The Glosa

I have been on a bit of a poetry kick lately, so when I heard that our third assignment for Creative Writing was going to be to write poetry I was excited. When I read over the instructions for the assignment my excitement faded. When I write poetry I just write it. I don't follow and rules, I just write what comes to mind. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the starting of a poem in my head and I have to put it on paper. So I will stumble around my apartment, in the dark, looking for pen and paper. It seems silly but if I didn't write it down it would disappear just as fast as it appeared.

Some of these mid-night scrawlings have been pretty good. Well at least I think so. But my point is, when writing these gems down I didn't leave something out or put something in so that it fit the rules. I just let it flow. I just felt that that is what poetry was about, letting it flow, naturally. 

Well after I made my selection from the list of choices, I started my assignment.

I chose a 'glosa'

The glosa is an early Renaissance form of poetry that was developed by poets of the Spanish court in the 14th and 15th centuries. A glosa can be a tribute to another author. The opening quatrain, called a cabeza, is by another poet, typically one that is well known. You chose any four consecutive lines from one of their poems. 

The quatrain opens the poem, followed by four stanzas, each of which is generally ten lines long, that elaborate or "glosses" on the cabeza chosen. The tenth line of each stanza is a line from the cabeza. So the tenth line of the stanza is the first line of the cabeza, line twenty is the second line of the cabeza and so on.

The usual rhyme scheme of a glosa is, the last word in lines 6, 9, and 10 must rhyme. 

I have to admit, I enjoyed writing my gloss. It was challenging. Like trying to put together a complicated jigsaw puzzle. In the end I gained a new appreciation for traditional forms of poetry. I also ended up with a poem I am truly proud of. It may not be Shakespeare  It may not be your cup of tea. Heck, my teacher might even rip it apart, tell me it's crap. But I don't care. 

I tried something new, something I really did not even want to attempt... but I did, and I love it.