I received my contributor's copy of this beautiful journal, Twelve Mile Review, which is in its first year. This issue, Number 1:2, Fall/Winter 2021, focuses primarily on the long poem, so while the contributors' list is relatively short, there's a lot there in terms of words on the page. The editors, Adam Houle and Robert Lee Kendrick –– neighbors of mine, relatively speaking, in South Carolina and North Carolina respectively –– have made it their aim to showcase a diversity of poetic orientations and forms.
My poem in this issue is not, for me, that long a poem. I write a lot of sonnets, but otherwise I have trouble keeping things under three pages. My current MS ends with an eight-page poem that is a beast to try to place, but I might send it to Adam and Robert in the new year and see what they think about it. My poem in the current issue is, again pretty typically for me, a three-pager, a riff on the Vietnamese lúc-bát, a syllabic form with a dense rhyme scheme. Traditionally the lúc-bát's couplets consist of lines of six and eight syllables –– Marly Youmans pointed out to me that I'd inadvertently reversed that order to eight and six, which I hadn't noticed I'd done. As she said, it makes sense, because that hews closer to our Common Meter or Hymn Meter, which alternates tetrameter and trimeter lines. This poem isn't metered. I was counting syllables, not stresses. But it does fall a little closer to that comfortable English form than it might have otherwise.
Here's the poem, which I hope shows up clearly in these photos:
As maybe you can see, aside from the set numbers of syllables, the rules are: rhyming couplets, but the end rhyme of each line must recur (somehow) in the next line. Possibly in Vietnamese it has to occur on a particular syllable, but I didn't go that far –– I just settled for somewhere near the middle of the next line.
Both Asian and Welsh syllabic forms, for example, often have these kinds of schemes. The Burmese than-bauk has an end rhyme that occurs one syllable back in the next line from where it occurred in the first line –– I can't remember offhand how many syllables each line has, but if a sound occurs on the last syllable of a six-syllable line, it occurs on the fifth syllable of the next line, and so on, until it hits the second syllable, at which point the sound that ends that line becomes the new rhyme.
All of this starts to be more like playing Sudoku than anything else, but when your whole attention is concentrated on the pattern, you surprise yourself with the things you're able to say that you'd never have thought of otherwise. You still have to assess those things for beauty and truth, of course. You can't just say anything. Not that I would pretend to be able to summarize what I've said in this poem here, mind you –– but somehow it has to ring true on every level, and not be frivolous or merely interesting (I guess I've really just said frivolous two ways, haven't I?).
The college kids are both out today. The girly has gone to Asheville with a friend for a quick mountain overnight in an AirBnB. I think they thought they'd see fall color; I'm not sure they will at this late date, but they'll enjoy driving on the Parkway anyway. Meanwhile, the Viking has gone down to South Carolina to see some friends for the day. So things are quiet. Dora and I have been for our morning walk, the highlight of which was a distant encounter with a large, loud black Labradoodle. It was a good encounter, in which the Labradoodle's owner and I were obviously on the same page. I saw them come around the corner and made Dora sit. They saw us, and the Labradoodle lost its mind, barking and yelling imprecations at Dora. Dora, to her immense credit, just sat there, though she was trembling with outrage. The Labradoodle's owner turned around and walked back the other way; we sat where we were until they were out of sight, then continued on our way. The only other events were cat sightings. Dora came home after all that excitement and ripped some more stuffing out of her ducky, but all things considered, she behaved with admirable restraint while we were out.
She was sprawled out flat beside the duck, but as soon as she felt the camera's eye upon her, she sprang right up again. Here you see only a tiny bit of fiberfill. I assure you, in the interest of full disclosure, that it is all over my kitchen floor.
Every time I take photos of Dora on her bed here in the kitchen, I am reminded that one of my self-proposed projects for this fall was to scrape and repaint a lot of woodwork. The house was last painted ten years ago, and thanks to dampness issues from our unfinished basement, we've had a good bit of cracking and peeling in various areas: windowframes and baseboards, chiefly. Maybe in Advent I will bestir myself, since I don't have any other major projects on, and think I will say no to any new major projects until the new year. I do still need to finish my novel revisions, and I do need to write a children's-lit column in December, but beyond that . . . truly, I need to paint, preferably before I go to pick up the college kids at the end of exams.
Wearing today:
Paper-bag-waist cotton knit pants, bought on Ebay but not secondhand as I had thought; Goodwilled wool sweater; wool blue-and-pink patterned socks; Birk Madeiras also bought on Ebay and really secondhand. This outfit would be snazzier with lighter or brighter shoes for a frame, but I don't have any that I feel like wearing, so here we are. Tucked the sweater hem in a little at the front to break up the line and show a little of the paper-bag waist.
It is a lot colder today. We had an actual frost this morning. I'm grateful for some soft, warm clothes, and for the sigh-of-relief blue-on-blue tonality of today's outfit. I'm just doing a lot of puttering: more laundry, chiefly, since having family dinners means we generate a lot more kitchen-linen laundry all of a sudden. I don't use paper products in the kitchen as a general rule, so between all the kitchen towels we use and the napkins and tablecloths, it mounts up faster with twice as many people at home. Laundry, some basic housekeeping, a little pre-cooking for Thursday, plus dog walks. I also have some spring bulbs that I need to get into the ground, so possibly I'll spend an hour on that this afternoon as well.
I love the color of this sweater with my coloring. Everything just feels really in balance. Day 6 hair in a claw-clip updo which feels pretty secure and successful. I will probably put on a scarf as well as a coat when I go out again with the dog. The day is bright and sunny, but again, cold. I also love these simple little drop earrings that came from the thrift shop down the street. They make a perfect daily staple.