Three Aelinscapes
Hello friends,
Three “aelinscapes” this week. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing either my omnibus edition Knit Ink (and Other Poems) or something from my store.)
Alternatively, buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi!
An aelinscape is a metered poem in which two or more formal poems share metrical feet. This form (or rather group of forms) first appeared in my collection SLATE PETALS.
This first aelinscape presents an ottava rima in iambic pentameter, intersected by a sonnet in iambic monometer:
In this next aelinscape, a Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter holds within it a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer, such that the Shakespearean sonnet is made from the third feet of the Petrarchan sonnet’s lines.
And this final aelinscape presents a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer, intersected by a triolet in iambic pentameter:
The second one particularly gets me — hiding a Shakespearean sonnet inside a Petrarchan by extracting every third foot. It’s like finding a secondary poem nested in the rhythm itself, a metrical hologram. The constraint here isn’t just "write two poems simultaneously" but "make them occupy the same prosodic space without collision." Which is wild. The monometer poems feel almost like a pulse running beneath the pentameter surface.
These are such bangers. I can't even handle it.