Welcome to sonnetmageddon, day 4. Not even 1/6th of the way through the month, I have a sense of something taking shape in the way of a connective thread, beyond the repetition of this formal structure, the sonnet. Just four poems in, it might at this point be pretty oblique–so I mention it here just as a note, a kind of heads up, maybe more for myself than anything else. Just in terms of subject matter: sonnets, dogs, travel, and this one, an autobiographical sketch about a young college kid making his way into the world. There’s a kind of domesticity in these poems. I think I even have a title brewing, related, interestingly enough, to the odd title I gave to my undergraduate creative writing thesis. And taking a cue from Shakespeare himself, sometimes it is just necessary to write an eleven syllable line.
Four
I named my undergrad creative thesis
Home Appliances, it’s a true story.
A book of early poems and fiction pieces.
I was twenty-one, and hunky-dory,
full of the possibility, obsessed
with fridges, toasters, televisions,
and sex, the kinky kind; I guessed
or thought I was on some brave, bold mission.
At a student reading, a teacher’s wife
Told me my fiction was abjectly “male.”
The prof defended me, citing my life,
“He is,” he said, but still, a kind of nail.
Against the disapproving social din,
We strive to feel at home in our own skin.
michael jarmer 