Saturday, January 1, 2011

Wrought Words: On Writing the First Rionnard Tri-Nard (With a Nod to Lewis Turco)




Late last spring, the outlier veteran formalist poet Lewis Turco dropped me an email out of the blue, asking if I'd be interested in writing a poem in an ancient Celtic form called a "Rionnard Tri-Nard."  Generally, an email like this is about the most fun thing I can imagine receiving, so I was prone to say yes, even before I absorbed the form's daunting requirements: