Welcome to a Myriad of Form(s)

Monthly Prompt №1: April — The Duplex

Beginning this month, I am posting a monthly prompt in the tab, A Myriad of Form(s), which will feature a different form (and sometimes two) each month. The form I’d like you to explore for April’s prompt is the “Duplex”.

It is fitting that Jericho Brown’s third collection, The Tradition, introduces us to his invention called the “Duplex”. The duplex is a new form that renders the musicality and structure of the ghazal, the sonnet, and the blues all in one. The poem starts with a couplet of two distinct lines. The second line is repeated and a new line is added, and then repeated until there are seven couplets of nine to eleven syllables in each line. Although the poem sounds iambic, it retains its relationship to the metrical tradition of the ghazal. The first line is the fourteenth line. The last line of the poem repeats the first, with an increased or changed resonance that the rest of the poem’s context provides. The rhyme (via repetition) and the turn are reminiscent of the sonnet. The duplex holds tradition in its embrace while calling that embrace into question.

Prompt :

Check out the examples below, two by Brown and one by myself, and Write a poem using the “Duplex” form with the theme of your choice. Please submit your drafts to The Bazaar of the Bizarre, link this post to your submission and also tag me! Please make sure to use “Forms Prompt” as your main tag, along with the other tags you may want to use. All I can say is have fun with it, and Write On!

Tagging some writers, though all are welcome to participate :)

J.D. Harms, Harley King, Dennett, ◦•●Christina M. Ward ●•◦, Imad, Victor Sarkin, Raffaella Ferretti, Franco Amati, Samantha Lazar, Frederick Andrew, Naomi Leilani Acosta, John Levin, A.j Thomas, Joanna Vang, Daniel A. Teo, Deepak Jayal, Aaron Quist, Gaston King, Chloe Hill, Ann Marie Steele, Anna Rozwadowska, Amanda Dalmas, Terry Barr, Ivette Cruz, Cocoa Griot, FILZA CHAUDHRY, Dr. Fatima Imam, Viraji Ogodapola, Jessica Lee McMillan, Joseph Lieungh, Spyder, Andrea Juillerat-Olvera, Jesse M. Gonzalez, Barry Dawson IV, Iva Hotko, Lennie Varvarides, Justin Haag, Alina Sileanu, Georgia Lewitt, Warren Brown, ScienceDuuude, Roberto C. Salvador, Stephanie Blossoms, Paula Light, rowen maeve, Mike Scarpiello, Steve B Howard, Bhavyakirti, Matt Gleason, Henery X, Saurabh, Isaac, Arjan Tupan, Dana Sanford, Francine Fallara, Bahora Saitova, Normal Earthling, Isac Valdez, Zay Pareltheon

Below is one example by Jericho Brown.

Duplex

A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own.

Memory makes demands darker than my own: My last love drove a burgundy car.

My first love drove a burgundy car. He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

Like the sound of my mother weeping again, No sound beating ends where it began.

None of the beaten end up how we began. A poem is a gesture toward home.

From The Tradition. Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

Here is a link to another example by Brown in the American Poetry Review.

Below is the link to my first try at using Brown’s form. Though I prefer free verse and syllabic forms like Fibonacci poems, haikus, and tankas, and am not necessarily a huge fan of certain traditional forms such as sonnets and sestinas, I must admit that I had a lot of fun writing this one and believe it worked itself out well. Please check it out in Samantha Lazar’s publication, The Sky Collection. If you get a chance, also take a look at my Guest Writers Prompt there.

2021 MDSHall, in association with the Writes of Passage, “forged on the wordwrights’ anvil,” and the Muse Echo Collective, Purveyors of the Poet Tree of Discoursing Drums beating by any dreams necessary.