BJ Shadorma & Beyond – November 15, 2014

Hello Everybody!

First of all a special thanks to all of you who participated last week!  You did a great job some of you took up the challenge of writing an original poem in trochaic meter, some straight shadorma and yet others mixed the two … but each of you did a fantastic job. So let’s give ourselves a big applause!

Remember the trochaic foot went:

Tell me not in mournful numbers

– the stress being on the first of the two syllables in the metric foot.

The more common iambic foot ( a metric foot is two syllables btw) is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Syllables my friends not words …

That time of year thou mayst in me behold.

Now in the trochaic example I used a tetrameter line that is 4 trochees in 8 syllables … in the iambic example I used a pentameter  line that is 5 iambs in 10 syllables.  Which is the most common sort of meter in the English language over the last 700 years or so.

 

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,

 

 (Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare)

(I think that you’ll notice by the way … that poets rarely write in just iambic or trochaic meter … except for particular forms … and then, often, the rules become guidelines and mixed meter often occurs 😉 .)

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So … this week’s challenge: we’re going to be to try our hand with a strange little form called:

The Cavatina

Said to be an Italian poem from the 14th century, it is a series of quatrain stanzas … made-up of uneven couplets … no rhyme required but the meter is a switch between iambic pentameter and iambic dimeter (4 syllables).

The quatrain can be as many as you like, but to end the poem we use a declamatory couplet (declamatory: expressing feelings or opinions in a way that is loud and forceful)  in rhymed iambic pentameter.

Here’s an example:

I ran a race I never meant to win –
No reason why –
I ate the cake and then I thought I’d die –
It was too rich –

The king was raging when he broke his leg –
His horse was blue –
The woman wanted Grace to read the news –
Her voice is sweet –

And all of this is just a lot of goo –
So you can write in pentameter too!

For more information about the Cavatina follow this link to  Poetry Forms at  Poets Collective.

Here’s a Video Prompt that might help you write your Cavatina:

Of course you may wish to write a Shadorma or you may introduce or end your Cavatina with a Shadorma (a Shadorma is a non-rhyming six-line poem with a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5). The important thing is to have fun!

Once you’ve written your post please tag:  BJ’s Shadorma & Beyond andMindLoveMisery’s Menagerie, then put your info onto the Mr. Linky app.  If you ping us back, we’ll be able to read your post ASAP because we will be notified that you’ve written the post (not so with Mr. Linky).
Have a great week folks and happy writing!

Ciao, Bastet

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About Bastet

I love to read...I like to write...I've travelled the world and seen the sites. I'm past my prime and feel so young, especially when near the young. I'm writing this blog, to remember, to think and to share...with the hopes that someone else will make a comment that will stimulate new thoughts and pathways. Actually, I'm a gabber, so the logical extension of gabbing is blogging! ;-)

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