This post needs retitling ‘Stalemate with Tritina’…
I have been waiting for the poem to come and finally today, it did. It finally came! My poem for NaPoWriMo Day 7. It has been a lingering work in progress (with minimal work and hardly any process) for days now.
Day 7
It has taken 4 weeks, but I have managed a week of NaPo Prompts. Day 7 started with congratulating one week of poetry under our belts and a reminder not to be hard on ourselves if we had fallen behind – at this point (7th April) I hadn’t even started!
Our featured participant for today is Kat Shamash, whose poem for Day Six marries the concept of food with travel and with the meeting of cultures. A very appropriate poem for this year’s translation-themed NaPo- and GloPo- WriMo!
Today, as we move ourselves east-to-west across the world, we dip our toe into Europe for the first time (albeit only because Russia is very very wide). Our featured poet in translation is Vsevelod Nekrasov, whose spare, minimalist work relies heavily on repetition, and which became more widely available in English with the 2013 publication of an English-language collection of his selected poems, I Live I See. You can find English versions of two of his poems here, another here, and four more (alongside the original Russian) here. Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about Nekrasov, here’s a lengthy interview with him from 1993.
Today’s challenge was to write a Tritina. The tritina is a shorter cousin to the sestina, involving three, three-line stanzas, and a final concluding line. Three “end words” are used to conclude the lines of each stanza, in a set pattern of ABC, CAB, BCA, and all three end words appear together in the final line.
This is a form I had not come across before.
I enjoyed learning about the form and pondered over suitable subject matter. I felt I wanted this poem to be useful and currently apart from editing and NaPo writing I am not working towards anything so I struggled with this.
I decided to write a Tritina for Stanza, but then I missed the Stanza meeting (having no poem to take).
Eventually today I sat down with an unfinished submission and started to craft to theme. I realise now that it isn’t a true Tritina as I have missed the endline pattern, so actually it is back to drawing board with this form. Still like a fisherman who has been exhausted by a big catch I feel I am Tritina-ed out and will need to rest from it for a while. It will come… and when it does, I’ll be ready.
Ghost scenes torment you. A mistake made more than once,
tethers you to the past, keeps the replay running.
awritersfountain 