I made it to Barnes & Noble this week earlier than ever before in the morning, just after the store opened. On a Friday, that meant the store was mostly empty and quiet, just perfect for a bit of poetry play and rhyming.
This time I worked along two avenues, one with two forms that mix and match a poet’s own words to form new poems, and the other in exotic forms in the vein of the haiku.
My theme today was the Avengers.
The first two forms I worked with were the Cento and the Clerihew. Both ostensibly re-work an existing poet’s lines of poetry to form new poems. Instead of taking an existing poet and his words, I instead worked from another medium that I enjoy: film. For my centos I remixed lines from the three Iron Man films to form poems. A cento also uses the name of the purloined poet as the first line of the poem, and in this case, the name of the movie. There is no meter or rhyme scheme.
Cento 1
Iron Man
Yeah, well, vacation’s over,
there’s the next mission, and nothing else.
(Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.)
What you’re asking about: it’s me.
It’s not technically accurate,
I’m just not the hero type.
(Yeah, I can fly.)
The truth is: I am Iron Man.
Cento 2
Iron Man 2
It’s subtle, all the bells and whistles,
It’s a high tech prosthesis,
The suit and I are one:
It tastes like coconut. And metal.
The point is: you’re welcome,
I am your nuclear deterrent,
I’ve successfully privatized world peace:
it’s about legacy.
Cento 3
Iron Man Three
Let’s track this from the beginning:
we create our own demons,
the prodigal son returns.
Technically, I am Iron Man.
(I broke the crayon)
Everybody needs a hobby,
my armor was a cocoon:
I am Iron Man.
For these centos I tried to encapsulate what each film was about, speaking to both the plot and theme. And, as I said, all are composed entirely of lines spoken by Tony Stark/Iron Man.
Next was the Clerihew which is again formed by lines from an existing poetical work, for which I again used lines from a film, in this case, the first Avengers film. The clerihew uses the name of the poet for the first line of two couplets. There is no set length, and again, it is non-metrical and non-rhyming.
The Avengers
Thor
Who controls the would-be king?
Do I look to be in a gaming mood?
This is beyond you, metal man!
Tony Stark
Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?
Have you ever tried shawarma?
We have a Hulk.
Bruce Banner
So this all seems horrible.
I’m always angry.
Puny God!
Steve Rogers
There’s only one god, ma’am.
Put the hammer down.
We have orders, we should follow them.
Natasha Romanoff
These guys come from legend.
I’ve got red in my ledger.
This is just like Budapest all over again.
Clint Barton
You and I remember Budapest very differently.
Ever had someone take your brain and play?
I see better from a distance.
For better or worse: a clerihew. I tried to capture the core of each character, and also do a sort of call and response from one stanza to the next. In actual fact, each stanza is its own clerihew, as a proper clerihew is only four lines long. This is, truth be told, a super clerihew, just as the Avengers are a super team. Neat, huh? My cleverness knows no bounds, apparently.
Next up I tackled some more exotic forms. First, a Japanese form called the tanka, which is a five line poem consisting of lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables. Again, the Avengers gave me inspiration.
Hulk
Banner is a man
who got hit with gamma rays.
The man’s a monster
who turns tall and strong and green.
The Hulk is always angry.
Cap
Steven Rogers fights
for the small and helpless man.
The military
experiment made him strong,
time made him legendary.
Thor
He’s a demi-god
Thor from the realm of Asgard
He wields a hammer
a weapon to pound, a tool
to build a much better world.
After that I wrote a tanaga, a Filipino form consisting of four seven syllable lines, all rhyming.
Romanoff
Natasha’s a widow black,
a spy with assassin’s knack.
Fear and cowardice she lacks,
she shuts down the tesseract.
Finally, after all that, I wrote a Persian form called a Ghazal, which is written in couplets that rhyme the final word before an ending refrain. The ghazal is typically signed by the author in the last line.
The Avengers
There are six who fight: the Avengers.
In Loki they inspire fright, the Avengers.
Romanoff, a woman with widow’s bite,
Hawkeye, possessed of keen sight, the Avengers.
Thor, whose hammer throws light-ning
Captain America stands for the right, the Avengers.
Hulk, he smashes with green might,
Iron Man, a modern metal knight, the Avengers.
Though the world’s in a plight,
I, Redbeard, love to write the Avengers.
Do remember that all my poems are basically explorations of a form or style of poetry and are not claiming to be exemplars of said forms. They merely adhere to (most) of the rules of the form, no more, no less. Thus they are not great poems, or even good poems, but they are poems. I enjoy writing them, and as always, I hope you enjoy reading them.
a simple man 