Structural Considerations in Serial Poetry: Foundations

[ysabetwordsmith]

Writing good serial literature requires a keen sense of structure. There are many different aspects of structure which are relevant to this practice. Writers and readers are free to choose whatever options suit their skills, interests, or the subject matter at hand. Nobody is locked into doing things only one way; diverse examples exist, and that's a good thing. Let's take a look at some of the established options.

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Poem: "The Truth in the Tower"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the March 1, 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was crowdfunded by a bunch of different people, and originally posted on my LiveJournal. While writing this poem, I did a bunch of research on Italian wildlife and culture. You can find the other poems in the series Fiorenza the Wisewoman on my Serial Poetry page.

One interesting thing is that this poem contains a number of cliffhangers between verses, and some of those came up during the crowdfunding process. That helped encourage more donations. After verse 12 is a notable one, and after 17 another. It's kind of fun to look for these potential cliffhangers in my longer narrative poems, and then watch to see if any of them activate depending on how the donations come in.

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Structural Considerations in Serial Poetry: Infrastructure

[ysabetwordsmith]

Now that we've covered the underlying structure of a series, let's explore what grows out of that.  These are the smaller parts of structure reaching up toward the surface of what the reader sees.  They include basic literary concepts such as character, setting, and theme.  What distinguishes serial work from stand-alone work is repetition.  A series revisits something.  What it revisits is up to the creator.  Serial literature typically features recurring characters and/or settings. Another thing crucial to series cohesion is tembre -- the distinctive quality of the series as a whole, spanning aspects such as theme, mood, and authorial voice.

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Serial Poetry, Shared Worlds and I

[marina_bonomi]

Greetings to all

My name is Marina, Elizabeth has invited me as guest poster for today. I write poetry in a few genres, from haiku to nursery rhymes, in Italian (my native tongue) and English.

My involvement with serial poetry is multiple: I started as a patron in Elizabeth’s fishbowl, leaving a prompt that sparked the Origami Mage series, with time I got involved in more series: Fiorenza the Wisewoman, The Steamsmith, and Kungfu Robots either as a prompter or as research helper or both, most recently I became a contributor in the Silk Road Allies project, my works there include Cai Luoma and the Parthians, Thinking of Home While on a Mission in the West , and A Zhang Wei among others.

I am, in a way, a reluctant poet. My love affair with poetry began hearing my grandfather recite by hearth cantos from the Divine Comedy,  my interest in other classical works of Italian poetry was sparked by my mother’s memories about listening to an elderly man who used to regale the village children with snatches of poems and stories about the adventures of Charlemagne’s Paladins. The works on which I cut my teeth, the ones that were part of the common knowledge in my country and those that I came to know and love later : The Divine Comedy, the Aeneid, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Jerusalem Delivered, the Nibelungenlied, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, are narrative poetry, many are collations of pre-existing works selected and reworked by one or more authors. That was what spoke to me and, by and at large, I couldn’t find their like in contemporary poetry.

It seemed to me that, with time, poetry had become more solitary, that poets had moved away from writing for their people tapping from the common well of myths and experiences and had become more intellectual, soaring higher, possibly, but becoming at the same time too detached, too rarefied for me to follow.

I realize the implications of national myths and their use in propaganda, and the backlash of the Second World War and the horrid misuse of the ancient legends, all legitimate reasons for wanting to move away from them. Fact is that, on the whole, I kept just a passing interest in contemporary Western poetry  until I happened across Elizabeth’s works and I realized that somebody was still writing poems that told stories, and not only isolated stories but cycles with an overarching plot and complex themes weaved in, and that I wasn’t the only one left who enjoyed them.

The step from reader to contributor was long in coming, but The Lost and Found Legion gave me an idea, the result was Cai Luoma and the Parthians, narrating an episode in the travel of the Chinese ambassador to Rome. We three then talked about the possibility of the setting as a shared world, the framework, canon and so on. I can say that it is a sandbox I love playing into.

Some might find a shared world too confining, I love the interplay, the conversations that spark different ideas in everybody involved, the themes that weave themselves (or so it seems) in and out of our works, the different eras each of us feels more at ease in, the individual angles from which each of us may see the same episode or suggestion and how the world (even though very young, yet) grows richer both in material and opportunities with every new piece one of us writes.