Last time I promised to tell why I call this blog The Poet’s Path rather than The Poets’ Path. After all, it’s our path and we’re poets, so shouldn’t it be the path of all of us instead of the path of one poet? That makes perfectly good sense, and it would be quite appropriate to make the word poet plural. But I want to pay homage to someone we almost never think of, someone whose name—if he or she had one—we’ll never know in this life. Somewhere, long ago in some language long forgotten, someone used words to make art for the first time. That person was the first poet, the first person to set foot on the path you and I walk. Why not name the trail for the trailblazer? That’s why it’s the poet’s path.
Someone should write a poem about that person. I’ve wanted to, but so far nothing has come to me. Maybe you can do it.
Also, last time I promised to discuss a particular assignment I once gave to a poetry composition class. One student, immediately seconded by all the rest, said that if they had to complete the assignment, I had to complete it too. Bless her heart. Let me show you the poem I wrote. Take a look at it, and see what you can determine about its form.
A Fine Address
Something is scaling the foundations,
tracking minutely up white walls,
prying under latched window screens,
dropping unnoticed into clean kitchens
of houses in happy suburbia.
Suburban houses are gathering age
slowly, a paint blister here,
there a dented garage door,
a closet light not working
in little sister’s pastel room.
The little sisters of suburbia,
who say their nightly prayers
and sleep with fluffy dogs
that never tasted blood, believe
pre-packaged lives wait on shelves
like fat-free snacks aerobic mothers
munch in cheerful kitchen nooks.
In dark closets of suburbia,
gathering strength, the future broods
like teenage thugs; even now
something is scaling the foundations,
seeking the high kitchen shelves
of carefree suburbia, bringing in
the great beyond, the untamed
all this neighborhood fenced out.
This was the assignment: Write a poem with five words in each line and five lines in each stanza, and it must be five stanzas in length. I intended the assignment to be nothing more than an exercise in form, but I actually wrote a real poem. And I liked it. Sensing that I might be onto something with this form, I wanted to try to get it published. The poem is essentially an indictment against the sacred cow of suburbia and all that it entails, so I offered it to a small magazine called The Iconoclast, which specialized in poems tipping over sacred cows. That magazine published the poem, and I gained the rather insignificant distinction of having published the first written in that particular format.
How did the students fare with the assignment? Well, all but one of them did manage to create a statement in 125 words (5 X 5 X 5 = 125). Some hated the assignment. Some liked it enough that they went on to write more poems in that form. However, for me the most memorable poem I received dripped with good-humored passive aggression. The student poet got to the 25th line and simply needed extra words. Obviously, making the wording fit the form was the major point of the assignment, and other students solved the problem by editing out words elsewhere in the poem, but this poet’s solution was to complete her statement, which made the final line about ten words long. After the fifth word, though, she placed hyphens between the remaining words in the line. “The hyphens turn the rest of the line into one word,” she said with a straight face.
Right away I determined to write more poems using the assignment’s format. I decided on the term “logometrics” to describe poetic lines written according to the number of words they contained. The particular form that the students and I had used needed a name, and although logometrics might sound a little high-flying, my personal tendency is to bring things down to earth, so I hit upon the term “fiver”—for reasons that I hope are obvious.
I mentioned that some students liked the fiver. In fact, for a while they spread word of it. I learned from them that student writers at American University and Kent State University were experimenting with the form. I personally received a fiver from the University of Tennessee. I hoped that from my humble community college fivers would flourish across the English-speaking world and even cross language barriers, becoming at least as great an institution as the earth shoe had been in the 1970s. But alas, it did not.
I don’t know what happened to my earth shoes. All I can honestly say is that I don’t have them anymore. But I still write fivers. They’re actually about the length of a sonnet but constructed quite differently. And all of them are exactly 125 words long. That makes them an excellent choice for a suite of poems.
For some time I’ve been interested in Tarot cards, not for use in fortune-telling but for the symbolism they embody. I’m especially drawn to the cards of the Major Arcana, a subgroup within the larger Tarot deck. The 22 cards in the Major Arcana all have titles, such as The Fool, The Empress, The Wheel of Fortune, Death and The Star. I think it was in 1998 that I wrote a poem for each card in the Major Arcana, and each poem is a fiver.
After writing a few fivers, I wanted to diversify a bit within logometrics. I called my next form a sixxet. As you might guess, the sixxet is derived from the sonnet. It has six words per line and is 14 lines long, with two six-line stanzas followed by a two-line stanza. Here’s sixxet that I wrote only a few months ago, about a potential reunion meeting of two old people who haven’t seen one another in years.
Reunion?
After so many years, what would
she think to see him walk
beside a cane, his hair gray
and thin, his eyes set deep
behind a creased and crumpled mask?
Could they talk as if time
had not upon their two paths
harried them with patient ill intent,
or would they both lament, not
so much the years, the paths?
Lunching, across the gulf between them,
what would they dare to say?
After so many years, how should
he feel to see her again?
It might be more logical to write sixxets in two seven-line stanzas or even in one 14-line stanza, but I just prefer the way they look with two lines together at the bottom. No matter how we slice up the stanzas, every sixxet will be 84 words long.
Over the years I’ve seen other potentials in logometrics. I wrote a poem about the Pearl Poet, a 14th-century Englishman, in four-word lines but in stanzas of irregular length. Also, I wrote a poem called “Impression: Sunset,” its title derived from Manet’s painting “Impression: Sunrise.” I started the poem as a sixxet, but it just wasn’t working, so I decided to write it in four stanzas of four lines with four words per line. I couldn’t make the statement in four little stanzas, so I added a fifth. I don’t think that should be a form in itself, just a poem written in unrhymed logometric quatrains.
As for rhyming logometric poems, I don’t recommend it. Each line might be—say—five words long, but there can be considerable variation in the number of syllables in each line. To the eye, the lines appear the same length, but to the ear they don’t. Rhyme would probably sound chaotic in a fiver or a sixxet.
I’m issuing a challenge: Try your hand at logometrics. If you write something, send it to me. I’d love to see it. As always, please sign up for my email list. I won’t bother you unless it’s big.
Take care and be safe.