Poetry Friday: Boxing with A Curtal Sonnet

I'm not in a box, but a basket.
However, I am cute so I can do whatever I want.---Rebecca's cat, Neils

Sonnets are known as a "box form" because of their precise rules and tight appearance on the page.  Some poets, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, cried out inside those boxes, and made some of the most anguished, glorious sonnets I've read.

Hopkins, in particular, was known for counting hard stresses (punches?) rather than regular rhythms, and for compacting the Petrarchan fourteen-lined sonnet into a 3/4 sized poem, of 10 1/2 lines.  For what better way to squeeze out more anguish than with less room to cry?

I've tried one in his honor today.  (Thank you, Kelly, for the challenge.)



Hopkins foxed sonnets to 3/4 spare
    wire-whipped stresses til they wailed
      half-tocked feral hymns from sprung clocks

 Elbowing joy as birdsong from air,
     priested, pressed hard, he failed
       at 44, a life, curtailed and boxed

 Yet, cold-call his poems, and he swells,
     as slugger’s bandied cauliflower ear; rung,
       you clangor, near strangled, on far-hailed
 Words; carrion cry unlocked, he wells
                                      blood to tongue.

                                 ---Sara Lewis Holmes
                                    (all rights reserved)

My poetry sisters are writing sonnets today, too, some curtal, and some not.
Find them here:

Liz
Tricia
Kelly
Laura
Tanita
Andi


Poetry Friday is hosted today by Reading to the Core.

Poetry Friday: Carrion Comfort

The Washington Post's Book World has a new steward of their weekly Poet's Choice column. Mary Karr is "the author of four books of poetry... a Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, and the author of two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry." She also converted to Catholicism as an adult, which I learned from this interview at beliefnet, and which she confessed to in Poetry magazine, describing the experience as: “To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry — the journal that first published some of the godless twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals — feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s Real Sex Extra.” I think I love her already. Her most recent book is Sinners Welcome (you can read a thoughtful review of it and a discussion of poetry and spirituality at that link.)

This past Sunday, she featured the compressed agony that is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnets. Being raised Catholic, I hear in Hopkins, who was a Jesuit priest, the doctrine that there is no Easter joy without walking through the depths of Good Friday. This is one of those poems that seems complicated and perhaps, difficult to parse, and yet, the first time that I read this one out loud---and I mean cold, having never seen the lines before---I was carried by the strength of his lines to the end. Say what you will about his convoluted, sprung rhythm, Hopkins doesn't ever drop you or abandon you; he's there, in full force, to the last. Don't think, just cry out his words. You won't have any trouble understanding them.

Here, then, is darkness:

Carrion Comfort

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.



But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee

and flee?



Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me,

fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night,

that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

-----Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poetry Friday is hosted by Elaine at Wild Rose Reader.

Poetry Friday: Inked (on memorizing Gerard Manley Hopkins)

I wake up and pretend
it's between my shoulder
blades. I get out of bed:
Shook foil

I walk the dog and plot
how it gets stamped
on my ankle bone:
Crushed

I reach for a high-heeled
shoe and it flares
across the small
of my back:
Bleared

I want to flaunt it,
roll up my sleeves
in winter. Oh my
god! There,
on her bicep!
Smell

If you shaved off my hair,
it would be on my skull,
curved like cornrows:
Deep down things

I run after what’s
blown from my hand.
The poem lifts
with my hamstrings:
Brown brink eastward springs

It splays on my chest
like Eve's claws:
Broods

A microdot of information,
it could be mistaken
for a mole:
Ah!

Did it hurt?
Nah, I lie.
I turn my forearm up.
A word has appeared:
Cantilever
I don't even know what that is.

I look again.
The word
has changed. I bend
my wrist in the light:
wings

I want a tattoo of wings.
Are you sure?

Yes.
Here at the base of my throat:
Bright wings

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

See here for a copy of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem and my first post about memorizing it.

If you'd like to hear me read this poem, here's a link to Dropbox.

Poetry Friday is hosted by Big A, little a

Poetry Friday: I want to know it by heart

I made a vow to memorize a poem this month. Adrienne inspired me.

But memorization doesn't come as easily to me as it did when I was a teenager. I once memorized an entire scene in a couple of hours when an actress had to drop out of a theater showcase we were performing that night. And I can still recite, from 9th grade English class, Cassius's speech from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

"Why, man he doth bestride the narrow world
like a Colossus and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

But now? Tell me a simple thing, like your name, and I'll forget it in two seconds.

So to help my old brain, I made an audio recording of me reading the poem I want to memorize: God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

If you want to join me, here's a list of great tips to help you memorize poetry. And from the same source, a list of "starter" poems to try. There is also a whole site devoted to a national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, and one that podcasts classic poetry in a deep, rich voice with an English accent. (Don't know who it is, because the "About Me" section says: "Who I am is not important. The point is the poetry."

Also, since cloudscome is launching her brilliant idea to leave poetry where people might find it, I'm going to post this one inside that gazebo I blogged about several Poetry Fridays ago. I wonder what my poetry graffiti friends will think of it?


God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

---Gerard Manley Hopkins

***For another reading of this poem, go to the Favorite Poem Project and click on the Stanley Kunitz video link. He blew me away talking about how he encountered this poem for the first time and what it meant to him.

Poetry Friday is hosted by a wrung sponge.