[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

[Halvard Johnson]

Yawn, indeed.

4 Subprime-Mortgage Sonnets


i.

talent for vanishing
dance suites

repossessed pulque
bars, luxury-class

rigors of cold
climate

who's that on tenor?



ii.

backroom brawls
back in the news

raunchy endeavors
under review

local calls at long-
distance rates

empty before filling



iii.

away all boats
ask me about

red houses all
in a row

tonight's rock
concerto

cancelled



iv.

glossy enlargements
no extra cost

some ice cubes
on a blanket

your house or
mine?

Hungry, a country?



Hal

"Information cannot argue with a closed mind."
           --Mike Nichols and Elaine May

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html


On Apr 5, 2008, at 11:26 AM, David Graham wrote:

> These discussions sometimes make me scratch my head, but more often  
> they just make my eyes glaze over.  I agree with John Jeffrey, as it  
> happens, but so what?  I'm very interested in whether or not a given  
> poem is a good one.  But whether it is or is not a sonnet?   
> Yawn . . . .
>
> I'm content when someone says that a sonnet must have 14 lines and a  
> rhyme scheme; and I'm equally happy when Gerald Stern insists that a  
> sonnet is simply a "little song" and need have no particular shape.   
> I probably wouldn't follow his example myself, but again:  who  
> cares?  And why?
>
> Show me the poems, not the dictionary, I say.
>
> Why, here's one now:
>
> September, 1999
>
> I was thinking about pears—or you were—I
> don't remember who first started to think,
> though you said Seckle pears and I said Bartlett
> and nothing I could do could budge you; I
> could cut the skin so quickly and keep it so thin
> the light goes through it, and I held it to the light
> to catch the rose, and I knew when the core was
> already brown and it was spreading just by
> touching the flesh, and sometimes the neck was gone,
> as far as eating, though you would call it the nose,
> you with your Seckles, you with your freckles, and no one
> but me has quite such pleasure extruding the stem,
> and no one I know puts a pear in his coat pocket
> when he goes out in the rain, as I do, though what
> was the pleasure eating in sheets of water compared to
> the loneliness eating by yourself, and even though
> hornets were in your bowl and ten or twenty
> were crawling over a rotten peach and three or
> four were already after my pear since it was
> autumn again and hornets were dying and they were
> angry, and drunk, I just wiped them away.
>
> -- Gerald Stern.  American Sonnets.  Norton, 2002.
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
> Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz
>
> Poetry Library:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
> ==========================================
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 4, 2008, at 10:15 PM, John Jeffrey wrote:
>> These are the discussions that make me scratch my head.  Why the  
>> argument against the idea that a sonnet has a certain form--which,  
>> yes, is flexible to a point, but a poem that wants to live in the  
>> sonnet neighborhood has to conform to the rules in some major way.   
>> (I bet that word "rules" really set some teeth on edge, eh?)   
>> Otherwise it's simple: it's not a sonnet.  A chicken liver dropped  
>> on the cat's back is not a sonnet.  Neither is a toaster.  And  
>> neither is fourteen single word lines.  You can call it a sonnet,  
>> but it ain't.  Nor is this post a sonnet.  Nor is it a haiku.  It's  
>> not a earlobe either.  Even if I insist.
>>
>> Now where is that cat?
>>
>> John
>
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