Sonnet № 138346
Sonnet
Off-work Sundays we walked to tide pools,
shoppers at a bazaar: here sea glass, here
miss, here the urchin, here a clavicle
of deadwood scrubbed white, bullâs-eye seastar, here
black hobnailed rocks. The ocean turning pat,
obsequious, eager to make the sale,
held out a short arms-length of argyle, lace,
some silk handwork I was sure turning over
would show newsprint, whirled stains, some fakery.
We walked, bored sunstruck tourists, full as moons,
until the tide all in a tantrum klar-ed
its buoy-bells, counted, recounted, charged
the market, curled back, counted and again
swept up, to end things. We welcomed it in.
30 comments
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http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
Leda And The Swan - WB Yeats
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
He plays with the form--the broken line, the rhyme scheme, so it's a departure from standard form, sure--but so what?
Roethke's _In a Dark Time_ is another sonnet that you almost realize is a sonnet after the fact, because you're so caught up in the language and lyricism. Good stuff.
Don't get me wrong. I'm an old school poetry guy myself.
I was basically asking Zodiac if he didn't use the old standard form because he thought it was boring. It does have it's troubles working into modern themes.
Are there "modern themes"? At their core, are they modern? (I'm not being facetious or particularly rhetorical in asking.)
Even your Perigenetic Prayer--the language (i.e., your use of a scientific term) is modern--but is it a modern theme?
http://www.litgothic.com/Images/fuseli_n
A theme still relevent today but unnoticed by modern culture do to it's old structure.
I would like to think my theme is more universal, as modern as it is old.
I don't think the standard form is necessarily boring. I definitely don't think it has trouble with modern themes, as long as the rhymes you pick are good and specific to your piece. But I don't want people counting my rhymes instead of being pleasantly surprised by them. Here's a sonnet I used to have here that's more traditional:
When we are wed
I'll never wake you up when we are wed
and I'm just home from closing down the store,
the house and bedroom day-warm, dark, and still,
your shoes and pants and papers on the floor,
an empty bottle, a pack of Marlboro reds
haphazard on the sofa-arm and sill -
some things I'd tell you, things much better said;
but no, I'll never wake you when we're wed.
The faith that holds me to you holds me more
the less itâs stirred. So sleep, sleep well, until
the morning, sleep. Iâll come to bed before
you wake and wake you up - though not to tread
too loudly now going by the bedroom door,
I'll find, is some ungodly act of will.
ART by Charles Bukowski
âAs the spirit wanes, the form appears.â
I remembered my own spirit waning after work, as I relaxed with a glass of wine and witnessed the appearance of âformsâ that eventually found expression on paper. It seemed that Bukowski, too, had caught the notion that the cares of life and business inhibit creativity, the very notion I was feeling, but had never written as succinctly as his brief poem.
A year or so later I listened to a recording of Bukowski. He said that he wrote the poem to express angst at a trend among the poets in his circle. As the spirit of a poet wanes and becomes like a dead thing, a poet turns to forms such as sonnets, villanelles and the like to cover his loss and to give the impression of having something to say. He wrote the poem as a slur on poets become erudite. What Bukowski meant and what I interpreted were entirely different. One thing you and Bukowski have is aversion to FORM, and perhaps it should stay that way.
That you were gone, not to return again--
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man, who happened to be you,
At noon today had happened to be killed--
I should not cry aloud--I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place--
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face;
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.
- Millay
Is this a response to where the new trend of poetry should go or a response to the old form being relevent?
My favorite bas-relief: Athene showing
Heracles where to broach the riverbank
With a nod of her high helmet, her staff sunk
In the exact spot, the Alpheus flowing
Out of its course into the deep dung strata
Of King Augeasâ reeking yard and stables.
Sweet dissolutions from the water tables,
Blocked doors and packed floors deluging like guttersâ¦
And it was there in Olympia, down among green willows,
The lustral wash and run of river shallows,
That we heard of Sean Brownâs murder in the grounds
Of Bellaghy G.A.A. Club. And imagined
Hosewater smashing hard back off the asphalt
In the car park where his athleteâs blood ran cold.
Didn't Ginsberg used to do things like that, like cutting out newspaper articles for inspiration?
argyle, bull's eye, clavicle, curl, hobnail, klar (the German word meaning "clear"), obsequious, pat, recount, sea glass, tantrum, whirl
The trick to these is using weirder words than the prompt, so the prompt words don't show up.
I cut-and-paste news articles for inspiration a lot.
just enough talent - way too much time!
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