Wednesday 24 September 2008

I'm a poet...


... not that you'd know it.

I've gone and backed myself into a bit of a corner with Heart of Flame: I'm going to have to write some cod-Arabic poetry.

Why do I do these things to myself?! Luckily it doesn't have to be good poetry, which is fortunate because I have no talent for it at all. And I'm not even going to attempt the fine detail of the meter (which involves counting consonants - Arabic poetry is highly technical and complex and makes Shakespeare look like McGonagall). A quick scout around on Wikipedia (All hail Wikipedia!) has provided a suitable template. We're talking couplets with the rhyme scheme AA BA CA DA etc. Where "A" has to be the same word, mind.

This'll slow me down.

5 comments:

Vincent Copsey said...

You're completely insane!

Mind you, that seems to be the norm for writers. :-)

Janine Ashbless said...

Can't argue with that, Madelynne!

I suspect that because we don't work in an office where people dump crap on us all day, we have to dump it on ourselves.
:-D

Janine Ashbless said...

Or maybe that's just me!

Megan Kerr said...

If it's a ghazal you're thinking of, I understood the rhyme pattern to be something like...

------------A
------------B

------------C
----------A-B

------------D
----------A-B

------------E
----------A-B

English doesn't time its speech patterns by consonants, so it's normal to substitute heavy syllables for consonants. (Iambic with six feet works well, I found.)

Janine Ashbless said...

Spot the English graduate...
:-)

One thing I really wish I'd had the benefit of at school was a proper grounding in poetic meter. I wouldn't know an iambic pentameter from a limerick.

Oh, and I wish I'd done Latin too.