Sonnet IV - Jetlag

Sometimes the best way to work with structural rules of poetry is to break them. One of my favorite simple examples of this is Keats' sonnet "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." Keats writes a traditional sonnet, albeit with a slightly tweaked rhyme scheme, but on the final line - "Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire" - he switches from pentameter to hexameter (in other words, he adds an extra metric foot). The way that Keats broke structure here to underscore the feeling of the final line fascinated me so much that I wrote an entire paper on it... although I don't think my grade was that outstanding, so I could be the only one who feels that way.

In any case, I was inspired during a particularly difficult commercial airline experience to try my own play on structure. While squeezed into the last row of a 747 full of loud people and louder children, unable to sleep and contemplating infanticide, I messed around with a Petrarchan sonnet (I don't even know why, maybe I wanted to embrace the suffering) in iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter. So see if the shorter lines make you feel as crushed an uncomfortable as I was when I wrote them. Also note the alteration of the final line, which I ripped off from Keats. Thanks, John!

Note: Since this is a Petrarchan sonnet, there is some unnecessary angst and sentimentality. It's like a rule.

Sonnet IV: Flight

Inside the screaming metal beast,
The bird that swallows humans whole,
Presses the body and the soul
With each regurgitated feast—
My skin is sore, my bones are creased
And cracked, and travel takes a toll
On bodies broken of control—
To sleep—it’s been a year at least.

My head rolls deathlike on my shoulder;
I’ll find a better way to fly
Or failing that, to fall instead
And as the cycled air turns colder
You’ll be with me against the sky,
Your shoulder soft and warm under my head.

Sonnet III: Good Taste

One rule about the necessary structure of a sonnet (though it isn't always followed) is this: the first eight lines will present a theme or argument, and the next six will begin a change or turn in this argument. It should all be wrapped up, neatly and succinctly, in that final couplet (the last two lines). This structure developed from the original Petrarchan sonnet, which also contained 14 lines but was clearly divided between the first octet (eight lines) and the final sestet (six, good, you're catching on) by it's beastly rhyme scheme.

Why beastly, you ask? Well, Petrach was an Italian, you see, and the Italians cheat at poetry by having a lot more words that rhyme with each other than we do. Which is just linguistically unfair, if you ask me. So if you try to write a Petrarchan sonnet in English, the result is often hilarious as you begin trying to find third and fourth rhymes for the same sound. This wiki sums the form up pretty accurately, if you're curious.

With my sonnet today I attempted to take a clear turn after the first eight lines, from the introduction to the theme into the deeper "metaphor" of the poem (metaphor is in quotation marks because I don't want to claim that this poem is deep, or anything). Extended metaphor, or conceit, is also a tradition in sonnets.

Sonnet III: Seasonal Flavors

There’s something everyday in apple pie,
An old familiar sense of standard fare,
A treat on which pie-eaters can rely
To always be in season, everywhere.

Not so for pumpkin – fickle orange gourd!
A flavor never found outside of Autumn
And ne’er could Shamrock Shakes,* although adored,
Be found past March by customers who sought them.

No longtime lover’s lips could match the taste
Of ephemeral eggnog with a hint
Of nutmeg, or hot chocolate deftly laced
With temporary Christmas peppermint.

Some flavors linger, winter through the fall –
And yet, the sexiest are seasonal.

*For those who may be tragically unaware, the Shamrock Shake is a sort-of minty, delightfully ambiguous green shake served at McDonald's in March, in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

In honor of Halloween: Sonnet II

Slowly but surely I gather my motivation to continue this fruitless task! Faithful nonexistent readers, I direct your attention today to the neologism, or the 'invented' word. Shakespeare, famously, brought hundreds words into the English language. What many people don't know is that a lot of these words (and indeed, a lot of neologisms in general) were simply old words used in a new way-- for instance, a noun used as verb, or a verb used as a noun, or a noun used as an adjective, etc. By using recognizable English suffixes (-ed, -ing, -ly), a word can be used as almost any part of speech, even if a particular usage isn't part of our actual vocabulary yet. The English language was still pretty flexible through most of the Renaissance, before the idea of a 'right' and 'wrong' grammar really came into play (sometime in the eighteenth century when a few douches wrote some grammar manuels and everyone got huge prepositional sticks up their asses).

So I present to you my Halloween sonnet, complete with my very own neologism (according to Microsoft Word Spell-check, anyway).

Sonnet II: Halloween Women

So many choices on All Hallow’s Eve
The night of unrestrained imagination
We plan for months so that we may receive
Our compliments on that year’s costumation

And wondrous is woman’s inventiveness!
A simple costume can be so much more–
A cat or witch, with some attentiveness
To detail, can transform into a whore!

See there, a pirate with uncovered breast,
Too fine and healthy to have suffered scurvy!
A fairy flits in fishnets, barely dressed
(And Tinkerbell has never looked so curvy).

Tonight we can be anything we choose–
So long as we’re in heels, and full of booze.

Sonnet I

Hi there, nonexistent readers! I would like to begin this blog by launching my own English sonnet cycle. What's a sonnet cycle, you ask? It's an interconnected series of sonnets, usually constructed around some central theme or taking the shape of a personal narrative. Shakespeare's is probably the most famous, though still tragically underread by high school and college students (who usually just end up reading Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet several times, until they're so tired of Shakespeare they'd rather poison themselves than read anything else in iambic pentameter). In the hopefully rare event that you have never read a sonnet or don't even know what a sonnet is, I think you should go read some of Shakespeare's; #138 is an amazing example of structure and wordplay.


Sonnet Crash Course

Since my goal is to inspire you all to be as fascinated with form poetry as I am, I'm going to be educational for a moment. An English or Elizabethan sonnet (also called a Shakespearean sonnet, because Shakespeare is just that badass) is 14 lines, broken into three four-line stanzas (or poetic 'paragraphs,' if you're not down with the lingo) and one concluding couplet. The rhyme scheme is traditionally ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, though it's common for poets to scrap this scheme and make up their own.

More important than the rhyme scheme, in my opinion, is the meter. If you've ever read a Hallmark card with a terrible-sounding rhyming poem, such as, say, this one I'm going to make up right now--

My dearest daughter, you know you are the best
Better by far than all the rest
And so I am writing this card to say
I hope you have a wonderful birthday!

--then you can understand how much meter matters to a form poem (this is also why the greeting card industry is not a fair representation of form poetry in general... curse them). So, if you look at this... horrifying example, you will notice that the number of syllables varies randomly from line to line, and also that the stressed syllables follow no apparent pattern.

Not so with sonnets! Each line may contain only ten syllables.*

Furthermore, the ten syllables must follow a pattern of unstressed-STRESSED, like the syllables in the words "above" and "today." Each pair of one unstressed and one stressed syllable is one iambic 'foot,' and there are five 'feet' in each line, giving us ten syllables, and the meter name iambic pentameter (where pent=five).

Most sonnets are well-constructed, thought-provoking, and thematically significant. My sonnets, however, will not be. This is because my love of poetry far outweighs my actual ability. I'm here to prove that you don't need to be a poetic genius to have fun with words. Case in point: Sonnet I, my interpretation of the classic plea to an unattainable lover!

Sonnet I - to Mr. Spock

There's something in your eyes and pointed brows

As warm and dark as moonless Vulcan nights;

Some magic in your gaze that can arouse

In maidens' minds a dream of dark delights.

For you I'd fight the Gorn with my bare hands

And learn the discipline of Kolinahr;

In seven years I'd yield to your demands

And guide you gladly through your next pon farr!

But love, to you, is just an altered state--

A sickness caught from sweat or flower spores;

So if a lady snares you for a date,

You tend to sober up before she scores.

And yet, I'd wait a lifetime for the chance

To go where no girl's gone before (your pants).

As you can see, some emotions are so profound that they must be expressed poetically. Tune in next time for Sonnet II!

*(Okay, actually, this is wrong. There can be an extra syllable at the end of a line, but it must be unstressed, like the 'er' at the end of 'remember.' I didn't wish to confuse you during your first lesson.)