Tiptoeing Back Into Poetry: Pantoums

A pantoum is a highly structured poem. They are a Malay form of poetry and historically have been rhymed. As I noted many times before, I don't work well with rhymes. Luckily, a pantoum may also be unrhymed and mine tend to be. I last posted (and wrote) pantoums back in 2011. 

It is always written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third line of the next quatrain until the final quatrain, which is so neatly linked back to the first and third lines of the first quatrain that you feel as if you have just tied up a package.

I receive the daily "Poem-a-Day" email from the Academy of American Poets. One recently featured a pantoum. Oh my gosh. Back in 2011, when I was writing more extensively, I wrote several pantoums. I had forgotten all about that form and their precise structure.

Maybe, I thought, that was a good place to start writing poetry again.

It's been a while. A long while. 

Pre-Covid, I belonged to a poetry group, started by myself and someone else who was a close friend. Over the months and years, we added to the group. He invited someone; I invited someone. Then a newer member would say, "Hey, we should invite so-and-so to this group."

And so we did.

At its height, we probably had 10 to 12 regular members, with out-of-town guests sometimes joining us. We would gather monthly, often but not always at my house. Someone would usually bring wine, some of us would bring snacks, and we would share our own poems or read a poem that we had come across and felt like reading. (Billy Collins was often read at our gatherings.)

No surprise, the pandemic slam the door shut. There were no gatherings, no anything, while we all hunkered down and regrouped in our personal and professional lives.

Then one member suggested, maybe just to me, but maybe in a group email, what if we Zoomed? So we tried that.

It kinda sorta worked. But there were barriers, including most (all?) of us spending so much time in Zoom because of our jobs that one more Zoom meeting was just one too many. More than once, when I sent out the Zoom link, I will get a quick email: "Sorry, but I won't make it. I am on overload."

I should've pulled the plug earlier. (I am saying "I" because I was the one who set up the meetings.) But it turns out in the end that I didn't have to. On what became the very last meeting ever, sometime in early 2021, the club died a very swift death after two members behaved badly (one by email, one at the meeting) on the day of the last meeting. 

And that was that. 

For the most part, I stopped writing poetry at that point. I had not been writing regularly and that last meeting killed my interest. Oh, there were some scraps and half-bitten lines here and there, but not even much of that. I did not work at it or set aside time for it.

Two things happened.

Earlier this month, I opened my poetry file folder – not the one on the computer, but the massive paper one I keep in my desk drawer. [Know that I have hoarding tendencies. My poetry file made the bread twist ties stash and the plastic straws stash look like nothing. Don't ask. I cleared those out weeks ago.] I took out a handful of poems and read them in the silence of my study with an audience of one – me.

OK there was a lot of ehhhhhh there. But a few caught my attention.

Maybe? Maybe there is something here? 

The second, of course,  is the spark that pantoum email sent through me. 

Maybe I could try to edge my way back into writing poetry more regularly through pantoums? Maybe I just try it.

As I just noted in my last post, I have been writing a minimum of 15 minutes per day. Every day. Almost all of that writing is what may yet turn into a memoir. No, I am not ready to reveal anything about that but what about poetry too? What if I wrote for 15 minutes on the one project and then also allowed myself time to write poetry whenever it nudged me?

What if indeed? 

Here is a very recent and rough example from our trip to and from Mayo. I experimented with the traditional pantoum form in the very last quatrain, changing the wording of the very last line to create a different outcome. 

While driving, I saw

Two sunbows

On the wisps of a cloud.

The sun in a haze.

Two sunbows - 

The sheerest of colors.

The sun in a haze - 

My eyes glanced at the shimmer.

The sheerest of colors:

No wonder they fade in a blink.

My eyes glanced at the shimmer,

But I had to watch the road.

No wonder they fade in a blink.

How could they not?

But I had to watch the road

Instead of the sunbows.

How could they not?

While driving, I saw -

Instead of the sunbows -

Only the wisps of a cloud.

I am feeling my way back into writing. Let's see what comes of this.