April 2017
Breathes there a poet who doesn’t love the sonnet?
I think I may have begun writing sonnets a few Buddhist lifetimes ago. At any rate, in this lifetime, like many other poets, I’ve found the form irresistible.
Here are four sonnets. The last three are offered as invitations:
But the first is a traditional religious sonnet, a Petrarchan:
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“Sea-faring Lord. . . .” Sea-faring Lord—lord of the telescope, Sails and mast, the prow against the waves, The distant island and the ringent grave, Deck and hold, net, harpoon, and rope-- Grip my clasped hands clinging to the mizzen-top, And with your storming make my sails concave; Heal the scourged back of the ocean-slave. You round my life. You are my Cape of Good Hope. And if my prayers to you are puny prayers, The miserable heap of secrets only you dispel, Send colors to my ears, and to my eyes oblique Gull calls of Hell. Lord, it is you who stares Through the empty sockets of the turtle shell And winds my soul and body with your marlinspike. from This Shadowy Place (St. Augustine’s Press) |
The second is a result of years I’ve worked trying to create a new sonnet form. Since a sonnet is a “small song,” it actually doesn’t have to be the traditional 14 lines of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Mine is 16 lines.
For the first stanza, the Nona, the rhyme scheme is a neat
ABC / ABC / ABC
For the second stanza, the Septimus, the rhyme scheme is
DEEDFFD:
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Dada Dada spread his fingers on a cloud of nails inching across the eyes of several tourists come to gawk at New York. Dada said keep your thoughts on how a train derails and angels love tunnels. On Dada’s wrists, lips turned into mirrors and loaves of bread leaned from the doorways, raggletails ending their stories. Dada in the harbor mist never wore a rainbow on his head. Say that for him. But Dada never stalked slowly though a pine forest, or climbed the stairs over a sleeping dog, and when my prayers nudged his shoulder, Dada only chalked narwhals on the backs of my kid gloves, elephants on stars. Still, still I loved to pull his beard and follow his jaywalk. from Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books) Note: I’d be tremendously pleased if others happened to like this rhyme scheme, and wrote some of their own sonnets using it. (For additional interest read down the first letters of the poem to find an egotistical acrostic.) |
The third type of sonnet is from a sequence I call a “Gerund Sonnet” or “Gerund Phrase Sonnet.” Jealous of the Japanese having their national haiku popular form, I’ve wanted to encourage an American form of the sonnet that’s very easy and even fun to write, requires no strict meter and only minimal rhyming.
It’s particularly useful for poetry workshops, helping cajole free verse poets into at least attempting something close to traditional form.
It can use the basic Shakespearean or Petrarchan or Miltonic form (or other rhyme schemes for the sonnet) as well as slant rhyme (slant rhyme and off rhyme and enjambment and varying line meter greatly encouraged). In the Shakespearean version, the rhymes are minimal, just four, one each for each of the first three quatrains, followed by the couplet rhyme:
ABCB DEFE GHIH JJ
A Gerund Sonnet usually uses the rhetorical form of “Process Analysis.” It describes an action while keeping, hopefully, something other in mind.
Here are two examples, the first with a slight variation on the rhyme scheme, rhyming
ABCB DEFE GHIH JH
so requiring only three rhymes:
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Raking in a Japanese Sand Garden I’m not wearing a robe and my head’s not shaven, nor am I trying to solve some impossible koan. And it’s been months since I last meditated or in a small tea ceremony patiently waited. Yet slowly, backing away from one more life boulder, I become calm, raking around it a curving sand river quietly flowing, and the leaves falling here. from Zen Master Poems (Wisdom /Simon & Schuster) |
and the second:
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Sending Morse Code I practiced often: dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot—that simple S.O.S. sent by telegraph key or flashlight flash everyone knows. Meaning “save our ship” or “save our souls.” Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, over and over. I sent it out to the universe by blinking my eyes, by tapping my knuckles on a classroom desk . . . by clinking a bottle cap against a cemetery stone. Save our Souls. Help. Mayday. Vessel sinking. We won’t be here very long. from Mockingbird |
Ultimately, I’m with those who would advocate an “American Sonnet.” This sonnet might also be akin to “American Zen,” which can be at once zany and serious.
To paraphrase the old sea shanty, the “American Sonnet” might be a sonnet with a belly that can be shaved with a rusty razor, put in a hold with the Captain’s daughter, tossed into the back of a paddy wagon and brought to jail.
To extend the metaphor, if the sonnet has both drunkenness (freedom; elements of free verse) and form (jail experience; Dylan Thomas: “Though I sang in my chains. . . .”), it may well be fit and fun to ship out onto our 21st Century seas, “Earl-eye in the morning,”
To paraphrase the old sea shanty, the “American Sonnet” might be a sonnet with a belly that can be shaved with a rusty razor, put in a hold with the Captain’s daughter, tossed into the back of a paddy wagon and brought to jail.
To extend the metaphor, if the sonnet has both drunkenness (freedom; elements of free verse) and form (jail experience; Dylan Thomas: “Though I sang in my chains. . . .”), it may well be fit and fun to ship out onto our 21st Century seas, “Earl-eye in the morning,”