Poetic Forms: Phrase Manipulation

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to week five of poetic forms, where every week I introduce a different type of poem and invite you to give it a go! As an added incentive to take part, the best poem every week is featured on the Writing Gooder blog on Sunday afternoon, alongside a brief analysis by myself.

To enter a poem, make sure it’s written in this week’s style and then either post a link to it in a comment below, or post the full text of the poem.

This week we’re stretching the definition of ‘form’ as we take a look at an experimental writing exercise. It’s called phrase manipulation and the poet may choose to manipulate a line or a stanza in its entirety. When manipulating a stanza, the aim is to use the same words in every verse of the poem, but re-ordered to give a different meaning. When manipulating a line, the form is less strict and sometimes the poet will break down the line, losing a word each time and then building back to the original once more. Here are two examples to illustrate each type of phrase manipulation:

Example One: Myron Lysenko makes the form look effortless with his beautiful poem.

Under The Tree

Myron Lysenko (1952-present)

 

They stood

under the big tree

and talked slowly

 

Under the tree

they stood

and slowly talked big

 

The big tree

stood slowly

and under they talked

 

They stood big

and slowly talked

the tree under

 

The big tree talked

and they slowly

understood

Example Two: Presley and James set out their letter bank in the form of a two line sentence at the start of the poem and every line afterward uses those letters and no more.

‘Neither the One nor the Other’

Frances Presley and Elizabeth James

 

We need to approach the pastoral with care and remember that it’s not a

convenient utpoa

 

we need

we need to approach

we need to approach the past

to approach the past we need we need

to approach the pastoral

we need to approach the pastoral in a car

o approach the pastoral with care

we need to poach the pastor

to cart toward aporia

approach the water and pare the weed to the core

to catch a parsnip

and remember that it’s not

and remember that it’s not a convent

and remember that it’s a con

ut poesia pastoralis

I will only add that I have tried this myself and the experts make it look far easier than it is! However it’s a lot of fun and produces some excellent poetry.

Good Luck Everyone!

** Image owned by Enokson at Flickr.