The Sonnet Board

Disunity, with scapegoat

feeds@yuku.com (Dave McClure) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:40:19 GMT

She says I'll roast in hell for not believing
the things she does the way she does. She says
my feigned agnosticism is deceiving
myself, not God, through whose mysterious ways
I'll learn too late that sulphurous fire and worms
that never die are my eternal fate.
She relishes the telling, as she forms
each loving syllable from finest hate.
Her husband offers hope: I needn't worry.
His Jesus has already paid the price
for all my...

Reading from 2005

feeds@yuku.com (Alan Wickes) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:59:17 GMT

Hi,

I've been clearing out space on my hard drive and came across some video readings I made in 2005. I think I'd been experimenting with lifting audio from camcorder tapes - so never used the video.

Alan

The Butterfly Effect (pt 1)

feeds@yuku.com (quatermass) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:57:13 GMT

Greetings!

Then where it says 'Describe in your own words . . . . .'
There is where I come unstuck, learning curves
Too tight for all and sundry trains of Thought
Wont to wand'ring off salient points rather,
- No direction, mind - getting no farther
Than Grid Reference nought nought nought, nought nought nought.
Nothing short of a vicious circle then
- An irony that doth my freedom pen!
-...

Young Girl in a Suburban Café (new sestet)

feeds@yuku.com (Rick Mullin) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:59:06 GMT

Young Girl in a Suburban Café

Marcie plays guitar and sings off key
or listens to the Velvet Underground
revivalists and sips an herbal tea
until her turn on-mic comes back around.
She's luminescent, reaching to the length
of fingers spread across a rosewood board.
There's stiffness in her rhythm but some strength
behind that errant F# minor chord.

And, yes, the knotted...

no title

feeds@yuku.com (quatermass) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:33:57 GMT

Shirking quantum gravitational glues,
And without Einsteinian insistence,
With the nib of my pen I touch you, Muse,
As though a wormhole, forshort'ning distance,
Were in your grasp as physic to my reach;
Though merely made of paper and some ink
Whose curves trace the gravity of my speech,
It abbreviates hyperspace to link
Our two worlds, where, untouched by spacetime's bight,
You are free to track by all...

Sonnet call from EXOT books

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:52:55 GMT

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Exot Books, a high-quality chapbook press in New York City, is
publishing an anthology of sonnets in 2010. Submit as many sonnets as
you like to the editor, Mary Meriam, at sonnetexot(at)gmail(dot)com.
The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2010.

Ars Optica

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:37:25 GMT

Revision is like seeing the optician,
to get a new "prescription" as it were,
to be absolved of one's sins of omission,
to make creation less a muddled blur;
a nurse's aide, much like a muse, applies
a saline drop to lower your defenses
directly in the center of your eyes,
then walks you through a panoply of lenses.
"This better? Yes? how's this? then this? & this?"
The letters thrown in strange configurations...

The Smile

feeds@yuku.com (Ravincause) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:13:15 GMT

Her love emerged from shadows cast
By winters lustrous moon
Spells decanted from the past
Foretold by ancient rune
He gazed at her across great halls
Of ancestral remains
And as a dove pierced arrow falls
His beating heart proclaims
This is the woman of my dreams
The Queen I'm looking for!
The truth cast open fate it seems
That I the fool ignore!
She hides her knowing all the while
In Mona Lisa's smile.

Lord Ralph

feeds@yuku.com (normball) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:48:00 GMT

Lord Ralph

Outshone by luck, though cagey, he'd impress
with tales (the grift of high-proof subterfuge)
so tall and wide his pals felt parched to bless
their own zigzag of fortune. No mere stooge
to rock gut and regret, he nursed a plan.
The buzz assisted, ironing the details
of stupefying ledges. "What great man",
he'd say,...

Challenge: Your Personal Time Machine

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:22:35 GMT

In 'onor of our tenth slingshot go-round of Sol since we started this (mostly) iambic journey, let's try some sonnets that slip between the measures of time. Step write up. Attend a Gladiator game at the newly constructed Colosseum! See that new Skaxpers latest comedy at the Rose. Get your Xmas shopping done for AD2364 at the Saturnian Ring-Mall. Synchronize your anachronometers. Past or Future.

Chaos in Fourteen Lines, Annie Finch's essay on the Sonnet

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:45:39 GMT

Sonnet essay in CPR (sneak preview of A Poet's Craft/A Poet's Ear)

The Raintown Review's 2009 Pushcart Nominees

feeds@yuku.com (Quincy R Lehr) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:01:42 GMT

The Raintown Review's Pushcart nominations are as follows:

"Marat" by Mike Alexander
"A Brief History of Women's Swimwear" by Caitlin Doyle
"Morning Beam" by Ray Pospisil
"Bribes My Family Made" by Jehanne Dubrow
"The Autopsy of David Tihokahana" by James Wilk
"The Darwin Vampires" by Patrick Chapman

Congrats and best of luck to all the nominees.

The Sonnet Board's Aluminum Anniversary

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:48:10 GMT

In the beginning, there was a site, Sonnet Central, & on this site there were sonnets, & some of these sonnets were submitted through the site's guestbook, & along with these sonnets, there were comments, & among these comments, there were some that said, "hey, wouldn't it be nice if we had a workshop section to this site..."

& so, ten years ago, as of the end of this month, this workshop site was born, if, er, birth is what commences a message...

Congrats

feeds@yuku.com (Alan Wickes) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:12:42 GMT

Cyberpoetry land is buzzing about the Pushcart nominations...well done Mike - and good luck with Marat!

Alan

On Bloomfield [reordered quats]

feeds@yuku.com (Rick Mullin) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:44:54 GMT

On Bloomfield

Our beards are soft and gray as morning ash
endowed with parables and cigarettes.
Our coats, a vagary of petty cash,
describe the button holes in safety nets.
The news is immaterial. And wet.
The numbers coalesce in black incisions,
photographs dissolve, and you can bet
the unread words accrue to bad decisions.
Our given names are of no consequence
to the pedestrian or to the morning.
A casualty of the...

Grave Levity

feeds@yuku.com (Lance Levens) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:31:27 GMT

The flies are heat-drugged underneath the tent.

The preacher has exhausted all his phrases.

The watermelon gut tells the guy who raises

Goats that he smells a lot like excrement.

They're laying to rest another of my kin.

Good rednecks all. Top drawer and all that.

See them in Wald Mart, K Mart, any mart,

but when they pull up and you hear "hop in,"

don't. Not that if you...

The Seat of Our Panting

feeds@yuku.com (normball) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:14:19 GMT

The Seat of Our Panting

The sex, we gobbled flat (or vertical,
depending on the chandelier and space.)
On scales of ten we sought no visual trace
as why subtract with things numerical?
How dull, mere skin: a tit, a mouth, a cock.
Anatomy's so not the thing at-hand.
Between the bodies, sparks that never land
as objects (e.g. scissors, paper, rock)
conduct the stuff of passion's sleight-of-hand.
Of...

My Great-Grandmother's Bible

feeds@yuku.com (D G Anthony) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:41:52 GMT

My Great-Grandmother's Bible

by

Slither

feeds@yuku.com (normball) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:16:09 GMT
Slither

"The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole; to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a straight Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion --the snake with its Tail in its Mouth." --- Samuel Coleridge, Collected Letters IV (1815)

Accomplicing that plot device, surprise,
the day shone picture-blue. Our Sunday walk
assumed...

Life Support revised (ie chopped)

feeds@yuku.com (Celimlodyn) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:49:33 GMT
rev.
Life Support

There's an outlet by the bed.
Sometimes you sit and watch it, and pray
for storms. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards,
floods. For a minute, you imagine it:
great forgiving winds tearing
down power-poles. Snow that sifts beneath
the door as drifts pile higher and higher,
cool and quiet, blocking the drains
and shutting in the grey eternal
light. Water swirls in the gutters,
creeps through basement windows,...