[Winter Writing Contest 2022] Earthly Interval Assortment

Blissful View

A simple, tranquil forest—blissful view
The flowers, bloom in colors, brightly grow
Above their leaves a coat of morning dew
A stream dug through the soiled dirt below

A doe approaches parched, thirsty for drink
The water drowned the buzz of wildlife
The flow does move along the woodland rink
A liquid treasure making creatures rife

A gift of plenty spreads so far and wide
The life and blood will pump through forest veins
This trickling water will traverse in stride
A fluid nourishing away all pains

A time for propagation, growth, and love
Contently building nests the birds do sing
The flora green, the fauna fed above
The perfect image roused of joyful spring

---

Until Work is Done

Awaken beneath the rays of the sun;
Heed the migratory call of summer.
Travel and toil until work is done.

Feast and nourish, satiate consumption.
Fuel the day and labor until slumber;
Awaken beneath the rays of the sun.

Another day lived, another goal won,
Roam to new lands when resources suffer;
Travel and toil until work is done.

Abate the solar heat, to shadows run;
Evening fades, night comes, prepare supper.
Awaken beneath the rays of the sun.

Enjoy the warm weather, frolic, have fun;
But plant enough in mind for the future,
Travel and toil until work is done.

Season of sweating, give thanks to the son.
Prepare for plenty; revere the mother.
Awaken beneath the rays of the sun.
Travel and toil until work is done.

---

Fleeting Flickering Fun

I adore the fall colors of red,
Or orange or yellow instead.
Leaves drop to the ground,
First a penny, then a pound,
Best enjoy it before all have shed.

The campfire was set aflame.
To remain warm is a wise aim.
To forget and stay cold,
Would be perhaps bold,
But mostly it would be a shame.

As leaves in the mind
Fleeting memories soar high
Elegant autumn

Past remembrances
They come like a flashing flame
Am I capricious?

Crafting limericks is lots of fun
Be clever in ending each one
Haikus are quite slim
You can fit them right in
Is it familiar, the pattern I’ve spun?

---

Still Snowy Dune

Amidst darkness, this chilly night
The snow falls slowly, floating down
Upon the ground, leaving a crown
Atop the rolling hills of white.

The vastness of plains, white and pure,
Like dust, the snow is blown amiss;
It builds into a snow cornice,
This is winter’s innate allure.

It seems almost that time will stop;
The night’s silent, perfectly still,
No green grass remains on this hill,
An intrusion—a sudden drop.

Only the carcass of a beast:
Cold, hungry, left to die alone,
Laying on an eternal throne,
Only bones remain, flesh a feast.

Illuminated by the moon,
Its face emotionlessly stares,
A picture that which none compares:
The stillness of the snowy dune.

Moonbeams cast on the ground as tears,
The only face present to cry,
Left wondering reason and why,
Fly away from shivering fears.

Alas, the earth, and creatures die,
The plants have wilted and withered,
None protected from this blizzard,
Gently gone along with a sigh.

Frozen blackness, nary a thing
Remains on this plain, a desert
It seems and will never revert
Until the floret blooms come spring.

Mmm I'm not the best at poetry but it read well and I enjoyed the imagery evoked of all the seasons. Smashing entry as always!

Nice poems. I like the second one the best. I think it has the best rhythm to it when read out loud, but they're all good.

Good poetry always reminds me that I have so far to go in writing. With just a fraction of the words, you're able to spin such vivid imagery.

Really like the last one the most. The scenery feels incredibly unforgiving, but also just so lonely. Really amazing stuff

The meter felt incredibly consistent in this piece, I could tell you put a lot of thought into it. I feel I would need to truly practice reciting this piece to myself multiple times, to truly show its full potential. It really filled the different seasons with their own color and mood, I could sense a feeling of aliveness to the world through these pieces. Reading them one after another also really gives a great sense of the world moving through it's cycles. Excellently written!

Thanks, everyone, for the compliments.

I set out to learn something new this year by venturing into poetry, something I have never really spent a large amount of time trying to understand very well before, asides from a few cheeky limericks in past contests. Sure, I felt a poem could sound pleasant, but I never was interested in exploring why. I was really glad that I gave myself the opportunity to learn a little bit about a powerful form of literature. It was fun and fresh. I highly recommend it if anyone is for example blocked and wants to try learning something new.

With the contest over, I wanted to go a little bit into my creative process to share what I learned. To explain my reasoning for these pieces, I felt from the very beginning that dedicating four poems in honor of the four-season cycle was what I wanted to accomplish this year, with varied types of poetry to represent each season along with paired emotions. I wanted one to honor the Shakespearean sonnet and learn how to craft it, I wanted to explore alternative forms of poetry, and I wanted to have some fun, too.

I began by dividing the four seasons into four poems: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. The order is important because it represents a standard life cycle: Birth -> Death. However, because the seasons cycle, theoretically one could begin and end at any point in the order. Each poem is dedicated and specifically calls back to the season it represents. Their titles either represent the theme, or are in honor of my favorite portion, as is common for poems, so that meant they were named at the end of construction. I then established a list of themes and emotions I wanted to convey with each season and poem, aligning to the themes of the contest.

Spring – Water – Love, serenity, propagation, time, growth

Summer – Sun – Heat, work, consumption, travel & migration

Autumn – Fire – Fleeting moments, leaves, memories

Winter – Moon – Death, silence, stillness, cold

Then research began as I sought poem styles with forms that can accompany these themes.

Beginning with spring: Who is more well-known for composing odes to love than classic Bill? If I was going to learn how to compose a poem, one had to be a Shakespearean sonnet, so I studied William Shakespeare's classic Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?. Funny that I would make mine in honor of spring and not summer. It is mostly composed in iambic pentameter. Perhaps you may have heard of the concept of the iambic pentameter. I had, but I never investigated what that term meant. An iamb is a pattern of unstressed, then stressed syllables. While it can be subjective, as it is an art and not a science, that usually means the first syllable is easier to speak and the second one harsher and must be enunciated more. One example of this would be "finesse," while words like "apple" begin stressed and end unstressed. "Banana" is unstressed, stressed, unstressed. If you switch around the stress on any of these words to shuffle which syllable has the emphasis, they start sounding unnatural. Fortunately, in English, that doesn't usually change the meaning, though some words will. "Conflict" and "subject" being prime examples. It's helpful to be aware of this, and perhaps you could even utilize it. Anyway, iambic is the unstressed and then stressed pattern, and pentameter means five patterns per passage. So, five sets of unstressed, then stressed, to total ten syllables, concluding the line. I went with a traditional ABAB rhyming scheme with my sonnet. The sonnet does usually have a two-line end as a final punchline or parting thought, but I chose to keep consistent with quatrains. Quatrains meaning 4 lines per paragraph. The act of counting the syllables and the patterns used within the poem is called scanning a poem. To analyze the metrical cadence of a poem is to determine its scansion. Scansion is one of the primary lessons I learned from my research, and this taught me to be aware of the syllables within. Having a consistent number of syllables per line keeps the poem lyrical. That is how the flow creates a pleasant lasting rhythm, and arguably makes poetry poetry. Of course, free verse poetry exists and is valid, but my aim was to discover the properties of traditional poetry and first learn the form before contemplating how to be free from such form. Anyway, that was my mindset going into crafting Blissful View. With that in mind, I could craft a setting that would introduce my perfect image of spring in a forest.

For summer, I wanted to examine an alternative form of poetry than the standard ABAB form. In my research, I discovered the form known as the villanelle. It is a form that does utilize an AB rhyming scheme, but the form requires much more repetition establishing a refrain within the poem that returns in parts. You can look up up the villanelle to discover the format, but it requires 19 lines with those refrains alternating. Until Work is Done was crafted in honor of Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas. "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." This refrain appears numerous times in the poem, and the high structure of the villanelle dictates where these appear. In turn, I crafted "Awaken beneath the rays of the sun. Travel and toil until work is done." in order to convey the themes I selected earlier through summer and work. Creating the villanelle felt like plugging in expressions into a mathematical formula, and I felt that it was fun to examine a more structured kind of poetry.

For fall, I let loose. I feel like limericks and haiku are really effective styles of short form poetry. Even if one isn't a poet, even if one doesn't know about the rules and nuances of traditional poetry, they probably still know about limericks and haiku. Their structures are short, simple, and easy to remember. The limerick uses an AABBA rhyming scheme and the form requires the As to be long (8-11 syllables) and the Bs be short (5-6 syllables). The last line is always a witty punchline that the previous lines set up. It can be a story; it can be commentary. It can even be a humorous attempt at meta, as was the case with the final limerick of Fleeting Flickering Fun which points out the pattern of limericks and haiku as being a giant limerick (two long, two short, one long - two limericks, two haiku, one limerick). The haiku, in turn, use the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. In my research, I discovered it commonly utilizes some Japanese words called Kireji, or "cutting words." These words are difficult to define and hard to convey what they express, as they have no English equivalent. However, what has been maintained is the syllable pattern, but even these have been broken in modern free verse poetry. I looked into some examples from Matsuo Basho, as he is considered to be one of the greatest masters of haiku from the 1600s. Some of his haiku are fairly jovial, others are more serious, but they all convey a strong sense of imagery despite their length. Because the patterns are short, I like to think that the words chosen naturally carry a heavy weight. Lines can therefore be powerful in their statements. It helps to be aware of, if you ever construct one, the power you have at your fingertips by what you select. I think that makes the haiku a beautiful choice because of this. Think about how deep you can make the words cut with the point you want to get across. There are a lot of possibilities, even with a small number of allotted syllables.

Lastly, for winter, I knew that I wanted to approach it stereotypically by conveying a grim, yet peaceful, sense of finality. For this purpose, I explored odes, but eventually settled on the elegy. Elegies are typically used to honor someone who has departed, but also to lament on serious subjects. This is not to be confused with the eulogy, which is a speech in honor of someone who has just died. The elegy is just as poetic in its scheme and pattern as the sonnet. I did not compose Still Snowy Dune with a pattern in mind, however it does obey an eight-syllable quatrain structure and an ABBA rhyming scheme. The poem is in honor of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's composition In Memoriam A. H. H., which was in honor of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died at the young age of 22 in 1833, only two years younger than him at the time. You may at the very least recognize the final passage within his poem: "'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all." It is in its honor that I lament through Still Snowy Dune. I wanted to showcase a cold snowed-over winter scene at night, which can be dark, yet is lit with the bright reflection of the light of the moon. There is something exceptionally beautiful about a scene of silent stillness. Death is indeed a natural part of the cycle of life. However, even in the face of something so somber, spring will come after the cold, and with it, the cycle will inevitably continue, no matter the darkness before.

Thanks for joining me on this trip into literary discovery. I went in looking to exercise a little aspect of writing that I have spent a long time ignoring. I occasionally nurtured my experience with prose here year-after-year, but I am very glad to have been able to utilize the contest this year to encourage me to explore some more literary tools. And who knows? I may make direct use of my research here in the future, either here or elsewhere. It was great to see everyone's work once again this year and, as is our tradition, until the next time.

Be well until then,

X

This is a very late review, but I very much enjoyed this. I second what someone said before me that I am terrible at poetry. I had to write a few for school many years back, and I always felt ashamed at what I wrote, haha. I say all this because I feel that I might not be qualified to say what follows.

I enjoyed all the poems. The imagery sold me so well that I believe I did not need titles to understand which season each part addressed. Since I am quite a novice with poetry, I am very attached to the simple standards of rhyming and equal syllable count for lines. Because of that, I think the second was my favorite, since it was the most rhythmic to read. Other than that, I don’t know much else to say!

Thanks for sharing!