Syllabic Poetry: Meet the Etheree
Guest Prompt — and easy as 1,2,3
Since returning more intensively to writing poetry in the last year, and reading poetry more widely, this formerly free-versing poet is discovering the delights of form poetry.
Maybe my immersement, as a child, in the study and performance of (often) rigid rhyming poetry caused me to rebel with free-verse poetry as an adult. I revel in its generosity of form, the free-flowing slipstreams of rhythm and metre, the permission to play with shape and structure. To rhyme, if I so please, in surprising ways and places — not just at the end of a line. They don’t call it free-verse for nothing.
However, there can be a different kind of freedom and growth in form poetry; a virtuosity and vibrancy where, before, I imagined only restrictions. Just as when a framed painting immediately appears more striking, drawing the eye, so too can form poetry alter the way the light — and the reader’s eye — falls on your words.
Introducing the Etheree
Samantha Lazar, the lovely creator of Sky Collection has invited me to create a Guest Prompt. So I wanted to share a new form I discovered recently — and invite you to write one with me. A relatively new variation of English syllabic poetry, the etheree is a twentieth-century creation…
