Nonet

Someone once told me that I wrote Proustian sentences, and back then I had no idea what they meant, so I thought, it must be a compliment. Until I picked up Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and promptly fell asleep after reading the second page – then I wondered if I could still call that comment about my writing a compliment at all. Who knows?

Don’t get me wrong. I like Marcel Proust, and maybe because I write long long sentences (in case you haven’t noticed that in my writing), but I also love poetry, from the sagas of old to the counted rhythms of old and new. Most of all, I love the spoken word – words written on paper that jump off the page, especially when read out loud. It’s like making love with words both physically as I write them, and audibly when I listen to them.

Last year, I discovered nonets, a poetry style akin to haiku and senryu, with syllable counts per line. 5-7-5 for haiku and senryu, while a nonet goes like this: 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Start with 9 syllables for the first line, end with one for the ninth line. Hard to be Proustian with that, eh?

But it turned out that I loved the challenge of writing nonets, whether they turned out good or bad, just as I love the challenge or writing haiku and senryu. And so I started writing a bit here and bit there in 2013, and hope to write one for each day of 2014, though I don’t exactly post them on the exact days on here.

So I hope you enjoy just a few of my nonets here, and maybe even take up the challenge for yourself.