I cannot sleep for an unknown reason,
The light is off, but thoughts are in confusion...
Perhaps, it is my poems writing season,
as poetry is coming in profusion.
The light is off, but thoughts are in confusion,
and, burgeoning with rhythm and with rhymes,
the words invade my mind in profusion,
like it had been before in old times.
They, burgeoning with rhythm and with rhymes,
so easily, and full of gentle grace,
like it had been before in old times,
a while ago, in another place.
So easily, so full of gentle grace,
the words were streaming from my heart inane
a while ago, in another place,
when I have been in love- perhaps, insane.
The words were streaming from my heart inane.
It’s history, but what I find odd
that I have been in love- perhaps, insane.
Why? This is known only to God...
It’s history, but what I find odd:
I cannot sleep for an unknown reason,
as this is known only to God...
Perhaps, it’s just my poems writing season?
7.12.2022
Submitted for the contest on Poetry Soup website
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A pantoum is a Malaysian form of oral poetry that features repeating lines that change meaning throughout the poem.
A pantoum is a poetic form consisting of any number of rhyming quatrains (four-line stanzas). The traditional Malaysian form is disjunctive: The first two lines (called the pembayang) do not have a straightforward narrative connection with the third and fourth lines (called the maksud), but are connected through rhyming, repeated sounds, or metaphor. In this way, the pantoum is similar to the Arabic poetic form ghazal. The pantoum is also similar to the villanelle, a tercet form, in that alternating lines are repeated.
What Are the Origins of the Pantoum Poem?
Pantoum is the French word from the Malay pantun berkait, a form of rhyming couplets first recorded in fifteenth-century Malaysia but likely transmitted orally before then. The form became popular among French poets with Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales, which includes a version of poet Ernest Fouinet’s French translation of a pantun. Charles Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du Soir” (“Evening Harmony”) is an example of an irregular pantoum, with an ABBA rhyme scheme. American poets have also tried their hand at a modern pantoum, including John Ashbery (“Pantoum”), Carolyn Kizer (“Parent’s Pantoum”), Donald Justice (“Pantoum of the Great Depression”).
What Is the Structure of a Pantoum?
Each quatrain of a pantoum follows an ABAB rhyme scheme with lines that are eight to twelve syllables long. The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become first and third lines of the next stanza. This pattern continues until the final stanza, in which the last line is usually the same as the first line of the poem.
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PANTOUM
“pan-TOOM”
“Pantoum” is the Western word for the Malayan pantun, a poetic form that first appeared in the fifteenth century in Malayan literature.
The contemporary Western version of the pantoum is a poem made up of stanzas whose four lines repeat in a pattern: lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are repeated, whole, as lines 1 and 3 of the next stanza, and so on. The poem can be of any length. Sometimes the final stanza has a neat twist: lines 1 and 3 are as usual the same as lines 2 and 4 in the stanza above it, but lines 2 and 4 are in fact lines 1 and 3 (or 3 and 1—the order reversed) of the very first stanza. This creates a tidy closing of the circle.
This poem uses an extreme version of repetition with change.
Here are some of the possibilities you can use to solve the problem of repeating whole lines:
• Change nothing
• Change only the punctuation
• Change the verb tense
• Change a noun from singular to plural
• Change pronoun (I to you)
• Substitute words
• Change the order of the words
• Use homonyms (hear to here)
• Or, or, or…
Here’s the pattern:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
Line 5 – repeat 2
Line 6
Line 7 – repeat 4
Line 8
9 – repeat 6
10
11 – repeat 8
12
13 – repeat 10
14
15 – repeat 12
16
Etc….and so on, for however many stanzas,(although I like to stop at line 20).
17 – repeat 14
18 – repeat 1 or 3
19 – repeat 16
20 – repeat 3 or 1
https://phillywriters.com/resources/howtowriteapantoum/