[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

[James Cervantes]

One of my favorite, other-species sonnets:

Sonnet Nabokov



Pathetic, how the stiff wings' final reflex

Mimics

A death struggle; how the brittle thorax

Clicks

As the pin penetrates; how the pin exits

Cracks

Riddle the chitin; how the aftershocks

Climax

In a foreleg's or an antenna's palsied metrics;

Facts

Carousel on a dark scrim of wax;

No music;

No music but a pulse make-believe makes

Relax.


- Daniel Bosch, Poetry, November 2005

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 8:32 AM, <JforJames at aol.com> wrote:

>  A form as universally successful as the sonnet is bound to attract
> artists who want to tinker
> with its formal constraints or those who just want play with the form. A
> true formalist like Mona
> Van Duyn did a series of 'sonnets' with one word per line while
> employing a rhyme scheme. Also,
> there's to consider the break from the Italian form toward the English
> sonnet form. What did
> practitioners of the former at the time say/think about the liberties
> taken by the latter?
>
> It seems easy enough these days to stick a modifier on the term if one
> needs to make clear
> distinction: 'traditional sonnet' or 'formal sonnet' would do the trick.
> Or one could put quotes around
> the non-traditonal sonnet, "In Ted Berrigan's 'sonnets' we see..."
>
> My philosophical side reminds me that poetic forms are not like Plato's
> 'forms'. There isn't a universal
> sonnet form/ideal that manifests itself in the language object we call a
> sonnet. All forms arose
> in some arbitrary fashion from a set of rules first laid down an often
> unknown ur-maker. So in that sense
> all forms are arbitrary and capricious. A certain14 line metered and rimed
> creation becomes habituated
> in the general practice of poets, while the twelve-liner or the
> eighteen-liner never caught on. Many claims have been for special qualities
> inherent in 14 lines (or the 8 + 6 mode), but most are specious.
> Finnegan
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080406/21056124/attachment.html