Sonnet

I wrote four and a half sonnets this week, mostly painfully cloying- it took a lot of fooling around (and the first 3 poems) to get past the sing-songy iambic pentameter that was rattling around my head when I started.  And then I continued to write in sing-songy iambic pentameter anyway.

I don't like writing in such popular forms.  They make me nervous because almost anyone who has completed secondary school can pinpoint exactly where you've screwed up (or at least thinks that they can).  Also, because of the plethora of amazing sonnets that already exist, there's so much pressure that all my attempts just start to feel irritating and overdone when I reread them.

That said, I did actually come out with one with which I was mostly satisfied, eventually.  I find that forcing ideas into iambic pentameter and rhyme tend to lead me into archaic syntax, which reads kind of strangely when the language is not particularly archaic, but make of it what you will.  Suffice it to say that I am less unhappy with this one than I am with the others.

The final couplet was a real struggle- "together" throws the rhythm off in the first line.  Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't come up with another word that meant what I was trying to say at all, even with utter disregard to syllables.

The last mistake, the perfect biting flaw

in every hope that trickled from the start

to morning, March the 18^th- then you saw

the peppermill, thrown freely like a dart,

the arc so clean as it sailed through the air.

The gasp, the beat, sharp crack as it came to

collide beside your head, your fearblown stare-

it startled me, the pain on which you drew.

Your face, its beauty pale outlined in shock,

pressed me to grasp at last what I had lost-

the wonder that you’d brought my life, my rock,

I’d wrecked it then, my hopefullness the cost.

Alone together for so long- my heart,

my bones don’t remember alone apart.

Found Poem

Having written an incredibly unsuccessful villanelle in the past, I decided to go for the found poem this week.  Unfortunately, my first few attempts were also incredibly unsuccessful, mostly because I was sticking so rigidly to the text that everything just sounded ridiculous and uninteresting.  Also because the texts I kept picking were ridiculous and uninteresting.  But I have two of them here, because I'm not sure if either of them work, but they're very different and the methods by which I went about creating them are different.  And one is probably more correct than the other.

I ended up drawing first from "Shooting An Elephant" by George Orwell and possibly interpreting the directions a bit too loosely.  What struck me most about the original text were the adjectives used to describe the death of this elephant and which also seemed to describe the feelings this death evoked in the elephant's shooter.  They're incredibly strong and not at all the kind of adjectives I'd ever use in poetry, so naturally I felt compelled to use them and almost nothing else, hence the loose interpretation.

I'm not sure how successful this is.  I didn't pull out full lines, or even more than a few short phrases.  I just felt as though globbing all the adjectives together in one place instead of spread out throughout the text strengthened the experience, but I could be completely wrong about that.  Also, I'm almost certain it makes no sense outside the context of Orwell's text, and therefore probably doesn't work.

The other was pulled more directly from an op. ed. piece in the New York Times on Ron Paul's facial mishap at a debate.  Funnier, and with only very minor editing to lines (to keep it grammatically sensical).  I'm possibly not very good at humor in poetry.  Possibly because I'm not very good at humor in any writing.  But the article was so ridiculous it lent itself to an attempt at humor in a poem.

Pastoral

Pastorals have been a bit of a struggle for me in the past, mostly because I think I'm missing the point.  I'm still not sure I got the point.  I'm not sure if the problem that the definition of a pastoral is just so loose- relatively speaking- that I find the variety of possibility paralyzing rather than freeing, or just that I'm not entirely certain that I actually understand the definition.

Anyway, I still don't have my text.  It seems to have been lost in that abyss we call the postal service, although whether the problem is on the American end or the Irish.  Fortunately, Google yields no shortage of pastorals, so I had no difficulty finding a number to refresh myself.

I stumbled on this page of Frost and Heaney pastorals that I found lovely, although confusing.  After reading them, I was even more certain that I didn't actually understand what a pastoral was.

I especially liked Heaney's Blackberry Picking, for its vivid imagery in plain language- I vividly remember blackberry picking as a child just the same, and the end is bizarrely depressing considering the subject matter. Unfortunately, it also more or less cemented for me the fact that I have no idea what the message of a pastoral is meant to be/if there's meant to be one.

I tried, though.

The glow of the orange-bright

October leaves, a broken halo

‘round the head of a half-cocked angel: you,

homesick for heartsake.

Your fingers, knotted in mine,

awkward grasp, endearing angles,

numb but unwilling to give.

Someone belonged to the wrinkled smile

that took that photo, I’m sure,

but it’s all I remember

about anyone else.

The world glowed too bold,

blinded me to anyone but you.

Incidental rays of sunlight

blended with the blaze around us.

You carried me across the hill,

my hands tangled through your hair –

I was never, never letting go-

as we squinted in the sunshine,

spectors of crow’s feet

and smiles lines to come:

collateral beauty.