Archive

Tag Archives: sonnet

The middle name starts with a W. People would ask, “What’s the W stand for?” and often they thought they heard this in reply: “Whatever you say it is, it’ll be right.” But what was actually said was, “Whatever you say it is, it’ll be Wright.”

“Wright” means “maker.” In my more pompous moments I have said it means “Creator.” But its original meaning referred mostly to things of wood; thus were dubbed Shipwrights and Wheelwrights. Later, Playwrights. Perhaps one fine day Dreamwright will be a legitimate profession. One may dream.

As a Wright, it is incumbent upon me to make things. Here is something I made in September of 2005, via the process described a couple of posts ago as “the superheated glory of RAKU:”

001And here is something I made in July of 2008, and “digitally remastered” just this morning:

002

The text is a triple-acrostic sonnet that goes like this:

Full fathom five to fifty off the reef
For all the Captain’s faithful to his staff
Onsurgent waves tall as a tall Giraffe
Obsess, convulse, and bloom like an O’Keeffe

Let’s pack it in lads this is so unreal
Let’s lash the sail and say that I’m a fool
Let’s learn our lesson and go back to school
Let’s NOT feed lampreys–sucks to be a meal

O MY, spake Bo’s’n–I’m already Jello
O LORD cried Brother–I donwanna halo
Whoopee! said Zooey–why so bleakly stay low
Why Shore said SureShot we’ll be coolly mellow

West of the Sun, Wise are the Woken Few
Whip out the World Wide Web O Brothers New

I love that I have made two such diverse-but-not-opposite things. About the poem I have a perspective just shy of six years from its creation, telling me that despite its adroitness of meter, rhyme and storytelling within the straitjacket of the acrostic form, scholars of the future will not take it seriously due to its scattershot clownishness. That’s moot, though: Not only did I make it, but it reflects my mind with a good transparency. And so in conclusion, ye Creatives, ye Makers, ye Wrights–go thou and do likewise, with my blessings and bonhomie!

 

shakespearean sonnet: shoddily shod soles at stake

erosion of the soles accelerates
through stepping through the asphalt and the gravel
and soul-erosion also lurks and waits
when apathy makes empathy unravel

the thinness of the foot-to-harshness barrier
exacerbates the feel-the-sharp acuteness
like little fangs of lilliput-ish terrier
it worries tender flesh kaputs astuteness

some stubborn souls indulge in masochistic
beyond-the-expiration-date foot-manglement
and put their soles at stake with unholistic
unholy and yet holey wound-entanglement

physician heal thyself and strider likewise
or lose thy chance at heaven heart- and hike-wise

Image

Here is the text of the acrostic sonnet:

The challenges that meet us every day
Essentially define us over time
So if we promptly Act–get off the dime–
That which seemed insurmountable–is Hay.
If Wishes turned to Courses, we’d all Golf
Not much else COULD we do, there’d be so many,
Got Jokes–enough to make a young man Henny–

1-liners fit for each Tom, Dick and Rolf.

2 live the Here and Now is much more serious

Travail avails itself of every life,
Heroics may be needed when the strife
Ramps up from Not Too Bad to Deleterious.
Each Crisis Met puts more tools on your shelf
Enabling reaching farther than yourself.

–Which, granted, is SO much easier said than done. But, Friends, it would have been easier for me to say Help Yourself or You Can Do It and have done with this blog post. Struggling through fourteen lines of acrosticized iambic pentameter to tie in with a crucial line from a Who song has made me a little bit better poetically. I wish you well with your own struggles to be a better You.

… because it is a Mars/Soupy/Al (Marsupial).

In a lifetime of concocting horrible puns, this is one of the worst. As far as I know, the planet Mars and Soupy Sales and Al Pacino have never before been linked to such nefarious purpose.

The text of this triple acrostic is nigh-impossible to read, doing as it does Loop-the-Loops with internally-repeating text strings, so here is a plain-text transcription:

My Mephistopheles has an Agenda
Mmmost unmysterious–yet an enigma
My bane is mucilaginous pudenda
My oddities extend to the 6th sigma

And if by chance I riff a lot, my VISA
Augmented by demented tours of ASIA
And psychical applause from Mona Lisa
Agrees then to succumb to Euthanasia

Responding to despondent plaintive plea
Retributive spare parties hunt the Fauna
Responsible for plaguing Earth and Sea
Repeatedly whipped-creamedly with Sauna

Spawn-taneously we may Breed until
Symp symphony then contraceives our Will

Fans of the Sonnet will note that this is one such: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, Shakespearean rhyme scheme, concluding final couplet. In my immodest and self-aggrandizing opinion, no one else on Earth could have written a triple acrostic, the letter lengths of which are three/five/two, with a metaphor of such stick-together oddness summed up by the punned acrostic, cleaving to sonnet parameters, with a Zero Population Growth message embedded. Plus it has Loop-the-Loop calligraphy and loopy illustrations. Hope you like it!

Image

Dorothy Parker thought “Excuse My Dust” would be a fine epitaph. Had her spirit persisted after her death, and hung around Earth to see what happened to her Earthly remains, I think she would have howled to see that her Earthly remains somehow ended up in a filing cabinet for seventeen years.

She had an incomparable wit. I am sorry to have never met her. I pay my respects by paging her with a sonnet.

dorothy parker

Image

If you have never tried your hand at acrostic poetry, here’s your chance. This triple acrostic has barely been started. but it is revelatory of one of the secrets to acrostic success: start with the end words first. Note also that A, L and Y are easy end-letters for rhymes. (J, Q and U are less so, unless you want to repeat a limited set of words in your poetry.)

In this case the first four end words are Belladonna, pneumonia, begonia, hineyana. That’s an a b b a rhyme scheme, which may or may not lend itself to a Petrarchan sonnet.

I frankly don’t recall whether I ever finished this one. Its color, and the winglike ears of the mournful-eyed pup, suggests the winter holidays, so it grabbed my eye when I was looking through my files.