[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

[John Jeffrey]

You're right, of course, in yawning.  It is all about the poem's worth.  I guess I'm just sick of all the stretching of terms to the point where they're useless.  And it's not just sonnets, it's poetry itself.  It's capital A Art itself.  I think instead I'll go read a Shakespeare's villanelle, or maybe I'm in the mood for Basho's heroic couplets.

John


David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> 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:
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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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