There is only one entry under “J” in William Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices, but all is well. My inability to write anything illustrating the particular tradition described therein has led me back to an old mountain song my grandmother used to sing, to Peggy Seeger’s website, and, ultimately, to a new poem … and maybe even a series of new poems. Today’s device:
Jongleur: Roughly from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, throughout France and Tuscany and northern Italy, Jongleurs were entertainers (acrobats, actors, musicians, singers) who originally wandered from town to town offering their arts for a fee. Later, these Jongleurs became official fixtures of the various European courts as jesters, clowns, and reciters of poetry.
At first the Jongleur did not create his own poems but drew from a repertory of ballata and canti and chansons de geste, but by the twelfth century the minstrels or trouvères or Troubadours of Provencal and Tuscany were writing their own poems to be sung.
So, the Jongleur tradition is a tradition of sharing poems through song. Packard further explains, about the Troubadour:
The Troubadour poet (from tobar, to invent; also from trouvère, to find) usually sang of courtly love – the ethereal, extramarital praise of any Lady who inspired the poet to virtue and to moral excellence and achievement. Sometimes the Troubadour’s songs followed specific conventions, as the following list indicates:
canzo – song of love
balada – story in verse
plante – elegy or dirge for a lost lover
serenade – evening song
alba – dawn song, when lovers realize day has come and they must part
Continue reading “I Cheated the Prompt, and then I Cheated Myself: April 14 Poem”
Talking to Myself ... eavesdroppers welcome 