POETRY WINNERS
TAMING THE ttriversen
Alison Chisholm is thrilled with the levels of talent in the winners of WM’s most recent poetry contest
Alison Chisholm
William Carlos Williams’ triversen is an attractive form, long enough to communicate a message with intensity, but not long enough to become tedious. It’s easy to craft, with no rhyme or metre to be incorporated, and simply a requirement for two, three or four stressed syllables to appear in each of its eighteen lines. The only other restriction is that each line should be a complete phrase, and each tercet a complete sentence.
Triversens arrived covering all sorts of subjects. Cats featured prominently, and so did children, the natural world (particularly with regard to changing seasons), landscape and loss. There was humour and also pathos, levity and weight.
With such an appealing form, it is no surprise that both the number and the quality of entries in the triversen competition were high. Very few entries could be eliminated at a glance. Most had to be read with care two or three times before difficult decisions were made. In a form that encourages alliteration –a favourite tool of the poet who devised it – there’s a fine balance to be found between its use in a pleasing and artistic manner, and its overuse, turning the lines into tongue-twisters. Overuse is counterproductive, as the reader becomes fixated on the sounds and loses the thread of the poem’s message, and unfortunately this dominance of sound occurred in some entries.