Podcast Script

Sean: Good morning (or whatever time it is…) listeners of Siena Saint radio. This is Sean Moran

Grace: and Grace Lewandowski

Sean: Today we will be presenting to you our first ever Radio Show. This is a first for us but I think you all will really enjoy it and I think it would be safe to assume you’ll be learning something new… This podcast is for a class we are taking here at Siena called, “Linguistic Architecture.” It is a class primarily focused on poetry, focusing on many kinds of poetry from the sonnet to the blues. The class has really opened the door to a new way of thinking about poetry and creative writing as far as how difficult it can be and all the work that has gone into these writings.

Grace: If anyone is interested in seeing specifically what we have worked on please check out our “Medium” pages. You may also use this page to follow along with our show today, as we may direct you to a few videos or pictures that will be posted on that page. You can find that page by (still trying to figure out how the listener can find our page. ) With that out of the way, I would like to introduce to you, our topics for the day, the Cinquain (SIN-CAIN) and the Quatern.

Sean: We first wanted to jump into explaining the life of Adelaide Crapsey, the woman known for creating the American Cinquain. While Crapsey did not invent the 5 line-poem, she did invent a distinct American version, closely inspired by the Japanese Haiku and tanka.

Grace: Born on September 9th, 1878 in Brooklyn NY, Crapsey attended a girls’ preparatory school in Wisconsin before going on to study at Vassar College, and passing away in 1914, at the ripe age of 34 from Tuberculosis. The majority of Crapsey’s works focus primarily on a confrontation with mortality, mirroring the life she was living while fighting her disease. The subject of death within Crapsey’s works took on a more significant meaning, as it was exemplifying her actual life and feelings.

Sean: In the year following her death, her only volume, Verse, was first published in 1915 as a posthumous selection of her works that included 28 Cinquains, which led to a critical acclaim for the form. Through her admiration of Japanese poets for their compressed language and formal aesthetics combined with her advanced knowledge of metrics, Crapsey developed a version of the Cinquain which she believed to be “the shortest and simplest possible in English verse”. As mentioned before, she created a a five-line syllabic poem containing two syllables in line one, four in line two, six in line three, eight in line four and two in the fifth and final line adding up to 22 syllables in the poem. Additionally, each line was stressed in a specific way. Cinquains are particularly vivid in their imagery and are meant to convey a certain mood or emotion.

• November Night — Adelaide Crapsey
• Listen…
• With faint dry sound,
• Like steps of passing ghosts,
• The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
• And fall.
• Subtly links autumn with death
• “Frost-crisp’d” — portrays the sound of crisp autumn leaves falling to the ground and being walked upon
• Image is formed of two elements: falling leaves and steps of the ghosts
• Something small and everyday (leaves) are compared to something large and timeless (the dead)
• Comparing the dying leaves to the footsteps of ghosts intensifies the simile between the two objects
• Ends with the word “fall” — very fitting for a fall setting