having a try at the triolet
(and also The Epidemic, which I’m devouring!)We lingered in the poetry section today, jumping off from Laura Purdie Salas’ triolet to a post from Kelly Ramsdell Fineman, which I thought was lovely, but which we couldn’t view at school due to the school’s Internet filters blocking livejournal. So we went instead to her website and browsed some poetry and then looked elsewhere for a definition of yet another new-to-me traditional poetic form, the triolet.
I’ve been enjoying our foray into these traditional forms…it feels like poet acrobatics at times, but the most interesting stuff comes out when you stretch a little and maybe go into your writing without any expectations. It’s a bit like what I’m hoping to do with this blog, which seems to have quietly resurfaced in my writing life. I started an Instagram account a little over a year ago, as one of my 2015 resolutions, actually. (In fact, it was my last post here!) I’ve really fallen in love with this visual platform, and sometimes I thought maybe one of the pictures deserved a little extra space over on the blog — a story, a bit of myself that I haven’t found so easy to share publicly since the publication of my first book.
So here I am, in the middle of a no-expectations WIP that at first felt like a novel-in-verse contemporary retelling of a fairy tale and now feels somewhat like a performance piece with possibilities for artistic collaboration — full of potential but still playful. Still mine.
I’m not going to post my second triolet, which may make its way into a draft of the aforementioned WIP, but here’s my very first try, using the theme of Change/Beginnings and Endings that (I believe?) was part of the Poetry Friday project for the triolet (which was actually happening just when I was posting the same goals post originally…)
the sun is awfully bright today
I curl up bashful, spiral fern
stretch to meet the yellow ray
the sun is awfully bright today
the breeze is gentle, feather sway
spring susurrus, the seasons turn
the sun is awfully bright today
I curl up bashful, spiral fern
