Poetry Challenge #251-Roll of the Dice
Know who coined the idiom “The die is cast”?
If you answered Shakespeare, thinking it one of the many idioms and phrases William Shakespeare coined for his plays, think again. It was Julius Caesar, and no not in the Shakespeare play either. The real Julius Caesar.
Technically, according to my go-to, Writing Explained.org, Roman historian, Suetonius, said, what Caesar said was Alea iacta est, the Latin phrase meaning “die is cast.” The year was 49 B.C and Caesar had just entered Italy with his army, thus starting a civil war.
Since then, the saying “the die is cast,” has come to mean that the dice—literal six-sided gaming cubes—had been thrown and whatever numbers had come up were the numbers that would be played. For Caesar it meant that it was too late to stop the war from beginning. He had already disobeyed orders, and he must win the war if he wanted to keep his life. On that cheery note, let’s toss some dice!
Poetry Challenge #251
Roll The Dice!
Topics for poems are all around us, but sometimes we don’t know how to start.
This is a simple exercise you can use as many times as necessary to create a structure for a poem.
Roll a pair of dice. The lower number indicates how many words should be on each line. The higher number indicates how many lines in the poem.
(If you don’t have dice, you can use the A-6 cards in a deck of cards. Or use a number generator on the computer. Or make slips of paper with the numbers 1-6 on them and draw numbers from a hat…)
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Warm up the dice with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s song “Roll the Dice”! It’s a winner!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #65-I Yam! Channeling Shakespeare/Popeye
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, 4 poems and 154 sonnets (that we know of). Of these, many of the plays and all 154 sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. Popeye guzzled spinach from the can and sang one truly memorable song, “I Yam what I Yam.”
What do Shakespeare and Popeye have in common? I Yam!
“I Yam” as in I-Yam-bic Pentameter. Iambic meaning a two-syllable soft-hard beat foot: “I-am” or “I-Yam”; Pentameter meaning five metrical of these feet, thus creating that singsong rhythm—da DA da DA da DA da DA da DA.
That pattern soft-HARD-soft-HARD-soft-HARD (like a horse gallop) is said to “fit the natural rhythms of English fairly well” in that it offers “enough structure to be memorable and enjoyable, without feeling sing-songy.”
Too, in Shakespeare’s case (and maybe Popeye’s creators, too) the words were intended to be memorized—not read. Mimicking the natural rhythm of the english language I am I yam I am I yam I am made memorization easier.*
If Shakespeare and Popeye could do it, surely we can to.
Poetry Challenge #65
I Yam! Channeling Shakespeare/Popeye
Can you write a four-line rhyming stanza of iambic pentameter?
Or, in Popeye-ese, four-lines each line five I-Yams long?
You can rhyme each pair of lines (AABB) or every other one (ABAB), whichever you choose.
Write on any subject you want or choose one of the prompts below.
I wish I could remember…
I love the smell of…
I’m waiting for…
Once you’ve got the rhythm, ala Shakespeare, try writing a complete 14-line sonnet.
BTW: “French and Italian frequently use six-foot lines, which correspond to about the same number of words but with more gender-marked endings,” (Literature Stack
Channeling Shakespeare Playlist:
*Cindy Faughnan nd I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge over 950 days ago. We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. If you join us in the 7-Minute Poetry Challenge let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Join the 7-Minute Poetry Challenge. Click on Fishbowl link below and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl)!
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