The Tweeolet
The view across the Hurkar Rocks, Eyemouth, to St Abbs.
No, the title’s not a typo. Or maybe it is at the moment. But my aim is for it not to be. Let’s start at the beginning.
The triolet
The triolet is a specific type of poem. One that I very much enjoy writing. In its paradigmatic form, it consists of eight lines structured as follows: ABaAabAB. The capital letters denote verbatim repetitions. So, the first line of the triolet is repeated as the fourth and the seventh. The second is repeated as the final line. The lower-case letters refer to unique lines which rhyme with each other. One rhyme is used for lines one, three, four, five, and seven. A different rhyme is used in lines two, six, and eight.
There are specific variants of the triolet that are characteristic of different traditions of writing. I’m not going to go into these because I’m not a historian of poetry and know little about the wider form. Suffice it to say, you can have great fun writing triolets that simply fit the pattern outlined in the previous paragraph.
That may very well be the first mistake of this post. There’s nothing ‘simple’ about writing any poem, let alone one that has a structure as tightly defined as a triolet. But the basic rules that govern its construction are straightforward and easy to get the hang of.
One final point before we move on from this outline of basic structure. Triolets can employ different meters. I tend to write in iambic tetrameter. That means lines of eight syllables, with the stress on the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth. ‘Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM’, is the pattern.
Cryptic crosswords
A triolet forces you to be exacting in deciding what you want to say. Although the structure can force the poem in directions that you hadn’t at first anticipated — I must say this is one of the joys of writing in this form — you are unlikely to end up with a good outcome if you do not have a clear idea of what the take-home message should be. This principle holds for most writing, as it happens. I have written extensively about that elsewhere, including in my ‘Five Principles’ article.
Five Principles of Effective Writing
The fun and challenge of triolet penning come in fitting your ideas into the structure. The first job is to get the first two lines established. Between them, these take up over half the poem. So, they’d better be good! Ideally, they should take on nuanced shifts of meaning each time they are repeated. Minor adjustments to these lines, upon repetition, can be particularly effective.
During the writing process, you inevitably find yourself mulling over questions such as, ‘what four syllables mean X, have the correct ‘da DUM’ rhythm, and end in a word that rhymes with Y?’ It’s not far off the experience of doing a tough cryptic crossword. Thankfully, with triolets you don’t have the added problem of a setter going out of their way to misdirect you. But the discipline of having to think like this is good. It forces you to be brutal with ideas because there simply isn’t room for padding. Every word matters. Even the ones that you use to provide rhythmic padding.
By ‘rhythmic padding’ I am referring to the solution that frequently suggests itself to a common problem. You very often want to start a line with a specific word, the first syllable of which is stressed. And that doesn’t fit with an iambic meter. So, you have to insert a single syllable unstressed filler word before it. Easiest is often an article, a preposition, or a conjunction. I find that I go for the simplest option to start with. But when the whole poem has come together, I go back to those words and invariably change them to make them work harder.
For example, in the triolet called ‘The Hurkar Rocks’, the sixth line started life as, ‘a witness now and evermore’. That mostly said what I wanted it to say. The Hurkars were a major part of the 1881 Eyemouth disaster in the Scottish Borders when 189 men lost their lives in a storm. Visible from the shore, families watched as many of the ships were wrecked on them. And, of course, they are still there, jagged, just beyond the entrance to the harbour.
So, change the filler article to ‘mute’ and you have an unstressed opening syllable to the line, which adds immeasurably to its impact.
Twitter poetry
The triolet already demands a super-tight structure within which we must work, and there are very few words available to say what needs to be said. In the circumstances it would be crazy, would it not, to add a further constraint. However, if we want to publish this on twitter then we have no choice. The whole thing has to fit into a tweet. Hence the new form that I have been constructing: the ‘tweeolet’.
The rules of the form that I have developed are that it must have a title, and it must be double spaced. Double spacing in twitter uses up eight extra characters. This is necessary to make the tweet pop out, and to ensure that the line breaks are properly noticed by the reader. And the whole thing has to come in at 280 characters, including spaces, hard returns, and punctuation.
It so happens that the first draft of a triolet written in iambic tetrameter tends to be a little longer than that length. So your title has to be short. And you often have to lose punctuation. Because you cannot emphasise text in a tweet I tend to surround the title with ‘* *’ (Markdown syntax that in other contexts denotes ‘bold’), at a cost of two characters. But that’s not always possible.
After that, you have to start compromising on the content. And that’s hard. But if you want to publish a tweeolet you simply cannot let it spill over into two tweets. You have to make it work. Each one I have tweeted has no characters to spare!
On 13th May 2021 I posted a tweeolet, entitled ‘Empty’. The poem has been liked and retweeted several hundred times. It has been turned into a song (Wiegman, 2021), and the whole concept of this form is now to be covered in a university module on digital storytelling and (wait for it) ‘Twitterature’ (Walker, 2021). Figure 1 shows a screenshot of another tweeolet I published on Twitter, entitled ‘Wave’.
Figure 1. Wave. A tweeolet.
It’s a fun and cool poetic form! What I am hoping is that the act of re-creating it for twitter will encourage more people to find out about this and other poetic forms.
References
Walker, J. on Twitter, 13/05/2021
Wiegman, R. in Twitter, 13/05/2021