Sonneteering

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping. (Marianne Boruch)


For the last maybe six months I've been concentrating on writing, poetry mostly. There are always essentially three questions to be worked out in the writing of a poem: where to start, how far to go, and where to end. Ken Ronkowitz, a teacher and writer I admire who lives in New Jersey, maintains a whole bunch of web sites that have to do with writing and education and life. I've had fun with a form he invented, based loosely on the Japanese form of the tanka, which he calls the ronka. The formal rules are simple: five lines, seven words per line. It's an interesting form to play with, because once you write your first line you only have three lines before whoops, it's over. Like this:

There's a logic to all this, first
the leap into space, then the
attempt to see something quickly enough
that the last line (coming up fast)
doesn't cut you off before you're done.

It happens just that fast. The challenge is to see how much work you can get done in a very short space. Imagery can help:

Another April opens up, hummingbirds and bees
flitting in the branches of the cherry
trees, a restless breeze stirring the air.
The worst of the winter is behind
us, the sidewalks flanked with new flowers.

I found, after working in that framework for a while, that when I turned to writing sonnets, they seemed luxuriously roomy. I think that's been one of the enduring attractions of the sonnet in English: it's long enough that you can sink your teeth into a subject, but it's short enough to demand a certain amount of compression and attentiveness to each syllable. It's also very versatile in terms of the structural possibilities it presents, familiar to anyone who had to endure high school English: Octave and sestet. Three quatrains and a couplet. Seven and seven. Five and five and two. And of course the history of the sonnet is rich with examples of poets who just made up their own patterns within the fourteen-line constraint.

In any case, I'd say that something like eighty or ninety percent of the poems I've written of late have turned out to be sonnets, or at least sonnet-ish. (While I sometimes like to work with strict iambics and regular rhymes, more often I don't.) It's not like I started out any of these poems with the intention to write a sonnet; it's more that if the challenge is to open a topic, develop it, and then close it down, I often find myself in the neighborhood of 14 lines anyway, and thinking of it as a sonnet gave me something to work against: I need to cut two lines. I need to add a line and a half. That line is too long. That line is too short. This is of course one of the reasons that poets choose to work in forms in the first place: the form gives you something to work against; it forces you as a writer to come up with something just slightly—or maybe completely—different than what you might have said if you were just spooling out words as they came to you. It gives you the opportunity to surprise yourself.

So here is a sampling from the current body of work, now closing in on 30 sonnets. Got a ways to go to catch up to Uncle Will, but hey.

Waiting

Swabbing the decks. Mending nets. Sewing patches

on torn sails. Polishing the brass fittings along the rail.

Ship at anchor under still black clouds. Clusters of seagulls

screech in the rigging, cruise over the dark water

in search of scraps. The captain has gone ashore,

for how long no one knows. Ripples of water lapping

at the hull. Smell of salt water and rotting seaweed.

The beach by the pier deserted but for two homeless men

in skull caps warming their hands over a driftwood fire.

The storefronts along the boardwalk shuttered, the streets

empty. The flag in the town square limp against the pole.

Distant ringing of bells from the churchtower somewhere

near the hills. On the afterdeck men sit and stare out to sea,

the first mate whistling softly as he sharpens his knife.

 Fever Dream

Enter reluctant disparities in keen-edged thwarted
restorations, relentless gravel and rock grinding,
storm-wind caterwaul, pellets of rain pounding
down, what we never expected, after cross-stitched
emendations, to be cast again back into hard weather,
notions ridiculous and scorned actualized, weaponized,
hard now at work, seething, stamping, spewing bits
of bone and hunks of flesh, smoke and stench roiling,
rivers of gravity-based black ink everywhere, recoiling
wretched malodorous eddies swirling, swallowing
whatever you make of them and spewing it back out
on blacktop do you remember what you thought
you had got before it all exploded and the smoke
came rolling down from the hills and choked your eyes.

Questions about Art

Painting is still the material form of desire.

                    - William Logan

Supposing this to be true, what kind of desire
might we be talking about? Sublimation? The yellows
and reds and blues inviting, as flowers do, bees,
the oblique mechanics of pollination and sex?
Is it a desire for self-transcendence, the urge to make
something to stand in for us when we are gone, to speak
for us once we can no longer speak for ourselves?
Or to evoke the viewer's desire to possess this work,
the pride of owning objects we have coveted, and won?
Or perhaps simply the desire to have, for as long as
we hold the brush in our hand, a focus, a reason to hope
that at the end of the day's work there will be something
real, something created, something visible to justify
the hours of our life given over to the making of it?

Intersection

Four way stop at Maple and Main. Betty's Better Donuts:
red and white awnings, wrought-iron tables and chairs.
Round-topped blue post office box by the door. Lonely-
looking dog on a leash. Next door, two rundown houses,
porches caved in, ivy tendrils climbing the walls,
growing around and into the wheels of a rusted tricycle.
In the next lot, bounded by barbed wire, a swaybacked
bay mare swishes her tail, nibbles at weeds. In the oaks,
three crows stare off into the fog just starting to burn off.
Across the street, at the playground, two mothers sitting
side by side on a bench watching their kids chase each other
around the jungle gym. Up above the clouds, a white needle
pulling thread: vapor trail of a jet too high up to see. Me,
I'm looking out the window of the bus pulling out for Ames.


Take That

The light aggressive, intrusive, squinting
a stratagem, but only against perhaps a half
of what might effectively be blocked. Then
that noise, no longer white but burgeoning,
like motorboats growling on the mirrored
skin of the lake, or warrior ants sowing
trepidation and deliverance. What next?
Odor of skunk and lemon under the boughs
of the pin oaks. Working from outside in,
you whisper as if in supplication the words
of a nearly forgotten prayer. Overhead
a plane circling, circling, just audible above
the dripping leaves and the hum of the cicadas,
looking for some trace of human life.

 - - - - -

PS, several months later: I wound up compiling 28 of these sonnets (two sets of 14) into a little digital chapbook that you can see here if you are so inclined.