At pffa during NaPo, lots of people are busting out the sevenlings for their daily poems. Scavella can make a poem from the form. The rest? Eh.
The good thing is that they are much shorter than the previous bane of my poetic existence–sestinas. Another good thing is they aren’t as banal as most attempts at haiku.
There. Now I’ve offended almost everyone. I should throw in something mean about sonnets just to cover the bases.
Hey Julie,
My enthusiasm for forms waxes and wanes. I am pitiful at haiku/tanka, etc. Sestinas are torture, but I’ve written several. (Glutton for punishment) I am a miserable failure at true sonnets, but I’m playing with non-rhyming sonnets. I do move in and out of ‘form’ but always seem to end in free verse.
What’s a sevenling?
best,
lisa
I have only read sevelings by one person, who is rocking them…52 Fledglings. (dot blogspot dot com, I think, if you are interested).
I did one myself and cheated. Like I always do with form.
Frankly, I find the villanelle a horror of horrors, and it is what is on the menu at Poetry Thursday today. I call them Villain Hells, and I wrote one awful one and won’t ever write another.
I could never
Write the short stuff
I don’t know why.
I think it’s very hard to write a good sevenling, Julie. But for the purposes of NaPoWriMo, they have the virtue of being short and can be dredged out easily enough if you’re feeling short of ideas. They also give you a ready-made structure and a finite number of lines to fill, but don’t require rhyme (always hard to find good ones in a short space of time), and have few mind-bending formal constraints.
That said, I’ve seen one or two good sevenlings outside Scavella’s thread.
Lisa – Sevenlings
(Ignore the comment above. My mistake. Couldn’t edit, so deleted. NO sinister plan beyond mind-changing.)
I hate almost all forms, as I’ve said before, with these exceptions:
sonnets
ballads
quatrains
blank verse
For some unfathomable reason, I took to sevenlings. Somewhere else I’ve said that I think it’s because they were invented for 21st century English. I like Julains, too, not because I’m sucking up but because I just do. They too were invented for 21st century English.
The rest are really just gimmicks, IMO.
Say nothing against sonnets, Julie. They are the greatest form in the world, I think. I wish I could write more than one.
Cheers.
I’m with you on that. I hate sevenlings. Nothing to do with the people writing them on or off pffa. They just strike me as an annoying, really arbitrary form.