Alliterative Acrostic Trigee? What the Heck is That?  July 2, 2008 - October 13, 2008

A friend here on the cafe recently challenged me to write one, thinking it would be too hard. I think there just may be another literary nerd on here who is capable of this type of wacky word-smithery. In fact, I think there might be three or four, or maybe... more? Someone's going to be up to the challenge, I think. I know I'm not the only word nerd here on a site for writers.

So you know what alliteration is (or if you don't, it's the repetition of a consonant sound in a line or in an entire poem, such as "rubber baby buggy bumpers full of bananas busily bouncing about in a Balkan bay".... (had to expand that old standard to be at least slightly original).
You know what an Acrostic is, of course... (you know, when you spell a word with the first or last letters of the words in the lines of the poem...) but do you know what a Trigee is?

I actually didn't, and couldn't find many sources of information, other than a couple of samples. Here is one sample- see if you can look at it and figure out the form, but then I'll explain it anyway for those of you who don't like puzzles as much as I do.

Trigee #3 by TD Euwaite, posted at the folowing web address: www.e-answer.net/arts-a-humanities/398-poetry/116037-redo-of-trigee-

Trigee #3

no soldier wants . . . . . . war with men who dream
to be immortal . . . . . . . . senselessly peaceful
with the living ghosts . . . . among brothers and sons
of the ancients . . . . . . . . . with no blood to shed

I'll give another sample if this one doesn't make the form clear enough.

This piece is another by TD Euwaite, who claims to have invented the Trigee:

Trigee #2

Lets go down . . . . . . . . . . . The same old walkway
to the beach with . . . . . . . . our red sandals remembering
our new bodies . . . . . . . . . . years before, wanting
to frighten young boys . . . . more than unrequited love


Do you notice what the form entails? The poem can be read both left to right and line by line as a normal poem would be read, but there is a purpose for the separation at the middles of the lines. If you read straight down, each of the separated parts forms a tangible poem as well. Notice also that there is an economy of words. No trigee will ever be long. I followed Euwaite's examples and made mine of four lines, or eight when separated.

Now that you know what a Trigee is, and you already knew what alliteration and acrostics are... you can put them all together, like I did in this poem, I called I Ran Iran, thanks to the Acrostic words I spelled, in order to alliterate more easily, down both parts of my Trigee:

I Ran Iran (alliterative Acrostic Trigee):


I am truly inspired to............ Instigate another uprising

Reveal to you my radical........Really revolutionary idea:

Anxious new plan for you.......America has awakened and

Now that we've grown...........None dare stand in the way


See? It can be done. But I know it can be done better than I did it. So I want to see you try. :) Be good sports, if you feel like trying a new form that no one other than me has possibly ever tried before. (The Original Trigee form itself seems to be rather rare, at least online). You can do it!

*Huge kudos to Todd Bailey here at Writer's Cafe, who actually invented the form by challenging me half-heartedly to create one in a review on one of my other experimental works.

Constance

A Small Town in, KS

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Created Jul 1, 2008