Dance of Skins". I was lucky enough to find a publisher willing to include both these stories, each taking place at the same time from vastly different perspectives, in an anthology. Being the scope of the tragedy and being that I had, for that day, a potential cast of up to a thousand, I have a whole host of potential Tales available here and expect, as time goes on, to ultimately be able to have enough for a collection of Tales based on this one night.
I will, when it is time, dive deep into these two stories. Each one is, well, let's just say that they are established on specific structural formulas, the first including elements inspired by "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" and "Chapter 24", both off of The Pink Floyd's debut album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". Trust me on this. The temporal structure, present to flashback, is based on the primary concept line in the second song leaving six sections with a seventh bringing the whole together while the establishment of positive and negative space in the introduction of the first song informs the physical space of each section. This structural formula, specifically the temporal sequence, has become a staple formula for me, one which I refer to as my "Chapter 24". When a new story begins forming, this is one of the formulas I always check first to see if the story fits.
As for "Dance of Skins", well, let's just say I broke "La Villa Strangiato" by RUSH into forty 15 second sections, then divided the whole into 5000 (story length planned) which gave me 125 words/15 seconds song time. It gets complicated after that, so much so that it needs some serious explanation. I am also using this same structure in the novel length Sestina I am currently working on within a 2000 word section which, well, is half in one POV and switches, mid-sentence into the next sub-chapter section and a second POV, both of whom I intend to introduce in the next exciting episode of this blog.
Like I mentioned in my first post, I'm doing some seriously weird shit with structure.
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