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| _vault, brink, expire, origin, give or take.Image(s) from the Internet.
The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed! And couching them in Poetry is definitely NOT required.
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.
12 comments:
This is a tale of the old, old Southwest
Before the Spaniards, Whites and the rest.
Two lovers, star-crossed, from warring tribes,
The original saga, how they loved, or died.
Cari was a maiden who brave Tucum would admire.
They pledged their love, to never expire.
In the breast of her tribe's bucks she'd spurned
A heat both of jealousy and hatred burned.
A war party chased them across mesa tops
Where crevice cliffs fell to lethal drops.
The pair reached the brink of a yawning gap,
War party behind them, they were in a trap!
They held hands, looked into each others eyes,
Then ran to vault the gap, despite its size!
With one hand Cari grabbed a bush on the verge,
The other held Tucum, fallen short on his surge!
Should she let go of Tucum to save her own life?
Should he release Cari, make a grand sacrifice?
There's a give and a take in all life and love.
Or maybe she lost her grip from that bush above.
This is the story, told by campfire flame
Of how Tucomcari inherited its name.
FLN: Misty ~ Thanks for your last posting, clarifying your scheme for Wilbur.
But give yourself more credit.
Your actual rhymes were AABBCCDDEEEDDCCFF
By repeating D and C couplets, you worked those rhymes more thoroughly, milking them as a stretch of the imagination.
The symmetry of using them to flank your triplet was neat!
Here's my effort today. This is a simple ABAB:
"Live & Make (your bets)"
The time on the vault's lock expires in a minute.
We hostages can quit dealing hands. Release shall be ours!
This ordeal reaches the brink--its limit!--
or I "gin," and shuffle afresh--for a dozen more hours.
~ OMK
Ah, dear Owen ~ You old romantic!
You have done a real service. Your Ballad of Tucumcari fills in an historical blank.
I see that linguistic scholars are not confident they know the origin of that name. Now your tale (which I trust was thoroughly researched & only amped a tiny bit to win teen girls' hearts) will help them as they revise town histories, lay out atlases, and croon lullabies to papooses.
We thank you, good sir!
A fn. to my poem, above:
I believe the homophones ending the B lines tend to weaken the ABAB scheme, rather than enhance it.
That's my personal taste.
But whatcha gonna do?
~ OMK
Why, thank you, Ol' Man Keith, for pointing out a feature of my rhyme scheme yesterday that I hadn't even noticed. How very kind and generous of you.
As to your worry about your B lines, I didn't think of them as homophones, as a reader, because their different letters made them feel, if not sound, different in my head. I worried that for once you didn't work all the Jumble words into the poem, and then it hit me: or I gin--you even bothered to italicize it.
My goodness, Owen, how do you come up with such amazing, intricate verses every day. I worry that you're up all night, working through the complexity of the story, sounds, and meanings, and hope you get some rest in between. Always a lovely gift--many thanks.
"Spending and Saving"
The origin of Walt's fault
had nothing to do with his vault.
He had plenty of money to give,
yet his future looked a bit dire
because, wanting wildly to live
made his bank account slowly expire.
Before he got to that brink
he had to take time to think.
So he went out to the lake
where the sun made his face glow pink;
there he munched a bit of cake,
washed down with a cool champagne drink.
All this cleared up his confusion
and helped him figure out a solution.
He had to stop being a knave
and had to shrink spending and save.
He did this for a year
and now his future is once again clear.
WooHOO!
Misty, you give us not one but two ABAB sections in your piece today! Beautifully done, Madam!
Now you raise more--and quite interesting--questions of form. WHY bother shifting schemes at all? Do we do it just by whim? Are our choices of meter and rhyme completely arbitrary?
Questions which bring us to other questions--of tradition. Of stanza breaks --and so on.
To keep it simple, I would propose that you have given us 18 lines, consisting of three equal stanzas--two balanced sextets of a rhyming couplet followed by four lines of alternating rhymes; and one final sextet of three rhymed couplets.
WHY do these breaks? For one reason (the most important in my book), they relieve the tedium of regular rhymes. (This is the "routine" I have mentioned before, the thudding monotony that is even more oppressive when a piece is ONLY couplets, such as in your last six lines.)
In both opening sextets, you have given us a neat switch from a starting couplet to the punchy conclusion of ABAB. It is especially fortuitous that your thought (and a full stop) ends with the sixth line.
Then by changing over to JUST couplets in the final sextet, a stanza separation would suggest that your narrator is rolling to the end, "wrapping up."
If you agree, I think you'll find that this keeps your new fluidity of rhyme schemes from being lost and seemingly merely arbitrary, or happenstance.
Such shifts in form may very well be accidental while we are in the process of selecting rhymes but, what may start off as just one "Oops"-after-another, we often work up into a governing plan.
To come clean, I will add that my own preference is for a reverse order: Whenever I can, I like to begin with ABAB and use a single couplet at the end. This is hardly my own idea, but has a lot of tradition behind it.
But your piece today is so good, I much prefer YOUR way!
~ OMK
Your "Walt" makes me think of young Cary Grant.
This is partly because I was watching Suspicion again last night.
Cary's character, Johnny Aysgarth, is a "knave," just like Walt, a spendthrift always short of money because he pays for good things and good times for his pals and his wife.
Like Walt, he goes outside to think, and is likely to wash his worries away with champagne.
Also like Walt--and in director Hitchcock's questionable ending--Johnny makes a sudden complete 180 in his behavior at the end!
Much fun for us in any event!
WooHOO!
~ OMK
My goodness--what incredibly kind and inspiring comments about my verse this morning, Ol' Man Keith.
I have to confess that my first draft of the poem was the usual AABBCCDDEEFFGG. But I had your discussion of yesterday in mind and so began to see if I could create a different pattern. It still sounds a little awkward to me when I read this revised version, but I think it's good practice for me to continue experimenting until I can maybe come up with better sounding ones. I think my problem is that music is not one of my talents and so sound experiments are new to me. But I'll keep working at it, and, as I say, I appreciate your analyses and explanations very much.
Misty ~ I don't say you need to speak the verse aloud (my old actor's trick) but it might give you more confidence to actually hear your words.
At least try spacing your lines into stanzas, and see if your eye doesn't enjoy the relief after each sextet.
I'm sure you understand that I am not recommending always taking a break after six lines. But in this case you created patterns that will appear all the more "natural" when partitioned into sextets.
~ OMK
_____________
PS. You might also consider splitting your last three couplets into a quatrain followed by a stand-alone final couplet.
That could have the effect of emphasizing the virtue of Walt's new program--almost like the morale of the piece.
Just a thought.
Well, after all this complex discussion and looking up quatrains and couplets and sextets and the like, I feel as though I need a little break before continuing with my verse experimentation, Ol' Man Keith. So please don't be disappointed before it takes me a few days before I go back to this poetic playing around.
Dear Thomas Stearns,
Of course not. I do not mean to push you, not at all.
My enthusiasm shifted into high gear today because you rang such major changes--both yesterday and today. I just wanted you to know how thrilled I was.
I know you will absorb everything as it works for you--on your timetable.
A for me, I am looking to take that day off soon, the one I deferred from last weekend.
~ EZRA
What fun, having EZRA POUND responding to T.S. ELIOT about my poetry construction anxieties. Who could possible give me better advice and better permission to just do my own thing. Give them my warmest thanks, Ol' Man Keith.
And have a great day off tomorrow.
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