Tag Archives: sonnet

Poem on poetry: Sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘White Water’

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A poem is so obdurate and small
Compared to what you wanted it to say
And sometimes isn’t even close at all.
For instance, this. I’ve worked on it all day,
A metaphor for all of love’s affairs.
I failed to ride the energy it gave,
My form and balance gone. Nothing prepares
You for the wildness of the standing wave.
Possessing and possessed and then propelled
Abruptly past the point of no control
To merely peril, having once beheld
The moving stillness of it all, all whole.
Your head’s what every poem wants to split,
While you stroke hard to stay ahead of it.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My online pal, the poet Liam Guilar, was a kayak adventurer, sneaking across borders to paddle the most dangerous rivers in the world. I went white water rafting once. You’re stuck in cold, wet, awkward positions that often turn suddenly painful. Why people do it over and over seems not just unreasonable but cold, wet, and painful. There are exhilarating moments, but you’re still cold, wet, and out of control. I could feel in my one experience that the out of controlness might be the point. Still, it was wet and cold. Very wet. Very cold. 

“The confluence of Liam’s many tales, my paltry experience, and he and I both struggling to write poems is the impetus for this poem. I’ve often thought that maybe what it needs is a bucket of ice water suspended over the reader like a, well, like a bucket of Damocles, that sloshes over the head and down the back of the neck in order to make it work.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Kayaking through the white waters of the Gorge” by Grand River Conservation Authority is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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: 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: 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.

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: 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.

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘The Bateleur’

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She was returning to the gauntlet when
some dolt yee-hawed a horn. She slewed left, fetched
off course, alarmed, towards the misty fen.
I heard the sharp cries of the crowd, and stretched
my ungloved wrist out wide. She landed there
as softly as a stork re-sits its nest.
She gazed at me and I absorbed her stare.
She preened her wind-combed quills, then came to rest
sphinx-still, her eyes a blaze of feral gold.
The handler bustled up to break the charm.
He mentioned luck, unlocked her talon-hold,
and claimed the eagle from my unscathed arm.
Between her wingbeats, Nature spurned the rule
that beauty shows no mercy to a fool.

*****

Margaret Ann Griffiths, aka Maz, aka Grasshopper, was a British poet known almost exclusively for her online work. She had been active on Eratosphere, and when she died in 2009 ‘The Bateleur’ was a frequently mentioned poem by other contributors remembering her. In his Preface and Personal Recollection to her posthumous collection ‘Grasshopper‘ (Arrowhead Press and Able Muse Press), editor Alan Wickes writes: “There is much in the poem that typifies Margaret Griffiths’ art. The subject matter seems both ancient and modern simultaneously. The sonnet itself is wonderfully organised, metre, form and meaning honed into a rich amalgam. Most of all the poem is beautifuly phrased. Maybe it seems a bit far-fetched to suggest the way the startled eagle settles upon the poet’s ungloved wrist is a metaphor for the power of art over nature, nevertheless there is something mythic about the bird’s return. It is a magical piece in the best sense of that over-used word.”

“Bateleur (eagle), Terathopius ecaudatus at Kruger National Park” by Derek Keats is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Zombies and Wolves’

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Women I’ve failed or wronged or left behind
approach my thoughts like zombies for the kill;
I’ve literary walled defences – still
given the chance, they’ll eat my brains, my mind.

Through forest, orchard, farmyard in decay,
a shadow of a wolf slips greyly in,
my thoughts of death, grim, wasted, ill, rib-thin,
tracking my weak resolve, hungry to slay.

Mountaintops blown apart, forests clear-cut,
where’s there to hide? Nature doesn’t exist;
her landscapes crushed in patriarchal fist.
This former farmland hides my ruined hut.

Impotent, I still write, thus giving birth
to future wolves and zombies of the earth.

*****

This sonnet was originally published in Candelabrum (a twice-yearly print magazine of formal verse that ran bravely from 1970 to 2010… now sadly defunct, eaten by wolves or zombies or whatever snacks on print poetry magazines), and republished in Bewildering Stories #1039, a decades-old online magazine of primarily speculative fiction.

Photo: “Full ‘Wolf’ Moon – January 22, 2008” by Rick Leche is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Sue Parman, ‘Kaizen: How to Build a Poem’

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Ignore your hand and focus on the pen,
which writes without your knowledge of the whole.
Do not insert the personal. Avoid translation.
The changes made are small and gradual.

Commas herd their letters toward a distant
goal of rhymes and metaphors but do not
specify a conscious “I” or soul,
a bold new vision or a school of thought.

Write like a dancer making small mistakes.
What is wrong to you fulfills your friend’s desire.
Cuttings and shit are what it takes
to grow a garden from a funeral pyre.

A poet will die unless she learns to laugh.
Do not hit DELETE. Save everything as DRAFT.

*****

Sue Parman writes: “When I was four years old, my father asked me, ‘When is a door not a door?’ His answer, ‘when it’s ajar,’ infuriated and then intrigued me. I began to keep a journal in which I wrote down sentences such as, ‘If the Devil is evil, God is odd.’ Puns were my intro-duction to poetry, a form of verbal play that taught me that words, rather than being a lifeline to truth, could be slippery and contain many truths at the same time. One of my favorite poets is Kay Ryan, the queen of poetic puns (see her ‘Bestiary’). As an anthropologist, I consider them a vital contributor to mental health, since they satisfy the needs of large-brained mammals to avoid epilepsy by indulging in surprise.”

Sue Parman is an anthropologist and award-winning essayist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. She is the author of two poetry books, “The Thin Monster House” and “Carnivorous Gaze,” and her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including the above poem in Rattle. She writes in a number of other genres as well, including anthropological travel memoirs and mysteries. Her most recent publications include a short story, “Gannets and Ghouls,” which appeared in the September/October 2024 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; and a nonfiction essay, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” that was awarded the Travelers’ Tales Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of 2024. After teaching anthropology in California for thirty-five years, she moved to Oregon in search of water, and travels frequently in hopes of getting lost. https://www.sueparman.com

Photo: “PDCA-Cycle-Kaizen” by Tagimaguitar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.