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.
The image kinda wrote itself. Once you see the nested structure it's hard to unsee. Reminds me of those Russian dolls but for prosody. Still trying to wrap my head around how you even compose backwards from two target forms at once.
A metrical hologram, I agree, for the way in which each poem's bridled intensities fuse with such charged, uneasy, convincingly achieved elegance, that we're left uneasily grateful for the bridle. Our wary reflex of distaste for pianistic cleverness is erased, replaced by a steely cloud of British severity and noli me tangere aesthetic emotion.
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.
Thank you! "A metrical hologram" -- I like that!
The image kinda wrote itself. Once you see the nested structure it's hard to unsee. Reminds me of those Russian dolls but for prosody. Still trying to wrap my head around how you even compose backwards from two target forms at once.
These are such bangers. I can't even handle it.
A metrical hologram, I agree, for the way in which each poem's bridled intensities fuse with such charged, uneasy, convincingly achieved elegance, that we're left uneasily grateful for the bridle. Our wary reflex of distaste for pianistic cleverness is erased, replaced by a steely cloud of British severity and noli me tangere aesthetic emotion.