INTRODUCING THE "MONOBON" POETIC FORM

I'm pleased to introduce a new poetry form, the "monobon" consisting of a prose paragraph followed by a monostich (one-line poem). I present the form's inaugural poem below, which is based on a true story of a recent cancer scare:

 

Without

 

Have poems always been conscious of mortality or has my aging recently passed some threshold that makes me now read poignancy in any poem? Prageeta Sharma* reveals relief when she discovers her “breasts are okay, just dense with benign cysts” and that her nurse told her those cysts are “from coffee or chocolate, two things I love.” This is from her poem “Annual” where she quotes me when I wrote (and forgot) on Facebook, “A problem with entering your sixth decade is that death is no longer unimaginable. To continue, you must renew your commitment to an art/poetic practice that most others find irrelevant. That renewed commitment is… hard.” I quote her now in this poem because Prageeta doesn’t know that I read her poem shortly after my doctor discovered a cyst in my left breast. Prageeta doesn’t know how I kept the news private and relied on the comfort of sharing her coffee and chocolate habit until my doctor confirmed the cyst was benign. “It wasn’t cancer, but it was still a brush with death,” I wrote in another Facebook post that concludes, “A brush with death is a potent muse.” With these words, I inaugurate a new poetry form I call “monobun,” a prose paragraph that concludes with a monostich. My first draft wanted to end this inaugural monobun by citing another poet and Facebook friend with this line: “Harry K Stammer says Death’s pause by your door ‘will fuck with your head’ long after the peevishly immortal Death ends its brush to move on with its breath turned dank and hair turned oily by wide experience whose breadth cannot avoid regret.” But the sentence’s length would diminish its visual impact on the page; nor do I wish to hearken Walt Whitman’s long monostich from his 1860 Leaves of Grass. Thus, I shall end this poem instead with

 

A life without is darker, especially without you

 

* After “ANNUAL” by Prageeta Sharma, The Bennington Review, Issue 12. 

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The Monobon is also inspired by its initial name of “Monobun” which is also a hairstyle which provides a metaphor I appreciate, a gathering of hair atop the head--above the brain--to clear one’s vision of impediments to seeing clearly before alchemizing what’s seen into the single line of the monostich:

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If any of you write in this form, please share your poem(s) with me!

Here's an illustration of my coffee and chocolate habit in my poem "Without," a real-life scene on my writing desk:

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Master poet Sheila E. Murphy who's known for writing in such forms as the ghazal, pantoum, and haibun--as well as hay(na)ku--also has just written a monobon which you can see HERE.