Song That Luc Bat

Song That Luc Bat
The Song That Luc Bat is another Vietnamese form. The name means double-seven six eight. The six-eight lines form a luc bat couplet, as above; this is preceded by a rhyming couplet of 7-syllable lines. (The Vietnamese are a delightfully wysiwyg people.) To chain stanzas together, the last syllable of each stanza should rhyme with the first two lines of the next. Three and a half stanzas of this can make a rather pleasant form (admittedly quite unknown to Vietnam), the Song That Luc Bat sonnet:
Making Tracks

Walking in new-fallen snow
I prefer always to go
Where none has trod before
To make my mark. The thaw will come;
Footprints must in time succumb
To Nature’s slow pendulum.
Till then my pugmarks stand,
And blaze a path, crisp and distinct,
On the whiteness darkly inked,
Individual, but linked.
Let others do the same –
But do not play this game to win.
You will lose when spring comes in.
The blanket of snow is thin.
If such things matter to you, you should note that this is not a sonnet at all, strictly speaking.

Pasted from http://volecentral.co.uk/vf/luc_bat.htm#Song%20That%20Luc%20Bat

My thanks to Bob Newman for his years of work on the wonderful Volecentral resource

My example

In Your Face Upper Case (Song That Luc Bat)

I was taught in forty-eight
poetry (to give it weight)
must have rules of its own.
Capitals must begin each line.

Kids absorb new rules just fine.
Rhyme and Caps thus did align
making poetic verse.
For me it was tautology.

Ten years later I would see
e. e. cumming’s poetry
and thought it was absurd.
Dogma disallowed that man’s style.

Lazy, I thought for a while,
scheme of poet to beguile,
and though he’s well acclaimed
still I’ve deigned to pass his work by.

Still don’t like it, but know why.
Change, when sensible, I try.
Upper case helps readers
when it falls where it ought to be.

It helped past type-setters see
Proper breaks for poetry.
Hence it helped all concerned.
Setting of type is now passé .

Now we’re free to have our say
aiding readers seems the way
capitals should apply.
They emphasize full-stops when used.

Still, their absence is abused
i, as me, can’t be excused
Dogma serves in lieu of
thought but bows at last to logic.

© Lawrencealot – August 21, 2014

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