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Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Chinese Classical Poetic Form "Shi" in English

Here's what friend and fellow poet David Raphael Israel calls a Boomerang Poem, named "Signs and Clues." The poem appears on his blog.

According to him a Boomerang Poem (a genre of his own invention) is:

"English Shi" (on my blog), because it follows certain other conventions of Shi [classical Chinese poem, which can most typically be in 8 lines, with 5 characters (or in English, 5 stresses) per line]. Most crucial is that the 2 middle couplets (if the poem is construed as being comprised of 4 couplets) both demonstrate what we call (in Chinese poetics) "grammatical parallelism." In the Boomerang Poem form, I've not always kept to that latter -- but all in all, it carries the poem much farther when one's able to do it.

David is an American who studied Chinese, classical Chinese, he says. He also studied the Gazal and wrote a few Gazals in English. Not surprising, since I know of poets who write Gazals in Marathi. He works for a living in Beverley HIlls. Now, can you imagine that? Heard of movies like "Down and Out in Beverley Hills," "Beverley Hills Cops," eh? Dude, I would give anything to know what it's like.

1 comment:

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Nice poetic
I enjoyed reading it a lot.