Labyrinth Men

By John Beach

Labyrinth Men is John Beach’s ninth collection of poetry. The 36 terzanelle poems in this collection are mostly the ranting of a middle-aged man who’s feeling even older than that.

The terzanelle is a French/Italian adaptation of the terza rima to the villanelle form. Each terzanelle is meant to be 19 lines long (ten syllables each), composed of five triplets with a concluding quatrain, and are written in iambic pentamater. I don’t pay much attention to where my metrical feet are stepping, but I enjoy the puzzle-like nature of this form and the subtlety of the repeating lines, the variations in meaning. I also enjoy breaking the lines and changing punctuation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Beach
• Release date: Oct 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370175857

John Beach

John describes himself now as “the evolutionary result of Paperboy to Grocery Store Worker to Professional College Student to Magazine Editor to Computer Night Operator to Jr. Database Programmer to System Administrator to Computer Consultant to College Professor to Dean of Information Technology to Retired Old Guy Who's Really Not Old Enough To Be Retired.” He’s always been around writing and has used it daily in his professional life. He's used it in his leisure time, too, often when he plotted out D&D adventures that he and his players communally craft together around the dining room table and on Zoom. John’s always loved stories, always had them forming, churning, and reshaping in his brain. It wasn’t until he began closing in on an early retirement (for health reasons) that he began to get those stories out of his head and into text documents and then released into the world through ePublishing.You can visit with John on Facebook. He’d love to hear from you regarding his written work (and your hobbies), and he would greatly appreciate it if you could write reviews for his books. Ask him for free coupons if you need them. He only puts prices on his most recent books so that people will take them more seriously. The money’s not important: his stories and poems just want to be read.

Book preview

Introduction

Labrinth Men is a collection of 36 poems written by a middle-aged man who’s feeling even older than that. When he renders his rants onto paper, his go-to poetic form of choice is the terzanelle.

The terzanelle combines elements from the terza rima and the villanelle. Terza is italian for one third (of three equal parts), while rima means rhyme. Each stanza of a terza-rima poem contains three lines—often ten syllables each—and the poetic structure uses an end-rhyming pattern: ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on. A terza rima poem consists of any number of these interlocking tercets, but it usually concludes with a couplet (or a single line) rhyming with the second line of the last tercet. The subject matter can be about anything, but anecdotes or descriptive portraits are popular.

The villanelle began life as a loose, ballad-like song in France. As it matured, the villanelle gained more formal structure: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. It uses the end-line rhyming structure of A1bA2, abA1, abA2, abA1, abA2, abA1A2. The A1 and A2 lines appear four times each, end-rhyme with each other and with four other a lines. In between are five rhyming b lines, which end-rhyme only with themselves. Due to the regular repetition of lines, a villanelle tends to showcase obsessions.

The terzanelle combines the interlocking transitional mechanism of the terza rima with the obsessive, yet not-as-obsessive nature of the villanelle. It features five tercets and one concluding quatrain, 19 ten-syllable lines (ideally using iambic pentameter), and only four of the poem’s lines do not repeat. However, since no single line is echoed more than once, the poet has some increased