29wordsforsnow
beyond thirty
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2019
- Posts
- 1,185
The end of year is near and it's time to sum up the months gone and hopefully remember a bunch of good days. I myself had a great time learning a lot about poem forms. So, to thank Piscator for the twelve Line Challenges we all enjoyed and fed with hundreds of poems, why not have a bonus line challenge?
But bonuses often come with a twist: Get your creative juices flowing and create a form never seen before, and, if you like, add a little (made up) story to give it some background.
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The Parallelogram
On a fateful day in November 1887 Karl Finsterwalder, a German teacher in an elementary school in Munich, had to fill in for Theodor Neustätter, a math teacher who reported to be sick for the day. In a dramatic moment one of the students, one Albert Einstein, was ordered to the front of the class to assist with the stubborn geometry tools on the anything but plane blackboard. The result left both of them frustrated, and while Einstein from now on disregarded geometry as an untrusty tool instantly affected by the curvature of space which led him to skip most of the math lessons in university so he later had to rely on a fellow student to bring in all that stuff into the theory of relativity, Finsterwalder went down another road.
Processing the horrible experience, he insisted throughout his whole career to never touch a ruler or a triangle again. But, oh, at night, those haunting dreams!
On Sunday the 4th of December 1887 he was up, after another horrible night dreaming of man-eating blackboards, long before his usual time to already attend the first breakfast. That's when his mother asked him to cut some twigs of the cherry tree in the garden and put them in a vase to celebrate the day of St Barbara. In the crisp morning the sunlight got caught between a handful of twigs, four of them aligned to form a perfect parallelogram. The raw beauty of this inspired Karl to storm back into house and not leave his room until he had preserved that moment with his kind of tools, words!
To cover the opprobrium of his new found love for geometry, he soon started to write in English only and burn the writing of his first so. So, while the original is lost, this is his attempt to retell the epiphanic morning and perfect example if the traditional Parallelogram: four more and more intended lines, usually iambic tetrameter, with an ABBA scheme starting the lines and CDDC ending them, representing the corners and parallel edges of the geometric shape.
morning to an endless bum night
Today, variations of the original form are known as well, adding more B/D lines but leaving the 'corner' lines untouched. In the late 1970s, a short-lived extremist group insisted that to make it really parallel the first and last need the rhyme completely, no examples ever went public and the rebel group soon disintegrated after Finsterwalder's granddaughter learned about it and smashed the ambitions of whom she called "Weirdos".
But bonuses often come with a twist: Get your creative juices flowing and create a form never seen before, and, if you like, add a little (made up) story to give it some background.
-----
The Parallelogram
On a fateful day in November 1887 Karl Finsterwalder, a German teacher in an elementary school in Munich, had to fill in for Theodor Neustätter, a math teacher who reported to be sick for the day. In a dramatic moment one of the students, one Albert Einstein, was ordered to the front of the class to assist with the stubborn geometry tools on the anything but plane blackboard. The result left both of them frustrated, and while Einstein from now on disregarded geometry as an untrusty tool instantly affected by the curvature of space which led him to skip most of the math lessons in university so he later had to rely on a fellow student to bring in all that stuff into the theory of relativity, Finsterwalder went down another road.
Processing the horrible experience, he insisted throughout his whole career to never touch a ruler or a triangle again. But, oh, at night, those haunting dreams!
On Sunday the 4th of December 1887 he was up, after another horrible night dreaming of man-eating blackboards, long before his usual time to already attend the first breakfast. That's when his mother asked him to cut some twigs of the cherry tree in the garden and put them in a vase to celebrate the day of St Barbara. In the crisp morning the sunlight got caught between a handful of twigs, four of them aligned to form a perfect parallelogram. The raw beauty of this inspired Karl to storm back into house and not leave his room until he had preserved that moment with his kind of tools, words!
To cover the opprobrium of his new found love for geometry, he soon started to write in English only and burn the writing of his first so. So, while the original is lost, this is his attempt to retell the epiphanic morning and perfect example if the traditional Parallelogram: four more and more intended lines, usually iambic tetrameter, with an ABBA scheme starting the lines and CDDC ending them, representing the corners and parallel edges of the geometric shape.
morning to an endless bum night
my hand on the tree's, breaks and takes
sigh, spend some days till life awakes
mourning the arrested sunlight
Today, variations of the original form are known as well, adding more B/D lines but leaving the 'corner' lines untouched. In the late 1970s, a short-lived extremist group insisted that to make it really parallel the first and last need the rhyme completely, no examples ever went public and the rebel group soon disintegrated after Finsterwalder's granddaughter learned about it and smashed the ambitions of whom she called "Weirdos".
