“A Cretan does not say in plain words what he feels,
With mantinades he weeps or with laughter he peals!”

From couplets sent by SMS from Yorgos Vittoros, Mayor of Kparissi

Whose  garden are you blossom to, to whom do you belong?

Whose velvet down, whose feather are you, whose rejoicing song?

By Manolis Pasparakis (blind rhymester)

My heart, it doesn’t fool me, even with the games it plays:

All my nights are dark, but that’s the same with all my days.

From Yannis Pavlakis’s Cretan folk poetry collection

Take a look around you when the trees are all in bloom,

And wonder why you’ve chosen that old desiccated broom.

*

The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught;

It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought.

*

When they open wide the church doors to bear his body hither,

I’ll drag forth such a savage cry the wild greens will whither.

*

I want my darling filthy—it’s the dirty girl I trust—

To keep her to myself and make the rest flee in disgust.

From the bard of Sitia, Crete, Yanni Dermitzaki

Lower your branches, little one. This favor’s all I seek,

Because when lightning strikes, my, dear, it always finds the peak.

(Translated from Greek)

Upon reading these poems after seeing He’s Just Not That Into You at the dollar theater at Restaurant Row

I have a band with my fellow classmate, Emily. We write songs about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hamlet, and other works of genius. We write rhyming songs, usually in the couplet style, and we pride ourselves on cleverness and wit. Witty titties—that is what we are. We twitter and text each other our rhymes and compose songs based on these rhyming triggers.

So, sitting at the bus stop (my location 80% of the time), I read these and read these again and then read these one more time because they accomplish in two lines what I often cannot. I was in awe of their skill and cleverness and skill. The couplets deal with large, universal matters—big stuff, so to speak. It’s ironic that these poems, two lines long and about fourteen to fifteen syllables at most, manage to accomplish the task of tearing the universe apart and then building it together again.

Obsessed with these poems as I was, I looked them up online to find more information.

I found some technical stuff about the couplets, called mantinades. The mantinades are in fifteen-syllable lines, an iambic “fifteener.” Fifteener is the meter that the Erotokritos, a founding document of demotic poetry for modern poets, uses. It’s also the rhythm that drives Greek rap music (fifteeners on speed) as well as protest slogans (fifteeners on steroids). The translators mention that they often took liberties with the fifteen syllables, partially because they wanted to recreate the wit and wordplay of the poems and partially because English tends to prefer ending in “da-Dum” not “da-Dum-da.”

Much in the way that Americans have “rap offs,” Greek rhymadoros have couplet-offs. Particularly skilled rhymadoros even perform at weddings, baptisms, funerals, and inaugurations. Poetry slams are called mantinadomachos. Like Emily and I, often times teens text message couplets to each other. It’s as much a part of their modern culture as facebook statuses are to us. I love that.

A typical example of a rhyming coupleteer is Andreas Papyrakis, in his sixties, black waxed mustache, black riding boots, illiterate but with a deep knowledge of musical traditions, a lyre player and always of good cheer. He says good couplets come to him only when there is a strong “opposition” in the house. If he bumps into another coupleteer or speaks to one on the telephone, there is a rapid exchange of rhyming volleys before they get to their first hello.

Often the rhymadore repeats the first line to build suspense and then releases the second like an axe, earning applause if it is truly complex or surprising: implying the whole from the detail, breaking up and rejoining the universe in two lines. For the rhymester, the couplet is an obsession, a livelihood, a talent, a war, a proof of life.

Here’s my attempt:

By Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, modern rhymester

I spoke aloud what I thought, in the future, should happen to me.

But then I was eaten by a giant monster from the sea.

*

Jealousy creates a dark hole that no one can ever fill,

No matter how hard you browse their Facebook, and with passion will.

*

Between us lies mountains, oceans, border guards, and streams.

But we still speak secrets with letters, Skype, smoke signals, and dreams.