Fatras

[Tinker]

Explore the Craft of Writing Poetry
French Verse

The Fatras, fatrasie, fratrasie, resverie, could be described as the ravings of a happy lunatic. The verse is joyously irrational with no clear direction and yet it has a unique defined structure. Originating in Europe in the Middle Ages it is upbeat, "full of wordplay, ridiculous associations, and intentional nonsense." NPEOPP.

The elements of the Fatras are:

1. a poem in 11 lines.
2. composed in a way that the 1st and last lines form a distich, a poem in 2 lines, that holds the entire theme of the larger poem. This is known as the fatras simple.
3. unmetered.
4. unrhymed.
5. written with clever wordplay and disconnected nonsense which set the tone. The fatras possible allows for some coherent text, the fatras impossible make no sense at all.
6. a fatras double when 2 eleven line stanzas are formed, with the lines of the distich reversed in the 2nd stanza. The last line is a restatement of L1 of the poem