Monday, April 5, 2010

Awl what?

An awdl gywydd (double dd’s make a “th” sound) is a Welsh form of poetry. It’s pronounced owdl gow-widd, or at least that’s the closest my non-Welsh speaking talent can get it.“Awdl” means ode and when I figure out what gywydd means, I’ll let you know. Unless we have some Welsh speakers among the readers, which feel free to correct my dumb American ass. :p

The stanzas are quatrains, meaning four lines to a stanza. Each line has seven syllables with end rhyme and couplet binding. So it looks like this:

* * * * * * A
* * A * * * B (A could shift to 3rd or 4th syllable)
* * * * * * C
* * C * * * B (B could shift to 3rd or 4th syllable)

Guidelines: Mid-line rhymes can be half- or off-rhyme, using various elements of consonance and assonance, but the main rhyme (B) should be perfect.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.

Again, this was from PoetryBase, but Celtic Poetry offers lots of good stuff.

There’s a ton of Welsh poetic forms out there and while I haven’t read much Welsh poetry, I’ve liked what I have read, if that’s any endorsement. At risk of starting to sound like an advertiser for PoetryBase, at their page they have a function to search poetic forms by origin and again, Celtic Poetry offers a wealth of resources for Welsh forms. Maybe I’ll try to branch out tomorrow and do sestinas or something. But anyone can do a sonnet. How fun is it to work with a form you can’t pronounce? (I just became a geek, didn’t I?) Oh well.

Happy poeting.