challenge

FinsburyParkCarrots

I've written many of those over the years, but I'll write something new in the Petrarchan and Spenserian forms for this thread.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Here's a brand new one I just wrote in the past hour, for the Nun, which I include here too as part of the olderman-Finsbury poem exchange programme.

Hector

In your roar of laughter, plumes upon
your golden battle helmet shake like death
beneath an airswung sword. And in your breath
of boasted fearlessness, your infant son
wails in his mother's arms in unison
with soldiers' bloodgasps, teeming underneath
your city battlements. You will bequeath
him feasting dogs, once Argive fleets have won.

Oh, Hector! See the flashing diadem
Andromache, your wife is wearing? How
it captures your reflection, multiplied
in rainbow spectres, you, within each gem;
Your glory? Death wan dust. How she will throw
Hope's ghosts to ground, when you, her light, have died.

Ms. Haiku

These poems are excellent! I'm still working on my NJ poems, but I'll add one soon.

FinsburyParkCarrots

The Hector sonnet above followed a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (abbaabbacdecde). This next sonnet is my own scheme, I think: abbabccbdedeff. It also makes use of what used in the old days to be called "feminine" endings (ie: lines of four iambic, and one amphibrachic, feet).

Old shelves prop up concordances (outmoded,
so you hear, by new editions); fading
foolscap on your desk declares your jading
penmark. Lifelong care to have decoded
ancient stones, before new studies flooded
lecture halls and bookshops, weaves your ebbing,
cataracting sight in deskgloom webbing:
You embrace the waste your critics boded.

Now a bright young man (not college stock)
Deciphers all the symbols on the stones,
Showing up your work as poppycock:
Dust thrown wide in digging up old bones.
Blind white beckonings to aged dread
consume a broken vision none will read.

ExTReMe FrEAk

I'll be posting a sonnet later tonight, once I grab it out of the car. It's out of my usual times of writting, but I think it's still good.

ExTReMe FrEAk

(abbaabba cededc)

What made me so different from them all?
I had never seen what they seem to see
I cannot be who they want me to be
Their egos above me, I want to crawl
For months at a time, my life had to stall
A shroud of darkness had come around me
Hiding in the shadows had always been key
Am I real? Because my feelings gone dull

In the mirror I stare myself eye to eye
This man is to be no one but himself
I think to myself; my soul swells and crests
The book slams shut and then placed on the shelf
Then the memories were leashed up like pets
The darkness within me left with a sigh

FinsburyParkCarrots

You're right. It is good.

ExTReMe FrEAk

That night had been very lonely and sad
I had nothing more than a broken heart
With my actions, I made her very mad
Time was spent alone, ‘till I fell apart
Why didn’t she understand how I feel?
She had never returned my love for her
Why had it been my heart she had to steal?
It is revenge, with my self I concur

I then prepared my 9mm
I was going to her to show my love
Her words I noted, seemed a touch sweeter
She said she had missed me, at least kind of
I looked into her eyes with much vigor
We shared love, and then I pulled the trigger

Percival himself reading the sonnet

olderman

I dig the audio EF. btw are you Percival?

ExTReMe FrEAk

Nope. Percival is a charact that my friend and I made up. I write the story, he does the voice. He does like 80% of the work. Chip, the friend from Manhattan who does the voice, is an actor. He does the voice very well.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Very enjoyable.

ExTReMe FrEAk

This is just a revival bump so this thread can continue.

ExTReMe FrEAk

Sorry about the double post (no edit feature you know).
I was wondering, how important do you feel it is to use iambic pentameter in sonnets?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Some sonnets use tetrameter, some sonnets are twelve or sixteen lines and most sonnets, I think, deviate from iambics (take for example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 with its concluding line "LILies/ that FESTer/SMELL FAR WORSE/ than WEEDS", a tetrametric line comprising a trochee, an amphibrach, a mollossus and an iamb).

Here's Patrick Kavanagh's fourteen line sonnet "Come Dance With Kitty Stobling" that breaks lots of rules but is still in my view a supreme modern example of the form:

Come Dance with Kitty Stobling(1960)

No! no! no! I know I was not important as I moved
Through the colourful country, I was but a single
Item in the picture, the name, not the beloved.
O tedious man with whom no gods commingle.
Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time
I had a myth that was a lie but it served:
Trees walking across the crest of hills and my rhyme
Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved
Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously
Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces
Stumbled behind Jove's page boy paging me.
I had a very pleasant journey, thank you sincerely
For giving me my madness back, or nearly.

Patrick Kavanagh
Copyright © Estate of Katherine Kavanagh

Ali

Shakespeare Sonnet 126 throws off the whole ababcdcdefefgh.line pattern..it's 12 lines. I always though it was ab etc cd etc ef etc ab..but I think it ends differently with gh,from what I studied and am looking at.Just in case anybody has a complete works around.

olderman

Waste not your time on blabbering babies,
Jack had his dog put to sleep for rabies,
Chester came home found his wife entangled,
Anthony was killed, his body mangled,
Sarah sought solitude in the convent,
Clara found cheer in a lustful moment,
Ashley seeks fortune from illness and health,
Patrick disguised his wicked bent for death.

Strangers like these plod through our dark story,
Beggars all they dwell in the blank recess,
Minds tormented by past deeds unforgiven,
Sorrow's victor buried with no glory,
Edit the play with love's smiling excess,
Cheerful, thankful - as was freely given.

**feel free to help me with the sextet.. especially the last two lines.. thanks for reading**

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

FinsburyParkCarrots

Reads great to me, Jesse!

olderman

i walked a strangers path of heated sand,
a burros trail lined with rose red cactii,
the gypsies way to avoid guardia grand
de sevilla and franco's killers nigh,
andalusia's distinct aroma,
pill box remnants of war along beaches,
oily vessels darken the bubbled foam,
whilst remnants of moorish inward teaches

the gypsy that he lost his land long ago,
a freedom born of freedom still taken
away as is the way it seems to be
among those who wish to traverse a slow
long trail of hot sand in a land forsaken,
just a ditty, a remnant by the sea......

olderman

Written by P B Shelley.. (check it out)


Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it--he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Pearl_Jam_Necklace

Yellow wrote:

that fekka roits way betta-n-i-do

you from jersey? or chicago ???