Self-referential poetry

[primeideal]

Serendipitous flea-market pickup last week: "Rhyme's Reason," by John Hollander. He was one of the first English poets to write what Agha Shahid Ali calls "real" ghazals--not just a series of couplets, but preserving a repeated word and rhyme scheme. This book is full of similar self-illustrating examples of various poetic forms.

One that was new to me and I'd like to try experimenting with is Hollander's take on the pantun, a Malay form that influenced the French pantoum (the latter being a series of quatrains linked by repeated lines.)

This is a single quatrain only, rhyming abab. But the sentence making up the first ab has no immediate logical or narrative connection with the second. Only the rhyme pattern and some pun or like-sounding construction connects them on the surface. It is only after the lines have sunk in that the deep connection emerges. The following example might be entitled "Catamarans."

Pantuns in the original Malay
Are quatrains of two thoughts, but of one mind.
Athwart my two pontoons I sail away,
While touching neither; land lies far behind.