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| _ petty, lasso, onward, lawful, a lot of late.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.
15 comments:
Peewee wanted to be an old West outlaw,
To rustle cattle, to be a quick draw.
He learned to ride, and throw a lasso,
The way he saw cowboys on T.V. do!
Peewee wanted to lead a wagon train West,
Onward to Oregon, to Destiny, Manifest!
To circle the wagons when under attack,
But the Indians now mostly deal Blackjack!
Peewee wanted to explore unknown wilds,
Befriending a grizzly, petting its child.
But trespassing is a crime that is awful,
And molesting wild animals isn't lawful,
There's not a lot for Peewee to do of late.
Born the wrong century, curse his fate!
A bit of serendipity. If you right-click to view the black-and-white lower cartoon, it will blow up to its full 1915 x 2965 size! No need for me to shrink it to the 620 pixel width of this column. I just accidentally discovered this! My manually shrinking it destroyed that option in the past.
Peewee will have to be content with TCM movies or paying for the action in casinos.
The old Old West is long gone, as your poem reminds us. It only lasted about 100 years, just an Augenblick in historical annals.
Thanks, Owen, for your note on the hi-res cartoon. Just to add to your explanation, I'll note that only my old mouse had a right-click option. My current Mac mouse if held down will offer a screen of options, and I can choose to open the picture "in a new window" to make it larger.
On my iPad, I can enlarge it by spreading my fingers over it.
Thanks again for setting these up.
~ OMK
"A Knot of Fate"
He lassoed the crook
rushing onward from petty
theft--a lawful hook.
This haiku is OK. It's technically correct, serviceable.
But it doesn't compare with my early one yesterday.
That was nuanced, wasn't it?
~ OMK
Delightful poem, Owen. How sad that Pewee wasn't able to fulfill his dreams. But their description in your verse is magical.
Ol' Man Keith, I looked up yesterday's haiku as soon as I read your message. It is certainly nuanced, but I also like this one. The split of "petty" "theft" makes you stop and figure out the action--clever. And I'm always amazed at the way you worked all four Jumble words into your terse three lines.
"Date and Fate"
Betty and Teddy were ready
to finally start going steady--
a decision not at all petty.
Once they finally started to date
they saw a lot of each other,
and they'd been thinking, of late,
that maybe they wanted to mate.
So they decided not to waffle
but make their relationship lawful.
The wedding was held in El Paso
where Teddy had once bought a lasso.
At the ceremony they starred,
then were ready to now move onward.
Their first year was a bit wild,
but now they have a small child,
and life is now settled and mild.
Thank you, Misty ~ for taking the time to go back to yesterday to compare my haikus.
I had not appreciated how my splitting today's "petty" and "theft" might be so favorably read. As you know I am a big believer in the reader's right to open a creator's eyes.
Your poem today is a typically pleasant unspooling of couplets & triplets. Your trimeter beat keeps things light, a way to underscore how Betty & Teddy's affair and marriage won't (and don't) encounter any bumps.
The most curious aspect of the piece is the single unrhymed line, "...they saw a lot of each other."
Its outlier status is all the stranger because it contains the first half of today's solution, while the latter half lurks in the line below.
What to make of this?
Stranger still, it did not bother me. In fact it brought a slight relief from the constant rhyming (not that I wouldn't have appreciated a later echo in the same stanza).
~ OMK
Thank you, thank you, OMK, for your kind words about my poem. Yes, I noticed that my "saw a lot of each other" didn't rhyme with anything, but figured I'd let it be part of my new experimental impulse. So glad it didn't bother you. That's what made your kind response such a gift!
I'm glad that was OK for you. Just please be sure to remember my parenthetical follow-up.
So long as a piece continues to use rhyme in a regular scheme--any regular scheme--that scheme may very well be switched, but it really shouldn't be broken entirely.
I guess such arbitrariness is against the poetic ideals of pattern, concision, and efficacy.
But who knows? maybe your experiments will lead to a refreshened form, a new model for us all!
~ OMK
Here's an extra model, just for ducks.
This is an imitation of an Elizabethan scheme--the kind of thing used in the plays. Playwrights knew early on that nobody could stand constant rhyming, so they settled on Blank Verse.
Most dramatic poetry did not rhyme, but was in iambic pentameter, as are the following lines.
Only to mark the END of a scene would they rhyme, as in the final two lines of this little piece.
I've had some petty thoughts a lot of late,
the kind of random blips I couldn't lasso.
I wonder if the're meant to prod me onward,
or if they have no bearing on my will.
Regardless whether they're a sin or lawful,
just mulling over their intent is awful.
~ OMK
Okay, so they all have the same 11 count beat (is that what it's called), except the first line, which has only 10, by my count. So that's what gives them their meter, of sorts, even if their last words don't rhyme--until the last two at the end. Very interesting. I'll have to start paying more attention to my iambic pentameters.
Many thanks for this neat demonstration, OMK.
By the way, how would you define the iambic pentameters in your poem? I gather they normally have 10 beats, but yours have 11?
Check again. Do not count syllables. They are irrelevant in most English meter. (The French and Japense do it.)
We want to look only at the "beats" or "feet" (the preferred term).
Pentameter means five feet.
Most of your poems--and a lot of the lighter pieces here--are trimeter, three beats. Sometimes four.
The case can be made that we speak English most often in pentameter.
Iambic pentameter means of course that the dominant foot being used is the iambus, or u/, one unstressed and one stressed syllable. I often vary my attempts with anapests, uu/, two unstressed followed by one unstressed.
Remember each foot, no matter how many syllables, counts only as one beat.
One of the tricks of iambic pentameter is to be sure you know how the words are actually spoken, so as to fit them correctly into feet. Check my first line again. You should only find a natural stress on
had, pet, thoughts, lot, late. -- Five beats.
Lines that end on a stressed syllable are called "masculine."
Lines that end on an unstressed (often extra) syllable are "feminine." Like my second line ending in "lasso."
I'm sure you know much of this already. But Please ask me anything.
~ OMK
More regarding syllables ~
Because blank verse lines are mainly made up of iambic feet, just two syllables, typical pentameter lines will often be ten syllables long.
Some sites even refer to this as "decasyllabic verse." But, as I used to tell my students, this is misleading because, while the iambus is the dominant foot in iambic pentameter, it is not the ONLY foot.
Anapests are common, as are trochees and dactyls. (You can look these up; there are a great many more types of feet, but these are the most common.)
Here is a pentameter line, one that would fit comfortably in blank verse, all in anapests (u u /):
"He went back to the fork in the river and damm'd it with rocks."
It is 15 syllables, but still just five beats.
Technically, many feminine endings are three-syllable feet, known as amphibrachs. Don't let this throw you. They still only count as one beat, with the stress in the middle, as u / u.
Example, from the 2nd line of my sample poem:
"...n't LAS-so," the last three syllables of "couldn't lasso."
Enough for now.
~ OMK
Thank you, thank you, thank you, OMK. I'll have to figure out how to save the date of these comments because you offer a whole lesson on poetry that I want to be able to check in the future.
You would think after being a professional literary critic for all of my professional life, that I'd already be familiar with all these terms and analyses. But my specialty was chiefly experimental prose (James Joyce, of course, and others) and although I taught and worked on modern poetry as well, my preoccupation was of course with the themes and ideas and concepts, rather than the syllables and beats and feet. Wish I could go back and work in this area a bit more. But I greatly appreciate your knowledge and discussion--thank you so much.
Erratum, in my long post beginning "Check again":
There is a typo in my definition of the anapest, u u /, where I said it was "two unstressed followed by one unstressed."
That should read "...followed by one stressed."
Sorry.
As to your lack of familiarity with these technical features, you needn't explain. I didn't know half of this stuff for many of the years I was speaking Shakespearean texts as an actor-- from one Shakespeare Festival to another.
I only found it necessary--and really valuable--when I taught playwriting. No, I am not a playwright, but as a producer I worked with many authors and premiered several plays; hence my department called on me to mentor student writers.
Some of them included poetry in their work, some even tried verse drama. That is what led me to educate myself.
~ OMK
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