Readers & Fellow Bloggers! Happy New Year to all of you. May you all shine with happiness!

Today is Monday and so is the day of Poetry Forms. This week I would like to share with you all the technique and method to write a Pantoum. Well, this is a Malaysia-originated form and the following extract shows how it has come the long way.

Have a good read friends:)

The pantoum originated in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century as a short folk poem, typically made up of two rhyming couplets that were recited or sung. However, as the pantoum spread, and Western writers altered and adapted the form, the importance of rhyming and brevity diminished. The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

The pantoum was especially popular with French and British writers in the nineteenth-century, including Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, who is credited with introducing the form to European writers. The pantoum gained popularity among contemporary American writers such as Anne Waldman and Donald Justice after John Ashbery published the form in his 1956 book, Some Trees.

A good example of the pantoum is Carolyn Kizer’s “Parent’s Pantoum,” the first three stanzas of which are excerpted here:

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group–why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

One exciting aspect of the pantoum is its subtle shifts in meaning that can occur as repeated phrases are revised with different punctuation and thereby given a new context. Consider Ashbery’s poem “Pantoum,” and how changing the punctuation in one line can radically alter its meaning and tone: “Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.” which, when repeated, becomes, “Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!”

An incantation is created by a pantoum’s interlocking pattern of rhyme and repetition; as lines reverberate between stanzas, they fill the poem with echoes. This intense repetition also slows the poem down, halting its advancement. As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explained in The Making of a Poem, “the reader takes four steps forward, then two back,” making the pantoum a “perfect form for the evocation of a past time.”

Content Credits : Poets.org