Double Dactyl

The Double Dactyl - what a cool poetic form!  I was made aware of double dactyls by the lovely Cath at The Picket Fence, who admitted that it sounded like a strange sort of dinosaur, which is what I'd been secretly thinking myself.

The rules of a double dactyl were difficult for me to grasp:

• dactylic meter, meaning that the 'feet' are made up of three syllables in a 'strong-weak-weak' pattern
• two verses of four lines each, each line having two of these dactylic feet (although the fourth and eighth lines usually have one dactyl followed by a single stressed syllable ... once you've understood this pattern of syllables, it's a piece of cake, I promise)
• the first line of the poem is a rhyming nonsense phrase - the hardest part for me, as I am just not that into writing nonsense phrases
• the second line is a name
• one of the lines in the second verse is a six-syllable word, and Cath kindly sent me a list of 1,500 six syllable words to choose from  Some poets add a rule that no single six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, should ever be knowingly used again.
• the ends of each verse rhyme, and the whole thing is usually humourous.

That's a lot to take in, but once you've read a few double dactyls, you get an 'Aha!' moment and understand the structure.

My friend Cath posted a double dactyl written by her friend, poet Will Mackerras.  Will's poetry blog, The Banjo Bible, is well worth a read and it includes a few superb double dactyls.  Read Cath's own double dactyl, which came with a short lesson in art appreciation.  Both were brilliant!

I wrote my first double dactyl in the comments on my sister's blog in her recent poetry posts while I was sleeping in the dorm at the campsite where we had our recent beach holiday.  When I came home, I realised another whole double dactyl was needed to fully explain my plight (as if a 2kg gain on the scales wasn't explanation enough.)

Does this make it a Quadruple Dactyl?  I am not sure.

Camp Food – Two Double Dactyls

Holey Kamoley
At Seabreeze Apartments
The weather was wondrous,
The cabins were close.

But I'll be needing some
Anticoagulants -
Though they did feed us,
The food was quite gross.

 - - - - - - - - -

Yuckity Pyuckity!

“Week-long camp nourishment”:

Mass-produced, deep-fried stuff,

Battered or canned. 

Cholesterol-laden with

Oil spots on napkins! Such

Inedibility!

This should be banned.

 - - - - - - - - -

(The name of the campsite, although dactylic, needed to be replaced with a fictitious campsite name.)

How much fun was that?  Not the eating the food, writing the poem!  I know you're itching to give it a try, so here is an A-Z of hopefullypromising six-syllable words, hand-picked from my list of 1,500.  This list is without an x-word.  A six-syllable dactylic x-word.  Sigh.  Clearly, that was too much to ask.

Antibacterial

Bibliomania

Characteristically

Disciplinarian

Extemporaneous

Fantasmagoria

Germanophobia

Horizontality

Impossibility

Juxtapositional

Lexicological

Megalomaniac

Nonsensibility

Octogenarian

Psychoanalysis

Quasiequivalent

Reputability

Sentimentality

Transmississippian

Unreproducible

Veterinarian

Weatherability

Yerwamaiduguri

Zoogeography

This poetic form is growing on me.  I particularly love feeling the cantering meter and then getting flattened with a six-syllable word of sheer brilliance!  I haven't mastered that yet, but I'm going to enjoy trying!