Is form like sand? Can thoughts be manifested
While made to rhyme or metered to a beat
That's somewhat stilted? And, if sounds repeat,
Is poetry erased? We've all attested
To modern dictums: rhyming's been arrested
And meter's been abandoned. There's a beat
To Eliot, but it's gone tachy. Neat,
Intended structure's been confronted, tested,
And deconstructed... maybe it's enough.
Perhaps Petrarca's handsome plan's best junked
If Mister Death's the product. April's bluff,
"The cruelest month," was called, beauty's debunked,
And here, The Waste Land grows. Come, see where Buff-
Lo Bill, that blue-eyed boy, eclipsed "defunct."
3 comments:
Four transgressions, all intentional: feminine endings, purposefully book-ending the octet, such that they end with the concession of the sestet begins; "beat" rhymed with "beat"; the off-the-meter flip in line 12; and the across-the-flip name in the final couplet, with the "a" dropped. I am perhaps overly pleased with the couplet. This sonnet was prompted by a discussion in this month's Poetry magazine on form, and on whether an education in form is necessary to write well in free verse. I managed to get all my thoughts in here except one: a comment from a poet whose work I admire on the sonnet being an exhausted form. There's still time to edit and add that, but I'm scared to touch this sonnet further lest I ruin it.
Aye, dinna touch this sonnet further, unless some typo makes it blush an error. Instead, write a second, using its concluding lines to begin, a linked set of sonnets on the theme. That is what I did this morning when the first sonnet just failed to include (the sestet ran out of space) a moving feature. Maybe you will argue it is not the greatest idea or set, nonetheless, it did finally include all I'd intended, and that sans slaughtering the good original. You might anyway consider that, eh?
The argument proffered seems possibly to bolster the modern tendency for calling all plain speech "poetry" if the speaker/writer so wishes such ill-gotten riches. Or, rather, some of us find it more difficult than others to fully master a form, and laziness reckons that we need not expend the effort. Yet you should read in Mains' notes some of the tributes to the great pains of writing a good sonnet. I would have agreed when I first began sonneteering, that it is a weighty chore. Yet, granted the seeming success of so many by now, it seems mastered and merely the tool, the gilded cage, into which I pour whatever I desire. That intention is practically how I approached serious/dedicated sonneteering, in hopes of mastering the form. Insist on mastering it. Aspiring poets, don't lazily leave off, calling your seeming prosperous initial forays more than sufficient. I believe...well, you might see what you think of my "Being Romanced By...." sonnet/discussion more or less on this very topic.
Aye, and a beautiful concluding couplet to an Italian! Me likes well too, and I can readily see your seeming undue delight in it which I think is quite deserved. I confess similarly for my latest as well.
Ah, I did not notice your "transgressions" until you mentioned them, though time would have whispered them. I was too delighted with how well the feminine endings matched each other to see their faults. Just an acceptable means of tweaking the form a tad? Or to criticize? And all four sins were deliberate? Oh my. Shall you be absolved for such defiance?
How is death the by-product of chasing Petrarca's darling in his wake? Modern society is so immoral that all rules must be abandoned? To what end? Let us all never even get out of bed. It is too much work.
La, but my mind tends to try mending your intentional line 12. Wherefore did you do so?
Besides, we are none of us up to the Prince's standards, for he reportedly coddled his babies until each was a masterpiece, and I post ere the ink dries...to my chagrin at times as well.
I love how full this is and how easily the discussion flows! It rather leaves a sigh of satisfaction that so much is fit almost adroitly into the specified form's parameters.
Nuff said, yet so much has been left out. Awesome! I am liking it very well.
Happily, eliding the already-fragmentary "-Alo" to "Lo" allows a sonnet to start with that line.
I am all right by modern poetry, and personally find writing in a form to be easier in some ways, having difficulty myself when I try to write free verse. The form dictates my line breaks for me, so I do not anguish over them; when I do not know what to say, I speak into the form until it is full, and then there's a poem. The consequence of doing the job poorly is still a sonnet - a bad one, perhaps. Doing free verse poorly seems inexcusably, and the final result may be so bad that it cannot be called poetry... although, that said, I haven't seen such an example yet - just bad poetry, if I may be forgiven for calling it so.
In line 12, a lot of the difficulty was in constructing the line, but the more I toyed with it, the more I felt it appropriate to have a deviation squarely on the phrase "beauty's debunked." It reads smoothly if read naturally rather than iambically, but the "error" remains, and thus remains ambiguous. Is the debunking bad? Is the deviation the result of debunking Keats' beauty-truth? I just wondered, and liked the idea, and left it. Although, all that aside, if I could have fixed it to my satisfaction, I would have done so. But I could not.
The last two lines spun and spun. They were originally:
Without The Waste land here to cross, could Buff-
Lo Bill, that blue-eyed boy, eclipse "defunct"?
And I liked that. I liked it a lot. I liked it enough that I moved the lines, which were not originally the final (or even a couplet - they were lines 10-11, IIRC), to the end, and changed the end words around them to fit. But then I noted that Buffalo Bill's was written before The Waste Land, and the implication (that Eliot permitted Cummings) bothered me. So it shifted, enough I hope to remove that implication and instead paint both images on the same Dark Tower-inspired canvas.
Post a Comment