*Yesterday, Kirsten asked me to challenge her to write a ten minute sonnet. So I gave her a subject that I thought would suit her —the tech crew setting up and taking down a stage —and she ran with it (and will share her poem with us?)! In the process she has also challenged me (and all of us!) to follow up with a similar effort, and my ten (okay, maybe thirty) minutes are what you now see before you. In turn, I’ll be glad to offer anyone a quick prompt –or better yet, turn to your nearest family member. Give it a try!
It makes me smile to write these fourteen lines
With structure, cadence, balance, pattern, pose
But I have learned that just one thing defines
A sonnet and determines how it flows
More than the number of its syllables,
More than its meter or the way it rhymes,
More than the measure of its parables
Dressed up in templates drawn from other times:
A sonnet is a river that appears
To trickle out of nowhere; it’s a stream
That cuts its path, a course that winds and veers
With more beneath its surface than would seem
But what defines the river most to me
Is how, in time, it brings me to the see.
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DeleteDear Dan,
ReplyDeleteThere can be so much to see in a sonnet, but you help me to see how we have to look more at the rivers around us: the people we work with and spend good time with, the constant stream of lives and deaths that touch us profoundly, the local news that can shake us more than any headline can. My prayers go out for your colleague’s family and friends, and for you, being the friend that you were.
That river analogy, which also works directly for other poems, by the way, Psalm 23 being a perfect example, was inspired especially by a rereading of Hesse’s Siddhartha last week. What a beautiful book that is, a river by its own right, a poem that cuts its own path. It had me revisiting the fatherhood movie you recommended this summer, A Place Beyond the Pines. It also reminded me how, despite all the intellectual ways we try to perfect our faith, it comes down to simple things, like listening to the world around us and appreciating the life that God gives us.
My proposed sonnet project seems a little trivial by comparison, but maybe not. Fourteen lines are never expected to equal the collective force of all rivers, but I do hope this idea, really Kirsten’s idea, can inspire a few efforts to see the streams around us, and even share a little of the glimpses. So, if anyone is interested, let me throw out a few prompts:
- tomorrow is the Chicago Marathon, a river of 44,000 people.
-“Poetry makes nothing happen” - W. H. Auden, elegizing W. B. Yeats
- Siddhartha first “saw” the river by hearing it laugh.
- French river barge stories anyone?
Yes, excellent! And add to the list a favorite season (even of a sport or tv show--I'm the only one on the planet, I think, who hadn't seen any episode of 'Breaking Bad'). My recent 'Indian Summer' was going to be a sonnet but it morphed into a 16-line set of quatrains, with descending sentence lengths. Pushkin, Keats, Frost, and now I have poems on this favorite season. What's yours?
DeleteI think the double post of Psalm 23 is thanks to "Deus ex machina"
ReplyDelete- aren't I remembering that right?
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