The Pleiadic Poem

I wrote a little while back about the idea of the Poetic Alphabet as a writing goal for this year and how some letters were hard to cover off so I might have to create some forms of my own. The letter P was not one of those hard to cover letters, but way back in 2010 (I think), I made a spur of the moment decision while observing the night sky. “You know what would be interesting…” and the Pleiadic form was born.

Eventually, I formalized my “rules” for the form:

A single, seven-line stanza
Seven syllables per line
Each line starts with the same sound (spelling is a convention, after all, even if it’s been heavily formalized in modern days, and poetry is a spoken art)
Rhyme scheme optional

Background notes:

The Pleiades star cluster, an open cluster close enough to us that it’s seven brightest members are visible to the naked eye in a dark sky (I’ve also referred to it as the Mini Dipper, but I doubt that’s a first, either), has often, since ancient Greece, been referred to as the Seven Sisters, referencing a particular legend. Six are visible in slightly less than ideal conditions, and if you’ve got great eyes and a perfect site, you might be able to count as many as 12, although there are over 500 stars in the cluster.
Other ancient cultures obviously had their own names for the asterism/cluster but the number seven often features in the attached legend, and I grew up with the Greek name as with most constellations visible in the northern hemisphere, so it feels natural.

Over the decade and a half since, I’ve written several dozen of these to varying degrees of success (based on how I feel about the final product). It’s a fun little form and amuses me once in a while.

I absolutely do not claim to be the first one to come up with the basic form, although this particular expression of it is mine. If you have an interest in writing poetry and an interest in the night sky, it’s not a hard connection to make.

And it’s good that I’m not making that claim. I found (when I finally cared to look after I’d been occasionally playing with the form for several years) a page on the Shadow Poetry website referencing a named form called “Pleiades”, created by Craig Tigerman, the then-editor of Sol Magazine (a literary publication), that had the following rules:

A one-word title
A single seven-line stanza
Each line starts with the same letter as the first letter of the title

With a later refinement, added by another poet, Hortensia Anderson:

The lines are to be six syllables long “to represent the nearly invisible nature of one sister”.

You can see the similarity, but I’m also fairly sure similar ideas have been given form by a large number of other poets.

I have to admit, though, that the idea of tying in the title never occurred to me. I don’t always give my poems titles, fairly often just saving them to a file with the date and the name of the form. I’m not going to incorporate it into my version, at least not intentionally, but it is a neat adjustment.

But my version, the Pleiadic Poem (alliteration often amuses me, so it’s not a surprise to me here), is how I’ve taken care of the letter P in this year’s Poetic Alphabet challenge.

Be well, everyone.