I am in Denmark for the month of August visiting my daughter and her family. She and her husband are here working, and the international school my grandsons attended is out for the summer. My job is being nanny, but it’s more like company, for the boys. An enthusiastic traveler, Emily makes sure weekends are full. On my first weekend here, we were off from their apartment in Aarhus to Northern Jutland to see the point where two seas meet. My son-in-law drove us the two and a half hours to Skagen, where we stopped for lunch, before going on to Grenen. We were not alone when we arrived at this most northern point in the country and walked a stretch of sand dune (my grandsons were surprised to find greenery growing in the sand–they, of course, expected a desert) to a white-sand beach. Each week in summer, this spot lures hundreds of tourists and Danish families on holiday, who check into hotels, campsites and cottages.

Tonight while everyone sleeps, tired and content from our out-of-doors weekend adventure, I am drawn not only to write but to make use of a lovely book I’ve brought with me, one my eight-year-old grandson, the younger one, gave me for my birthday this year: A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms.  His note to me had said he knew I would enjoy the book because his school has a copy and he uses it.

And now I will use it, too.

After flipping through the 29 poetic forms, beautifully and accessibly introduced in the book, I decided on trying my hand at a pantoum, because a favorite poet teacher of mine, Nelson Bentley, worked in this form writing about his daughter. “For Julie At Ten” is one of my favorite poems. It begins by setting a scene:

Snow comes down, a multitude in feather
Across the valley snow fills every pine.
Julian sits improvising on her zither,
Under a wall hanging of the tree of life.

And so I began to write by setting a scene and then following the pattern described in A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms:

Pantoum from Northern Jutland

                        for Emily and Vijay, who took me there

At the top of Jutland, where two seas meet,
my daughter and her family and me
stand with one of our feet in each of the seas
to see which of the two is the coldest.

My daughter and her family and me
take our time before we put in our votes
about which of the two is the coldest;
we know it is a very close match.

We take our time before we put in our votes,
my oldest grandson leaning toward the Baltic.
Though the two are a very close match,
sun heats the North Sea’s shallower ripples.

My oldest grandson sticks with the Baltic;
I remember as a baby he flinched in slight breezes.
The sun is certainly warming the shallower ripples.
I vote just as he does.

As a baby he flinched in breezes by windows;
I look at the smile of the swirls of the waves
and I vote now just as he does,
smiling at his height, how he’s taller than I am.

I look at the smile made by the swirls of the waves
and how the two seas seem a slit in a skirt
while I smile at my grandson’s height, how he’s taller than I am
and listen to my daughter say not a slit, but a zipper.

I see the two seas seeming a slit in a skirt
while I stand in the sand in the small space between them.
My daughter says not a parting, a zipper,
three generations fastened by waves and the water.

While I stand in the sand in the small space between them,
my daughter says not a parting, a zipper,
three generations fastened by waves and water.
I stand in the sand in the small space between them.

Here’s an explanation of the pattern for the pantoum:

The pantoum can be as many stanzas as you’d like, and each of the stanzas has four lines. The pattern is this: lines one and three of the second stanza are repeats of lines two and four of the first stanza. And then you keep repeating like this, making lines one and three of each new stanza repeats of lines two and four of the preceding stanza. To end the pantoum, lines one and three will be lines two and four of the previous stanza as usual. Then, line two will be line three of the previous stanza and line four will be line one of the previous stanza.

You can see that I didn’t think line one of the penultimate stanza would make a good last line but that line two would; so I took what I thought were liberties and repeated that line to make what I felt was a good ending. You have surely also noticed I took liberties, too, with the repeated lines throughout, adjusting where I thought that withf the new lines I introduced, changes improved the stanzas’ sound and sense.

When I was done writing, I looked up pantoum on the National Poetry Foundation site and read, “The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.” With the word “often,” I felt like I hadn’t exactly taken liberties and that my instincts hadn’t ruined my attempt at being in form. The site also shared “Parents’ Pantoum” by Carolyn Kizer, in which she radically alters words in the repeated lines.

Here’s what I did to make the pattern easier for me to follow as I created the poem:

I wrote out a first stanza.

Then I wrote lines this way to write the second stanza:

My daughter and her family and me
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
to see which of the two is coldest
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Then I filled in the lines that I’d left blank. These new lines would become lines 1 and 3 of the next stanza and I would again put in the X’s where I hadn’t written the new lines yet:

We take our time to think before we vote;
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
though they are a very close match;
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I kept doing this until I thought I’d reached an insight into why this image of us standing with one foot in each of the seas had special meaning to me. Then I started work on the last stanza. When I had them all, I went back to do some fine tuning.

****

You can read more about the history of the pantoum and about its past and its modern structure in Pantoum — A Dance With Words, a column by Violet Nesdoly.

I hope you’ll take a recent or past occasion, experience or memory and allow the pantoum form to help you mine it for what it means to you. My experience is that taking something special or idiosyncratic from an occasion (in my case it was my daughter’s idea to put one foot in each sea and try to decide which sea was colder) will allow you to start writing and then move along letting the pattern dictate where you go from there. Truly, it was fun and not at all grueling. I saw how a particular repeated pattern of language wove a spell and allowed me to find an emotional insight, an evocation of what I was feeling personally there at the point called Grenen.

Let me know your experience after you’ve tried this form. I look forward to hearing from you and feel free to post your pantoum in our comment box.