Pieces From the Year
Just to put that pin in
Is it Monday yet?
The ninth poem for my sonnet crown is in a zygote stasis, becoming better defined but certainly not ready for our post-Thanksgiving email. I refused to take my laptop on my holiday travels to see family, and got a proper break from even checking my subscriber list (hi all, welcome). In lieu of a new sonnet, I thought I’d share some pieces from the year.
First off, it’s not about me. Remember always that I’m eager to see guest posts always. I understand my poetry is a little eclectic, but I’m happy to see the traditional sonnet land in my inbox, a sonnet like Henry Crawford’s “Everword” (published June 15th).
Then there’s Arjan’s sonnet, “A walk with the dog in the evening”, published June 29th of this year. Arjan Tupan writes #trpplffct | fresh poetry & friends, which shares his own poems as well as others. His Substack is worth knowing, since it will introduce you to many other online poets, and includes his always lovely and thoughtful meditations.
The last guest post is a favorite of mine, having been written by one of my favorite American poets, and if you’re not aware of his writing, I suggest you start looking up Dan Beachy-Quick. He was kind enough to offer up a sonnet for me earlier this year, “In the Small Room” (published June 1st).
And Now, A Sonnet
I’ve written exactly thirty new sonnets this year, starting with number 34 and recently finishing up number 64 just before Thanksgiving. In between, I had to go back and rewrite a few of them, mostly for this sonnet crown that still does not bear a title. The crown has five poems to go, so we’ll see the end of it after the New Year.
I’d like to finish off this glib post with my favorite of the poems I’ve written this year, but I enjoy so many of them. I figure that’s a good thing: if you’re bored with a poem you’ve written, how on earth do you think the readers will feel? The topics are sprawling as well: I’ve written an awkward love poem. An arrogant projection toward a just reward. I’ve given my thoughts on Florida’s don’t say Gay laws, and a meditation on the post-Roe world. I meditated on the relationship between Black and white men, and how there always seems to be a gun between them. I got really obsessed with “The Waste Land”, and started to think about how poetry is really always a burial followed by a resurrection (more on that, later). Of course, in the last half of the year I’ve been intensely distracted by the sonnet crown, which is born out of my thoughts on the cult of Osiris and reading some of Joseph Campbell’s ideas of “the cannibal gardener” in his book Primitive Mythology, which was coupled with my excursions into the wilds of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (what, you didn’t see that in “On this fallen |hguahp!| fined again, swallow them”?), the seeds of which allowed me to finally get my Mordred (I/me) out, a long time coming. Now that we’ve had our meat sacrifice and from our carbon garden the seeds have sprouted, I’m hoping to be back on solid ground soon.
But instead I’d like to share a little poem I wrote all the way back in late January of this year, “Why not first place, Achilles, and hate him to play”, which came out of my most recent reading of Homer’s Iliad. It’s the scene when, having declared games during the funeral rites of Patroclus, Achilles hands Agamemnon the first place prize before the game has even started, to show deference to the Achaean’s leader. It’s a little piece of diplomacy aimed at a character I have little respect for, who has his half to pay for the whole conflict and I think everyone (except Achilles?) is a little afraid of. In any case, this sonnet was my musing on that scene:
A strange one, I admit. But “neatsleather” is a fun anachronism. The pterodactyl, too, was an image my son asked me to put in (he turned 5 this year).
Hey, you know you can share these poems? It helps. See that button below? Click it, and it will do the work for you.
Now I got to get back to writing. Thanks for reading, and have a good week.