The April 2013 Challenge
A “line-unit palindrome” is a piece of poetry that forms a palindrome on the line level. Each line appears twice (excepting the middle line if the poem has an odd number of lines), with the second half in the opposite order of the first half. Perhaps the most well-known line-palindrome poem in English is J. A. Lindon’s “As I was passing near the jail”.
Write a line-palindrome poem of at least twelve lines. As with Lindon’s creation, you are allowed to vary the punctuation in the repeated lines, but the words and their order must be the same. The subject matter is left open, with the exception that, like a proper haiku, it must include a seasonal reference.
The Results
Ryan Finholm
Fall
I foresee impending trouble.
Fall comes quick and sad again.
You and your dishonorable
actions — I can sense it when
leaves, free-falling into rotten
swamplands, and your sense of good,
wither like some old forgotten
swamplands, and your sense of good
leaves, free-falling into rotten
actions. I can sense it when
you and your dishonorable
fall comes, quick and sad, again.
I foresee impending trouble.
Summer Vacation
You use your funny insults, whine, and gripe
away. Our pleasant mem’ry of this place —
it falters, crumbles, then it’s gone. You’ll wipe
that haughty, spiteful smirk right off your face
when you see how I cope with this: I’ll drink
in all your negativity. You’ll flip
your outlook and be glad… or else you’ll sink
in all your negativity. You’ll flip
when you see how I cope with this. I’ll drink
that haughty, spiteful smirk right off your face —
it falters, crumbles, then it’s gone. You’ll wipe
away our pleasant mem’ry of this place.
You use your funny insults, whine and gripe.
Spring Cleaning
I guess that’s where we’re at.
I’ll miss them all, I will:
your dog, your plants, your cat.
But first I’m going to kill
some time till I begin
your house, and all that work
in your yard. I peek in
my soul, and find I lurk
April CC
I lift my pen and start to write
the April Challenge entry now.
The words flow out. I cannot fight
my Muse; she is renewed somehow.
I take a break from that for beer,
some wine, tequila shots, and then
some schnapps, tequila shots again,
some wine, tequila shots, and then
I take a break from that for beer.
My Muse! She is renewed! Somehow
the words flow out. I cannot fight
the April Challenge entry now;
I lift my pen and start to write.
League Season
Someone loses, someone wins
in that roaring, rumbling din:
rolling balls and crashing pins.
Some will win and some will lose
wearing tacky rented shoes,
chugging inexpensive booze
(wat’ry wells and macrobrews).
Chugging inexpensive booze,
wearing tacky rented shoes,
some will win and some will lose,
rolling balls and crashing pins.
In that roaring, rumbling din
someone loses, someone wins.
Brian Raiter
Duck Hunt
They sweated in the autumn sun,
Watching Simon’s black Lab run
As it flew off with the breeze.
The noise echoed round the trees.
Somebody called out “Duck!”
Simon brought his rifle up.
Ed looked through his rifle’s sight.
Perhaps it wasn’t mounted right —
Ed’s barrel pointed at the dog.
Simon stared as if through fog.
The dog cried out and then was still.
As its blood began to spill,
The dog cried out, and then was still.
Simon stared as if through fog.
Ed’s barrel pointed at the dog.
Perhaps it wasn’t mounted right?
Ed looked through his rifle’s sight.
Simon brought his rifle up.
Somebody called out “Duck!”
The noise echoed round the trees
As it flew off with the breeze.
Watching Simon’s black lab run,
They sweated in the autumn sun.
When this Commuter Challenge was first announced, I felt a little intimidated. I had never heard of the format before, it sounded difficult, and there were few examples to be found on the internet. Then I stumbled upon a line-unit palindrome on the internet that was so bad that it reassured me that I could do better; it was essentially a bunch of random, independent declarations about love that were put in verse form and listed in the line-unit palindrome format, so the order of the lines really didn’t matter. That sub-par poem led me to my first two efforts, ‘April CC’ and ‘League Season’, which were composed in the grand tradition of “Beer and Bowling” poetry (established a quarter century ago by Brian and I, and some college friends, to make fun of Sylvia Plath wannabes).
I was on a lot of long flights in April. After getting the Beer and Bowling poems out of my system, I had a lot of commuter time to work on the challenge. I thought it would be most interesting to compose something that was going in one direction for the first half before becoming something entirely different, with the same lines, in the second half. My first tries were towards a verse that was innocuous when read forwards, but then X-rated when read in the opposite order. I didn’t like how that was going, and at best it would have just been a clumsy attempt at a dirty joke, so I abandoned that.
With ‘Fall’ I just wanted to get those homonyms in there – in the second line “Fall” is the season, but it becomes the general noun in line 12. “Leaves” is a plural noun in line 5 but it becomes a verb in line 9. There is a little bit of that in ‘Summer Vacation’, but I think that was a less successful effort because it doesn’t read well. I found that the most effective way of making the same lines say different things when set in a different order is to break up the phrases. In doing so, I couldn’t help but also ruin the flow of the poem.
I think ‘Spring Cleaning’ worked out best. It is just a creepy, morbid joke of a poem, and it suffers a bit from flow problems, but I still like it better than any of my other submissions this month. The final line is the non-repeating pivot, and I guess line 11 would need brackets or ellipses (“[some time till I begin]” or “…some time till I begin…”) because it’s a sentence fragment or subordinate clause or whatever.
A couple things I need to admit: For those poems for which it wasn’t obvious (or when it simply wasn’t present) in the text, I fulfilled the seasonal reference constraint by forcing it into the poems’ titles. Also, I got that “I’ll drink that smile right off your face” line from a song, but I can’t remember which one.
And despite all the negativity in my submissions this month, I promise you that I am not depressed, angry, violent, or alcoholic.
by RyanF — 1 May 2013 @ 10:25
I knew this challenge would require some effort, but I was surprised at how hard I found it. For most of the month I was working on an idea tentatively titled “Timing is Everything”, in which the inverted order of events in the second half would contrast with the first half. (Thus e.g. “The day after my wife left me / I kissed a girl I met in a bar”.) The idea never really came together, though, for some reason. With the deadline looming, I became nervous. I decided to set it aside temporarily and throw together something short and simple, to have as a backup poem in case the first one never gelled. I focused on choosing the rhymes and the changed meanings first, and only secondly did I worry about trying to fit the lines together into a coherent whole. To my shock all the pieces fell into place directly, and before I knew it I had a sensible poem that was clearly better than anything my original idea was ever going to lead to. (It sort of reminded me how much easier the crossword-puzzle Challenge became by settling on the grid pattern before choosing any of the words.)
by Brian — 31 May 2013 @ 20:36
Contemporary poets have also expanded the notion of mirror poems to include those whose unit of construction is the entire line (something like the way a pantoum is made with repeated lines). Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway ’s “ Myth ” is a lovely example of a line-by-line palindrome poem, which explores the subtle changes in each line’s meaning as the reversed order changes its context.
by Edith G. Bond — 5 August 2013 @ 05:52