The Stanley Tools System of Versification is aimed at aspirant poets who’d be better off waxing their cars. Like most ill-conceived tuition it is based on analogy. The completed poem is seen as a wall built from multi-coloured flexible bricks which can be elongated and compressed. The poem’s dynamics are simulated by a wave form which ripples continuously along the wall, creating a rhythmic base and highlighting mismatched bricks. An early graduate of STSV I embarked months ago on a four-verse poem in iambic pentameter. Since I know little poetry, don’t read it much and know nothing of its making I was, to use a cant phrase, outside my comfort zone. But I felt disadvantaged, surrounded as I was by those who were producing sonnets in industrial quantities, tossing off haikus and terza rima and translating from the Czech.
My proposed poem sprang from juxtaposing a three-syllable adjective with a single-syllable noun. A month later I devised a phrase which summarised particle physics. After a further month I discarded the particle physics phrase. Brick building proved to be a snare. Flemish Bond unites bricks well but makes for monotonous poetry: di-di, di-di, di-di.
The incomplete poem lay rusting on my hard disc, the first two verses apparently unbridgeable. With what now seems like unmitigated gall, I asked Julia if she could help. After deferring to the greater skills of Lucy and Eleanor she agreed but simply publishing this request stirred my somnolent muse and an idea for the link occurred. I presently play with elongatable bricks. “Dodecahedron” takes up half an iambic line and I find that encouraging.
