Showing posts with label Sherman Alexie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sherman Alexie. Show all posts

Monday, February 2, 2009

Zen Golf


I had the very good fortune of having dinner with Sherman Alexie and a few other people tonight. Mr. Alexie is an enormously talented, funny, humane, intelligent man, who also likes basketball and big laughter.

I was talking with a friend after the dinner, and he said, "You write--a lot"--referring to my blog, etc. I told him, "Yes, but unlike you, I'm unimpeded by being smart."(This fellow won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, so I wasn't indulging in flattery.) I thought that was a pretty good line: If I were smarter, I probably wouldn't write as much. Reflection might get in the way.

Back to Alexie: what impresses me about his intelligence is its flexibility. He's interested in . . . everything. That's actually more a characteristic of a poet than a novelist, in my opinion. Novelists tend to ge most interested in things that follow a certain deep channel. Poets will go up and down any creek.

Back to the friend: He has a great idea for a Zen-related novel set in Seattle. I shall try to induce him to write it.

In the meantime, a wee Zen poem:


Zen Golf
*
*
Bow to the ball. Apologize
in advance for striking it.
Hit it with your favorite
club in any direction.
It's all a Hole out there--
the course, the world,
reality. Therefore, you
can't not hit a hole in one.
Going dualistic for a moment,
the bad news is that no one
keeps score. Even if someone
did count the strokes, there's
nothing to win. Good news
on the dualistic scale: You're
outside, the club in your hand
gleams, a bird craps on a
rich man's head, and . . . .



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Monday, October 27, 2008

Deconstructing the Sonnet-Form






In a poetry-writing class recently, we read and discussed several traditional sonnets, some modified sonnets, and one sonnet by Sherman Alexie that deliberately shreds the form entirely. Alexie writes 14 paragraphs of varying lengths. Why he still calls the poem a sonnet and why he shreds the traditional form are both made compellingly evident by the poem itself. It's a very effective poem.
We then decided to develop our own list of improvised sonnet-forms, and we had quite a good time doing it. We may even have come up with variations you'll want to try. Here are some of the variations:

1. A traditional Italian sonnet, which tends to "break" after 8 lines. Our version, however, would be a "dialogue" sonnet, in which the first 8 lines are spoken by one person and the last 6 by another (for example). Thaks to Miriam for this one.

2. "The Baker's Dozen." A sonnet that is about baking or a baker but goes only to 13 lines. I think this was Jean's idea.

3. A free-verse sonnet--the only real restriction being the 14 lines.

4. A blank-verse sonnet--14 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. This might have been Meg's idea, but I'm not sure.

5. A "choose your own adventure" sonnet. I have to confess I did not fully understand the guidelines for this one, but basically the idea is that within the poem, you give the reader different options as to what line or lines to read next. This one's above my pay-grade. I think Ryan may have come up with this one.

6. A blues sonnet. Tricky. Two traditional blues stanzas (six lines each), followed by a couplet. One would want to go very easy on attempting to imitate African American dialect as sung (for example) by Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, or Son House. The emphasis here is more on the f0rm than on imitating the vernacular because such imitation can go very badly. I am intrigued, though, by combining the two blues stanzas with a couplet--an interesting formal experiment.

7. I told the students about a "diminishing sonnet" I once wrote (and may have posted here earlier): The rhyme-scheme is more or less traditional, but in the first quatrain, you use iambic pentameter; in the next quatrain, you use iambic tetrameter; in a couplet, you use iambic trimeter; in the following couplet, you use just two iambs; and in the final couplet, you use two syllables per line (could be one word with two syllabes or two words with one syllable each). And yes, the last two "lines" still have to rhyme. The shape of the poem is like that of a somewhat lopsided triangle.

8. Two stanzas in limerick-form (for a total of 10 lines) plus a quatrain (for a grand total of 14 lines). The additional twist: it must be a serious "sonnet," not a joke-poem.

9. A "Joycean" or "Faulknerian" stream-of-consciousness sonnet. In traditional sonnet-form--or not? It's up to you. Intriguing. I think Cory might have come up with this one.

10. Traditional sonnets that embody the plot and/or convetions of fictional genres. For example: a "mystery" or "detective" sonnet; a "science fiction" sonnet; a "trashy romance" sonnet, also known as a "bodice-ripper," I believe; an autobiographical sonnet; a picaresque sonnet (or Don Quixote in 14 lines) ; a "sex sonnet." This last one was supposed to be in contrast to the traditional "love" sonnet, but I expressed the view that one pitfall to avoid was writing a pornographic sonnet.

11. A sonnet in 7 heroic couplets. Oy! Shakespeare meets Alexander Pope.

12. An "indecision sonnet." I wrote this down, but I confess I can't remember what the rubric was.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Extremely Narrow Sonnets

Some poets like to write in traditional forms, some like to write in free verse, some like to do both, and some like to monkey with traditional forms. Some poets like to do all four things, and I am one of them, and I am also a person who likes to use "monkey" as a verb, an idiomatic move I permanently borrowed from my parents' generation.

Sherman Alexie monkeyed with the sonnet-form by writing fourteen rather large prose-poetry paragraphs. Instead of fourteen lines in a metered, rhyming scheme, there are fourteen large chunks of writing, much of which concern American history and American Indians (or Native Americans--although I gather the former term is back in use). I like Alexie's poem, and I like what he does with the sonnet, which in my view he treats as an old-fashioned constricting form--a figurative reservation, if you will, from which Alexie wants to escape. He explodes the form, to good effect, in my opinion.

My present aims are much more modest and, arguably, whimsical. I wanted to write the narrowest sonnet possible. I'd already written a sonnet that rhymed on its left side. That is, I used the Shakespearian-sonnet rhyme-scheme and the usual iambic pentameter, but the rhyming words occurred at the beginning of each line, not at the end, so of course the rhyming-effect is completely different. I just thought it needed to be done--done, but not repeated.

A traditional sonnet is ten syllables wide and fourteen lines high. As my late friend Wendy Bishop noted, it is a 14X10 poem. Wendy was extraordinarily imaginative, but she had a great practical side, too. She also thought of the sonnet as a poem that could fit on a postcard. I think she even had her students literally write sonnets on (onto) postcards.

I supposed, then, that the narrowest possible sonnet would be composed of 14 letters that formed words vertically. Here is an example:

Wafer-Thin Sonnet

I
l
o
v
e
y
o
u,
m
y
d
e
a
r.

I like this because it fulfills the 14-line criterion, and its theme is the same as 57. 5% of all sonnets, based on no research and a blind guess. But you do have to figure that tens of thousands of sonnets have had a thesis-statement similar to "I love you, my dear," don't you?

But then I thought that I'd gone too far (or not far enough) because the rhyming had disappeared. So I decided to write an extremely narrow sonnet that still rhymed, and here it is:

Extremely Narrow Sonnet

How 'bout
If we
Went out
To see
What you
And I
Might do
And why?
Let's set
A date
And let
Our fate
Unfurl--
Or curl.

So I kept the basic rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian or English sonnet: ababcdcdefefgg. And in the interests of narrowness, I used one iambic foot per line. An even narrower sonnet would keep the rhyme scheme but just use one word per line; that would be tough. Take a whack at it, if you like.

The purpose of such foolishness? Partly, it's foolishness for its own sake. And, well, as W.H. Auden said, of his poetic vocation, "I like to play with words." He did not say "I like only to play with words," and his poems demonstrate just how much more he liked to do with poetry. But playing fanciful, whimsical games with form is not a bad thing to do after one has been hitting the serious poetry-writing hard for a while, and I think a playful connection to venerable forms actually complements a conventional connection to them. It's good training--discipline, if you will--to try to write a genuine Shakespearian sonnet--but in a contemporary idiom. It's also good to explode the sonnet, as Alexie did. It's good to "stab" the sonnet, as Shapiro claimed to do. And it's good to monkey with the sonnet. All are ways of living with words, as musicians live with sounds and rhythms, strictures and improvisations, the old and the fresh.

I invite you to attempt to monkey with villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets--ballads, too, perhaps. Venerable, venerated forms can withstand whimsy and deconstruction. Sonnet 18 by the Shakemeister General isn't going anywhere.