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Friday, January 27, 2023

Poetry Sisters Write Cascade Poems

Happy 2023. I'm thrilled to kick off another year of writing with my poetry sisters. We met at the beginning of January to plan our challenges and talked about forms, themes, and prompts for the year. The theme guiding our writing for the year is transformation. 

The challenge this month was to write a cascade poem. You can learn more about this form in Robert Lee Brewer's column at Writer's Digest. This is a repetitive form where each line from the first stanza becomes the final line of each stanza that follows. Therefore, if the first stanza has 3 lines, the poem will have 4 stanzas. For this poem, I went with exploding stars.

Galactic Chemical Evolution*

Stars go supernova
expelling elements into space
we are made of stardust

time passes - in billions of years 
cascading elemental changes
stars go supernova

seeding future generations
stars burn and die
expelling elements into space

carbon, nitrogen, oxygen
formed, reformed, remade
WE are made of stardust

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

*Galactic chemical evolution is a real field of study. Here's a brief introduction.
Stars and interstellar gas in galaxies exhibit diverse chemical element abundance patterns that are shaped by their environment and formation histories. The aim of Galactic Chemical Evolution (GCE) is to use the observed abundances to unlock earlier epochs in the Universe, probe the mechanisms of galaxy formation, and gain insight into the evolution of stellar systems. 

The quote above came from Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia in a paper entitled Galactic Chemical Evolution. If you want to learn more about this topic, The Journal of Physics: Conference Series has a paper entitled Introduction to Galactic Chemical Evolution

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

    Would you like to try the next challenge? In February, we are writing ekphrastic poems. You get to choose the topic, form, meter, length, etc., but your poem must be based on an image. We hope you'll join us. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on February 24th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

    I hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Jan Annino at Bookseed Studio. Happy poetry Friday, friends!