found: The Princeton encyc. of poetry and poetics, c2012(Fatras (also called fatrasie, fratrasie, resverie). An irrational and deliberately obscure piece of verse that, originating in the Middle Ages, constituted a mode of licensed regression into unreason, absurdity, and nonsense in which pleasure is taken in the creative and willful defiance of sense that the verse form celebrates. It is generally lively and joyous in style, full of word play, ridiculous associations of ideas, and deliberate nonsense. Qua genre, however, it is not the incoherence of content that constitutes the fatras but its special form: a strophe of 11 lines, the first and last of which form a distich placed at the beginning as the theme of the composition. This is known as the fatras simple. The fatras double is formed from this by "restating the initial [distich] in reverse order, and adding a second strophe of ten lines ending with an 11th, a restatement of line one of the [distich]" Porter distinguishes between the fratrasie and the fatras, a later development. The former is invariably composed of a single strophe of 11 lines, and its content is always irrational; in the fatras, the opening distich introduces the next 11 lines, serving as their first and last line and imparting a uniform rhythm to the whole poem.)
found: Poetry magnum opus website, Oct. 22, 2012(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." The Fatras is: 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)
