Hello All, here is Björn with a prompt that I hope will give us some great poetry. It is a form that I first became aware of when reading this week’s Quadrilles and came upon the poem by Jane Dougherty which was written as a Cadralor, a form described in the poetic journal Gleam as:

The cadralor is a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?” 

It is left to the poet’s discretion to decide how much, if any, contextual connection or linguistic connection will exist between the stanzas. The more unrelated in context, the sharper–riskier–the poem. Ultimately, the more unrelated the stanzas, the more successful the poem will be as a cadralor: they contain oblique connections that are illuminated by the fifth stanza. End punctuation between stanzas is also at the discretion of the poet. 

I must say that my first thought went to the poem “Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird”  by Wallace Stevens which we featured a while back here at dVerse. Given how many great entries we had from that prompt, with many poems also becoming part of our anthology I thought we should try to write cadralors here.

In addition, since today the Nobel Prize in literature was announced I give you the option of being inspired by:

Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.

Av PalFest – originally posted to Flickr as Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, CC BY 2.0,

I must admit that I had never heard about him before. He was born in Zanzibar in 1948 when Zanzibar was still a colony under United Kingdom. He moved for his studies to England and first studied Science before moving on to become a teacher. Writing came gradually and he said that he never considered writing a career but rather something you did because you had something to tell. If you want to write a poem based on a topics such as exile, migration and colonalialism you can do that as well, in the form of a Cadralor or not.

I will leave you with a quote:

“I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea

As usual here at dVerse you may link up your poem by clicking Mr Linky below, adding a link directly to your poem. Leave a comment below and take part in the discussion if you want and of course visit and comment on as many poems you can muster. 

But most of all be kind and have fun.