[Susan McLean]

Call for submissions of poems in French repeating forms

From Apr. 25 to May 15, I will be accepting submissions of poems in the French repeating forms for an event that I will be hosting with Distinguished Guest Bruce Bennett. To encourage submissions in a range of forms, he and I have decided to accept two submissions per person, so long as they are in different French forms. Both poems should be included in the text of the same message (no attachments, please). I will strip the names from the poems before sending them along to him, but I will not be screening out any entries. He would like to see all of them. Since he will know which poems are from the same person (though not the person’s identity), he will be able to avoid selecting two poems by the same person. He will choose between 12 and 14 poems to comment on and will start posting them, two per day, on May 27. This is not a bake-off, so I think it should be viewed more as a showcase/master class in French forms. Everyone is welcome to comment on the poems, but I am not planning to have a vote on the best ones of the poems selected. After all of the poems chosen have been posted and commented on, I will identify the writers of each.

Here are the most commonly used French repeating forms (among writers of poetry in English):

Triolet
Villanelle
Ballade
Rondeau
Rondeau redoublé
Rondel
Roundel
Kyrielle

Also allowed for this event:

Sestina
Pantoum
Terzanelle
Paradelle

Descriptions of the characteristics of each form are available on Wikipedia and in a number of books, such as Lewis Turco’s Book of Forms, so I have not included descriptions of them here. I am not ruling out entries in the lesser-known forms, but if you choose to do one of them, please put the name of the form in parentheses next to the title. Some of the forms occur in more than one format or length, so I am not specifying which of those formats to use. You may send published or unpublished poems.

Send your entries (in one message, as described above) to me at this address by midnight, Central Time, on May 15:

susandotmcleandotpoetryatgmaildotcom

For your subject heading, write “French forms.”

I look forward to reading your entries and to hearing what Bruce Bennett will say about the ones he chooses.

Susan