| A 20-consonant poem uses each of the 20-consonants exactly once before
repeating any of them. Sometimes, a poet may use the Mississippi Rule:
to repeat a consonant indefinitely so long as no other consonant intervenes.
For example, in the navigation bar below, the poets has repeated the S
in “essays”:
poetry . essays . joey zoey . FAQ . video & audio . go back home . email . lynx . ww I wrote my first 21 Consonant Poem—“IFel in Ove”—in late 1992. I spent the next few years encouraging people to write this way, collecting their writing, publishing humble anthologies of 20 Consonant Poetry, and even teaching it in high schools, universities, and The School for Designing a Society. It started in the Hampshire College library in 1992 when Joe Futrelle, then a student of 12-tone music, proposed (as a joke) 26-letter writing. It quickly became clear that there weren't enough vowels in the alphabet to pull that off (“Mr. Jock, TV. Quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx” is the only grammatically coherent example I know of), but that one might serialize just the consonants while using vowels freely. In 1993, Rick Burkhardt proposed two helpful innovations —considering Y to be a vowel even when used as a consonant (Y is a vowel in “psychoanalyze” but a consonant in “yoyo”), and repeating a consonant as many times as you like so long as no other consonant intervenes. Mark Enslin perfected the technique of the retrograde with his unforgettable poem "Albuquerque Blues" and also proposed (and wrote) 24 Consonant Phoneme Sound poetry. Susanne Belovari completed the first 20-Consonant matrix, and Andy Foland and I figured out an all-interval row, and I built a matrix with it. Many other variations have followed, including, in 1999 at the Community College Articulation Conference, a poem which used the 20 consonants once each as a consonant, but using them freely as vowels (he was a speech therapist). In the course of our enthusiasm, we did three 2-hour radio shows composed exclusively of 20-consonant songs, radio plays, scripts, poems, stories, and interviews. Eventually, the process of compiling (mostly other people's) work into self-published print anthologies lost its momentum (as the anthologies got bigger, it was like pushing a gigantic snowball uphill). And eventually it occurred to me that the web was a better medium for a project that was inherently collaborative and required frequent updating. (someone who had listened to thone of the 20-Consonant Radio shows built the first 20-Consonant website, which has since been abandoned). I 20-Consonant Poetry can be a hell of a lot of fun, but only if you write it. |