Have cinquain poets varied from the form as envisioned by its creator, Adelaide Crapsey? Madeline Eastlund thinks so, writing passionately about accentual-syllabic prosody in the introduction to her chapbook, Cinquains for Tea Time.

Designed as a teaching aid for the many poetry workshops and readings Eastlund organizes and attends through her involvement with the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, this slim nine page saddle-stapled chapbook contains sixteen of her previously published cinquains from publications such as Amaze: The Cinquain Journal, American Poetry League Bulletin, The Angels, Crum's Crumpets, Dream Shop, Hartford Courant, Laurels, Manna, Moccasin, No Name Newsletter, Pasque Petals, Poet's Forum Magazine, Prophetic Voices, and Wide Open, in addition to one previously unpublished cinquain.

Eastlund's belief that meter is paramount for cinquain construction is reflected in cinquains where the author's intent is to follow a 1-2-3-4-1 accentual form instead of a strict 2-4-6-8-2 syllabic form:

Spring Vignette in New England

Sing me
a song of Spring
bird song drifting on the breeze
and the hint of hillside's greening
through snow

and

After the Funeral

Sunset
on the horizon
is glowing an orange-pink
but on the path no silhouette
of you

Although Eastlund describes the stresses as iambic, neither poem is strictly iambic. The first contains trochaic and anapestic feet in addition to iambic feet and only contains ten stresses instead of the required eleven. The second has eleven stresses but not all iambic. Since metrical scansion can vary with each reader's voice, it is possible Eastlund scans these poems differently than I do. Frankly, I think the fact that these poems are not completely written in regular iambic meter gives them a musical quality that would be missing if they just thudded monotonously along thus:

th-thud
th-thud th-thud
th-thud th-thud th-thud
th-thud th-thud th-thud th-thud
th-thud

The soft "s" sound and long "e" sound alliteration and assonance in "Spring Vignette in New England" enable the reader to hear the breeze softly singing of spring as the poem is read. The end result is a scene of beauty conjured for the reader.

Eastlund finishes out her collection with a two-page free verse poem, a poetic rant told from the viewpoint of Adelaide Crapsey about the cinquain, the practice of referring to a cinquain as a "Crapsey cinquain," and the aesthetics of composing cinquains with "iambs" over syllables.

My personal cinquain philosophy differs from Eastlund in that I believe while it is true Crapsey initially visualized the cinquain as an accentual form because of her metric studies, in the end, she herself moved towards accentual-syllablic prosody. I favor syllablic prosody for an international audience and for publication in Amaze due to regional differences in pronunciation, which can lead to difficult differences of opinion as to how many stresses a given cinquain may actually have. However, even with this difference of philosophy, I whole heartedly recommend Cinquains for Tea Time as an essential addition to a cinquain poet's bookshelf.

--Deborah P. Kolodji