It’s ridiculous that I’ve only written one post for this blog in the last four months. I have about three dozen articles in various stages of undress. Instead of clothing them properly, they are wandering sheepishly around my laptop half-naked, dazed and lost, like at some after-party gone bad. Continue reading
My father, an astute and thoughtful man, asked me two great questions.
What is a quilting sword?
What are you meditating about in all those Meditating Wind photos.
Today I’ll answer the first question. But I’ll let you decide which you think is true, multiple choice style.
A. A quilting sword is a curved needle made of hummingbird bone used by Turkish women to embroider their rugs. The designs are usually illustrations of their dreams, often of flying farm animals over fields of opium poppies..
B. A quilting sword is a long dagger wielded by bodyguards of the Dalai Lama. The swords are discreetly hidden under their robes. They are primarily used ceremonially to draw patterns on sand mandalas. And to peel fruit for altars.
C. A quilting sword is a term used in chaos theory to describe how folds of space are stitched violently together during a supernova explosion.
D. It comes from an old Korean saying, “Even in war, a sword is more useful when making quilts.”
Guessed yet? The answer lies after the break. Continue reading
In this fourth installment of the Water Poetry Series, I present an open form or free verse poem about the San Francisco Bay. In contrast to the previous poetry forms which have strict rules on meter, rhyme, stanza structure, and even the content of the poem, the open form poem has no such rules. Therefore, it is the most difficult to describe. I haven’t been able to find a good set of guidelines on how to write one. In fact, there have been contentious schools of thought on what a true open form is. Continue reading
This is part 3 of a series of poems about bodies of water. Each poem is written in the form of a popular poetic style native to that body of water. In Water Poetry 1, I wrote a haiku about the Tama River in Japan and how it resembled the stream of people in a busy train station. In Water Poetry 2, I wrote a sonnet about London’s Thames River, putting the river’s long history into perspective against the London bombings and corporate greed. Water Poetry 4 riffs on the San Francisco Bay. Water Poetry 5 is a sijo about the Han River.
This post is about Paris’s Seine River, written in a villanelle.
Although it’s known as a French poetic form, there are probably more villanelles written in English. Continue reading
Earlier this week I presented the haiku. Today I present the Elizabethan sonnet. The first sonnets appeared in Italy, and is designed for the rhrythmic syncopation of the Italian language, where every other syllable is stressed. Adapted into English, that rhythm is somewhat awkwardly transposed into the iambic pentameter, a line of poetry that consists of 10 syllables, with every even syllable stressed. There are a variety of sonnets, each with its own rhyme scheme. But every sonnet is written in iambic pentameter.
So to write an Elizabethan sonnet you must follow these guidelines: Continue reading
