History That Never Was

The paradelle is one of my favorite forms of really ridiculous poetry. United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins made it up as a JOKE. But I latched onto it as an interesting and somewhat challenging form that I could logic my way through. And folks, I do love a challenge I can solve with logic!

The rules, as stated at Writer’s Digest, are:

• The paradelle is a 4-stanza poem.
• Each stanza consists of 6 lines.
• For the first 3 stanzas, the 1st and 2nd lines should be the same; the 3rd and 4th lines should also be the same; and the 5th and 6th lines should be composed of all the words from the 1st and 3rd lines and only the words from the 1st and 3rd lines.
• The final stanza should be composed of all the words in the 5th and 6th lines of the first three stanzas and only the words from the 5th and 6th lines of the first three stanzas.

And here’s the logic part of this. The fifth and sixth lines of each of the first three stanzas contain all the words in each of those stanzas. The final stanza contains only the words from the fifth and sixth lines of the first three stanzas. Therefore, the final stanza will include all of the words that can be used in the entire poem. Which, in my world, means write the final stanza first, then split up those words roughly evenly, and write the other stanzas from there.

In this way, it’s a lot like magnetic poetry with a very limited word set, like the small poem I wrote for the image in this post. My tiny poem reads: “I could ship away but my skin is the storm.” If I were writing a very tiny condensed paradelle, with just those words, then I’d rearrange them for each of the other stanzas, winding up with things like: “My skin is away, I could ship the storm” or “The storm is away, I could ship my skin.” (There may be a limit of how few words you can easily use in this form without having to get very convoluted or repetitive in your other stanzas.)

My poem “Radiance and Obscurity,” which appeared at Liquid Imagination recently, is an example of a full length paradelle, if you want to see a real one in action. I did a lot with punctuation to change up the repetitiveness of the form, which also served to change the meaning of some lines!

Tags: advice, paradelle, poetry, radiance and obscurity

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, December 23rd, 2019 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.