Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mary Meriam) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:15:08 GMT

Yeah, Tiel, that's partly true, that we know about the poet in advance. But I also feel like (and maybe this is an illusion/delusion) that I'm getting so that I can tell which poets (even if I've never read them before) have ever touched meter with a ten-foot pole. I'm slightly bonkers about meter, I think. I love how it captures the entire range of sounds (if that makes sense). Meter can be loud as a drum or soft as a sigh. (oh, how poetic, lol)

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (tielj) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:53:13 GMT

Too kind, Mike. I actually posted a revised version on the main thread: things there have been way too serious lately.

Re this: "When you say "let me see first that the poet has mastered the form...Otherwise, I tend to think they're lazy, ignorant, or arrogant," you are saying that you have come to the poem with a check list in hand." Mary can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is at least partly about what we know about the poet before coming to...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:21:08 GMT

That I can understand -- though Collins is writing a poem about writing sonnets. A far worse example would be Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, which he regards as an open-ended mosaic of received information, like cutting-up his diary & arranging it in several different ways. Worth reading, but not as having the slightest thing to do with sonnetry, is American Sonnets by Gerald Stern. Just forget he used the word.

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mary Meriam) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:27:31 GMT

That's all true, Mike. It all depends on each poem. Maybe I'm objecting to false advertising. The example that sticks in my craw is this. When I first starting writing sonnets, of course I googled like mad for them, esp. contemporary sonnets. I saw Billy Collins had a poem called "Sonnet." Oh boy! I thought. When I read it, I was crushed. Fourteen lines and that's it? Not one other sign of the form. I felt it was practically criminal for the poet laureate to call this a...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:21:51 GMT

Tiel, that's frickin' brilliant. Oh, to have a rejection slip that clever.

Mary, I would taken most of your statements above as unquestionable, except for "To fail completely." You don't know a poet has failed completely until you've given them a chance to define their own goals. To get the meter & rhyme right is not a poetic goal. It's a skill one uses along the way to the goal. A poem written only to get the meter &...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mary Meriam) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:58:52 GMT

I think every poet who writes a sonnet reveals in the sonnet what they know about sonnets and how they feel about sonnets. So every poet who writes a sonnet puts an individual stamp on it. My point is that even within all the strictures of the form, I'd even say, especially within all the strictures, there are an infinite number of possibilities for variation. To fail completely with IP and rhymes seems to me to be smashing a priceless vase for no good reason. There may be good...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (tielj) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:44:10 GMT

I wrote a sonnet once that darkled bright.
It swelled like fungal fruiting bodies full
of psilocybin or amanitol
and sped like meteors across the flight
of NASA shuttles. Thought it only right
this node of genius should be shared. What pool
of readers could be got to wrap their skulls
around this zooming piece of dynamite?
Why, Captain Beefheart's Sonnetry Review!
The very place for hallucinogenic
...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Rick Mullin) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:18:28 GMT

I think Captain Beefheart got it right when he observed that the sonnet is "fast and bulbous."

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:14:33 GMT

To may way of thinking, Mary, the sonnet itself is founded on variation. Every sonneteer to touch the form in any language over the last (nearly) eight hundred years has changed something. Besides, variation is intrinsic to the form. The second quatrain varies from the first. The sestet varies from the octave. Expectation is set up, & yet we are surprised to some extent by the closure -- or the poem fails.

Still, this doesn't say in any way that one needs to relenquish...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (D G Anthony) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:48:50 GMT

I have it on order.

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mary Meriam) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:38:51 GMT

Mike- thanks for your excellent review. I especially enjoyed this:

Does variation damage or invalidate the sonnet? That question is what keeps sonnets delicious, so sweet & so cold.

I wonder why poets today seem compelled to break the form any which way they can. Don't they realize that there are infinite possibilities within the form itself? To me, it's the form itself that is delicious and sweet - don't know about cold...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:30:42 GMT

"The only thing worse than being talking about is not being talked about"

(but thanks for the link, Tiel)

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (tielj) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:17:55 GMT

You are being watched...

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ (about halfway down)

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:34:30 GMT

Glad to hear it interested you, Margaret. I really do think it's a worthy journal. Unfortunately, I was getting so far into the details that I didn't even get to the sonnet essays. There's one on Robert Lowell's imitation of the form, something which interested me quite a bit in my college days. One on Karen Volkman's use of 'Orphic naming," or as Volkman herself asks the question, "how does a namelessness name?" (Whole lot of nominalist theory...

Re: Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (sonnet622) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:02:29 GMT

What a wonderful review! I've read every word of it, and now I want to read Sixty-Six.

Margaret

Sonnet Kicks on Route Sixty-Six

feeds@yuku.com (Mike Alexander) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:48:56 GMT

While I was away on vacation, the first issue of Sixty-Six arrived, & I have to say that reading it through gave me great pleasure. I've always wanted to see a journal where new poetry & a disciplined response to that poetry could co-exist, side by side. To narrow the field to a chosen form simplifies such a dialogue, increasing the likeliness that one side will be relevant to the other. (Unlike, say, the essays that appear in Poetry magazine,...