I add yet another formal constraint to the roster. Rhymed haiku observe the strict 5-7-5 syllable count of traditional haiku, but add rhymes. Here are seven examples: Look at all the salt Sprinkled on my frosted malt It’s the waiter’s fault You thought it great sport To commit a grievous tort I’ll see you in […]

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All of Robert Herrick’s rhymes are replaced. This is what he’d be like if he were different. HERRICK RERHYMED Gather ye Rose-buds while ye might, Old Time is still a tilting: And this same flower that smiles so bright, To morrow will be wilting. The glorious Lamp of Heaven, his place The higher he’s a […]

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“The Isle of Dogs” is a story in my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. In it, a group of scholars investigate the play of that name, by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, which was suppressed and is now lost. The French play mentioned here, Caquire, is also real, but its use in the story […]

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A rollicking fairy tale told with stringent poetic constraints! Here are the first six stanzas of thirty-three. BARON AARON The Baron Aaron, though of great nobility, Did not appear particularly noble. His face was red and round, his features mobile, His body squat and scot-free of agility. His intellect was frivolous and trivial; He wasn’t […]

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The Pope’s Mustard-Maker is now available from Black Scat Books! Translated by Doug Skinner! Le Moutardier du pape was the last work that Alfred Jarry finished, a few months before his death in 1907. It was one of many operettas he worked on in his last years, and one of the few he finished: a bawdy three-act […]

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People seem to like epiphanies. EPIPHANIES I walked out to the back acre Where the hawthorn climbed shyly over the sagging fence Like a little girl at a birthday party I looked off to the east At the darkening clouds And realized Why my mother was never home on Sunday I walked out into the […]

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I’m currently translating Alfred Jarry’s operetta Le Moutardier du pape for Black Scat Books; it should be out later this year. I’m translating Jarry’s rhymed verse as rhymed verse; it always requires some compromise, but I hope the result is more faithful than a literal, unrhymed rendition would be (and more faithful than Jarry’s own […]

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Here’s another new poetic constraint: the anagram rhyme. As the name says, anagrams are treated as rhymes. Here are seven examples: Whenever we go out, the post Beside the park is still the spot Where our retriever always opts To tug upon his leash and stop. The life of urban man is tame: He earns […]

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Here’s another entry in my continuing search for new poetic constraints. Monosyllabic haiku contain three one-syllable words, with 5, 7, and 5 letters. And here are seven examples: moose springs forth tweak twelfth shelf cheap schlock sells bears scratch backs white wraiths whirl swill thrills swine frail scrolls crack

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Upside-Down Stories is now available from Black Scat Books! Charles Cros and Émile Goudeau were quintessential Bohemian poets of the 1880s. Cros also experimented with the phonograph and color photography; Goudeau founded the Hydropathes, who met to declaim poetry while not drinking water. Cros and Goudeau’s only collaboration was a series of five exuberant stories […]

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