Poetry practice, this writing a poem a day lark,is certainly stretching all my capabilities. I have added in another little challenge for November in a nod to the 30 days of Gratitude people. So my subject must be something for which I give thanks. One gratitude prompt had words on the list. And this suggested dictionaries to me. I have a large Oxford, an etymological and a rhyming dictionary on my book shelves. Not to mention online resources in a pinch when I am feeling too frail to lift the weighty tomes. I love dictionaries in all forms.
For an added challenge I decided to try a hithertoo unknown poetry form called the octameter. Its invention is attributed to Shelley A. Cephas and I found it on Linda J. Wolff’s blog Write An Octometer.
The octometer is two stanzas of eight lines each. Each line must be five syllables long. And there is a complicated rhyme scheme, too. It feels a bit like doing a crossword puzzle. The poem references two writing warm up exercises I use in my Word Alchemy workshops. See if you can guess which!
Word Salad
Who has need of jewels
with a dictionary
in their possession?
Bless Dr. Johnson,
Webster and Oxford!
With a lexicon
you can feast your fill,
word epicurean.
Words fresh and crunchy,
word Venn diagram
or cold collation
with syntactic dates.
To be rambunctious
plan to obfuscate.
All language’s cousins
kiss in this cauldron.
Copyright © Bee Smith 2018
