Certain GRE Literature guides (what's the sniglet for typing something, knowing you've just created a future frustrated moment for someone riding a google?) advise me that I can expect to find terza rima on the exam. And Spenserian stanzas, would you believe, but I've already forgotten them.
I've just gotten to the bit in My Poetry Book that mentions terza rima, in fact. I'm weeks ahead in Poetry, but God forbid I wrap up my Modern Era paper before tomorrow's deadline, and me with The Big Test (#1) tomorrow.
So, I tried to write a terza rima thinga in Ethnic Literature on Thursday (because, again, God Forbid...) while we were discussing family relationships and gathering and... well, something that made me think of people standing in line at a family reunion, heading toward the end of the table where I was dispensing my contribution to the feast.
Note: this has never happened in real life. I've been to a couple of cemetery reunions where there was family involved, and also potluck, but that's a little different. We just brought chicken from the local Albertson's, anyway.
Unfortunately, at the time I didn't know how terza rimas ended, and I didn't grasp that they could go on for more than three tercets. I didn't even know what a tercet was. So I just did /aba bcb cdc/ then felt sorry for the d. Now I know I needed another /d/ on its own.
So now we all know that I never read The Divine Comedy and I will fail my GRE Literature exam and no one will ever love me.
What follows is my partial terza rima, as scribbled while listening to words floating around the room during the short story discussion in class:
Oh, and the rhyme really doesn't.
Oh oh and I didn't do anything iambic so... yeah... I didn't know. Sorry. And I didn't even think about breaking up the tercets.
What am I a part of
when I struggle behind the potato salad
sketching tree-lines above
the pied heads, composing the epic ballad
of cropped long visions in tied notes
like butcher-strings coloured mad or sad
or sometimes sunny or rose
but this line moves single and samey
together in pudding-plops of another afternoon, I suppose.
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