Writing sonnets, cont.

Another installment in (hopefully) a series featuring ways the sonnet can be written:

Here is a sonnet from British poet Geraldine Monk's Ghost and Other Sonnets (Salt Publishing, 2008). Nice sounds:


Chronic webbings. Intrigue.
Androgynous flush haunts
Reptilian spine vault gothic.
Vehement throb conflicts on
Polyphonic gutwire. Phantom strings
Berserk minor arpeggios. Buttress ups
Super star dome. Sanctuary out to lunch.
Alone and pale and sort of floaty
Fingers clutched the altar rails of dread
Draining the face with featureless
Caress a shaft of light carved through her
Strained glass prelude.

Fragmented fugues of spheres break
Wind on mobile ring tones. Discarnate.

Writing sonnets

A link to a talk by Ted Berrigan on writing sonnets (from the Poetry Project Papers, 1989):

http://poetryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/v2-ted-berrigan.pdf



Here is one of his sonnets from The Sonnets:

Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
dear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read
It's 8:30 p.m. in New York and I've been running around all day
old come-all-ye's streel into the streets. Yes, it is now,
How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine
and the day is bright gray turning green
feminine marvelous and tough
watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard
to write scotch-tape body in a notebook
had 17 and 1/2 milligrams
Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
fucked til 7 now she's late to work and I'm
18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better

Rae Armantrout's poetics

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.
(Rae Armantrout, from "Reversible")


The following are some interesting comments Charles Bernstein made in introducing Rae Armantrout at a recent reading; they touch on not only Armantrout's poetics but disjunctive or associative poetics in general. The comments are posted on his blog: http://epc.buffalo.edu/
authors/bernstein/blog/#03-17-09/

"Armantrout’s work is not surrealism, not realism, but para- or peri-realism: it is constructed of precisely articulated observations that seem to logically follow one another but that, like everyday life, don’t or better to say, don’t quite. Her rhythms are of dislocation and relocation. Armantrout’s signature is serial displacement: incommensurability torques from one iteration to another, like Marcel Marceau miming a mime miming. Such an approach can be used for many ends. Armantrout’s engagement is often social and cultural dysfunction, giving her work its dark undertones and muted overtones. In this way, she depicts the socio-cultural logic of late Capitalism; dark matter, indeed. So yeah, sure, please be sure to note: her work enacts, through its multifoliate insights, an ideological critique, as when you lose your balance but don’t fall; you realize something must be wrong but don’t know what. Preston Sturges said it best: if you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee it’s the bunk.

So, yes, Armantrout is one of the grand masters of our beloved radical disjunction of the 1970s and 80s. If one were to chart the vectors of each of her lines, you would get a field of skewed angles. Her motto might be: One perception must lead tangentially to the next. But tangential is not arbitrary or disconnected. Tangential is the mark of contingency but also motivated relation. To follow associative and peripheral connections – non-rationalizable, nonexpository, non-narrative – offers a constantly reiterated possibility of new perceptions.

Next to us is not the world we know so well, which we use to do our bidding, but the world that could be, the world we might make. I jump the line because I am so tired of waiting in it. . . ."


Let's jump the line and into that space of tangential perception, between one line and the next.

Anagrams

Interesting (but probably very slow) technique. See method in Author's Note below. Results at:

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark30/contents.html

Author’s Note. Each of the poems in Anagrams of America is an anagram of its source text. All of the letters of the source text have been used, once and only once, in the composition of the corresponding poem. No letters have been added and no letters have been left out. Many of the sources are familiar works by familiar authors, and I have indicated below each poem the text used. Unless otherwise indicated, titles, epigraphs, section numbers, and section headings are not to be considered part of the anagram. — Mike Smith

MESHWORKS (Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance)

Bill Griffiths

This site has a great list of mp3's of poets reading: Bill Griffiths, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, SoundEye (Irish sound poetry conference), Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Festival, and more.

http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/index.html

Managable Imaginations

Hello all, check out the interview re: Suicide Psalms on Tracy Hamon's blog.

http://thamon.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/interview-with-mari-lou-rowley

Hilary, thanks for the google exercise. still haven't had time to try.

Keep warm. ML

Lyrical constraint-based poetry

Inger Christensen, a Danish poet, has just died. From Inger Christensen's Alphabet(1981):



...and Icarus, impotent Icarus exists;

Icarus swaddled in melting waxwings
exists; Icarus pale as a corpse in
civvies exists, Icarus all the way down where
the pigeons exist; dreamers, dolls
exist; the dreamers' hair with cancerous tufts
torn out, the dolls' skin pinned together
with nails, rotting wood of the mysteries; and smiles
exist, Icarus' children white as lambs
in the gray light, will indeed exist, indeed
we will exist, and oxygen on oxygen's crucifix;
as hoar-frost we will exist, as wind we will exist,
as the rainbow's iris, in the shining shoots of
mesembryanthenum, in the tundra's straw; small

we will exist, as small as bits of pollen in peat,
as bits of virus in bones, as swamp pink maybe
maybe as a bit of white clover, vetch, a bit of chamomile
exiled to the lost again paradise; but darkness
is white say the children, the darkness of paradise is white,
but not white as a a coffin is white,
that is if coffins exist, and not
white as milk is white,
that is if milk exists; white is white,
the children say, darkness is white, but not
white as the white existing
before fruit trees existed, their flowering so white,
darkness is whiter, eyes melt


Translated by Pierre Joris. From Poems for the Millenium II, ed. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg (and from the excerpt posted on Joris' blog "Nomadics" today). Alphabet is also available from New Directions (and a different translator).

Joris on Christensen's method in Alfabet: "Alfabet (1981) is a book-length poem using two reticulating systems: the alphabet (that adamic, prelapsarian state of language, as Roland Barthes suggests, because it is pre-word & pre-syntax, & thus before misuse, lying, rhetoric, polysemy are possible) & the Fibonacci series (where each number is the sum of the two previous ones, i.e.: 1,2,3,5,8,13,34,47,81,128...) Thus the first section of the poem is one line long and starts with an "A", the second 2 lines long, and starts with a "B", etcetera)" (see Joris blog).