Fene

[David_Kaine]

whispering fields by the mill                     older than even a clock
   slowly infecting livestock                   pleasant and peaceful until
kids then come home with a chill          forming a few tiny pocks   

entering, no need to knock                 grudgingly swallow their pills
easily passing through locks              nurses and doctors with skill
figure it came from the spill              figure it came from the docks
    anger as hospitals fill                      making its way up the blocks

bringing disease to the flocks          living by sheer force of will
    everyone else falling ill                  misunderstanding and shock
kids will cry 'fene' to mock                   enemies no one can kill

[dukealien]

whispering fields by the mill                     older than even a clock
   slowly infecting livestock                   pleasant and peaceful until
kids then come home with a chill          forming a few tiny pocks   

entering, no need to knock                 grudgingly swallow their pills
easily passing through locks              nurses and doctors with skill
figure it came from the spill              figure it came from the docks
    anger as hospitals fill                      making its way up the blocks

bringing disease to the flocks          living by sheer force of will
    everyone else falling ill                  misunderstanding and shock
kids will cry 'fene' to mock                   enemies no one can kill

In intensive critique, first, if column spacing is important, use a fixed font such as Courier (effectively, typewriter).  The effect in default font here is (close to) two columns, each centered.

If this is a form, it's very clever (the way A and B rhymes dance back and forth, with the reader wondering whether to make the leap or carriage-return to the next line).  The only break in meter is "livestock" - a variance is acceptable and sometimes welcome, but this one seems clumsy and perhaps unnecessary.  Since you have "flocks" later, perhaps simply "their stock" would work.

I make the time sequence roughly northwest to southeast, but all the lines deal with the same situation and can be traversed differently without losing meaning.

There are two possible problems with the last line of the first column.  The first is "fene," also the title, which I had to look up.  Once aware that it's a foreign word for a minor demon and/causing a disease, it makes sense.  "[M]ock," though, feels like forced rhyme - which tends to happen toward the end of a piece.  I can picture children using the word as an insult, not knowing quite what it means but something bad and personal/personified, yet not in a *mocking* way, exactly.  Maybe.  I'd use italics, without single quotes, to indicate simultaneously that "fene" is a foreign word and that it's shouted.  Perhaps an exclamation point:  fene!

So just those two rough spots.  It's good in that it forces the reader to pay attention, assembling the evidence.  Not a medical person, I'd diagnose anthrax.

[David_Kaine]

@dukealien

Thank you so much for commenting, it was making me dizzy and I needed a third (or fourth) eye!

I thought for sure this one was trying too hard- dizains/cleave poem. I tried reading so many things in dactyl hexameter to go for a more Hungarian feel, but I couldn't figure it out and hear the rhythms, and thought whatever this was might be close enough.

Ill definitely change the live stock line and maybe the mock line, this one will have to sit for a bit though, thanks again!

[milo]

whispering fields by the mill                     older than even a clock
   slowly infecting livestock                   pleasant and peaceful until
kids then come home with a chill          forming a few tiny pocks   

entering, no need to knock                 grudgingly swallow their pills
easily passing through locks              nurses and doctors with skill
figure it came from the spill              figure it came from the docks
    anger as hospitals fill                      making its way up the blocks

bringing disease to the flocks          living by sheer force of will
    everyone else falling ill                  misunderstanding and shock
kids will cry 'fene' to mock                   enemies no one can kill

I feel like we had something like this form in practice for a bit but I can't remember the name of it. It feels like a loose dactyllic hexameter.  I will say the meter feels overly dead stopped.  For trochaics, if you want that meter of metric verse it is nice to throw in some feminine rhyme. 

Actually, now that I look at it, it is dactyllic trimeter ABAB arranged in a way to look like heptameter.  Let me just experiment for a second to see what it would look like as that:

whispering fields by the mill
older than even a clock
slowly infecting livestock        
pleasant and peaceful until
kids then come home with a chill    
forming a few tiny pocks   

entering, no need to knock      
grudgingly swallow their pills
easily passing through locks         
nurses and doctors with skill
figure it came from the spill       
figure it came from the docks
anger as hospitals fill          
making its way up the blocks

bringing disease to the flocks    
living by sheer force of will
everyone else falling ill       
misunderstanding and shock
kids will cry 'fene' to mock  
enemies no one can kill

Actually, like this we can see it is an inconsistent repeat of A's and B's.  I like the rhyme scheme.  The trimeter feels a little like a chant with all the end stops.  There is a little fill, one metric sub on L3 that should probably be dealt with.  I feel like you use it to good effect here.  You have some cliche and a bit of filler you might want to address.  It also feels a bit like explication due to it never really veering off.  I suppose we can consider the cry of "fene" to be the turn here(?) but I wonder if it would make sense to deal with it a little more metaphorically rather than literally throughout.

Still, not an easy task and now you have yourself this poem.  Were there any specific areas you wanted feedback on?

Thanks

[David_Kaine]

@milo, thank you again for commenting!

would you say this doesnt work as a cleave poem because its not two different poems acting together to make a third, but rather uses unnecessary spacing for what all is really the same thing?

And would they not work as dizains because I use only two rhymes instead of four?

It reads a little like a cut up which bothers me

Also I dont understand what you mean by feminine rhyme

[milo]

@milo, thank you again for commenting!

would you say this doesnt work as a cleave poem because its not two different poems acting together to make a third, but rather uses unnecessary spacing for what all is really the same thing?

And would they not work as dizains because I use only two rhymes instead of four?

It reads a little like a cut up which bothers me

Also I dont understand what you mean by feminine rhyme

Yes, to the cleave poem.  To me, it looked like you took a poem and just eliminated half the line breaks and added some spacing.  I have a read a few cleave poems and they usually work as either side and as the complete poem.  Generally, to me anyway, they read a little gimmicky of course I suppose they can be fun.  They seem like a lot of work but what do they say - if you enjoy it you never worked a day or something like that.

So masculine rhyme, the one we are most familiar with, rhymes on the accent of the foot.  The reason this is so popular is because most poetry is anapestic or iambic which means the beat flows right into the next line. Take these four lines by Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

This is iambic, it finishes on the beat - daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM so that the next line can pick right up on the da.  This is great for reading because you get a nice rhythm.  
Now your dactylic lines are also finishing on the beat but they pick up on the next beat giving us DUMdada DUMdada DUM

whispering fields by the mill

older than even a clock
slowly infecting livestock        
pleasant and peaceful until
kids then come home with a chill    
forming a few tiny pocks   

You can see how it forces a pause before your next line giving an abrupt stop to the rhythm.  This is used to effect in poetry when the writer wants the reader to pause on a specific thought or at a time but if the writer just keeps doing it, it can feel kind of hurky jerky.

The solution to this for trochaic or dactylic verse is the feminine rhyme.  A feminine rhyme ends on the unaccented syllable

All of the men in our covenant
tend to look red-faced and silly
throw up their arms at the government
keeping one hand on their willy

or whatever, just a bit of nonsense but all feminine rhymes, see how they tend to flow better into the next line.  You can also check out the Double Dactyl threads in the practice section.  Dactylic verse can be hard to maintain for extended periods but there are some tricks.  One is anacrusis - add an unaccented pickup syllable to the beginning of a line which will have the same effect as the feminine rhyme.  Another trick is to write in anapestic or amphibrachic and "slide" the meter.  This is accomplished by adding or removing syllables to the beginning or the end.

Anyway, I am prattling on in your thread, hope I have given you some to think about.

Thanks

[David_Kaine]

More like sharing special interest, thank you again!