Dissenters Revisited

Are they the ones whose narcissistic wit
disdains the compass of a mere six lines?
whose scintillating brilliance only shines
when grander architecture beckons it?

They'd turn Pope’s epigram “Whose dog are you?”
from fifteen words to, say, a hundred two.

.

edited for typo



[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited August 02, 2008).]

Dissension Rides Again

No man told Pope the form that he must use,
defined the rhyme scheme, length, and meter too,
left filling in the blanks for him to do -
Nope! Pope and Pope alone amused his Muse.

The less the poem gets, the more you must
forget the structure strictures; go with trust.

The Chateau of M. Quasimodo

The portraits on the walls depict
my ancestors and their demise,
here, cousin Anatole is kicked
as peasants gouge out both his eyes.

And here, a basket case is seen--
'Papa Greets Madame Guillotine'.

I cheat though, this is culled from a longer piece.

Edited to say that I agree with M. Cantor, this form is really too easy



[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited August 02, 2008).]

How’s That Again?

Nothing except the fashion of the age.
Chaucer of course had used the form before,
and Denham* and Dryden had refined the ore,
making heroic couplets all the rage.

No Pound or Eliot to dictate rules,
the classics and his forebears shaped his tools.

..

*O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
<FONT >..My great example, as it is my theme!
..Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
..Strong without rage, without o’erflowing, full.

........—Sir John Denham, from Cooper Hill (1642),
..........on comparing his verse to the River Thames</FONT s>

The Snot Sonnet

Is snot a sonnet, the turn will grate
it’s at L4, I say you blew it.
It always must be at L8--
that’s the way us purists do it.

Leave it to the Dutch to find
A form that doesn’t tax the mind.



[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited August 03, 2008).]

The Netherlands are where they play with style
upon old instruments they tend with care.
Old forms fare better there than anywhere,
played gravely with an enigmatic smile.

Snelsonnets give them energy to write
in language which gives most of us a fright.

Nascetur ridiculus mus, or The Italics Weigh In

For Petrarch's sake, no more! alleviate
the pain you cause us with your clashing klaxons,
you BEEPing Dutch and BEEPing Anglo-Saxons!
Fourteen? è troppo! Please, abbreviate!

And so was born this mongrel form, this sham,
this cross of worsted sire and hamster dam.

Squirrel Madness

The car slows but the squirrel splats the street.
It's dodged far faster cars and wasn't hit.
Now that some heartbreak has come over it,
It wonders why it thought that life was sweet.

You might see some of these pause when they are
With sadness overwhelmed and seek a car.

Oh Stephen! Really !;)

"worsted sire and hamster dam."

The form’s too easy, dumbs things down, you say? What of the sonnet? The English golden age saw thousands of them, hundreds read today--clowning, loving, mourning upon the page. Romantics too produced them by the score, Millay alone one hundred seventy-six, a hundred times that number by Merrill Moore.* Cummings wrote dozens, for all his graphic tricks. Each day more thousands flood the internet, many met with cheers (and some with booing), and not a hint of its abating yet. The form’s too easy, dumbed down, not worth doing? A form’s as good as any writer makes it, as bad as any hack who undertakes it.

*Moore taught himself shorthand so he could write down the sonnets he composed while walking between classes; he had written some nine thousand by age 25, and his “autobiography,” M, is a sequence of a thousand sonnets.
___

P.S.: As the English sonnet soon modified the Italian, so the Irish snelsonnet (ABAB CC) apparently modifies the Dutch. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif