Failed my first Perform Poetry roll at the Java Hut tonight. Then did ok the second time around, even though I left out three middle verses of the piece. Need to review the Heron and Midas in the next few days. I definitely want to perform Midas next Sunday.

Special meeting post-tournament on Sunday for fencing may be delayed by a week. THis puts it in Labor Day weekend, which would suck, because then I’d have to leave Labor Day plans for a scheduling meeting. On the other hand, this means I may be able to share the day with … PL, the master chief fencer in CT, said he’d let me know if I actually needed to be there, by Wednesday.

asked for the form of the Canzone which I use in the poem, The Knitting Lesson. Blithely and offhandedly, I mentioned that the form appeared in Lewis Turco’s book, The Book of Forms, and I promsied to look it up and post the form here.

So I got home and looked it up, and …

It’s not in Book of Forms. It must be in John Hollander’s book, Rhyme’s Reason, which some cute punk poet in Middletown swiped after a reading, when my back was turned. At least, I think it might have been her. The other candidate was the academic poet who stopped by once in a while and wrote in his own invented script.

Anyway, here’s Lewis Turco’s interpretation:

The canzone is an Italian form structured, like the Pindaric ode, in three strophes or movements. Each strophe is divded into three parts. The first stanzas (piedi, “feet”; singular, piede “foot”) are structurally alike in each strophe; the third stanza in each strophi (the sirima or cauda is structurally different from the piedi, but the structures of piedi and sirima are nonce forms: the poet’s invention. The poem often closes with an envoy, a commiato, or valediction.

Aren’t you glad she asked?

John Hollander has a rhyme-scheme for the canzone which is mad-crazy, but which I don’t have the resources (at 3am) to decipher from my poem. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, after I clean my house…

and are coming to dinner tomorrow at 6pm. I have to get some groceries in the house so I can eat this week, and feed them. Hmmm.

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