The word form is a turnoff for some people. They think “sonnet.” “The sonnet is dead,” is a frequent claim by such folk, but what they usually mean is that, in their opinion, nobody can write a sonnet anymore because the form has been done to death; it has become trite.
But “the sonnet” is not dead. It cannot die. It is merely a specific, often-used pattern. It is totally neutral in the abstract. It isn’t the form that’s dead, it is the burden of tradition that lies upon the form. When one thinks “sonnet,” one doesn’t think merely of the form, one thinks of all the sonnets he or she has read, and when one goes to write a sonnet, one still thinks of all those sonnets lying in all those books of poetry lying on the shelves.
As a result, one often winds up writing a sonnet that sounds like Shakespeare, or Milton, or somebody, and one thinks, “I want to write like me, not like somebody else,” and we grunt n disgust as we crumple the paper and toss it into the circular file. But if one can unburden oneself of the burden of tradition, the form remains waiting to be used in a new way. It is nothing more than a pattern that offers potential. Take the triolet, for example, that form which Edgar Lee Master derogates in his poem,
PETIT THE POET
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel —
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens —
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage constancy, heroism, failure —
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers —
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
Every garden club poet from Dubuque to Oshkosh has written a triolet. Its burden of tradition is that the form is a pretty little thing, fit only for writing about fluffy cloudlets on a spring day, and daffodils on a lawn. Even the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, when he was a child, wrote a triolet and fell under the weight of its burden of tradition:
TRIOLET
The bees are glad the livelong day,
For lilacs in the beauty blow
And make my garden glad and gay.
The bees are glad the livelong day,
They to my blossoms wing their way,
And honey steal from flowers aglow.
The bees are glad the livelong day,
For lilacs in their beauty blow.
Dylan Thomas
A truly awful piece of work, unless one looks at it simply as an exercise in metrics, but but even then one need not have written a triolet about flowers and bees. Even the rhymes Thomas used are what are called “trite rhymes” because they have been used in similar ways so often, for such a long time. Do you need a list of trite rhymes? Joyce Kilmer used almost all of them in his poem “Trees.” This is a triolet too, from a series titled "Bordello: in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available in a Kindle edition.:
JASPER OLSON
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Jasper Olson" from “Bordello”:
I take my women any way they come —
I'm Jasper Olson, brother. Hard and fast
I play this game. Though some folks think I'm dumb,
I take my women any way they come,
and come they do. There's no time to be numb
in this life — grab it now and ram the past.
I take my women any way they come.
I'm Jasper Olson, brother, hard and fast.
Lewis Turco, a.k.a. "Wesli Court"
And here is a description of the form taken from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.
The French triolet is an octave poem turning on only two rhymes and including two refrains: ABaAabAB. Every line is the same metrical length.
I suppose one of the reasons I wrote “Jasper Olson” was just to see if, for once, someone couldn’t dump the burden of tradition that encumbers the triolet. I found that the form wasn’t dead. Imagination is smothered by tradition, and all the poet needs to do in order to use an old form in a fresh way is to push the pillow off his face so that he can breathe again.
Suggested exercise:
Write a non-traditional triolet.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.
