*UPDATE: I received an honorable mention in this contest! The honorable-mention poems are now listed on the Americymru website here, so in order to give the site more foot traffic, I am removing the poems from this blog. Please go to the Americymru website to read the poems.*
Hello, friends! I am entering these five poems into a contest, so I am sharing them here for all to see, as part of the contest rules. The 2013 West Coast Eisteddfod Online Poetry Competition is featured through a group called Americymru, an online social network for Americans of Welsh descent or with an interest in Welsh culture. While it is stated in the contest rules that the poems do not need to be about Wales, as a fellow traveler through the country, I thought it would be more enjoyable to write some thoughts about my time in Wales and the history that fascinates me about the country. It was fun to recount these memories, and I hope you will enjoy them, too.
Hello, friends! I am entering these five poems into a contest, so I am sharing them here for all to see, as part of the contest rules. The 2013 West Coast Eisteddfod Online Poetry Competition is featured through a group called Americymru, an online social network for Americans of Welsh descent or with an interest in Welsh culture. While it is stated in the contest rules that the poems do not need to be about Wales, as a fellow traveler through the country, I thought it would be more enjoyable to write some thoughts about my time in Wales and the history that fascinates me about the country. It was fun to recount these memories, and I hope you will enjoy them, too.
The first four poems are about Wales, and the fifth poem is one I thought still fit nicely and would be of interest to like-minded individuals. It is a poem written in the Ae-freslighe Gaelic form, a form that dates back to the 5th century, where poetry was largely carved into trees and gravestones, thus the need for alliteration, repetition, and sound structure to make the poems easier to remember. The sound structure is so important that it even takes precedence over adherence to the rhyming and stanza-structure pattern, making this poem selection a fun one to read aloud. Gaelic poetry also relies heavily on the cyclical nature of its stanzas, with the ending words and syllables being the same as the beginning words and syllables. To make it even harder, each stanza is a quatrain of seven syllables. Lines one and three rhyme with a triple (three-syllable) rhyme and two and four use a double (two-syllable) rhyme:
x x x x (x x a)
x x x x x (x b)
x x x x (x x a)
x x x x x (x b)
Then, the entire poem ends with the beginning word or syllables that first began the poem. Please enjoy all five of these poems, and be sure to check out the 2013 West Coast Eisteddfod Online Poetry Competition!
Five excellent submissions to the WCE 2013 Online Poetry Competition. Diolch Leah :)
ReplyDeleteCroeso! And diolch yn fawr for reading them and passing the information along, Ceri. It was a pleasure to relive some good memories. :)
ReplyDelete-Leah Angstman