Another year has gone by - that makes two years now since I wrote my first sonnet. My sonnets were mainly written as a form of therapy, and so most don't stand up very well as works of art, but a few of them do hold up pretty well, I believe. First, the stats:
Total sonnets year 1
(2008-2009) - 50
Total sonnets year 2
(2009-2010) - 45
Grand total: 95
The Sonnet for Poetry Month #7 starts by referencing Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" - and I remember I was feeling horribly wretched when I wrote this - but I tried to be philosophical by reminding myself of the absolute horrors that some people endure in their lives - like poor Harry Eastlack who had a bone disease - I describe some of his symptoms in my sonnet. The best part of the sonnet is the last line, which I think holds up quite well as an aphorism:
"Pain comes from love, as death from being born."
Communication Sonnet #4 probably is my most accessible poem because I name-dropped Emily Dickinson - well, her first name, but poetry lovers can guess who I'm talking about:
Are you thinking of me on this spring morn,
In Emily's neck of the woods? By trees
And meadows that she loved, where she was born,
Where she spent much time thinking about bees,
Apparently, and eccentricity
While decked out in white...
Dickinson wrote about 20 or 30 poems that mention bees. And I noticed that Dickinson really loved that ee sound in her poetry. So the last two lines of CS#4 end with that sound. I also alluded to Dickinson's poem XCVII, which reads in its entirety:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
I allude to it in the "it takes" bit - my poem ends:
Communication takes more than just me,
Such work needs two, in close proximity.
The very next sonnet, Communication Sonnet #5 I rather like too. It describes a dream I had, and gets at the tricky nature of love that you don't want. It takes me years to forget any guy I ever care about - I am the queen of the unwilling torch-carriers. I can sometimes will myself to stop consciously thinking about a guy I loved, but invariably, as soon as I succeed in doing that my unconscious gets back at me by making me have sexy, romantic dreams about the guy. Then I wake up full of anguish, regret and longing. The damn well least I can do is get a poem out of it.
Another fairly accessible poem I wrote is Dream Sonnet 2 - another literary allusion, this time Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights."
more Sonnet Roundup here