National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

Very short poems are really tough to do—at least to do well. A while back I wrote about some poems by Franz Wright from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard that were, generally, very short and said something to the effect that I didn't find them very interesting. As with one's reading anything, that reflects as much or more on the person commenting on the author's work as on the author's own abilities, but for whatever reason I didn't get much from Wright's short poems.

On the other hand, for a long time I have enjoyed reading classical Japanese poetry (haiku, tanka, etc.) which are typically very short poems, often with intense and crystalline imagery. So length itself isn't a problem.

Which brings me to the poem I'm posting today, by Rae Armantrout. Armantrout is known for the extreme brevity of much of her poetry, though it is fundamentally quite different in style and subject than the Japanese forms. She is generally considered part of the so-called "Language" poetry movement, where much of the focus of the poem is essentially on aspects of language itself—syntax, semantics, and so on. Here is one of her poems:

And
Rae Armantrout

1

Tense and tenuous
grow from the same root

as does tender
in its several guises:

the sour grass flower;
the yellow moth.


2

I would not confuse
the bogus
with the spurious.

The bogus
is a sore thumb

while the spurious
pours forth

as fish and circuses.

Source: Poetry (May 2012)
​

I like this poem quite a lot but, oddly, can't really tell you why I like it or what it is about the poem that I like so much. I especially can't say what I think it "means." The first four lines are clearly about the nature of language and how quite different words can derive from the same root, but then those last two lines, which are clearly imagistic, don't seem to me to have any obvious connection to the previous ones. Similarly, the initial lines of the second part also move from a fairly straightforward comparison of two words to the incongruously arresting image of the last line. Where I found the elliptical style of Wright's poems kind of irritating, I find Armantrout's somewhat similar style fascinating, like unexpectedly coming across something weird—an abandoned wasp's nest in the middle of a baseball diamond, for example.

I can't really explain it other than to say that some art works for some people and the some art doesn't. Not very satisfying, but there it is.

 

[Angeline]

Very short poems are really tough to do—at least to do well. A while back I wrote about some poems by Franz Wright from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard that were, generally, very short and said something to the effect that I didn't find them very interesting. As with one's reading anything, that reflects as much or more on the person commenting on the author's work as on the author's own abilities, but for whatever reason I didn't get much from Wright's short poems.

On the other hand, for a long time I have enjoyed reading classical Japanese poetry (haiku, tanka, etc.) which are typically very short poems, often with intense and crystalline imagery. So length itself isn't a problem.

Which brings me to the poem I'm posting today, by Rae Armantrout. Armantrout is known for the extreme brevity of much of her poetry, though it is fundamentally quite different in style and subject than the Japanese forms. She is generally considered part of the so-called "Language" poetry movement, where much of the focus of the poem is essentially on aspects of language itself—syntax, semantics, and so on. Here is one of her poems:

​

And​

Rae Armantrout​

​

1​

​

Tense and tenuous​

grow from the same root​

​

as does tender​

in its several guises:​

​

the sour grass flower;​

the yellow moth.​

​

​

2​

​

I would not confuse​

the bogus​

with the spurious.​

​

The bogus​

is a sore thumb​

​

while the spurious​

pours forth​

​

as fish and circuses.​

​

Source: Poetry (May 2012)​

​

I like this poem quite a lot but, oddly, can't really tell you why I like it or what it is about the poem that I like so much. I especially can't say what I think it "means." The first four lines are clearly about the nature of language and how quite different words can derive from the same root, but then those last two lines, which are clearly imagistic, don't seem to me to have any obvious connection to the previous ones. Similarly, the initial lines of the second part also move from a fairly straightforward comparison of two words to the incongruously arresting image of the last line. Where I found the elliptical style of Wright's poems kind of irritating, I find Armantrout's somewhat similar style fascinating, like unexpectedly coming across something weird—an abandoned wasp's nest in the middle of a baseball diamond, for example.

I can't really explain it other than to say that some art works for some people and the some art doesn't. Not very satisfying, but there it is.

I like both poems although the second seems more informative, which is why I prefer the first one. I'm commenting because the last two lines in that first poem I read as examples of things that are tender: a flower petal, a moth's wing. Both are tender, delicate.

Otoh I can relate to your point about liking something without exactly knowing why or without feeling a need to explain it to oneself. Some poets (EE Cummings comes to mind) can elicit that reaction in me though I find it happens most often with music. But it ain't National Music Month huh?

 

[Tzara]

Poetry is often characterized as being of two, or perhaps three, different general types—lyric (poetry dealing with personal qualities like the emotions or feelings) and narrative (poetry that is story-based), with dramatic poetry sometimes considered a third category. Most of the poetry I read and/or talk about is lyric poetry.

So i wanted to post a narrative poem for a change. This also could be considered a persona poem, as the narrative voice is that of an adopted persona, in this case an art curator in the wartime USSR:

The Curator
Miller Williams

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,
were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,
the youngest assistant curator in the country.
I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes
precisely built to every size of canvas.
We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in,
we got each painting put in the proper box
and out of Leningrad in less than a week.
They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes
waiting in the basement, which was fine,
a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—
but what we did was leave the frames hanging,
so after the war it would be a simple thing
to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again
compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble
after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—
You know it lasted nine hundred days.
Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie
sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,
but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.
They told us this: in three homes far from here
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.
Now they had been sent to defend the city,
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger
than all of us being here in the first place,
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms,
what they could take the time for, wall by wall.
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.
I told them how those colors would come together,
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,
then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.
Each of us took a group in a different direction:
Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse,
Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,
Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.
We pointed to more details about the paintings,
I venture to say, than if we had had them there,
some unexpected use of line or light,
balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces
the same way we’d done it every morning
before the war, but then we didn’t pay
so much attention to what we talked about.
People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact
we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned
out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention
to everything—the simple differences
between the first and post-impressionists,
romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war
a little while. Maybe more than that.
Whatever it was, the people continued to come.
It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.
A few at first then more of them every morning,
some led and some alone, some swaying a little.
They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces,
they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,
to see better what was being said.
And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left
and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,
the blind never came again. Not like before.
This seems strange, but what I think it was,
they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.
They could still have listened, but the lectures became
a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?
Confluences come when they will and they go away.

Source: Some Jazz a While (1999)
​

One of the interesting questions about this poem is whether it is really a poem or, as critics sometimes sneeringly put it, just "prose with line breaks"? Unlike the narrative poetry of someone like Robert Browning, it doesn't have any obvious rhyme pattern or metrical structure (although is there perhaps a kind of loose iambic tendency?). On the other hand, does it matter? I don't know enough about narrative poetry to seriously comment on that, but if the author thinks of it as a poem—it is certainly verse, in any case—who am I to dispute that?

In any case, I think it's a very good exploration of the question about what constitutes Art; that as much as anything it is the response of the audience to the artwork that matters, however it is represented.

Miller Williams was for many years a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas. He was also the father of the great roots rock artist Lucinda Williams, whose song "Pineola" Angie referenced in one of her weekly challenge poems that other day.

 

[Tzara]

It was a beautiful day here in the PNW and I'm not looking to post anything dreary or depressing today, so this brief little poem by Howard Nemerov:

Epitaph
Howard Nemerov

Of the Great World he knew not much,
But his Muse let little in language escape her.
Friends sigh and say of him, poor wretch,
He was a good writer, on paper.

Source: The Blue Swallows (1967)
​

Nemerov was twice named Poet Laureate and won all three of the big US prizes for poetry: the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Award. He was also (something I just discovered, reading about him) the older brother of the famously iconic photographer Diane Arbus.

This poem exhibits the characteristics of good light verse—brevity, rhyme, a strong metrical component, and humor, albeit a rather satirical humor. For me it seems to evoke many contemporary poets, especially those associated with university creative writing departments or vaguely avant-garde artistic movements, poets who know an awful lot about the technical aspects of poetry but who are often lacking in the emotional aspects of the craft.

 

[Angeline]

Tzara I really enjoyed the Miller Williams poem. Thanks for sharing it. And not to get too far off track, but Lucinda Williams is an artist whose lyrics I've always found poetic (no surprise I guess considering she grew up around poets). And she's a natural storyteller.

But I was also happy to see you mention Robert Browning, a poet whose dramatic monologues (wherein the poem's narrator inadvertently reveals himself in the course of the monologue) are so good. His most well-known is My Last Dutchess, where the Duke slowly reveals how he lost his multiple wives (dear reader take your best macabre guess lol). But my favorite of these has always been Fra Lippo Lippi, based on the life of the Florentine painter. It's a beautiful monologue about the demands of the Church and the desire for secular realism, the monk's (that is, Lippi's) struggle for artistic freedom. I encourage anyone who's interested in the storytelling side of poetry to explore Browning's dramatic monologues.

 

[Tzara]

As I've said before (probably too many times), I'm interested in form poems, all different kinds of form poems. My poem for today is a form invented by Terrance Hayes, based on a famous poem by Gwendolyn Brooks:

The Golden Shovel
Terrance Hayes

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I. 1981

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left
in them but approachlessness. This is a school

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we
are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.
Standing in the middle of the street last night we

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike
his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we
used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.
The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.
He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We
stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June
the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die
before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.


II. 1991

Into the tented city we go, we-
akened by the fire’s ethereal

afterglow. Born lost and cool-
er than heartache. What we

know is what we know. The left
hand severed and school-

ed by cleverness. A plate of we-
ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-

ing in the afterglow. A late-
night chant. Into the city we

go. Close your eyes and strike
a blow. Light can be straight-

ened by its shadow. What we
break is what we hold. A sing-

ular blue note. An outcry sin-
ged exiting the throat. We

push until we thin, thin-
king we won’t creep back again.

While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz,

we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from we-

eping. Groomed on a die-
t of hunger, we end too soon.

Source: Lighthead (2010)
​

A "Golden Shovel" is a poem that uses a line, a stanza, or even an entire poem (as in this case) as its source material, forming a composition where each word of the selected source line/stanza/poem becomes the end word of each line in the new poem, including all of the words in the source in their original order, and not skipping any of the words. The name of the form is derived from the subtitle/epigram of Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" (i.e. "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel"). As a form based on another written work, it has some resemblance to the cento and glosa, and as a form where the end words are the relevant structure it is reminiscent of the sestina and its variants (tritina, etc.).

The two sections of the poem are titled with years a decade apart. The first clearly refers to the narrator as a child, the second presumably as the same narrative voice, but older (Hayes was born in 1971 and while it is problematic to identify the narrator with the author, one might guess that Hayes is thinking at least about someone who would be a near contemporary to him). In the first section the lines all end on complete words, while in the second section, the end words are often only part of a word (e.g. "we-akened" or "we-ekday") or even slightly warped (e.g. "[a]gain" for "gin"), both techniques sometimes found in sestinas to provide some variation in the repeated words. Here, I think, it is also used to convey the more subtle/complicated world-view of the narrator.

In any case, an interesting employment of a new form. Hayes won the National Book Award for the volume in which this poem appeared.

 

[Tzara]

Like yesterday's poem, today's post is a poem inspired by another poet's writing, though in this case it is the poet's commentary on the experience of writing a poem rather than another poem itself. The commentary is quoted as an epigraph and is a quotation from the poet Robert Lowell discussing some imagery that served—rather oddly, it seems—as a partial inspiration for his writing of one of his best-known poems, "Skunk Hour", though the image does not appear in the poem itself.

Like the Rae Armantrout poem I posted a few days ago, this poem is also quite spare, though in comparison it seems almost epic in scope. What grabs me about this poem is the imagery—intense, sharply rendered, almost alien at times—and the lineation, which seems to almost reverse the normal focus on the end word of a line to the starting word. This latter technique combined with the extensive use of enjambment seems to hasten one through the poem:

Blue China Doorknob
Kay Ryan

I was haunted by the image of a blue china doorknob.
I never knew the doorknob, or knew what it meant,
yet somehow it started the current of images.
—Robert Lowell

Rooms may be
using us. We
may be the agents
of doorknobs'
purposes, obeying
imperatives china
dreams up or
pacing dimensions
determined by
cabinets. And if
we're their instruments—
the valves of their
furious trumpets,
conscripted but
ignorant of it—
the strange, unaccountable
things we betray
were never our secrets
anyway.

Source: The Niagara River (2005)
​

Ryan, like several of the other poets I've posted so far is a former Poet Laureate of the USA and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry (for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, which also includes "Blue China Doorknob"). I think this poem is a good example of her style: compact with very short lines, heavy enjambment, and an emphasis on the beginnings of lines.

A poet well worth adding to your reading material.

 

[Angeline]

As I've said before (probably too many times), I'm interested in form poems, all different kinds of form poems. My poem for today is a form invented by Terrance Hayes, based on a famous poem by Gwendolyn Brooks:

​

The Golden Shovel​

Terrance Hayes​

​

after Gwendolyn Brooks​

​

I. 1981​

​

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we​

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real​

​

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.​

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we​

​

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left​

in them but approachlessness. This is a school​

​

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we​

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk​

​

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.​

Standing in the middle of the street last night we​

​

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike​

his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight​

​

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we​

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing​

​

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.​

The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We​

​

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.​

He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.​

​

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We​

stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,​

​

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June​

the boy would be locked upstate. That night we​

​

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die​

before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.​

​

​

II. 1991​

​

Into the tented city we go, we-​

akened by the fire’s ethereal​

​

afterglow. Born lost and cool-​

er than heartache. What we​

​

know is what we know. The left​

hand severed and school-​

​

ed by cleverness. A plate of we-​

ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-​

​

ing in the afterglow. A late-​

night chant. Into the city we​

​

go. Close your eyes and strike​

a blow. Light can be straight-​

​

ened by its shadow. What we​

break is what we hold. A sing-​

​

ular blue note. An outcry sin-​

ged exiting the throat. We​

​

push until we thin, thin-​

king we won’t creep back again.​

​

While God licks his kin, we​

sing until our blood is jazz,​

​

we swing from June to June.​

We sweat to keep from we-​

​

eping. Groomed on a die-​

t of hunger, we end too soon.​

​

Source: Lighthead (2010)​

​

A "Golden Shovel" is a poem that uses a line, a stanza, or even an entire poem (as in this case) as its source material, forming a composition where each word of the selected source line/stanza/poem becomes the end word of each line in the new poem, including all of the words in the source in their original order, and not skipping any of the words. The name of the form is derived from the subtitle/epigram of Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" (i.e. "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel"). As a form based on another written work, it has some resemblance to the cento and glosa, and as a form where the end words are the relevant structure it is reminiscent of the sestina and its variants (tritina, etc.).

The two sections of the poem are titled with years a decade apart. The first clearly refers to the narrator as a child, the second presumably as the same narrative voice, but older (Hayes was born in 1971 and while it is problematic to identify the narrator with the author, one might guess that Hayes is thinking at least about someone who would be a near contemporary to him). In the first section the lines all end on complete words, while in the second section, the end words are often only part of a word (e.g. "we-akened" or "we-ekday") or even slightly warped (e.g. "[a]gain" for "gin"), both techniques sometimes found in sestinas to provide some variation in the repeated words. Here, I think, it is also used to convey the more subtle/complicated world-view of the narrator.

In any case, an interesting employment of a new form. Hayes won the National Book Award for the volume in which this poem appeared.

Great reading and a very clever idea. I like how Hayes's poem not only riffs off the Brooks poem, but sort of expands the landscape it sketches in its brief lines. It's as if Hayes's poem is an annotated version of Brooks's...in a way.

Also it would make a great challenge. Take a short(ish) poem of one's choice and incorporate the last word of each line into your own poem. For example, William Carlos Williams' This Is Just To Say or The Red Wheelbarrow could work as the source poem. Lots of other poems come to mind too. The trick, I think, would be to keep the theme in the same ballpark, so to speak.

Times like this make me really miss our friend Guilty_Pleasure. She'd have this idea figured out and a fine poem written within a day.

 

[Tzara]

I've been kind of busy today, so a brief post. I have talked elsewhere about waka and its specific forms, in this case the tanka. Perhaps my favorite waka poet is Ono no Komachi, who often wrote about personal (i.e. erotic or love) relationships. Wikipedia gives this introduction to its article on her: "Ono no Komachi (小野 小町, c. 825 – c. 900) was a Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen—the six best waka poets of the early Heian period. She was renowned for her unusual beauty, and Komachi is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan. She also counts among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals."

Tanka are typically untitled:

[The autumn night]
Ono no Komachi

The autumn night
is long only in name—
We’ve done no more
than gaze at each other
and it’s already dawn.

Source: The Ink Dark Moon (1990)

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani
​

I find classical Japanese poetry quite remarkable in its range of expression despite its brevity and straightforward imagery (e.g. lack of metaphor or simile). The cited source by Hirschfield and Arantani is an excellent sampling on her work as well as that of Izumi Shibiku, whose work is also included.

 

[Tzara]

A couple days ago, I talked about Terrance Hayes' "The Golden Shovel," the original of a poetic form that takes a poem or section of a poem by another writer and uses the words as the end words in a new poem. Today I want to talk about another form, a much older one, that also uses part of another poem in its composition—the glosa.

The glosa originated in Spain in the 1600s. It begins with a quotation from another poem, known as the cabeza, and each line of the quotation is employed as a refrain in the new poem, often as the last line of each of the new poem's stanzas. In more restrictive definitions, the cabeza is a quatrain and the body of the new poem is four ten-line stanzas, each consisting of ten syllables, and rhymed ABBAACCDDC. Like most modern adaptations of older forms, many of the form requirements are often abandoned or modified, with the exception of some kind of quotation and the use of the quoted lines in the new poem.

I chose this example of the form particularly because it uses the chorus of the Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some Action as the cabeza:

​

Glosa in Middle Age​

Kathleen Ossip​

​

Shake some action’s what I need​

To let me bust out at full speed​

And I’m sure that’s all you need​

To make it all right​

—Flamin' Groovies, "Shake Some Action"​

​

To have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls​

of calendar entries, unsuitably​

boggle-eyed as if new—​

so these are mountains,​

there is horror, which is the subway line​

where I may lay down my creed​

and when will my breath stop​

acidulating like this?​

Exceed, said 27. In all things exceed.​

Shake some action’s what I need.​

​

27 was animated​

but has lately been absent.​

With them we raved and with them​

came. A dervish verve escorted them​

always, which now I feel dribbling out​

like the cruel juices of the steak I didn’t feed​

on, didn’t slaughter, wouldn’t want to but—.​

In a dream I asked permission​

and 27 agreed​

to let me bust out at full speed.​

​

That was a dream. The juices a memorial.​

At present, I’m perishing—​

but mayhap not right now. You too?​

Something immense is unwinding a spool of wire.​

You trace it and find, what else:​

Death on the end of the strand like a bead.​

To have arrived by spoonfuls of undecisions,​

to have arrived knowing you only fled.​

You drool over a bowl of soup, snorting greed​

and I’m sure that’s all you need.​

​

Mayhap not sure. Mayhap​

doors swing open even after juicelessness​

and soup. They might open onto tigers.​

Or a vision of  The Real True—​

after the shakes yield to a long loosening stare.​

Take hold of the knob: You’re bitten or you bite.​

If I, yet untoothless, can chew up despair,​

I’ll take a good calm look at the dark I’ve been given.​

Is that where I’m headed, with my hairband-searchlight​

to make it all right?​

​

Source: Poetry (December 2019)​

​

One of the things I like about this poem is the contrast between the source material of the quotation, a power pop song from the 70s, and the almost over-sophisticated (or stilted, thinking of the repeated use of "mayhap") language of the poem itself, all framed within a 15th century poetic form. It reminds me how, as we age, we're still dragging around our younger selves—teenager, college student, young married, etc.

We aren't those people any more, and yet we in some ways are.

 

[Tzara]

Literotica is a site focused on erotic stories and poems, yet few of the poems I have posted on this thread are erotic in nature. Nor is the following poem erotic, at least erotic in the Lit-typical "thrust and cum" style that one frequently finds here. Instead it is a poem that speaks to nature and how the sexual impulse is part of nature, and not just human nature:

Heat
Jane Hirshfield

My mare, when she was in heat,
would travel the fenceline for hours,
wearing the impatience
in her feet into the ground.

Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her,
give it up.

She’d widen her nostrils,
sieve the wind for news, be moving again,
her underbelly darkening with sweat,
then stop at the gate a moment, wait
to see what I might do.
Oh, I knew
how it was for her, easily
recognized myself in that wide lust:
came to stand in the pasture
just to see it played.
Offered a hand, a bucket of grain—
a minute’s distraction from passion
the most I gave.

Then she’d return to what burned her:
the fence, the fence,
so hoping I might see, might let her free.
I’d envy her then,
to be so restlessly sure
of heat, and need, and what it takes
to feed the wanting that we are—

only a gap to open
the width of a mare,
the rest would take care of itself.
Surely, surely I knew that,
who had the power of bucket
and bridle—
she would beseech me, sidle up,
be gone, as life is short.
But desire, desire is long.

Source: Of Gravity and Angels (1988)
​

Hirshfield was one of the first female graduates of Princeton University and besides being well known as a poet, essayist, and translator (she translated and edited the volume of poetry by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu I cited the other day), she also "received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979" (per Wikipedia), which might explain why I find that so many of her poems have a kind of calmness about them.

 

[Tzara]

OK. Today an erotic poem, though perhaps not the kind of erotic poem one expects here at Lit, albeit one that is perhaps a more accurate representation of real-life eroticism than some things that get posted here:

My Last Erotic Poem
Lorna Crozier

Who wants to hear about
two old farts getting it on
in the back seat of a Buick,
in the garden shed among vermiculite,
in the kitchen where we should be drinking
ovaltine and saying no? Who wants to hear
about 26 years of screwing,
our once-not-unattractive flesh
now loose as unbaked pizza dough
hanging between two hands before it’s tossed?

Who wants to hear about two old lovers
slapping together like water hitting mud,
hair where there shouldn’t be
and little where there should,
my bunioned foot sliding
up your bony calf, your calloused hands
sinking in the quickslide of my belly,
our faithless bums crepitous, collapsed?

We have to wear our glasses to see down there!

When you whisper what you want I can’t hear,
but do it anyway, and somehow get it right. Face it,
some nights we’d rather eat a Haagen Dazs ice cream bar
or watch a movie starring Nick Nolte who looks worse than us.
Some nights we’d rather stroke the cats.

Who wants to know when we get it going
we’re revved up, like the first time—honest—
like the first time, if only we could remember it,
our old bodies doing what you know
bodies do, worn and beautiful and shameless.

Source: Small Mechanics (2011)
​

Crozier is a Canadian poet (note: there is no tariff on reading Canadian poetry) who taught for many years in the University of Victoria MFA program. At one time I daydreamed about attending that program, but nothing ever came of it. I find this poem both funny and true to a degree that I'm embarrassed to admit.

Crozier is perhaps my favorite Canadian poet. She's really good. Check her out.

 

[Tzara]

Great reading and a very clever idea. I like how Hayes's poem not only riffs off the Brooks poem, but sort of expands the landscape it sketches in its brief lines. It's as if Hayes's poem is an annotated version of Brooks's...in a way.

I think that ideally, that is how a golden shovel poem is supposed to work, that the new poem acts in part as a commentary on the source poem.

Of course, it's probably perfectly fine to just follow the rules and write something unrelated as well.

Also it would make a great challenge. Take a short(ish) poem of one's choice and incorporate the last word of each line into your own poem. For example, William Carlos Williams' This Is Just To Say or The Red Wheelbarrow could work as the source poem. Lots of other poems come to mind too. The trick, I think, would be to keep the theme in the same ballpark, so to speak.

That would work too, but technically a golden shovel uses all the words of the source selection, whether it is an entire poem as Hayes does with "We Real Cool" or merely a section of the source poem.

BTW, you might also like this poem by Patricia Smith, which is a golden shovel based on Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till". (Actually, it's a double golden shovel, as the words go up the left-hand side as well as down the right margin!!)

Times like this make me really miss our friend Guilty_Pleasure. She'd have this idea figured out and a fine poem written within a day.

I really miss Tess.

 

[Angeline]

I think that ideally, that is how a golden shovel poem is supposed to work, that the new poem acts in part as a commentary on the source poem.

Of course, it's probably perfectly fine to just follow the rules and write something unrelated as well.

That would work too, but technically a golden shovel uses all the words of the source selection, whether it is an entire poem as Hayes does with "We Real Cool" or merely a section of the source poem.

BTW, you might also like this poem by Patricia Smith, which is a golden shovel based on Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till". (Actually, it's a double golden shovel, as the words go up the left-hand side as well as down the right margin!!)

I really miss Tess.

Thanks T-Zed. After I read your excellent poem The Interpretation of Dreams I realized I'd misunderstood the form. It's actually not too bad if (and it's a big if lol) one can find the right source poem. The idea of a double golden shovel however is daunting.

 

[Tzara]

I wanted to post something simpler today, especially something with no angst. Like a poem about nature. Like this one:

Before Dark
Wendell Berry

From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy.

He came down the river, splashing
against the water’s dimming face
like a skipped rock, passing

on down out of sight. And still
I could hear the splashes
farther and farther away

as it grew darker. He came back
the same way, dusky as his shadow,
sudden beyond the willows.

The splashes went on out of hearing.
It was dark then. Somewhere
the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for
or where, led by his delight,
he came.

Source: New Collected Poems (2012)
​

One of the things I like so much about this poem is that it is very like an experience I had watching a kingfisher dive and dive in the shallows off of the Puget Sound. Unlike the experience described in Berry's poem, my experience wasn't at night, but it was beautiful to see—one of those moments when one really feels the wonder of the natural world.

Besides being a poet, Berry is a novelist, an environmentalist (no surprise there), and a actual day-to-day farmer. He also wrote a really good book about the poems of William Carlos Williams.

 

[Tzara]

It goes without saying that break-ups can be painful. Even divorce, even when it is a mutual decision, can be especially difficult as, after all, you felt strongly enough about that person to marry them, didn't you?

Though I've never been divorced (fingers crossed), I have been through at least one big-time romantic break-up, so I can relate to a poem about the feelings one has in the aftermath of a divorce. Paisley Rekdahl's poem reflects on those feelings through the metaphor of a bouquet of cut flowers:

Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce
Paisley Rekdal

Cut back the stems an inch to keep in bloom.
So instructs the florist's note
enclosed inside the flowers.
Who knew what was cut
could heal again, the green wounds close,
stitching themselves together?

It doesn't matter. The flowers, red
and white, will bloom awhile, then wither.
You sit in an unlit room and watch
the vase throw crystal shadows through the dark.
The flowers' colors are so lovely they’re painful.
In a week, you’ll have to throw them out.

It's only hope that makes you take out scissors,
separate each bloom and cut
where you last measured. Did you know
Venus was said to turn into a virgin
each time she bathed? She did it
as a mark of love. She did it

so as to please her lovers. Perhaps,
overwhelmed by pain,
she eventually stopped bathing
altogether. It doesn't matter. It's a pleasure
to feel the green nubs stripped, watch the stems
refresh under your blade. They're here

because they're beautiful. They glow
inside your crystal vase. And yet
the flowers by themselves are nothing:
only a refraction of color that,
in a week or two, will be thrown out.
Day by day, the water lowers. The red-

and-white heads droop, blacken at the stems.
It doesn’t matter. Even cut stems heal.
But what is the point of pain if it heals?
Some things should last forever, instructs
the florist's note. Pleasure,
says one god. Shame, says another.

Venus heads, they call these flowers.
In a week or two, you'll lose the note,
have to call the florist up.
With sympathy, you'll think he says.
Perhaps: With love. It doesn't matter.
You’ve stopped bathing. Alone,

you sit before the crystal
vase refracting you in pieces
through the dark. You watch
the pale skin bloom inside it, wither.
You petal, inch by inch.
You turn red and white together.

Source: Animal Eye (2012)
​

A native of Seattle, Rekdahl started out to be an academic specializing in medieval studies before switching to poetry and non-fiction writing. She is a former poet laureate of Utah and teaches at the University of Utah.

 

[Tzara]

Sometimes poems become favorites even when one doesn't quite get everything they're talking about. John Berryman's Dream Songs are like that for me—they have a liveliness of language, particularly of rhythm, that I love but the narrative meaning seems sometimes obscure to me. Here's one:

Dream Song 53
John Berryman

He lay in the middle of the world, and twicht.
More Sparine for Pelides,
human (half) & down here as he is,
with probably insulting mail to open
and certainly unworthy words to hear
and his unforgiving memory.

—I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,
said the Honourable Possum.
—It takes me so long to read the 'paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,
because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
including the corpses, pal.'

Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read 'papers,
and that was not, friends, his worst idea.
Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,
a programme adopted early on by long Housman,
and Gottfried Benn
said:—We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

Source: 77 Dream Songs (1959)
​

There are a lot of references in this poem to other writers and topics that seem to need some footnotes to follow the poem. For example, Sparine is an antipsychotic drug introduced in the 50s, particularly for suppressing psychomotor responses (like twitching, one presumes); it is no longer commercially available in the USA. Pelides is a reference to Achilles (it is a patronymic, or name based on his father's name), the Honourable Possum is presumably T.S. Eliot, Kierkegaard the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and "Tiny Hardy" is (again presumably) Thomas Hardy, who was only just over five feet tall. Housman is probaby A.E. Housman; Gottfried Benn was a German poet.

Overall, the poem seems to be about the difficulty of the writer/individual to fit in to normal society, which is a theme I relate to, though not so much as a writer as just someone who has social anxiety issues. Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for its companion volume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He died by suicide in 1972.

 

[Tzara]

Yesterday I posted a poem by John Berryman. Today's poem is about John Berryman:

Berryman
W. S. Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

Source: Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005)
​

Merwin, who won the Pulitzer twice as well as the National Book Award, studied under the poet R.P. Blackmur at Princeton. Berryman was Blackmur's graduate assistant, which is how Merwin met and befriended him. He was obviously much taken by the intensity of the older poet (Berryman was 13 years Merwin's senior).

One of the interesting technical things about this poem is its absence of punctuation—no periods, no commas, no quotation marks, no capitalization starting sentences. Yet despite this, the sense of the poem is quite easy to follow. Merwin does this in part by how he aligns line and stanza breaks so that the reader can track the syntax despite the lack of formal markers.

The close of the poem is especially good, I think. You shouldn't, and in fact can't, write knowing that your writing is good and will endure. You write because you want to/have to/need to. That's all that really matters.

 

[Angeline]

Yesterday I posted a poem by John Berryman. Today's poem is about John Berryman:

​

Berryman​

W. S. Merwin​

​

I will tell you what he told me​

in the years just after the war​

as we then called​

the second world war​

​

don't lose your arrogance yet he said​

you can do that when you're older​

lose it too soon and you may​

merely replace it with vanity​

​

just one time he suggested​

changing the usual order​

of the same words in a line of verse​

why point out a thing twice​

​

he suggested I pray to the Muse​

get down on my knees and pray​

right there in the corner and he​

said he meant it literally​

​

it was in the days before the beard​

and the drink but he was deep​

in tides of his own through which he sailed​

chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop​

​

he was far older than the dates allowed for​

much older than I was he was in his thirties​

he snapped down his nose with an accent​

I think he had affected in England​

​

as for publishing he advised me​

to paper my wall with rejection slips​

his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled​

with the vehemence of his views about poetry​

​

he said the great presence​

that permitted everything and transmuted it​

in poetry was passion​

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention​

​

I had hardly begun to read​

I asked how can you ever be sure​

that what you write is really​

any good at all and he said you can't​

​

you can't you can never be sure​

you die without knowing​

whether anything you wrote was any good​

if you have to be sure don't write​

​

Source: Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005)​

​

Merwin, who won the Pulitzer twice as well as the National Book Award, studied under the poet R.P. Blackmur at Princeton. Berryman was Blackmur's graduate assistant, which is how Merwin met and befriended him. He was obviously much taken by the intensity of the older poet (Berryman was 13 years Merwin's senior).

One of the interesting technical things about this poem is its absence of punctuation—no periods, no commas, no quotation marks, no capitalization starting sentences. Yet despite this, the sense of the poem is quite easy to follow. Merwin does this in part by how he aligns line and stanza breaks so that the reader can track the syntax despite the lack of formal markers.

The close of the poem is especially good, I think. You shouldn't, and in fact can't, write knowing that your writing is good and will endure. You write because you want to/have to/need to. That's all that really matters.

Merwin makes Berryman more likeable to me (or maybe I mean accessible).

I really like those last four lines too. They'd work well for a Glosa, I think.

 

[Ash999]

Loving Tzara's write ups ....tho' much of it is unfamiliar , of unfamiliar poets and writers but fascinating yet.....today I was waiting for the Muncipality to rejoin our Office water connexion and had paid my mobile and gas ️ bills vide net banking and had to do something in the tedious heat of Mumbai ...so I delved into this thread National Poetry month....and got hooked...thanx to Angie too for providing a second voice to this conversation/ dialogue...

 

[Tzara]

Oh yes, well, the sonnet. Perhaps the most iconic of poetic forms in English and one of the most popular (after, probably, the Americanized "haiku" and the limerick). Originating in Italy in the 1300s, its name derives from the Italian sonnetto, or "little song." Traditionally fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in length with a fixed rhyme scheme, of which the Italian or Petrachan and the Shakespearian are the most common, some kind of "turn" from the opening lines to the finish, etc. etc.

All or most of which goes out the window in more modern incarnations of the form.

Here's a contemporary, or near contemporary, sonnet by the late Denis Johnson, a writer better known for his fiction (in particular for his story collection Jesus' Son) that features some aspects of the traditional sonnet while ignoring others:

​

White, White Collars​

Denis Johnson​

​

We work in this building and we are hideous​

in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes​

woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels​

and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,​

turning and returning like the spray of light that goes​

around dance-halls among the dancing fools.​

My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps​

to see the goodness of the world laid bare​

and rising with the government on its lips,​

the alphabet congealing in the air​

around our heads. But in my belly’s flames​

someone is dancing, calling me by many names​

that are secret and filled with light and rise​

and break, and I see my previous lives.​

​

Source: The Incognito Lounge (1982)​

​

Johnson's poem follows tradition by restricting itself to 14 lines. It also has a distinct rhyme scheme (abcabcdedeffgg), though one different from the classic Italian or Shakespearian pattern, and sometimes employing near rhyme rather then true rhyme. Metrically, the poem is at best very loosely iambic, and I get four to five stresses on most lines. Still, it's hardly written in a totally free verse, so I'll give it a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10 for metrical fidelity.

The subject matter and the imagery, though, are hardly the traditional love-drenched lyric (no "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" here, fer sure). This is a poem about the stultifying nature of office work, as Johnson makes clear with the remarkable image "our clothes / woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels / and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us", making the individual the prisoner of his job/role in the unnamed business. A kind of weird variation on the "empty suit," perhaps?

Johnson is an outstanding fiction writer (check out Jesus' Son if nothing else—it's a quick read), but I sometimes wish he hadn't stopped writing poetry; he was really good at it.

 

[Tzara]

The first poet I was really interested in was E. E. Cummings, whose work I discovered in high school. Liveright, his publisher, was putting out a number of paperback editions of his various books of poetry and I methodically went through pretty much all of them. His famously odd typography was one reason, but it was probably also because he can be a very emotional poet—emotional in the way that young people often are.

Because of the odd typography and syntax, I thought of Cummings as quite the radical artist and it wasn't until many years later that I realized that many of his poems followed traditional forms, like this one:

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear​

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Source: Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (1991)
​

Despite its odd appearance, this is a fairly straightforward Shakespearean sonnet. The rhyme scheme is the usual abab cdcd efef gg, though some of the rhymes (e.g. "anywhere" and "fear", "bud" and "hide") are near (or even pretty distant) rhymes and the closing couple is split between the third stanza and the last line. The meter isn't very consistent, but the closing "couplet" does offer the traditional resolution to the rest of the poem. And, obviously, the theme of romantic love is dead on true to the sonnet tradition all the way back to Petrarch.

Though my taste in poetry has changed over the years and I don't read Cummings much anymore, I still enjoy the occasional dip into his oeuvre.

 

[Tzara]

Today's poem is another sonnet—a rather peculiar one in many ways.

The poem is from the text of A Void, the English language translation of the French writer Georges Perec's La disparition (The Disappearance), a 300-something page novel that does not contain the letter "e". The poem is one of several presented in the text, which are all rewrites of famous poems, all also avoiding the letter "e" (a type of restriction on writing known as a lipogram).

Adair's English version, like the original, also does not use the letter "e". However, the poems presented in the translation are mostly rewrites of famous English language poems, not the French poems that are subject to the lipogram restrictions in the original text (perhaps for their familiarity to English-speaking readers or to make the manipulations of the text easier, it's difficult to say). So the "authorship" of one of these poems is in considerable doubt. For "Ozymandias", the poem I'm posting today, should the author be Perec (even though it does not appear in his original text), Adair (who chose the poem for his translation and wrote the restricted version of Shelley's text), or even Percy Bysshe Shelley (author of the original poem that is "translated" by the imposition of the lipogram restriction)? I've decided to credit it to Perec, which is, I think, the most common choice:

​

Ozymandias​

George Perec​

​

I know a pilgrim from a distant land​

Who said: Two vast and sawn-off limbs of quartz​

Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand,​

Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts​

And all; its curling lips of cold command​

Show that its sculptor passions could portray​

Which still outlast, stamp’d on unliving things,​

A mocking hand that no constraint would sway:​

And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown:​

"Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings:​

Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow down!"​

‘Tis all that is intact. Around that crust​

Of a colossal ruin, now windblown,​

A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust.​

​

Source: A Void, translated by Gilbert Adair (1994)​

​

Comparing the poem to Shelley's original, one can see that the basic sense of the poem (i.e. its semantic content) is fairly close to the source poem—probably at least as close as many translations are to their sources. The rhyme pattern is duplicated, albeit sometimes with different end words, and the poem is more or less faithfully in iambic pentameter. It's a pretty remarkable achievement, which brings home how really remarkable Adair's translation of the entire novel is. But in some ways it seems more remarkable as a feat than as literature, which I'm not sure would upset Perec (or Adair, for that matter).

Perec was a member of a group of writers known as Oulipo or OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "workshop of potential literature") which applied various constraints to their writing as a means of expanding their creativity. One of his later works, Les revenentes, inverts the restriction of La disparition, using "e" as the only vowel (translated into English as The Exeter Text). La disparition has been translated at least three other times into English, but I haven't seen these versions, so I don't know how they handled the embedded poems.

I find the this poem interesting not only as a linguistic experiment but, as I mentioned earlier, an intriguing example of the nature of authorship.

 

[Tzara]

Here's another sonnet, from John Ashbery's first collection, Some Trees:

Sonnet
John Ashbery

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
After many years he has been brought nothing.
The servant's frown is the reader's patience.
The servant goes to bed.
The patience rambles on
Musing on the library's lofty holes.

His pain is the servant's alive.
It pushes to the top stain of the wall
Its tree-top's head of excitement:
Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.
The light walls collapse next day.
Traffic is the reader's pictured face.
Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;
Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.

Source: Selected Poems (1986)
​

The question is, is this a sonnet? The title names it as such and it does have 14 lines, but that sure seems like the sum total of what might qualify it as a sonnet in the traditional sense. There is no discernable rhyme pattern (at least not one I can detect), the lines are non-metrical or not obviously metrical, there does not seem to be any kind of volta or "turn" in the poem. It is broken into a sestet and octave like an Italian sonnet, but the order of these is reversed from normal, for no reason I can discern.

But then, hey, it's Ashbery, one of the most obscure and difficult poets of the 20th-21st century.

Some Trees was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets award by W. H. Auden, although Auden later confessed that he "didn't understand a word of it", a sentiment I largely agree with. I assume some of the difficulty stems from the influence of French Surrealism on Ashbery's poetry, but I can't point to anything particular about the poem that would serve as an example of that influence.

The poet and professor Stephanie Burt has said of Ashbery that he is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Though he won all the major American awards for poetry (Pultizer, NBA, Nation Book Critics Circle award), I'd have to count myself among those who find his work generally incomprehensible.

So why post this poem? Because it exemplifies a contemporary trend in sonnet writing where hardly anything other than a line count of 14 qualifies something as a sonnet. That is a trend I personally disagree with (I think a sonnet should at the least develop a personal topic and end by resolving a problem or coming to a changed point of view—in other words, have some kind of "turn" in the text of the poem), but it is a trend and I wanted to provide an example of it.

 

[Angeline]

Tzara I love that you've devoted a number of posts to the sonnet, which is probably the best known "form poem" (limericks notwithstanding I suppose). It has been stretched and reimagined more than any form, sometimes as you've noted, beyond comprehension for most of us Thanks to your sonnet posts I went off to do some reading of my own. Of course I first thought of Billy Collins's wonderful modern sonnet.

Sonnet
Billy Collins

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blowout the lights, and come at last to bed.

(Source: Sailing Alone Around The Room, Random House, 2001.)

While it has neither rhyme scheme nor strict metric fidelity, it does number fourteen lines and gives a pretty straightforward explanation of what a sonnet is. It even includes the key element of a turn into the final lines that provide a thematic resolution of the issue set forth in the first eight lines. And because it's Billy Collins does so with warmth and humor. And yeah I've probably shared it at least a dozen times over the years, but we have new folks here now so mea culpa.

And then I found treasure at The Poetry Project, a resource run by St Mark's Church in NYC. The link takes you to, among other sources, a Sonnet Workshop by Ted Berrigan. It's fascinating to read how he came to understand the form and his own attempts at writing them (resulting in his own, now much respected, book of modern sonnets). I'm not sure if this workshop appears in his published essays (I lost a lot of books in my last move, including On the Level Every Day), but I highly recommend downloading the workshop PDF to anyone who's interested in a personal account of the poet's experience with the form.

Also that's a great site. Lots of interesting stuff there.