Day Seventeen of Sonnetpalooza finds me writing a poem about music, a thing I do from time to time, as music, it turns out, is one of the central concerns of my life–listening, making, recording, performing. Hardly a day goes by when I am not doing one of those four things at some point orContinue reading “#455: Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello . . .”
Tag Archives: sonnet variation
#454: Let’s hear your argument that a civilian . . .
Okay, today all the rules for the sonnet, except for one, have been thrown completely under the bus. Desperate times require desperate measures. I don’t have a lot to say about this one, as I hope it speaks for itself, but I will give you a bit of a heads up about the subject matterContinue reading “#454: Let’s hear your argument that a civilian . . .”
#453: If I can go one-hundred days without . . .
Fifteen If I can go one-hundred days withoutAlcohol, do you think I might be ableTo go a week without social media,Or the internet for that same matter?All that digital stuff has becomeLike the cordyceps in The Last Of Us,So inextricably intertwined in our livesSo as to make extrication seem nighImpossible. Maybe not even nigh. Again, likeContinue reading “#453: If I can go one-hundred days without . . .”
#452: The headline of a HuffPost article . . .
Another cockamamie idea I had once, perhaps before this nutty 30 sonnets in 30 days idea, was to write a series of poems based on idiotic news stories, or the kind of article you see nearly everyday on outlets like Huffington Post and their ilk, those pieces that either report the ridiculous, or those thinkContinue reading “#452: The headline of a HuffPost article . . .”
#451: If Walt Whitman tried to write a sonnet . . .
On day 13 of the sonnetsplosion, I find myself thinking, this is only day thirteen. We’ve got seventeen more days of this to go. And then: why did I choose to write 30 sonnets again? It’s proving more difficult than I thought it would be. Sonnet’s are a bitch, remember. Larry Levis was right onContinue reading “#451: If Walt Whitman tried to write a sonnet . . .”
#450: When my son was young he hated April . . .
Here’s another little sonnet experiment. Let’s try to be super dumb about the rhyme at the end of the line by using the same words over and over—but enjambing some of the lines so that the repetition is less audible and dorky! It strikes me that this has been a poetic goal since the EnglishContinue reading “#450: When my son was young he hated April . . .”
#449: My brother once said that his dear dead dog . . .
Welcome to day eleven of sonnet storm 2023. Thirty days, thirty sonnets. Here’s my first little sonnet experiment, a sonnet in iambic petameter (with a fudge here and there) that does not rhyme. We call that blank verse. Ooh, but there’s a rhyming couplet at the end—a button. Now we’re cooking. And the NaPoWriMo suggestionContinue reading “#449: My brother once said that his dear dead dog . . .”
#447: What if I moved the cushion out into . . .
Wouldn’t you know it? That on this ninth day of sonnetpalooza, the recommended prompt for the day on the glorious NaPoWriMo website is to write a sonnet!? Now there’s an assignment I can get behind! It’s Easter, and I feel the urge, almost a third of the way through National Poetry Writing Month, to switchContinue reading “#447: What if I moved the cushion out into . . .”
NaPoWriMo 2023: A Sonnet Festival
Don’t ask me why, not just yet anyway, but I am moved this year as I anticipate the first day of National Poetry Writing Month to veer away from my annual practice–not by skipping it, or by doing something different, like working on prose, for example, like some fiction writers do in the fourth monthContinue reading “NaPoWriMo 2023: A Sonnet Festival”
#434: Buying a Shed (a duplex on April 27, 2022)
Here’s a poem called a duplex, a sonnet variation developed by the poet Jericho Brown. It’s 14 lines long–and it follows a pattern of partial repetition in the first line of each stanza of the second line of the preceding stanza. Except that the first line and the last line must be the same. AContinue reading “#434: Buying a Shed (a duplex on April 27, 2022)”
michael jarmer 