Wilmette Warzone
 

REVISION 2--Pentameter this time (I think)

Nature Takes her Bow

Come see Nature tamed in Chicago’s north ‘burbs--
diverse species of trees queue up by the curbs,
vibrant blooms rest in mulch beds fluffed and rounded,
our manicured lawns by iron fences are bounded.
We’ve pruned the kingly oak’s shimmering crown
to pass electric lines to light the town.
Nature here has been completely overthrown:
her generals chained, her ground troops one-inch mown.

But wait! What’s this? A dandelion clock--
its fluffy head turned like a lollipop.
Now down the street that rascal Katie goes.
She plucks the clock with feral smile and blows!
Like that, her ambush by this wild child sprung,
Nature sticks out her wicked yellow tongue.


REVISION 1.1

Northshore Warzone

Come breathe the peace in Chicago’s suburbs
where birch, ash, and elm queue up next the curbs.
Our blooms rest in mulch beds fluffed and rounded,
our manicured lawns by fences are bounded.
We’ve pruned the kingly oak’s shimmering crown
to pass electric lines to light the town.
Nature here is completely overthrown:
her generals chained, her ground troops one-inch mown.

But wait! What’s this? A dandelion clock--
its fluffy head turned like a lollipop.
Now down the street that rascal Katie goes.
She plucks the clock with feral smile and blows!
Like that, her ambush by this wild child sprung,
Nature sticks out her wicked yellow tongue.



ORIGINAL VERSION

How tidy! How clean! This wealthy suburb--
birch, ash, and elm aligned along the curb--
our trees tucked in mulch beds fluffed and rounded,
next to manicured lawns by fences surrounded.
We’ve pruned the kingly oak’s shimmering crown
to pass electric lines to light the town.
Nature, here, is completely overthrown--
her generals chained; her ground troops one-inch mown.

But wait! What’s this? A dandelion clock--
its fluffy head turned like a lollipop.
Now down the street our neighbor, lil’ Katie, goes.
She plucks that clock with feral smile and blows!
Like that, her ambush by this wild child sprung,
Nature sticks out her wicked yellow tongue.

Paula,

As an exercise, it might be useful to write a sonnet with no inversions and therefore no escape hatches.

Hi, Paula—

I like your central trope of the homeowners’ association doing battle with the armed forces of nature. I’m having some trouble, however, scanning a few of the lines or visualizing the images. Here are the problem lines and some suggested fixes:

Line 1: No matter how I read it, I only get four stresses. How about
How tidy! How clean! This wealthy subdivision—

Line 4: In modern usage “next” is used with “to” rather than by itself as a preposition. Maybe
next to manicured lawns by fences surrounded. or maybe
by manicured lawns with fences surrounded
Carl will almost certainly ding you for the inversion, but I’m OK with it.

Line 11: I can force this into IP, but “lil Katie” sounds more like a rapper than a cute little girl. How about
Now down the street our tomboy, Katie, goes

Line 14: if she’s blowing on the dandelion clock, it would be grayish-white, not yellow.

I enjoyed the gently subversive humor and heartwarming images of the child. Nice work!

Glenn

I like this. A bit old fashioned, but the inversions seem to fit the intended tone rather than to be a sign of lazy writing. I'd omit the adjective before Katie's name. Let her just be Katie. We soon enough learn in the couplet that she is a child.

I enjoyed this too, Paula. A few thoughts:

How tidy! How clean! This wealthy suburb—

Like Glenn, I get tet here; if that’s intentional, fine. The sentence starting with “This wealthy suburb …” is a long fragment, and that’s fine too if it’s what you want. Also, “tidy” and “clean” are nearly synonyms. You could fix all that if you wanted—and tone down the exclamations—with something like this:

How orderly, how clean this wealthy suburb!—

I’m not a fan of “wrenched rhymes” like suburb/curb, but this one didn’t bother me for some reason. Maybe I’m finally loosening up.

next to manicured lawns by fences surrounded.

I’ve gotten dinged for inversions more than once myself, so I’m just dinging back! This one actually did irk me a bit, but I found the others more amusing than anything else, so Roger has a point. I suppose you could try a jocular slant rhyme like “with fences round ’em,” but that’s a stretch too.

Nature, here, is completely overthrown--
her generals chained; her ground troops one-inch mown.

The commas around “here” give it weight and break the flow, so I’d lose them. I’d also change the semicolon in the next line to a comma, but be aware that semicolons are another thing I’m rigid and prescriptive about. I like “one-inch mown.”

[EDIT: I took issue here with "dandelion clock," which I don’t think I've ever heard. Glenn discreetly set me straight.]

Like Glenn and Roger, I think “lil” should go.

Just to clarify, I am not applying a context independent rule that says "inversions are bad, don't do inversions", but I am not convinced by the sentence structure in this particular 14 liner. I might flick through some Norton anthologies, but I cannot remember any time period that has to work so hard to get the rhyme at the end of the line inside a sonnet. By the way, I am pegging this as 1950-60s vintage, going back further starts to become anachronistic in a way that doesn't really work for me. Wait, maybe 1920s? I have will have to go read some poems to be sure. It sounds old, but it shouldn't sound that old.

Glenn, Roger, and Carl-- Thank you all so much for pointing out my meter problems and supplying ideas to fix them. I've retooled the first four lines completely to try and move toward a more rhythmic sound. I've made Katie a "rascal" which I think implies her youth and fixes the meter. And I've removed the questionable poetic inversion, though now I have a passive voice that may also offend. Does it work better now?

Carl--I'm surprised to learn that the term "dandelion clock" may not be universally known! Meanwhile, you've taught me another new term today--the "wrenched rhyme".

Glenn--nature's tongue is yellow because the blowing of the clock will produce a vast carpet of yellow dandelion flowers--the bane of all the local gardeners hereabouts.

Yves--I had actually hoped that the frivolous content of this sonnet would strike a contrast with the loftiness of the sonnet form producing another layer of light humor. It's alright that it doesn't work for you--I have more! Meanwhile, I do take to heart that I should immerse myself in some more modern poetry if I want my work to sound fresh to modern ears. I appreciate your feedback.

Paula, this is not about modern poetry! As I said, I don't remember reading a sonnet of any time period that has to continually use one trick to get the rhyme at the end of the line. How often does even Shakespeare do it? I did not say I did not like the poem, I just said that I was not convinced by its control of syntax: rhyming is mostly about control of syntax.

.
I can't think of any plant more maligned than the lowly, lovely dandelion. Though it has its admirers, they are far outnumbered by those determined to ambush it every year with battalions of weapons aimed to obliterate it. It is a miraculous piece of nature with a divine life cycle.

I wish it weren't a sonnet. I see no reason for it to be. I can feel your voice trying to squeeze into a form that requires a scheme and a meter that just doesn't fit, imo. Maybe dandelions are more suited to another form? I could see it as a visual poem...

.

My question, slight hang-up, although it may shouldn’t be, is I’m not sure what the poem is having fun with. I know that may be a strength but I wonder. (First, why “Come breath” and not “Come breathe”?) Is it an early Blake with some exuberance and that light touch of mortality at the end? Or is it unabashed 21st-century Wordsworth with no cynicism intended? I like the music.

Syntax is more rhythm than rhyme. You learn that fast when you don’t have a received form for support. I would consider using a couple of commas at line endings instead of periods. The end of L3 for example, and lose the dash on L7. I’m not totally convinced by the dashes in this one. Removing the em dash at the end of S2L1 and replacing it with a comma would give the sentence a loop that I think is needed, or at least preferred.

Do you have to set “Katie” inside commas? Radical me may go with

Now down the street that rascal Katie goes
And plucks the clock . . .

I think that may be criminal to you but a fun poem like this needs a bit more flow IMO.

I like the bounce and the sly bite.

My half-penny.

Paula, I agree with John that the current punctuation makes this choppier than it needs to be, giving it that sort of regimentation that the poem's content seems to be charting a rebellion from.
For instance, here a lot more movement can be conjured by making the period a comma, and dropping some of the smaller words (which can be inferred):

Come breath the peace in Chicago’s suburbs—
where birch, ash, and elm queue up next the curbs.
Our blooms rest in mulch beds fluffed and rounded.
Our manicured lawns by fences are bounded.

Come breath the peace in Chicago 'burbs—
birch, ash, and elm queued up to curbs,
blooms tucked in mulch beds fluffed and rounded,
manicured lawns by fences bounded.


I'm not saying these sort of momentum-inducing edits are always better, it depends on the poem, but this one seem caught by the ankle and unable to emulate Katie. For me, the proper name for the child, seems somewhat cloyingly jarring, but perhaps if the poem were re-titled KATIE (instead of the cumbersome Northshore Warzone) then the mention of her name in the poem would have a quality of revelation that outweighs its sentimentality.

The poem is fine, but somewhat run-of-the-mill.
It needs more syntactical blood-flow to animate it.

Nemo

Hi, Paula—

The first line still only has four beats: Come BREATHE the PEACE of ChiCAgo’s SUBurbs— (Change “breath” to “breathe.”). I liked the two exclamations in the original version because they announced the octave like a trumpet fanfare, a device you echo with the exclamation and question at the start of the sestet. But I like the calmness that you add to the octave, which is disrupted by Katie in the sestet. You could split the difference: How tidy. How clean. This wealthy Chicago suburb—. Losing the exclamation points lets the calm mood prevail.

In Line 2, “next” still needs to be “next to,” or “beside.” This adds another syllable to this already bursting-at-the-seams line. Could you choose two of the three trees, or eliminate “where,” which isn’t really needed coming after the previous line’s em-dash.

Line 4 now has only 4 beats. Could you go back to “surrounded,” which allows you to promote the helping verb “are” to get your fifth beat?

The rest is fine. I like “rascal, Katie,” and now understand the “yellow tongue.”

Glenn

I will spell it out: rhyming is mostly about control of syntax because [1] it is the syntax which mostly sells a rhyme as not being forced, [2] it is syntax which creates the form of the idea that houses the rhyme, and [3] it is control of syntax which gives you many options for creating ways to position the rhyme at the end of the line which helps avoid monotony; but also so that when you do stuff like inversions (which is not that statistically common a trick in a sonnet as folk who go for an old sound make it out to be), you are not doing it out of habit or because you lack options. Simply rewriting this poem without inversion will force the working out of different syntactic possibilities all on its own without anyone else's external advice about which syntactic options to use.

It is about hearing more things.

Paula, at the moment, it just sounds like the sonnet form overly constrains you. But Eratosphere is currently the best place to learn so ...

I’m one of those otherworldly innocents who may not know things that everyone else does. I’m still surprised, though, that I didn’t know such a curious term. I can’t remember when I last saw a dandelion. Could I have forgotten?

You could also use “by the curbs” for an anapest or “by curbs” for an iamb.

Hi Paula. I have to agree about the still tet first line. In fact I'm getting tet in all of the first four lines, and also elsewhere in the poem. Does it actually just want to be tet? I think it might, so give it its head.

I'm also of the school that quite likes the inversions in this context, but you might find those changing anyway if you go all-tet.

Cheers

David

Hi Paula,

I have a question. And please don't think I'm being patronising because I'm sure I once thought exactly this thing. Are you under the impression that a 10 syllable line will automatically be pentameter? I ask because all these lines are 10 syllables but in the first four lines I definitely hear anapaestic tetrameter: a "bouncing" 4-beat rhythm. Then the poem suddenly changes to a much more regular iambic pentameter. I suppose I'm wondering how deliberate this is, or if it's kind of an accident based on counting.

Come breathe the peace in Chicago’s suburbs
where birch, ash, and elm queue up next the curbs.
Our blooms rest in mulch beds fluffed and rounded,
our manicured lawns by fences are bounded.
We’ve pruned the kingly oak’s shimmering crown
to pass electric lines to light the town.
Nature here is completely overthrown:
her generals chained, her ground troops one-inch mown.

Also, since the stress is on the 1st syllable of "suburbs", the first 2 lines don't really rhyme. Or at least, it sounds a little clunky. Something like

"Come breathe the peace in old Chicago's 'burbs
where birch and elm line up beside the curbs"

would give you pentameter and a true rhyme. Do you hear the difference? (and do people still say 'burbs in the US?)

Edit: I miscounted. L4 has 11 syllables. Counting is hard! :) My question still stands, though.

Edit edit: And Carl, you don't know about dandelion clocks? How did you tell the time in the woods when you were a child?

Jim Moonan--Quite right that the sonnet form was pre-determined here. I set myself to write a bunch of sonnets, and then I went looking for subject matter. This one came to me on my morning walk. I think it appeals to me to surprise the reader with a mismatch between subject and form. I'm thinking at the moment of Pablo Neruda's Odes (which I'm currently reading) many of which are elevating very "low" topics (socks, a lemon, a cat, etc) with grandiose language. The question, always, is, does it work?

John Riley—The poem is intended to mock my neighbors (and myself, of course) for our tireless efforts to tame nature so that natural beauty can shine forth! I’m thinking of sending it to the local paper when it’s ready. The intended audience is hyper-local and will definitely wince when Katie enters the scene.

Nemo—I’m struggling mightily with punctuation (here and elsewhere). I want to stick with the rules, but I also want to direct the reader’s pauses. Sometimes those two things are at war. Sometimes, I just forgot my 8th grade grammar.

David & Mark —Thank you for pushing me to rethink the meter. You caught me. In places, I really did just count 10 syllables and nod to myself and say “good enough”. I think that Revision 2 is truly pentameter throughout. Does it read more smoothly now? I do feel I sacrificed a certain jauntiness (that comes with tet) to achieve the more regular lines expected in sonnet form.

Mark – Thank you for your concern about being perceived as patronizing. Quite the opposite, I’m so very delighted to get such exceptional readers to look at my work in progress and give actionable feedback. Many, many thanks. I’m a beginner and happy to just be learning here with this talented group of writers.