Tag Archives: sonnet

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Halloween’

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I sing the changing seasons of the year
And, as leaves fall, I celebrate my death.
Each inhalation may be my last breath;
Each year I lose another near and dear.
So many people live life in Death’s fear,
The very word <cough> Dead’s a shibboleth –
Paint on false youth like old Elizabeth –
Yet half the planet’s Spring, while it’s Fall here.

Eternal life is ever to be felt,
For death, rebirth, are always intertwined
In pious hopes, in science still unseen.
The pagan in me – Viking, Druid, Celt –
All celebrate when Life’s return’s divined.
It’s Halloween, so I will dress in green.

*****

This sonnet with its Petrarchan rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) was originally published in The Lyric a couple of years ago. “Founded in 1921, The Lyric is the oldest magazine in North America in continuous publication devoted to traditional poetry.”

“Green pumpkin carved into witch face jack-o-lantern” by Chris Devers is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Non-traditional sonnet: RHL, ‘The Range of Change’

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In times of no change, the advantage lies
with those who are receptive to being taught.
Parents and teachers may seem truly wise,
avoiding dangers with which life is fraught;
the stories of the old none would despise
when they hold all the answers that are sought.

In times of constant change, advantage shifts
to those who, hating school, go and explore.
Old answers fail. Fresh questions cause great rifts
with parents who are seen as wise no more;
questions now turn up unexpected gifts
in crossing unknown seas to virgin shores.

Remain alert that there’s a range of change
from none, to gradual, to fast, to strange.

*****

A sonnet, or not? 14 lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming regularly and with a final couplet. Though not in either of the standard English forms, it has the organised, compressed, reflective sense of the sonnet. Recently published in Shot Glass Journal, Online Journal of Short Poetry. Thanks, Mary-Jane Grandinetti!

“Climate change icon” by Tommaso.sansone91 is marked with CC0 1.0.

Using form: biform poem: Daniel Galef, ‘Casey to his Bat’

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(as a sonnet after Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s 1888 collection “Imaginary Sonnets”)

You’re swell! No wizard’s-wand or Rod of Aaron
With this ease can whack one past the glove
The way a sparrow weaves through trees. No baron
Wields your power—you’re the scepter of
A king, and blood descendent of the club
That Hercules did swing. That bat was blessed!
It knocked the blocks off lions. (Not a cub—
A full-grown beast.) Herc wore its skin, the rest
Cooked up for grub. My point: We’ll stand immobile.
It’s beneath us—just a dud. To swing
At these poor lulus would insult your noble
Blood. One pitch will come—the air will sing—
We’ll know that this is it. We’ll swing. We’ll hit!
The crowd will cheer! We’ll run! We’ll win!—Oh, shit.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(in the meter of Ernest Thayer’s 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat”)

You’re swell! No wizard’s-wand or Rod of Aaron with this ease
Can whack one past the glove the way a sparrow weaves through trees.
No baron wields your power—you’re the scepter of a king,
And blood descendent of the club that Hercules did swing.
That bat was blessed! It knocked the blocks off lions. (Not a cub—
A full-grown beast.) Herc wore its skin, the rest cooked up for grub.
My point: We’ll stand immobile. It’s beneath us—just a dud.
To swing at these poor lulus would insult your noble blood.
One pitch will come—the air will sing—we’ll know that this is it.
We’ll swing. We’ll hit! The crowd will cheer! We’ll run! We’ll win!—Oh, shit.

*****

Daniel Galef writes: “I wrote this poem in 2017 while I was a student at McGill University and looking for anything to work on except my work. I have always loved both math and language, as well as making them kiss like two Barbies you mash together, and “Casey” was inspired by a couple of happy arithmetical coincidences: First, that there are exactly 70 metrical feet (or 25.52 imperial metres) in either one sonnet or 20 lines of ballad meter. Second, that both Ernest Thayer’s famous ballad “Casey at the Bat” and Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s not-so-famous collection Imaginary Sonnets were published in 1888.
The speaker of “Casey” is the mighty mock-hero of Ernest Thayer’s poem, subtitled a “Ballad of the Republic,” which is composed of standard ballad meter: rhyming couplets in iambic heptameter or alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. Thayer’s was possibly the last American poem to have massive popular appeal to the extent that it was commonly memorized for fun, performed on the vaudeville stage, and adapted into multiple films and even Disney cartoons. I memorized it in college as a party trick, which I’m quite eager to try out if I ever get invited to any parties.
As far as I know, this is the first sonnet* of its kind. I wrote another after, which was published first. Now that my first book is out,** I’ve written a third and fourth, but am still in the process of trying to find them loving homes in some journal or website where they can frolic and play with the other little sonnets. Of course, nothing’s wholly original. When I was a child I read a short poem by Mary Youngquist in a Willard Espy book which was readable as eight lines of six syllables or six lines of eight syllables. Robin informed me when the second of these was first printed (“A Poke of Gold” in Snakeskin Poetry in 2019; “Casey” was published in Able Muse in 2020) that the French surrealist Louis Aragon was toying with similar four-six/six-four patterns in the 1940s. But I think these are the first sonnets!
If you liked these, by all means check out my book, Imaginary Sonnets, available wherever sonnets are sold—but try here first: danielgalef.com/book/

*Sometimes they’re sonnets! I don’t really know what to call these. “Convertible sonnets” makes it sound like the rain will get in if you leave the top down, and “transforming sonnets” are plastic toys that come with a kid’s meal. The inaugural issue of the Journal of Wordplay called it an “equivocal sonnet,” and linked it to the 19th century genre “equivoque.” If you alternate the letters of sonnet and ballad, you get “sboanlnleatd.”*** Or, if you change the lineation of the poem only on a full moon: “were-sonnets”?
**Imaginary Sonnets (Able Muse Press, 2023), inspired by the Lee-Hamilton book—70 persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures, literary characters, and inanimate objects, including Lucrezia Borgia, Wernher von Braun, and a new brand of breakfast taco.
***Both “sonnet” and “ballad” come from the Old Occitan troubadours; “sonnet” is a diminutive of “song” whereas “ballad,” a cognate with “ballet,” comes from “dance.”

*****

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures and objects, including Nossis the Epizephyrian, Christopher Smart’s cat, and a breakfast taco. Besides poetry, he has written plays that won the McGill University Drama Festival, flash fiction selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology, and last year he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, which doesn’t really mean anything but he’s been telling everyone anyway.

Photo: “Casey At The Bat at Games On The Boardwalk” by Castles, Capes & Clones is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Sad, Actually’

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Unreconstructed, with unhealthy heft—
the image of uncivilised great ape—
a fraud who tries to win by lies and theft,
a man who’d propagate by power and rape,
racist extoller of his genes alone,
a would-be genocidal patriarch,
successful in some twilight Darwin zone,
uncultured as a mugger in the park…
But note, behind the thin success veneer,
the shallow love of gold and gilt and glitz,
gloating dismissals and the bloated sneer,
the self-aggrandisement that never quits:
an unloved child’s in some deep down recess,
the secret of the man’s unhappiness.

*****

I can’t help feeling sorry for people who were raised so badly that they have never learnt to find security, inner peace, personal meaning. On the other hand I can’t help rejoicing when some destructive, selfish racist is exposed as a cheat and a fraud under the control of a foreign power, and is removed from positions of authority. I think of that sympathy/schadenfreud dichotomy as a healthily balanced contradiction; but then, I’m a Libra…

This sonnet (Shakespearean, being in iambic pentameter and rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) has just been published in Shot Glass Journal, an online journal of short poetry. Most of what they publish is not formal verse, but most of mine is.

Photo: “File:Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (2019-06-28) 06.jpg” by Presidential Press and Information Office is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Using form: irregular sonnet: Jane Blanchard, ‘Premises’

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After an argument I listen hard
to noises in our common house—the ticking
of clocks, the humming of fans, the creaking of floors,
the rumbling of pipes, the ringing of phones, the groaning
of springs, the clacking or clinking of keys, the droning
of television, the drumming of laundry, the clicking
of locks, the tumbling of ice, the squeaking of doors—
all louder once a morning has been marred.
Hours may pass as I interpret sound
by sound—source, frequency, duration. Some
attention goes to silences, which pound
and pound, but not to show where each comes from.
Throughout, peace can be found in knowing you
are also wondering when words are due.

*****

Jane Blanchard writes: “This sonnet from Metes and Bounds was first published in Mezzo Cammin (Summer 2017). It is rather irregular, especially in the octave, but such deviation seems appropriate for the subject, at least to me. This poem is largely a list, yet it has narrative and lyrical elements, too, and the experience described, I hope, is easily perceived.”

A native Virginian, Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia. Her latest collection with Kelsay Books is Metes and Bounds (2023).

Photo: detail of the cover of Metes and Bounds.

NSFW Sonnet: ‘Restaveks’

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Illegals, both of us; married last year,
now she cleans houses, I cut grass, sweep decks,
for superrich who see us as mere specks
while their big spaceship exit they prepare.
Earth will be fishless, treeless, plastic, bare.
They’ve offered us both jobs as restaveks,
but I said No, they just want us for sex.
She said Then suck them off, why should you care?
I said, We’ll stay. She said, I said I’d go.
I said, You’d leave me? She said, Stay, be dead.
I said, That makes you nothing but a whore.
She said, I fucked him for your job, you know;
I go to space, I’ll live, have food, have bed,
and, if I’m good, oh maybe so much more…

*****

“Restavek” is normally a term for a child of an impoverished Haitian family, sent to live as a domestic servant for a wealthier (or less poor) family. There are an estimated 300,000 in Haiti, mostly girls; and an unknown number in the Haitian communities in the US.

This sonnet (Petrarchan, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) was recently published in the frequently NSFW Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates!

Illustration: “Tiny Empires 3000” by Daniel Voyager is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Labor Day 2023 – RIP Jimmy Buffett’

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He died on Labor Day, the end of summer,
And left us going back to work or school.
The days are shorter, now, the parties glummer,
Less heat and light, less beat and life, less cool.
We fall back on our favorite expressions
Of what it means to be young, tan, and free,
And weigh the anchors of adult discretions
Imagining we sail a sapphire sea.
The songs he sang, those figurative vacations,
Have turned our water into stronger stuff.
We toast each other, changing our frustrations
With dailiness to fantasizing fluff,
And drink the happy liquor we distil
From metaphoric Margaritaville.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My favorite Jimmy Buffett songs are ‘A Pirate Looks At Forty‘ and ‘Tin Cup Chalice‘, but I think his best song is ‘Margaritaville.’ I’m not as fond of ‘He Went To Paris‘ or ‘Death of an Unpopular Poet‘ as other celebrants of his work, and ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw‘ is certainly the best of the more raucous end of his oeuvre.

Like many other singer-songwriters Buffett seemed to me to work without an editor, possibly because the music business is such that even when you find a peer-group that you trust to say this or that just ain’t right, it’s hard to get the group together often enough, and for long enough, for the trust to re-blossom so that real reflection and re-working of lyrics can happen.

Those circumstances lead a lot of singer-songwriters, I think, to something that is not exactly laziness, and not quite smugness, but rather perhaps more like a sense that they’re the only ones whose taste they trust to judge their own work. Then they slide into a state where they are not themselves as critical of their own work as they once were. They get a good idea and a good line or two in the chorus, and the rest of it gets sort of clamped and glued together without a final planing, sanding, and paint job. The music is well-arranged and well-performed because you can’t fool musicians about music, but the lyrics tend to seem a little hasty, a little down-at-heels, a little scratch-and-dent. It’s too bad because their early work is almost always lyrically inventive and musically simple, while their later work is musically slick and lyrically spotty.

When I first heard A1A in 1978 I was entranced. No one else that I knew of was trying to sketch people and places from the point of view of a sort of scruffily aimless charmer. Oh, there was Tom Waits, but that was more noir and Bukowski than charming. Buffett’s work was entrancing, a refreshing way to write songs and perform them. A lot gets forgiven in the enchantment of the charm, but eventually the clanker lines and the narratives that don’t quite hold together accumulated, and I started to notice the tarnish more than the shine.

So the later work did not grip me as the early work had, and for most of the last 40 years, as the work drifted into crowd-pleasing medium-tempo rockers with a cheery tale told by a richer, more self-congratulatory narrator offering a smoother sail in a bigger boat crewed by professionals, I became less and less interested in what I had come to view as a pervasive sloppiness in the contemporary singer-songwriter tradition. It seemed to affect them all as they worked longer in the business, except perhaps for Paul Simon. But Buffett, Diamond, Prine, Browne, just to name a few, seemed all to become more facile than artful And Buffett in particular seemed to have decided to pursue sing-along music for the car instead of headphone music for the chair, and it started him on the path to wealth. And good for him.

But what I celebrate overall, and I hope in this poem, is the work that tried to be more than a pop song, that was striving, even if slyly and beneath the listener’s first perceptions, to be art. That’s what entranced me at the beginning, and that’s what I want to remember most fondly.”

Editor’s note: Jimmy Buffett died on the night of September 1st, and the news came out over the Labor Day weekend.

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’).

Tom Vaughan, ‘Swot’

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It’s time to hunker down and swot
with coffee as my only friend

and each dawn closer to the end
which in the distance I can spot:

the happiness which lies ahead
when I’ll have passed with flying colours

and on a day unlike all others
will saunter through the streets instead.

I won’t be bored, I tell myself:
the world will sparkle, and the hours

will sprinkle down in golden showers.
I won’t need anything – my wealth

will be the knowledge I’ll forget
and which I haven’t learnt as yet.

*****

Tom Vaughan writes: “Swot was inspired by coming across this sonnet form in a collection of poems – This Afterlife – by AE Stallings. It was – at first – simple imitation of her layout. But then I came to like – and to feel – the tension between the couplet form and the cross-couplet rhyming, as if the poem wasn’t sure it was a sonnet. I like things which pull against one another, and most of all I like doubt.
It was subsequently heartening to learn, in June, that she had been elected as the new Oxford Professor of Poetry, given her combination of massive formal skills and deep classical culture, plus her sharp contemporary voice and relevance. So there’s still hope . . . “

Editor’s note: Some non-Brits may only connect the word “swot” with SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), but Vaughan is using it as the perjorative verb to study hard for an exam or, disapprovingly as a noun, a person who studies hard and avoids other activities. Swot was published in this month’s Snakeskin.

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and two poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks:
Careers and Other Catastrophes
Familes and Other Fiascoes
Strip Down
Houses and Homes Forever
Travels and Travails.
He currently lives in Brittany.
https://tomvaughan.website

Photo: “The Studious One” by Szoki Adams is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Parking Lot’

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Although not of their class, I went to church
with Bryce and Nicky in the congregation.
In a shop’s parking lot and in the lurch
I asked Bryce for a job, loan, or donation.
Then Nicky’s car came up and Bryce got in,
the bastards swerved to hit me, ran me down;
when I got up, they ran me down again,
hit the wall with their car, left with a frown.
They don’t apologise, don’t feel the need –
“You caused it all ill-manneredly,” they say.
“Our car was damaged too.” (But did they bleed?)
I bothered them; they wanted me away.
The congregation says “Forgive, forget.”
Decades have passed. Forget? Forgive? Not yet.

*****

This Shakespearean sonnet (iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) has just been published in this month’s Snakeskin. Editor George Simmers expressed concern that it might be a true story… let me reassure everyone, I neither attend church nor get hit by cars. The poem is at most a parable, a parabolic approach to events.

Photo: from Snakeskin.

Susan McLean, ‘Dead Giveaway’

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Who’ll take my dead? I’ve carried them so long
my mind is swaybacked from their aching weight.
I can’t just cast them off. It would be wrong
to leave them in some shed, like unclaimed freight.
How could I walk away as Cathy’s smile
collapsed, as Brian gently said “Take care,”
and Grammy begged “Please take me home now” while
I shut them in the dark and left them there?

I’ve jettisoned so much I took to heart—
the afterlife, belief in justice, prayer.
I’ll have to lay my dead down too, I know.
After a party, when my friends depart,
I wash up, stow away what’s left, yet they’re
still here. The dead are always last to go.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I love the way a cliché can take on new life if the words are interpreted in a nontraditional way. The title of this poem seemed painfully poignant to me when I imagined it applying to the dead we all carry around with us. It would be nice to be able to walk away from that sadness, but of course who among us could bring ourselves to do it? Though I try to keep the voice of the poem sounding natural, I pay attention to the play of sounds in the words, as in the echoes of consonant and vowel sounds in the first two lines: “take,” “swaybacked,” “aching,” and “weight.” In the sestet of the sonnet, the imagined action of the speaker’s leaving her dead behind in the octave is reversed when she is herself left behind by her departing friends, with only her dead to keep her company.
This poem first appeared in the online journal 14 by 14, and later was published in my
second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Ghosts of the old house” by Tree Leaf Clover is licensed under CC BY 2.0.