A Ring-terzanelle is a variation on the Terzanelle. Terzanelles were invented by poet Lewis Turco in the 1960s, and I discovered that form around 2007. I wrote several conventional Terzanelles, but found myself wanting to shape the form into something more my own, more reflective of my tastes and my love of symmetry and structure.
Like the Terzanelle, a ring-terzanelle consists of a series of tercets where the middle line of each tercet is repeated as the last line of the next. Unlike the Terzanelle, it is of unbounded length.
The key feature that makes it a Ring-Terzanelle is the ending, where the final tercet is identical to the first. This means that the middle line of the next-to-last tercet is the last line of the first tercet.
Because of this cyclic structure, Ring-terzanelles make for interesting narrative poems. The repeated lines create a very strict pacing, and recontextualizing each one creates pressure to keep moving forward. The repetition in the final verse gives a chance to reflect on how far the poet and reader have come, as the opening lines are now recontextualized by everything that came after them. Sometimes this takes on an entirely new meaning because of how much the context has changed, as in Beatrice's Rose, while other times it emphasizes the things that have not changed, as in Beloved I Would Write.
An aurynelle is a refinement of the ring-terzanelle form that introduces a thematic structure that exists in parallel with the formal structure. In an aurynelle, the ideas in each tercet in the first half of the poem build up to a central idea, and then the tercets in the latter half of the poem work their way back to a new view of the poem's introductory lines.
I find that the aurynelle is very good for processing strong emotions, because it forces me to pace out my ideas and put them into a structure. It gives me an opportunity to take a question or problem and work through it towards a goal, and then wind my way back. In Be The Girl You Love, the emotional struggle I was grappling with lead me through a series of thoughts that culminated in a line from James Blake's song Retrograde.
The name "aurynelle" comes from a portmanteau of the word "villanelle", the original form from which these other forms are ultimately descended, and "AURYN", the double-ouroboros in my favorite novel, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. This reflects the doubly-cyclic nature of the poem, having both a cyclic structure to its lines and a cyclic structure to its themes, which intertwine together the way that the snakes do in the version of AURYN shown in the 1984 film adaptation.