Hi everyone!

September is a season of transition. Here in Ontario, summer begins to loosen its hold. Days grow shorter, leaves begin to fall, and we find ourselves somewhere between what was and what comes next. Meanwhile, our friends in Australia are experiencing their own seasonal shift as spring arrives.

With change in the air, this month we’re exploring the descort, a medieval French poetic tradition built around the idea of discord.

What Is a Descort?

Unlike a sonnet, villanelle, or rondeau, the descort is not defined by a fixed pattern of lines, rhyme, or meter.

Instead, it is a poem of deliberate difference.

History

The word descort comes from the idea of discordia or disagreement. Medieval troubadours developed the form in the late twelfth century, creating poems whose lines or stanzas intentionally disrupted expectations. Variations in rhythm, rhyme, stanza shape, language, or voice reflected tension and emotional conflict within the poem itself.

Interestingly, in troubadour poetry, descort refers not only to the poem’s form but also to its content. The traditional topoi (recurring themes) of the descort are inner turmoil, emotional conflict, and unrequited love. In other words, the discord in the poem’s structure mirrors the discord in the speaker’s heart.

In this sense, the descort is less a strict form and more a poetic approach. The poem’s structure becomes part of its meaning.

One of the best-known examples is Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’s Eras quan vey verdeyar (c. 1197-1202), in which successive stanzas use different Romance languages, creating formal and linguistic discord that mirrors the speaker’s emotional turmoil.  Source

Descort Form

The descort differentiates itself from other forms by differentiating its lines from other lines within the poem. That is, the main rule of descort poems is that each line needs to be different from every other line in the poem. An undeniable twist from the norm.  Source and credit for the sample poem below.

THE MOTHER LODE

By Taylor Graham

How to make music of a burl.
This is an art gallery, don’t even think of music.
She found it in the land of ripe apples.
The Pony Express shook its roots, riding through.
Vibrations can travel all the way up
the trunk and flutter the leaves.
Remember when we got lost in the depths of canyon.
Big-leaf maple green-golden against dark.
Nature makes its own patchwork and swirls its designs.
You’re mixing genres again.
I was speaking of music, no, of art,
this is a muddle.
This is the picture of your mind that sings.

The writing challenge is to write a descort.

You might experiment with:

*varying line lengths
*changing rhythms or meters
*inconsistent rhyme schemes
*different stanza shapes
*shifts in voice or perspective
*fragments alongside complete sentences
*the use of another language or dialect
*unusual visual arrangements on the page

You don’t need to use all of these techniques, but keep in the mind the key principle: Let the discord mean something.

Rather than creating chaos for its own sake, allow variations in the poem’s form to echo, resist, intensify, or embody the subject matter.

Some possibilities:

*A poem about a relationship coming apart might itself begin to fracture.
*Conflicting memories might shift unpredictably between past and present.
*A poem about longing might repeatedly reach toward something and fall short.
*A poem about transition might move between opposing states before finding a tentative balance.

Nor does a descort need to remain discordant until the final line. Sometimes the most interesting tension lies in the moment when harmony almost returns, but never quite does.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

*Write a descort poem incorporating the elements as described above.
*Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below
and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
*You will find links to other poets and more will join so please do check
back later in order to read their poems.
*Read and comment on other poets’ work–we all come here to have our poems read.
*Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.