Shakespeare Would Love This Assignment

 give me a sonnet . . .

No, that’s not a new kind of cocktail.  This week you’ll be playing with the sonnet form(s), reading everything from poems that strictly follow classic sonnet form(s) of structure and content, to sonnets that challenge the Petrarchan “beloved” as object, to sonnets that are quite badly behaved and probably aren’t invited to family reunions (but oh, their parties are so much more interesting).

Your assignment is to write a sonnet – in any of the various forms below – with the subject of either a Personal Ad, or an Insult (prep for assignment!  Read:  13W, read Chapter 12, “Sonnets: Exploring the Possibilities of Fourteen Lines;” sonnets in SM Poetry Anthology.  Also, read SM poems for “Personal Ad” and “Insult”). 

STRUCTURE

Most of you are familiar with, at the very least, the Shakespearean sonnet.  Wendy Bishop’s chapter in 13 Ways gives examples of more traditional sonnets such as “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” and “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”  This form uses the English sonnet, what Bishop calls “a small, often passionate or philosophical song” of 14 lines in iambic pentameter, with the usual suspects in rhyming patterns.  However, she also notes these kinds of sonnet possibilities:

a sonnet written in couplets

a personal (invented) rhyme scheme (called a ‘nonce sonnet’)

sonnet sequences, such as a ‘crown of sonnets,’ using the Italian form (see page 318)

a monorhymed sonnet

double sonnets (28 lines)

reversed Shakespearean sonnet

retrograde sonnet (reads the same backward as forward)

non-rhyming sonnet of 14 lines

shorter lines (a ‘skinny’ sonnet)

CONTENT

Traditional sonnets developed as a vehicle in which male poets praised their female beloveds in a predictable and objectifying manner, or as Julia Alvarez says, “The sonnet tradition was one in which women were caged in golden cages of a beloved, in perfumed gas chambers of stereotype … a heavily mined and male labyrinth.”  Although few men complained about the male-centricism of sonnets, perhaps Shakespeare himself rebelled against the necessity of constant praise when he wrote “my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” a sonnet that paints a less than flattering picture of the supposed-beloved.

Like Shakespeare, if you can’t find the form you need, tweak the one you have.  Bishop’s chapter contains sonnets about rape (“Leda and the Swan”), a sonnet that won’t behave (“The Bad Sonnet”), the loss of a finger while shoeing a horse (“One Morning, Shoeing Horses”), a diabetic seizure (“Fourteen”), and so on. 

On the web, check out this link, which has some fine examples of contemporary sonnets. 

Here are other examples that might inspire you.

The Bad Sonnet

By Ronald Wallace

It stayed up late, refused to go to bed,
and when it did it sang loud songs instead
of sleeping, disturbing its siblings--couplets, quatrains
in their small rooms, began caterwauling--
and soon the whole neighborhood was awake.
Sometimes it got in trouble with the law,
shoplifting any little thing it saw
that caught its fancy: happiness and heartache

slipped neatly in its pocket. It joined a gang
that forged currency, bombed conventions, and finally
tried to bump off all its competition.
Through a sequence of events, luckily
it was caught, hand-cuffed, and taken off to jail
where it would not keep quiet in its cell.

Margaret Menamin as a young woman

Margaret Menamin’s collection Blue Collar Sonnets gives us the sonnet in a new light:

The Hobo

Deep in the vast Missouri’s slimy silt
there lies what was a man. He has been dead
these seven decades, and his flesh has fed
huge catfish and a boxcar rider’s guilt.

There were no jobs. My uncle slept in trains
that ran along the river in KC
where hoboes gathered. It was here that he
jumped from a car and panic filled his veins

as someone stepped from shadow. It was here
he pulled his gun and dropped the man forever.
Quickly he rolled the body to the river
and watched it sink. He lived in guilt and fear

from that day forward, dreamed of Cain and Abel.
Who was the man? Who missed him at the table?

Plumbers

Up to their shins in human nastiness
of every ugly kind, how do they keep
from choking on their vomit when they sleep?
How do they free their nostrils of the mess

and find their appetites at dinner hour?
Do they just wash their hands of all of it,
the hairballs and the condoms and the shit,
and think of lilacs while they’re in the shower?

These are the men we call when septic tanks
rebel, when sewer lines regurgitate
their stinking contents. They investigate
our murky underworld for little thanks

beyond their union scale, but when they’re through
they know more secrets than the tabloids do.

The Molly Maguires

John “Blackjack” Kehoe Speaks

Oh yes, our hands were bloody, but in part
from lifting murdered brothers off the ground.
We came to this great promised land and found
that we were beasts of burden, saw the heart

of Ireland being trampled in the mud
by ruthless men who broke us, showed us hell
and left our shriveled bodies where they fell.
I’ll not deny we shed some rich men’s blood.

We wanted schools and doctors, shoes and bread.
We got betrayal, treachery and filth
while villains bribed our priests with tainted wealth
and winked at murderers who blamed their dead

on Mollies. It was perjured oaths alone
that hanged us not for our crimes but their own.

For more poems by Menamin, check out this issue of Shit Creek Review.

Marilyn Hacker’s amazing collection Love, Death and a Changing of the Seasons chronicles a love affair from first blush to final break-up:

“Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

Before a face suddenly numinous,

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?

It’s documented torrents are unloosed

by such events as recently produced

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest

of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

And Eavan Boland’s fascination with mythology and metaphorical descriptions of what’s been lost shows up in this one:  Notice that great turn at the end:  Atlantis, just another word for a loss too great to articulate?!  Love that!

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals—had all one fine day gone under? I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed? I miss our old city — white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe what really happened is this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.