Category Archives: sonnets

Using form: William Trowbridge, ‘Song of the Black Hole’

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radially extracted by NASA

You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.

As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.

*****

 William Trowbridge writes in Rattle, where this poem was published: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.”

William Trowbridge’s tenth poetry collection, Father and Son, was published by Wayne
State College Press Press in April. His poems have appeared in more than 45
anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac, AnAmerican Life in
Poetry, and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review,
The Southern Review, Plume, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and
New Letters. He is a mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA
in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more
information, see his website, williamtrowbridge.net.

YouTube: Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray), NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Sunny Afternoon’

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Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I suppose Sunny Afternoon reflects my own station in life, that is, drifting steadily towards the end, with the usual collection of regrets that most of us have.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: posted by Richard Fleming

Sonnet: Eric McHenry, ‘Lives of the Poets’

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They rubbed two sticks together and made friction.
They made a fist but couldn’t make a hand.
Their dictionary wasn’t made of diction.
Their diction made them hard to understand.

Trying to make a poem, they made a list.
Trying to make the team, they made the choir.
They made up stories whose protagonist
would rub two sticks together and make fire.

Mistakes were made, and mixtapes to go with them.
They made a couch their bed and made their bed.
They tried to make a joke at the expense
of love and money. “Make me,” money said.
They made up stories but they made no sense.
They rubbed two cents together and made rhythm.

*****

Eric McHenry writes: “Strangely, I remember almost nothing about writing this poem, except that I was thinking about the etymology of ‘poet’ (‘maker’) and about the versatility of the verb ‘make’.”

‘Lives of the Poets’ was first published in Literary Matters.

Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His books of poetry include Odd Evening, a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children.
Eric McHenry – The Waywiser Press
Eric McHenry, Author at The American Scholar

Photo: “Master Sacha twirls the fire stick” by one thousand years is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Communication Breakdown’

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I love you with that love floppy and large,
As one of us a man – the other, dog;
Involved, detached, our life’s a travelogue
Of countrysides seen from a rented barge,
“Travels With You” along some river’s marge,
Failing at interspecies dialogue
Till tries at talk are lost in night and fog,
Drifting with batteries we can’t recharge.

Yet there’s no option but to travel on,
Each varied day no different than before,
Wondering if we’ll find some magic door
Which, risking entry, gives communion;
And if, by talking, love would be enhanced,
Or if we’d then destroy all we have chanced.

*****

Sonnet originally published in Candelabrum in 2007.

Photo: “Accordion player” by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Spenserian sonnet: Charles Martin, ‘On the Problem of Bears’

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Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech,
Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs,
And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach
And almost never get Distinguished Chairs
Unless they come across one unawares
Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred.
Some of them have been known to have affairs
With a man or woman lured into their bed—
This often ends up badly with one dead,
The other executed for the crime,
Or given a life sentence in a zoo.
Bears are familiar with existential dread,
Bears put their pants on one leg at a time:
The problems bears have are your problems too.

*****

Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended. 

“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”

Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.

Photo: from the Bantam/Seal cover of Marian Engle’s novel ‘Bear’, referenced in https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-the-classic-canadian-novel-bear-remains-controversial-and-relevant-1.5865107

Using form: Sonnet: Jenna Le, ‘Purses’

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When our Quiz Bowl team of eighteen-year-olds snagged
a berth in the finals, held in New York City,

my small-town Minnesotan brain cells dizzied—
at last I’d be some place that mattered. Swag

was my teammate Anne’s fixation: knockoff bags
peddled in Chinatown, affixed with glitzy

Kate Spade labels. Anne bought a sack of six,
then forgot it on the airport shuttle’s shag

seats; someone swiped it within minutes. Kate,
I learned a fact of womanhood that year:

even we knockoff girls, cheap, desperate
to look like someone else, to imitate

a finer woman, have our value; we’re
wanted, wanted, until we disappear.

*****

Jenna Le writes: “The anecdote narrated in the first ten lines of the poem poured out of me easily and naturally enough. It was an anecdote that had been knocking around inside my brain for many years, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write the poem that the incident’s metaphorical meaning — that is, the epiphany contained in the poem’s last four lines — seemed to crystallize in the air in front of my eyes — and, to me, made the whole poem worthwhile. Honestly, until I sat down to write the poem, it had never even occurred to me that such a slight-seeming anecdote might have any metaphorical meaning at all. I sat down to write the poem more or less on a lark, and then the sonnet form just sort of took over and forced me to look deeper, to see more depth in my own material. This is one of the reasons I love the sonnet form.”

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022), the last of which is the collection in which “Purses” appears and which can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo185843950.html

Photo: “DIY Kate Spade Owl Purse” by Stacie Stacie Stacie is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Weekend read: Sonnet variation: Michael R. Burch, ‘Erin’

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All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—
bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,
her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children—some conceived in sin,
the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They grope to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair …
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “My poem is set in the present and really has nothing to do with poverty. All that’s left of Ireland of yore is the young mother’s red hair, fair skin, a tendency toward melancholy (“despair), and her train of children. She’s a practicing Catholic except for a few affairs. Otherwise she’s a modern woman, drinking and flirting in a pub. I was trying to capture a bit of Ireland in a young mother, very loosely inspired by one of my Irish cousins who was a bit of a “wild child” in her youth.”

(Editor’s aside: My bad for thinking that “All that’s left” implied poverty, which was not in Michael R. Burch’s mind at all. True, Ireland goes through enormous swings of fortune, but the Ireland of even some years ago no longer matches the fabulously rich Ireland of today – the people are 50% richer than Americans or Norwegians…

2024 top GDP.png

… putting the UAE and Switzerland in the shade as well.)

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 22 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 61 times by 32 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

Photo: “Irish Fire at the Barn” by Trey Ratcliff is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Walls of Work’

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With walls of work that never wear away
my house is halfway hilled above a plain;
ghosts of unwritten books moan and complain;
I step out on to scree, sloping and grey.
I’ve tried for thirty years to build up high,
raising five kids free of smog, vice and town;
the treacherous slope of scree slips, I fall down,
am shown – kids grown and gone – more work’s a lie.

Now I’m spreadeagled on the eager shale,
not daring move, gripping at slipping fears
of sliding down to sneered-at country vale
where poor folk pick, don’t buy, fresh fruit from trees
and I could go, unknown, to known warm seas,
run barefoot on the beach of my ideas.

*****

First published in The Road Not Taken – The Journal of Formal Poetry in Summer 2016 (but written a decade before that); thanks, Dr. Kathryn Jacobs!

“While everybody on the beach is relaxing, this chap runs by like he stole running.” by Gerald Lau is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Matthew Buckley Smith, ‘Youth’

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I miss believing that I’ll never die,
Or is it that there won’t be a tomorrow?
Both lines work out about the same: deny
The day you’ll have to pay back what you borrow.
It used to be I never went to bed
A second night with any girl I found.
No breakfast in those days–a smoke instead,
Then out the door before she came around.
Last night I passed a toppled garbage bin,
Its liner sagging with a rat’s remains.
He sank a little when I squinted in
And seemed embarrassed by his greedy pains.
And so much like a man, the way he sat
Still in his death, and so much like a rat.

*****

Matthew Buckley Smith writes: “I wrote most of Dirge” (his first book of verse, winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. – Ed.) “in a summer. I was wading through a bad depression, and having written almost nothing but free verse to that point, I set myself the challenge of writing one sonnet a day for the rest of the summer. ‘Youth’ is a survivor of that experiment, written while walking late at night through the campus of Johns Hopkins on the way to the apartment of the woman who is now my wife.”

Matthew Buckley Smith is the author of Midlife (Measure, 2024) and Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012). He hosts the poetry podcast SLEERICKETS and serves as Poetry Editor of Literary Matters.
https://www.matthewbuckleysmith.com/

Photo: “rats” by Lance McCord is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Janice D. Soderling, ‘September Morning’

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Across a sun-lit pane, deft, unconcerned,
a spider struts the steps of an old dance,
a set design, in no part happenstance:
and I again to sun and rune returned.
Stumbling along, half blind, half deaf, half-learned,
in yet a day of quarrel and circumstance,
I turn from cluttered web to view askance
night’s daughter, she who never can be turned.

Sleek spider dame with one plan, to consume,
to suck the juice from each unwary fly,
with no grand need to query or presume
if there was meaning in your quarry’s sigh.
Here, in the corner of my fog-filled room,
Atropos grins, her scissors lifted high.

*****

Janice D. Soderling writes: “I don’t write much these days, preferring to use the shortening days to read. But I woke up this morning with the last two lines in my head, and knowing it was an ending to a sonnet, I proceeded to write the rest. Perhaps it asks too much of the reader. Perhaps it is a pretentious piece, of interest only to me. Never mind, I shall keep it, having poured three hours into it.”

Janice D. Soderling has published poems, fiction and translations in hundreds of print and online journals and anthologies over the years. Her most recent poetry collection is ‘Rooms and Closets‘ available at all online bookshops.

Photo: “Spider In Window” by trekkie313 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.