And he felt in his heart their strangeness
At No Shame Theatre on Friday, a fellow sf and poetry reader approached me with an idea for a form poem that sounded to me to be impossibly difficult, but which I'll share here in case someone really wants to tackle it or knows of an example in which it has been tackled.
The idea is this: write a 4-, 8-, or 16-line poems that makes use of homonyms (just to refresh, words that sound alike and are spelled alike but have different meanings, such as river bank vs. savings bank.) Use one homonym per line or every two lines. However, the poem must be written so that when read aloud, every possible interpretation of the homonym is valid. The idea is to a achieve a poem that listeners will assign all sorts of multiple meanings to that will all be valid, but quite different.
Full disclosure: we all know I'm a quick gratification kind of guy, and when my friend explained this to me my reaction was, "That sounds like way too much work." But I thought, what the heck, I'll pass it on, maybe the thunderbolt of inspiration will strike someone...
The idea is this: write a 4-, 8-, or 16-line poems that makes use of homonyms (just to refresh, words that sound alike and are spelled alike but have different meanings, such as river bank vs. savings bank.) Use one homonym per line or every two lines. However, the poem must be written so that when read aloud, every possible interpretation of the homonym is valid. The idea is to a achieve a poem that listeners will assign all sorts of multiple meanings to that will all be valid, but quite different.
Full disclosure: we all know I'm a quick gratification kind of guy, and when my friend explained this to me my reaction was, "That sounds like way too much work." But I thought, what the heck, I'll pass it on, maybe the thunderbolt of inspiration will strike someone...