Cinq or Swim

I used to give an exercise to my poetry workshop students. I’d give them a prose paragraph, taken from a variety of sources, and ask them to turn it into a cinquain—a 5-line poem with the following syllable count – 2,4,6,8,2. 

The cinquain form was established in the early 20th century by Adelaide Crapsey, a poet and student of Japanese forms such as the haiku and the tanka. Crapsey believed that the English language did not lend itself to the degree of compression needed to satisfy the demands of the haiku, and that hers was "the shortest and simplest [form] possible in English verse."

That may be an extravagant claim to make, but I kind of agree with her, although I have seen some good haikus in English. Billy Collins used to collect found haikus—things he’s overheard in conversation that fit perfectly into 5-7-5-syllable lines, and that had a certain resonance. One, which he regarded as the perfect teenage haiku, came from a student, leaving his classroom at the end of a period and telling her friend,

When I told him he
was like Oh my god  and I
was like Oh my god

But the cinquain gives a little more breathing room. English is a more discursive language, and it mostly seems to need it. Crapsey’s most often quoted cinquain is:

TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.

She titled her cinquains; others don’t. She also tended to write in accentual-syllabics, with an iambic stress pattern and an accent count of 1-2-3-4-1, but she was willing to vary that. Here’s one more, with the accentual pattern less regular.

SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS

"Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?" "For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore."

One of my favorite contemporary poets, Mikhail Horowitz, recently collaborated with Louise Grieco on a dialogue in cinquains, which they put together as a chapbook. Here are a couple of the fruits of that collaboration. “Following Adelaide’s lead,” they say in their intro, “Louise has titled her cinqains; in the spirit of Japanese haiku, Mikhail’s are untitled.

water
is what we are –
old eye of the ocean
regarding everlastingly
itself

GLACIER
The road
melts away. Time
melts away. What we thought
eternal, solid, ours—melts clear
away.

Mikhail and Louise end their introduction by hoping that their readers will write a few cinquains of their own. I did more than hope—I insisted upon it.

My cinquain assignments were designed to pull my students out of their comfort zone of personal experience and personal emotion, and to give them words to play with that would be outside of their accustomed vocabulary. W. H. Auden once offered this advice to a hypothetical someone who wanted to become a poet. If the young person answered, "because I have something important to say," Auden would recommend giving up on the whole idea. If, on the other hand the answer was something like "because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another," then that young person would have taken an important first step.

Mostly, these assignments were for fun. Writing anything, but especially writing poetry, is so damned difficult and demanding and frustrating, and so often unrewarding, that there’s hardly any point in doing it if it’s not fun. There were no grades (well, I never graded creative work), no critiques, no revisions. We just shared them at the beginning of class, and then got down to whatever other business we had. And they were fun. At least I hope they were. Certainly they were fun to read.

So, like Mikhail and Louise, I’ll issue an invitation. Try it yourselves. Here is the assignment as I used to give it:

There are two points to this exercise: first, to get you outside of yourself; to use a vocabulary and a way of looking at the world that you would not otherwise be likely to use. Second, to find a poetic kernel in a place you wouldn’t necessarily expect to look for it.

You are not required to stick to the words in the prose passage, but they should play an important role in your cinquain.

Here are the prose passages:

1. Imagine walking through a field with 180 foot (55 meter) tall vertical structures overhead that continually vent warm fluids and which have delicate flanges and stalagmites on them.

2. From beneath the lid of a colossal stone sarcophagus workers removed mud, bricks and plaster, exposing an inner sarcophagus carved in Infaa’s image and decorated with a scarab, symbol of eternal rebirth, and protective hieroglyphics.

The comedian and radio kiddie show host Soupy Sales is reported to have once told his young listeners: “While Mommy and Daddy are sleeping, go through their wallets and pocketbooks, and take out all the little green pieces of paper you find there, and send them to Soupy!” I probably wouldn’t get away with that, but send me your cinquains. I’ll enjoy them, and I’ll share them.  

High Five, the collection of cinquains by Louise Grieco and Mikhail Horowitz, was published as a chapbook by Alte Books, POB 111, Accord, NY 12404. The book was originally intended to be given as a gift to friends, so there’s no price tag on it, but if you’re interested, you can write the publisher, and he’ll sell you one for 12 bucks. Or – he’s a little grouchy, but he has a heart of gold – you can write to Mikhail Horowitz. 302 High Falls Road, Saugerties NY 12477, and he’ll probably sell you one. It’s a lovely book.