Wallac Stevens
“Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet – Surreptitiously.” This charming journal entry by Wallace Stevens for August 3, 1906, triggered a fine sonnet by Frank Osen some years ago:
To Distribution:
Stevens was aware
That many poets must go leopard-like
Among the striped, yet not be spotted there.
This isn’t easy, when desire may strike
At work, although it called in sick last night,
And, stricken, one must chase in search of tea
Or oils or oranges, to some distant height—
Or only to the nearest OED.
Yet, when protective coloration’s risked,
A job transcends that mental game preserve
Where fauna don’t go frolic, but get frisked.
For all who bear an office to observe,
We ought to mark each August third this way:
As Annual Surreptitious Sonnet Day.
This in turn caused a rueful villanelle by Marcus Bales:
On August Third I have to write a sonnet
As Wallace Stevens did in Nineteen Six —
And here I’ve got a villanelle, doggone it.
And ever since Frank Osen got right on it
By writing his he’s put us in a fix:
On August Third I have to write a sonnet.
I hope you’ll Vladimir-and-Estragon it,
While I arrange my sonnet’s final mix
Cause here I’ve got a villanelle, doggone it.
It may be that allusion’s over-drawn – it
May not be your cliques that I transfix
When August Third I have to write a sonnet.
I haven’t got a shocking denouement – it
Isn’t how a villanelle does tricks,
And here I’ve got a villanelle, doggone it,
So as you don your writing hat, or bonnet,
Don’t mix your forms as I did, dicks and chicks —
Cause here I’ve got a villanelle. Doggone it,
On August Third I have to write a sonnet.
Well! What will today bring, I wonder?
Form in Formless Times 
On August 3rd of Nineteen hundred Six,
the poet Wallace Stevens spent his day
engaged not in the dull quotidian tricks
of the insurance business, but at play
with rhyme & meter, passed his day away
on poetry. No odes, no limericks,
no villanelles or rounds of rondelay,
with floral imagery thrown in the mix.
By rights, this was a scandalous misuse
of company time, & he would not have done it
if not at the insistence of the muse
of boredom, & once Stevens had begun it,
he had no other choice but to produce
“surreptitiously” a flagrant sonnet.
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