Pantoum links

The pantoum defined, in our glossary of poetic forms.

Among the most famous examples of the pantoum in French is Charles Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du Soir” from Fleurs du Mal, posted here with four different English translations.

The pantoum form is peculiarly suited for the circling obsession of grief—a powerful example is Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s “Stillbirth,” which you can read and hear at the Academy of American Poets site.

“Iva’s Pantoum” stretches the pantoum form by changing the pronouns in its chanting, repeated lines: “I am the woman who makes up words. / You are the woman who shapes / a drinking bowl with her fist in clay. / I am the woman with rocks in her pockets. // I am the woman who shapes. / I was a baby who knew names. / You are the child with rocks in her pockets. / You are the girl in a plaid dress.”

The lyrics of this song, sung by picture bride Mei Li in the first act of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1958 musical Flower Drum Song, are written in the form of a pantoum.

Felix Jung’s short pantoum was Flash-animated to reveal its line-by-line construction—a wonderful new-media visualization—but now it’s posted in plain text at the Wondering Minstrels site.

Robert Hass selected Donald Justice’s pantoum for his “Poet’s Choice” newspaper column, and it’s an interesting example, capturing the endurance of the poor in its repetitions and appending a deprecating line after the poem circles around to its beginning again: “And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.”

Carolyn Kizer’s pantoum, in text and RealAudio at the Academy of American Poets site, is a loosened—and lovely—example of the form, recasting most of the repeated lines for their context in each stanza.

The cycling repetition of the pantoum form seems ideally suited for ruminations about the passage of time and for meditations on the human experience of aging, as in this lovely pantoum by Linda Pastan.

This pantoum is unusual in that it takes the form of couplets with interlocking repeated half-lines rather than quatrains with repeated lines, but it’s still quite shapely.

Stallings’ pantoum harkens back to the strict rhymes, short lines and overall brevity of the Malaysian folk poems, pantuns, from which the modern pantoum was derived.

Anne Waldman’s long, sinuous and beautiful pantoum is reprinted with her comments about the form in Annie Finch’s anthology, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.

Cecilia Woloch’s “Bareback Pantoum” begins and ends, classically, with a single topic line—“One night, bareback and young, we rode through the woods”—and stretches its irregular lines in between to carry the rhythms of a wild ride—“the pounding of hooves and the smell of smoke and the sharp sweat of boys”—wonderful!