Saturday 8 October 2016

Definition of a quad by Chris Mansell

Here is a quad - a strict form I invented and which has appeared in two collections (Stung, and Stung More) to date.

Here is the first quad in the Stung collection:


What a quad is:

  1. One quad comprises 4 interlinked squares, made up of 15 characters wide x 8 lines deep, exactly. (Obviously the font chosen is fixed width. They were originally composed on a manual typewriter.) 
  2. There is no punctuation, at all, including apostrophes. 
  3. There are no gaps at the ends of lines
  4. There are words within words.
  5. The black/red is not accidental. There must be some red characters on each line. 
  6. The reds form a (subsidiary) poem in itself, particularly as a sound poem. 
  7. The breaks and elisions in words, and the grammatical enjambment are not accidental and contribute to the meaning, imagery, rhythm etc 
  8. Subject matter can be anything: straight imagist as here, though surrealism is good.
  9. There are no titles, except for perhaps numbers.

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