ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Beside feathery casuarina,
with yabbies fattening abundantly
to nurture platypus.
Clear water loitering
makes primal habitat.

Maureen. This departs a bit from the guidelines, sorry.

It is my first attempt at rhopalic verse, done by counting syllables.
Each word in a line exceeds the one before by one syllable ( some will argue about the syllable count of casuarina. For me it's 4 )

I couldn't make it rhyme, it's hard enough getting to that stage. But this is a workshop, workshops are allowed to be untidy.

Interesting idea, Neville...one of those quirky little corners of poetry. I'd never heard of rhopalic verse, although the internet tells me that Stephen Fry writes about it in 'The Ode Less Travelled'. He also says there are variations such as increasing each word in a line by a letter rather than a syllable, or decreasing rather than increasing the count. It's not surprising that rhyme becomes difficult with increasing syllables because you're dealing with long, multisyllabic words at the end of a line and that complicates matters. Might be a bridge too far!

Cheers
David

David Campbell wrote:Might be a bridge too far!

Yes.

A bridge I don't think I am venturing over but interesting to learn about new things so don't ever stop learning Neville - the day you do you might as well throw the towel in.

Good on you for having a go - and you are right about workshops, most are messy and that is fine because we can always improve and one learns (hopefully) from mistakes.

I know Haikus are not everyone's cup of tea - but I have become a fan of them simply because of the difficulty of writing a good one. I am guided in the art by a gentleman from Bhutan in the Himalayas who is a master at them and he has been very helpful and encouraging with the serious ones I do. I enjoy the challenge.

I like what you did - your fat yabbies and feathery casuarinas, with platypus in the creek as a bonus sounds like an ideal place to set up camp for the weekend

Cheers

Maureen