More poetry: Can you try your hand at kwansaba?
OK, I’ll grant you that we’ve had our fun with poetry in the Talk of the Day — as recently as yesterday’s posting for the current events limerick.
But now I’m asking you to take another turn. Our story for Sunday by Doug Moore profiles Eugene Redmond, an English professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the EBR Writers Club. That’s the group that created a relatively new form of poetry called “kwansaba.”
According to Doug’s story, “It’s half the size of a sonnet, a cousin of the haiku, but clearly its own style of poetry. And now, at age 12, the kwansaba has grown from a writing exercise for a local writing club to a style that is catching on around the country and some parts of the world.”
The crux of kwansaba — seven — comes from the seven principles of Kwanzaa, celebrated over seven days. Kwansaba is a truncation of the word Kwanzaa and the Swahili word saba, which together come to mean first principle. It represents the first distinct mark that African Americans have put on poetry, Redmond said.
Doug’s story goes on: “To be a true kwansaba, the poem must contain seven lines. Each line must have seven words. And each word must have no more than seven letters. Exceptions to the seven-letter rule are proper nouns (and) some foreign terms…”
Here’s an example, from this web site:
His-Story, By Diondra Humphries
What would history be without your words?
His story can’t be told unless chanted
in our blues as yours. Only you
can tell how it swells falls swells.
The truth sits on your tongue, ready
to be spat out into the world
to change it for all its worth.
Hear Redmond talk about it, and read an example, here for Windows Media or here for RealPlayer.
So our Talk of the Day challenge: Write a poem in the kwansaba form. Show us what you’ve got.
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
My brain hurts…