The Curgina

     In the first scene of Hamlet we see this piece ("stich") of iambic pentameter:

It would be spoke to.
                        Question it, Horatio.

     It is split into two lines because different people, Bernardo then Marcellus, are speaking.  What if we could find other reasons to separate lines of verse?  What if we want to enjamb for all the reasons free versers do?

     For example, what if we want to create temporary ambiguity?  Consider the last sentence from the first stanza of DPK's "Joie de Mourir:

Beyond this arid pit is life,
lived incognito. Dreams resist
our beckoning. Just coax the one
that's closest: I can see my wife,
a rose corsage adorns her wrist;
her iris catches the voyeur sun.

     Note what happens when you break the lines thus:

 I can see my wife, a rose
corsage adorns her wrist; her iris
catches the voyeur sun.

     Now we see the speaker compare his wife to a rose and that "iris" is a pun, referring to the flower and the part of an eye around the pupil.

     What if we want pauses within lines to give weight to what has just been said or is about to be?  Here we see an elegy for Chilean President Salvador Allende where the writer pauses to think up a euphemism that won't bring down the wrath of those listening:

September came like winter's
ailing child but
left us
viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
doctored moment lied. You lie with
orphans' parents, long
reviled.

     Were there no consequences, the speaker might want to say:

September came like the worst disaster in our history winter's
ailing child but was murdered
left us bereft of freedom and leadership
viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was, poignantly now,
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every treasonous scum
doctored moment lied. You lie with massacred innocents
orphans' parents, long revered by lovers of democracy
reviled by treasonous scum.

     What if you know an editor who is phobic about metered work?  Because these poems must operate as both types of verse, free and metered, they may be the perfect disguise for a naughty prank.  Of course, all of this is lost without these linebreaks.

September came like winter's ailing child
but left us viewing Valparaiso's pride.
You face was always saddest when you smiled.
You smiled as every doctored moment lied.
You lie with orphans' parents, long reviled.

     Suppose we want our performers to speak naturally, not necessarily or exclusively in ten-syllable bursts?  Check out the iambic pentameter presentation of A. Michael Juster's "Plea":

This is the time for mercy, time for letting
rage recede.

     Ten syllables might constitute a regular breath pause but who stops after "letting" here?  Here is how this sentence appeared in the poem when it was published in the November 1988 edition of "South Carolina Review":

This is the time
for mercy,

time for letting
rage recede.

     It still breaks on "letting" but after two syllables, not nine.  The voice is now more hesitant and breathless. 

     This is the definition of a curgina:  meter with free verse linebreaks.  Thus, while "line" and "stich" (i.e. the stretch of beats or syllables--ten in the case of pentameter--that make up the meter) mean much the same thing in other poems, they have little or no relation in curginas.  For example, the first stich in "Plea" is stretched out to form three lines.

     What if we want to highlight some internal rhyming?  Recently, Catherine Chandler's "Wherein the Snow is Hid" appeared in "Autumn Sky Poetry Daily".  Every stanza followed this pattern:

My roof is tempest-proof, my kitchen bright;
still, a bleak expanse
blinds my bedroom’s line of sight
as if to tease,
in squalls of gusting, icy sibilance,

     We see iambic pentameter, trimeter, tetrameter, dimeter and pentameter, with rhymes on lines 1 and 3, 2 and 5.  Thus, it is heterometer.  Indeed, we could leave things there.  However, if one wanted to reduce the number of meters to two and make the rhymes less conspicuous--which is the modern trend--one could combine the final four lines into two heptameters.

My roof is tempest-proof, my kitchen bright;
still, a bleak expanse blinds my bedroom’s line of sight
as if to tease, in squalls of gusting, icy sibilance,

     In this "decurginated" version we see pentameter, heptameter, heptameter.

     The curginic approach works seamlessly with others, old (e.g. sonnet, acrostic) and new (e.g. DATIA, cliché collage, etc.).

     While the term is barely a decade old, the concept of the curgina² likely wasn't new in 1923 when W.C. Williams published "The Red Wheelbarrow".  Watch for it in the 5th edition of the "Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics".

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Footnotes:

¹ - Notice that all of the words that end stichs (e.g. "bright", "sight" and "sibilance") also end lines (e.g. L1, L3 and L5) in the curginated version.  Put another way, no line in the curgina contains text from more than one full line in the decurginated version.  When speaking of entire poems this is called a "terminal" curgina.  All other examples we've seen are "enjambed" curginas.

² - Do not confuse the curgina with the corata, which is metered poetry rendered as prose, in paragraphs, or in unlineated text, like Beowulf.

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Great Poems of Our Time: "Beans"

September came like winter's
ailing child but
left us
viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
doctored moment lied. You lie with
orphans' parents, long
reviled.

As close as coppers, yellow beans still
line Mapocho's banks. It
leads them to the sea;
entwined on rocks and saplings, each
new vine recalls that
dawn in 1973 when
every choking, bastard weed grew wild.

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I could write a book about this poem and the newslist lore surrounding it. I make no promises but I'll try to stick to the facts.

DPK was a member of the Poets.org and Gazebo workshops. Nothing else is known about the author. In referring to the poet people use feminine pronouns because--get this--the writing comes up as more likely that of a female than a male on Gender Genie. We do know that she has designated all of her work, past, present and future, as licensed under Creative Commons, such that anyone can use it for any purpose.



"Beans" first appeared on Poets.org, where critics were impressed by its acrostic curginic form. Later, on Gazebo, "Shit Creek Review" editor Paul Stevens was struck by the core ambiguity of the poem. This remark turned out to be prescient;  people on both sides of the political divide have claimed it as sympathetic to their cause. Indeed, the poem can serve as a litmus test, the theory being that the more difficulty a viewer has appreciating this duality the more radical that viewer's politics. Unfortunately, all of this ambiguity is lost in the video below.

As with Maz's "Studying Savonarola", this source has covered the poem's technical merits well enough. Again, we have in "Beans" a piece that sparkles in performance.

As far as we know, DPK doesn't pursue publication. From conversations with them I know that two prestigious editors, one of a magazine, one an e-ziner, expressed a keen interest in publishing "Beans" until they were told that everyone was free to do so. One said he'd not seen contemporary verse of this ilk. The other managed no more than a "Wow!" I won't dwell on the possibility that neither of the two greatest poems of this century will have been published in print while their authors were alive.

The last seven words complete the experience. 

 "...when every choking bastard weed grew wild."

       Before them, the sounds include gentle alliteration (e.g. "as close as coppers"), consonance ("September came  like  winter's") and, especially, assonance ("recalls that dawn").  Now we hear a change, marked by three iterations of the lead in "when every choking bastard weed",  as trochaic words ("choking bastard") magically turn into iambs, culminating in the "Ta Da!" ending spondee:  "grew wild".  The lack  of repetitions sounds like a typing test.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

      The last five words stress sounds from the five different vowels:

i) the long "o" of "choking";
ii) the short "a" in "bastard";
iii) the long "e" of "weed";
iv) the long "u" sound in "grew"; and,
v) the long "i" in "wild".

     As for "y" being an occasional vowel, it is in the sixth last word ("every").  As for "w" and "r" being considered consonants despite being vowel sounds, they are in the seventh ("when") and sixth ("every") last words.  The poem loses its composure as the speaker loses  hers.

Beans (D.P. Kristalo) on Vimeo.

We judge poems as great not because we can remember them but because we cannot forget them. If I check with you in twenty years I suspect that you will still be able to complete this sentence:

"Your face was always saddest..."

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Next: "Antiblurb" by A.E. Stallings

1. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths
   
2. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo
   
3. "Antiblurb" by A. E. Stallings
   
4. "How Aimée remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson
   
5. "There Are Sunflowers in Italy" by Didi Menendez
6. "Auditing the Heart" by Frank Matagrano
   

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