Reverie Two: chutes and ladders

One of the cool things about carefully constructed formal poetry is that it does things with sound that hit on almost a subconscious level. We’re all usually acutely aware of rhyme, alliteration, meter if it’s done strictly, and repeating lines. But there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface, which even the poet might not be aware of; they may be selecting words that just “sound right” without even realizing that it’s because a particular combination of sound and rhythm can cause effects in the listener/reader. (Of course, those may differ from person to person, and what sounds right can be as much a product of personal preference as some kind of cultural notion of language/reaction.)

This week: “chutes and ladders“

So this time around we’re going to stretch a different group of poetic muscles and try some form work. I’m a fan of formal poetry, but I love exploring the really tough/little known ones; for now, I’ll go a little easy. The first challenge is climbing rhyme, a pattern that is very common in the poetry of Burma and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam. (Probably elsewhere in Southeast Asia too; I confess that my primary source for this is the Internet.) It’s a mix of end- and internal-rhyme, wherein a line will rhyme with a non-end word earlier in the second rhyme, then even earlier in the third line; meanwhile, the third line’s end-rhyme will carry over into the middle of the fourth line, etc. You end up with something like this:

…… A
…. A ..
.. A …. B
…. B ..
.. B …. C

…and so on. There are three (and a half) forms that seem to be the most common for this. Out of Vietnam is the “luc bát” (some of the diacritic marks omitted for ease of viewing on different browsers), which alternates six- and eight-syllable lines and uses a form of climbing rhyme. Since we’re not (on the whole) Vietnamese speakers, I recommend trying this with English. (Its variant, the “song thât luc bát” has stanzas of two seven-syllable lines, followed by a luc bát couplet of six and eight, stressed in particular ways; this one might be too tough to get into now.) Every other syllable also follows particular tones, which we can’t really do in English; I recommend setting yourself a rule like “sharp tones = tense/close vowels” (like sea, day, and few), while “flat tones = lax/open vowels” (like gnaw, slow, and bread). The meter is basically iambic (in English), with fourth syllable being sharp and second, sixth, and eighth (when appropriate) flat. Combining all these things together, you might end up with:

These worldly people thought
the fortune which they’d gotten dealt
would not suffice. They felt
the mansions where they dwelt collapse
to melted names on maps…

(The boldface shows where the stress is; I’ve tried to keep the vowels roughly following my suggestion above. Colors show how the climbing rhyme progresses to earlier and earlier in the line; as a stylistic choice, I kept it going back to the second syllable.)

The two Burmese forms that are attested are the thanbauk and the yadu, which are looser with the prosody, but not the rhyme. The thanbauk is almost a Burmese clerihew: three witty lines of four syllables each (optional longer last line), with the rhyme on syllables four, three, and two, respectively. The yadu’s last line can also be longer (as long as it’s an odd number of syllables), and its stanzas are five lines each (up to three stanzas total), which shows the climbing rhyme better. Here is an attempt at a yadu stanza:

Frost kills. We know
ice, and snow. We
will go elsewhere
when the air deigns
to bare its daggers.

(Note the extra syllable that bring the last line to an odd number count. Also, a yadu, like a haiku, should have a seasonal/natural component to it. The thanbauk can be more fun.)

Now that you’ve read all that – and it’s a bit wiggly, I know, I recommend doing some Google/Wikipedia surfing of your own (try this article by Gary Lucas) – let’s try a different form, the cascade. This is a more straightforward one: each line (usually three) of the first stanza becomes the last line of each successive stanza. The rhyme goes through the alphabet, in rhyme scheme notation, like so:

A
B
C

a
b
A

c
d
B

e
f
C

It kind of fits the principles of the climbing rhyme a little bit, but I like how it has more of a feel of falling straight down rather than carefully ascending/descending a ladder. A cascade can be thrown together pretty easily, though it’s more interesting when it’s carefully constructed: adding in a meter, making the rhyme scheme in the third and fourth stanzas more rigid (try c/a/B, b/c/C instead), etc. Or…

The basic challenge for this prompt is that you could try doing a cascade. The more intermediate challenge is that you could try doing a luc bát, thanbauk, or yadu (and wowing your friends with your verbosity). But if you’re feeling particularly limber, why not try to combine the two, and create your own Frankenstein’s form? Here’s a possibility or two:

- write a luc bát with three four-line stanzas; the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the last lines of the second and third stanzas, respectively (you won’t need to repeat their rhymes, don’t worry: you would end after “collapse” in the example above)
- write three thanbauk whose last lines can become a thanbauk of their own; you will need to rhyme very carefully to get these to work
- write a yadu where you add syllables to the last line of each stanza; have those last lines made up of words taken from the lines of the other stanzas (but always be sure to make the second syllable include the rhyme)

I may try one of these last examples myself, since I think it will be a great stretch for one’s poetic abilities. It’s all rather complicated, and it depends on the kind of thing you want to write: do you want the narrative possibilities of the luc bát, the brief wit of the thanbauk, or the observational meditation of the yadu? In any case, by carefully allowing the rhyme to follow vertical lines through the poem, sometimes fast and straight down, sometimes trickling sideways, you will add to the effect of your poem without making it seem sing-song or tired. Rhyming couplets can be beautiful, but are hardly subtle in their effect; try to go under the radar with these. Before you know it, your audience will find themselves tumbling down or scaling up with you, almost without them being aware of it. That’s the idea, at least.

And really, go searching some of the attempts that have been done in English on these. I can only open the door here. :)

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