The Sonnet Is a Puzzle in a Box

The sonnet is a puzzle in a box
That sits there on the shelf of poetry.
Of course the form has taken many knocks,
In part because of its ubiquity.

Indeed, as here, one writes about the form
When writing in it: ah, meta-verse,
It seems, became a while back the norm.
Some think it makes the sonnet even worse.

The sonnet lends itself to poise and pace,
And yet one feels quite rushed to make a point:
Iambic sprint, three quatrains in a race.
The last two lines, however, own the joint.

Well, here we are. This is the thirteenth line.
This sonnet says its feeling mighty fine.


Hans Ostrom, 2012

Top 100 Detective Novels?

(The image is of Denzel Washington in the film-based-on-the-novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley.)


I'm double-dipping on this post, as I have posted on a related topic--on

http://upsenglish.wordpress.com/

At any rate, the following site has a list from David Lehman of the top 100 detective novels, based partly on the value of the novels themselves but also on their historical importance in the genre:

http://www.topmystery.com/lehmans100.html



Like a lot of people who, one way or another, ended up making reading central to their lives, I started reading detective fiction early. There were always a lot of paperbacks in the genre around the house, for one thing, and I also got hooked on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes early on.

I teach a class, now and then, on detective fiction, and I've published one detective novel, Three To Get Ready--very much a first try, if you get my drift. I was so inexperienced that I didn't know I'd written a book in the sub-genre known as "police procedural" until I read a review of the book, the "police" in which are represented by a rural sheriff and his deputy.

I've always thought the detective (or "crime" or "mystery") novel had a lot in common with the sonnet, insofar as there are some strict conventions set up, and some heavy expectations--but also the expectation that one will improvise, somehow, on what's come before. In both cases, working within the conventions but also testing them and in some cases disrupting them--all part of a satisfying process, from the writer's point of view at least.

Let Him Collect His Thoughts

Thoughts Collected

He collected his thoughts, arranged them
in a heap outside on parched hard dirt.
The assembly didn't impress. It included
a rudimentary view of Spinoza's philosophy,
a reminder to buy shoes, numerous tattered
worries, sad wee handcrafted boxes of hope,
an image of a trout, one of a grasshopper
spitting brown juice, a strong opinion about
torture, and countless scraps, shards, and bits.

As expected, the pile smelled powerfully
of confusion, the odor of which is not unlike
that of mothballs. Having collected his thoughts,
he turned his back on them, went inside,
and produced more thoughts. Homo sapiens.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Fallability Sonnet

I think I already posted this sonnet once, but it couldn't hurt to post it again, as even more imperfections have piled up in the meantime.

The Fallability Sonnet


My fallability has tripped me up
Again. I've fallen on the gravelly ground
Of imperfection. I would like to cut
This nonsense out, but no; my flaws have found

A way to find me even when I seem
To have evaded them successfully.
They just show up. They are a well trained team--
And venerable. Yes, some have been with me

So long, I look at them with a strange mix
Of loathing, dread, familiarity.
Of course I have some antidotal tricks
And textual guides. Spirituality

Assists. Self-admonition, too.
Regret. I sigh. But still: what's one to do?

***

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2009

Civil Liberties Sonnet

(photo is of Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union)








Civil Liberties Sonnet


A civil liberty might be defined
As a chance to have a prayer to defend
Oneself against a power that's aligned
With secrecy and certitude, that's then
Brought out much of the worst in some
Of the cohort who enjoy power, which tends
To unhinge folks. What, however, has been done
Might be undone, with rights restored to mend
The rips in practices that hold a clear
And wary view of power. Checks and rein
And oversights on reign: basic but dear.
Unbounded power just tends to go insane.
Since that's the way it is, that which concerns
Our civil liberties is a priority that burns.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Quantum Sonnet

Okay, so I was reading about sub-atomic particles last night, and from I gathered (not much more than a few sub-atomic particles of knowledge, alas), scientists used to think light manifested itself in the form of waves, but now they think it manifests itself in the form of particle-bursts, also known as quanta. Apparently, this comparatively new way of think about light has resulted in a redefinition of the atom, which when I was in high school was represented as a kind of planet orbited by moons--all very orderly, circles and dots. Now, because of quantum-theory, there's no telling where those "moons"--or sub-atomic particles-- might be. Then there's this thing called a "quantum leap," which is a term lots of people throw around in all sorts of non-scientific contexts, including episodic television-programming. . Apparently a quantum leap--or jump--occurs when an electron is in one place and then in another place but not ever in the place in between. That's right. It disappears, and then it reappears. I think scientists should be pretty darned careful about accusing spiritual people of believing in things they can't see. It seems one has to have faith in quantum theory.

At any rate, I decided to write a sonnet based on last night's reading. More is the pity.

Quantum Sonnet


Electrons here, electrons there, but no
Transition anywhere. They disappear.
They reappear--a quantum jump--or so
It's been identified--not well, I fear.

For if the relocation were a jump,
The jumping thing would stay in view.
Electrons don't exactly make a whump
When landing after leap. I know it's true

They're ultra-small. Perhaps there is a sleight
Of light in sub-particulated world?
Or maybe God hides in a burst of light--
Photonic God, an energetic whirl

That makes and breaks the rules. Look there, look here,
But note that in-between does not appear.

Sonnet Play-By-PLay

So I write sonnets more or less as aerobic poetic exercises and only rarely expect them to turn out as successful poems, and then from that very limited set, I might try to publish one. I think the main thing with sonnets and other traditional forms is knowing why you're writing them. Also, it's good, I think, to see yourself as participating in a long genre-tradition and exploring the tension between adhering to conventions and disrupting them, perfecting your engagement with a mode and improvising upon the mode.

With the following sonnet, a mere exercise, I decided to provide a play by play, line by line, just to show what sort of difficulty the form puts a poet it.

Sonnet: Hometown Paper

[the title/subject: so this is a fairly conventional Modernist move--take the love-poem form of the sonnet and use it to talk about something unrelated to love and otherwise unlyrical]

And shall it disappear, the local paper--

[The "And" is there to jump-start the iambic with an unstressed syllable, and I've presented myself a problem by asking a question; also, I've chose a two-syllable end-word and what's called a feminine rhyme; I've chosen to go with iambic pentameter, the conventional meter]

The hometown's daily, weekly digested

[More hot water--another two-syllable end word, meaning I have to think of rhymes now for both paper and digested]

Familiar fare of nearby news and safer

[So I went with a half-rhyme with paper--which I think worked out okay, but then I caused more problems by introducing a conceit--the newspaper or news as food--hard to continue, and likely to tempt me into a mixed metaphor]

Palatable small snacks, time-tested,

[I love putting multisyllabic words in an iambic line; it really speeds things up. "Time-tested" is a cliche--so I had to pay the price for "digested"; I'm depending on a pronunciation of palatable that stresses the second syllable]

Reliable desserts of gossip, sports,

[So now I'm stuck in that food-conceit, but at least I'm hanging with the subject]

Cooked up by ones who know the local fears?

[Still wearing out that conceit, making the editors cooks--I do like "local fears," however, and it may let me out of the conceit--we'll see; and I've finally sewed up the question--started in line 1!]

Already, so it seems, rags of all sorts

[Sports/sorts: basic rhyme; a shift of subject--papers going out of business--but by using "rags," I may have attached myself to another conceit]

Have been attached to quilts (one hears)

[So I decided to take "rags" literally; as rags are made into quilts, "rags" (newspapers) are attached to figurative quilts of . . . what?]

That make up media conglomerates,

[Conglomerates are quilts. Hmmm. But what will rhyme with conglomerates?! Oy.]

While others simply went, were buried with

[Still stuck on the rag-conceit, now treating rags more as clothes]

Their owner-editors. Moreover, what's

[So I rhymed "moreover, what's" with "conglomerate"--that's fun; some small newspapers perish when their old editors die]

The fate of reading? Yes, like Faith and Myth,]

[I rhymed Myth with With--amusing; more importantly, I'm experiencing what many sonnet-writers experience--the sudden, panicky realization that the poem's about to end; one gets lost in the meter, rhyming, conceits, and so on. Then: OMG! Only 14 lines, and I've written a dozen already--and I need to end with a couplet--and finish the poem! I mean, it's not cliff-diving, but it does create a virtual adrenaline rush, for nerds]

Our Literacy is ultra-local now--

[Now I leap to a Big Point--linking local papers to larger issues of literacy; the couplet is an opportunity to do this; I've played it safe in terms of rhyming by using "now"--lots of options]

Locked to a screen mere inches from the brow.

[Like the Shakemeister General, except not really, I've gone for a wicked little irony. In the age of the Internet, we feel we're superior to printed local, hickish papers, but then here we are peering at our various little personal screens, which in one sense are more insular, even solipcistic, than the local rag, or so I argue.

So there you have it--a not very good sonnet, but a great aerobic poetic workout, getting some work on rhyme, meter, conceits, getting out of trouble, having fun. And play by play, just like sports! Such a deal. Or, as John Madden would say, "And, boom, he finishes the couplet!" Maybe Madden will make a Sonnet Video Game. Uh, maybe not.

Molecular Sonnet for Sunday

Whether you take some kind of Creationist point of view or some kind of Evolutionary one--or are skeptical of both, as a friend of mine is--it's nonetheless amazing that mere matter, of which we are composed, can have concepts and produce complicated emotions. If we ask how in the heck single-cell organisms evolved into organisms complex enough to think of love, time-share condos, philosophy, chess, and combustion-engines, the Creationist point of few is certainly easier to grasp: God made it so. The Evolutionary point of view, ironically, seems more miraculous. What are the odds that organism A would have eventually evolved into organism Z--a human? A key variable, I think, is time. The Biblical calendar is pretty brief. The Evolutionary one allows for millions and millions of years during which lots of accidents and false starts can happen--eventually leading to organisms called human golfing, cheating on taxes, and singing ballads in cafes. The Evolutionist's retort to God made it so seems, in part, to be Evolution takes its own sweet time, of which there is an infinite amount.

As may be immediately apparent, I did not take millions of years to write the following sonnet, which has something to do with molecules and love.

Molecular Mood: A Sonnet

Molecular in nature were the two,
For they were human, and therefore made
Of carbon, protein, fat--the usual stew
Of which stuff in this matter, fact, is said
By scientists to be composed. But how
Does one molecular composite reach
The point at which it loves, the point called Now
Wherein one body-mind, by means of speech,
Decides and then declares this thing called Love,
A concept generated by uncounted other
Molecular composites, the stuff of
Which Civilization's made? Whatever.
The she loves him; the he loves her. Their cells
Conspire to cast reciprocating spells.

Hans Ostrom/Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

I'm inordinately fond of the made/said partial rhyme in the first quatrain, and of the partial rhyming of other/Whatever. The couplet pleases me, for some reason.

How To Be a Sonnet

If you know any aspiring poems, as opposed to aspiring poets, out there that have set becoming a sonnet as a career-goal, then this poem may be of use to them:

How To Be A Sonnet

You have to utter what you have to say
Iambically, and then you must transmit
Whatever poet using you that day
Decides that she or he desires to get
Across compressedly and cleverly.
However well you carry out this task,
Please know, my dear, that you'll fail utterly.
For every sonnet-sampler now will ask,
"How can this upstart thing even presume
To carve its iambs anywhere as well
As Shakespeare's little monuments that loom
Or all the sonnets that still help to sell
Anthologies to students who view verse
As if it were a body in a hearse?"

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Sonnet For an Actress

Here's a sonnet for an actress. Which actress? No one in particular, though Julie Christie or Jacqueline Bissett might work in my case. Readers may substitute their own actress or actor, for the poem seems to be about "beauty" and notions of beauty, as they're projected onto and by the culture, whatever that means. I think it means that in a culture of mass media, especially cinema and television, media-icons, however short their iconic lifespan (as opposed to their biological lifespan) may be, help define beauty--for better or worse or both.

Sonnet for an Actress

You should have seen her yesterday.
She was more beautiful than our
Idea of beauty; and the way
She carried beauty in her hour

Unveiled achievement by a body
Unmatched by art. You should have seen
Her. Yes, our gaze was always ready.
What, though, did her beauty mean?

Did she embody what we thought?
Or did she teach us to desire?
And were we seeing what we sought,
Or held in spell by beauty’s choir?

Confused, nostalgic—what to say?
If you’d just seen her yesterday . . . .

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Fourteen Lines: Sonnet-Addiction

The sonnet-form of poetry has been around for about 800 years. That's a long time, from where I'm sitting, but maybe not from where geology is sitting.

It's a form that should be worn out by now (indeed, most working poets today probably view it as a worn out form), but it's simply too addictive--to poets as well as readers of poetry--to be abandoned. From an American perspective, one might compare it to the blues form or the three-chord country-and-western song. In one sense we feel as if we've heard it all before when we think of these forms, but on closer inspection, the possibilities for variations and innovations within the tight form are endless, and indeed one source of fascination is what the next person will do with the form, given the form's tight guidelines. The tension between tight, conventional form and innovation becomes a source of inspiration and interest. Of course, it's always possible to disobey a form's guidleines significantly, something that happened when the sonnet-form lept, so to speak, from Italy to England.



"Sonnet," so the story goes, springs from a similar word in Italian that means "little song" or "little sound." Apparently it began life as a song-form within larger works, in Sicily, at the court of Frederick, in the 1200s. We associate the form now with the Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch, and his sonnets refined the octave [8 lines]/sestet [6 lines] form. It's easier to rhyme in Italian than in English, so Petrarch was able to use as few as four rhymes over the 14 lines. Thomas Wyatt tried to keep the Petrarchan form going in English but started to vary the rhyme-scheme, and his iambic pentameter was pretty rough. As we know, Shakespeare put the real English stamp on the form, solidifying the three-quatrain/couplet form, which, among other things, allows for more rhymes. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter tends to be more regular than Wyatt's; that's for sure. Shakespeare also deviated from and even made fun of conventions of the sonnet. For example, in Sonnet 18, he asks, "Shall I compare thee [his beloved] to a summer's day?" The rest of the sonnet implicitly answers, "Yes and no," because he does draw comparisons but points out their inadequacy, thereby disrupting the convention of describing someone's beauty in terms of nature (a.g., a woman's complexion = that of a rose). Not to get too cute, but Sonnet 18 is both a sonnet and a meta-sonnet, a sonnet that shows off the poet's awareness of the tradition in which he writes.

Like Dickinson's poetry, sonnets are often met with resistance because they can seem too formal, encoded, and remote--something that belongs to dusty volumes in libraries or only to English teachers. But once you crack the surface, so to speak, they're very satisfying little puzzles to work on, and they often make quick little arguments, often feinting in one direction, going in another direction, and ending with emphasis, surprise, or both. And by the time Countee Cullen writes his famous sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel" (in the Harlem Renaissance), almost any subject is open to the sonnet; it's no longer a song of love. "Yet Do I Marvel" may well be my most favorite sonnet of all time, with all due respect to the Shake-meister-general.

In one sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading can be described as a figurative addiction, not so different from that to crossword puzzles or soduku. In another sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading are like a big ongoing party you can visit. It's a welcoming tradition. That one is welcome doesn't necessarily mean that the sonnet one tries to write will succeed or that every sonnet one reads will be satisfying. It just means a grand, flexible, evolving tradition continues--a moveable feast.

I usually have students (as poets or readers) write a "sound sonnet," in which individual lines or sentences make sense but in which the sonnet overall need not, and indeed should not, make sense. The idea is to liberate the students from having to mean so that they may focus on the meter and rhyming, the building of three quatrains and a couplet. Ironically, the hardest part of the exercise turns out to be not making sense. In most cases, the "sound sonnets" quickly begin to be about something.

I invite you to write a sound-sonnet, a 10 [syllables; every other syllable stressed] X 14 [lines] poem, as my late friend Wendy Bishop referred to it. Try not to mean!

I participate in the tradition chiefly by reading (and teaching) sonnets, but every so often I attend the party as a writer. In the following sonnet, I decided to have the poem try (at least) to meaning something, I decided to stick with the English or Shakespearian form (three quatrains and a couplet), I decided to adhere, with a few variations, to iambic pentameter, but I also decided to be flexible with the rhyming by using some slant- or half-rhymes.

Making the Soul’s Re-acquaintance

It seems you must give up your long-term lease
On being right and wronged, righteous and hurt.
No doubt there’s someone else who would be pleased
To lord over that haughty piece of Earth.

Move to a cottage of humility,
Cross-breezes, and a pantry full of jars
That hold your faults, preserved for scrutiny.
Live with the wretchedness of who you are.

Chop kindling from the stump of your assumptions,
And ask forgiveness from each simple wall.
It won’t be long before you sense resumption
Of simple gratitude for life and all.

Of course you’ll want to pray again, poor sod.
But keep it basic: pray there is a God.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom.

Here's a wonderful site, by the way, for sonnet enthusiasts, addicts, or casual visitors:

http://www.sonnets.org/

Fathers and Sons, Faith and Faithlessness: A Sonnet by Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers tended to write in long-lined free verse in which ideas and images were mortared together like stones. The lines are well and patiently built. Although one might be tempted to compare his verse to that of Whitman or Sandburg--other American masters of the long line--Jeffers is much more rhetorically and metaphorically restrained; unlike Whitman, he's not an excitable poet. He tends to stalk his subject coldly.

It was interesting to me, then, to run across a sonnet Jeffers wrote. I found it in a lovely pulp paperback, The Penguin Book of Sonnets (1943), the kind of compact paperback published on cheap paper that I remember fondly from my childhood. The westerns by Zane Grey and Max Brand that my father read--in bed, while smoking a cigar--came in this form. I think most people who love books love them not just because of the reading but because of the physicality, and one may cherish a cheap paperback--the feel of the thing--as much as an expensive leather-bound book with exquisite paper and printing. An old soft paperback is like an old soft baseball glove, in some respects.

In any event, here's Jeffers's sonnet:

To His Father

Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
He fails the world but you he did not fail,
He led you through all forms of grief and strife
Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
With coronal age and death like quieting balm.
I Father having followed other guides
And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,
Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides
For trophies on a savage temple wall
Hardly anticipate that reverend stage
Of Life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

Jeffers does well in the sonnet-form here, in my opinion, but I feel him straining against its limits, sense his wanting to let the lines find their own length, rather like the Pacific coastline on which he lived. Jeffers here is like a fine athlete who's been asked to perform within the proscribed limits of a team-sport; you can feel him wanting to overwhelm the sonnet-form.

And Jeffers's characteristic brutal honesty is by no means discarded in the sonnet form. Faith in Christ served his father well; that's the truth, and Jeffers speaks it, and he explains precisely how that faith worked in his father's life. The faith helped the father through "all forms of grief and strife," and it kept his father noble and calm.

The surprising adjective "coronal" is terrific. Because of his father's faith, his father's age became a kind of crown, and death became a kind of balm.

This is a Shakespearian or English sonnet in form, but, like an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, it breaks after line 8, and "turns" to another view of the topic. Now we learn that Jeffers couldn't imitate or adopt his father's Christian faith. He has followed "other guides," namely Classical models, including Stocism and Greek tragedy. But how brutally honest Jeffers is about his own lack of faith; often the guides he's chosen have not soothed his pain, have not helped him through grief and strife, and the years lived in faithlessness are compared to "nailed up" "dripping panther hides/For trophies on a savage temple wall." How wonderful of Jeffers to find a pagan image for what he admits is his own version of paganism, and to state that such trophies can't do for him what faith in Christ did for his father. Nor does Christ escape Jeffers's honest assessment. He claims Christ "fails the world," meaning what? Meaning, one supposes, that Christ has not returned yet, and that evil marches on? Perhaps. The final hard truth Jeffers leaves for himself: His worldview will not leave him in as good a shape, spiritually and philosophically, as his father when he, Jeffers, is old; "extreme age" will not be the equivalent of a "snow-wreathed honor." He's not looking forward to growing old. Old age will be harder for Jeffers, in the absence of faith in Christ, than it was for his father. I find this to be a bracing poem in which Jeffers honors his father and his father's faith without being sentimental and in which he honestly contrasts his own world-view with his father's without being argumentative or combative.