[Tim Murphy]

Dear Folks, we'll start our tour of thirteen member sonnets with R.S. Gwynn's "Shakespearian Sonnet." Professor Davis will weigh in tomorrow.

Shakespearean Sonnet

.....With a first line taken from the tv listings

A man is haunted by his father’s ghost.
Boy meets girl while feuding families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who block his way.
A ruler’s rivals plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.

[Roger Slater]

This wonderful. No wonder it was published!

Trying to find something to quibble with, though, since that seems to be the idea, I point to L4, which may (however unfairly) be accused of being tetrameter. The line sounds right to me, perhaps because "Two couples" asks to be pronounced with two initial stressed syllables so the line can be considered pentameter on a purely accentual basis.

Another thing to think about, though I feel all the decisions have been made correctly as the poem now stands, is whether or not some of the rhyming lines might be better if they switched places (i.e., L2 becomes L4 and L4 becomes L2). Is there any kind of thematic progression in the comically summarized plots? It might add interest if there were. For example, if we started with tragedy plots and moved to comedy plots by the couplet, or vice versa. If the reader gets a sense that some of the lines might be interchangeable, like a modular sonnet, it may reflect poorly on the poem. Better that each line should seem to belong exactly where it is and nowhere else.

My favorite is L12, which pulls off its understatement with brilliance.

I see no awkward enjambments whatsoever.

(This is a wonderful poem I'd give anything to have written).

[Tim Murphy]

Roger, I laughed out loud at your comment on enjambment. To you and all other participants, let me point out that this isn't Deep End. We're not posting these for criticism; rather we need to appreciate them and discuss what makes these sonnets so superior to the run-of-the-mill ones we see at Sonnet Central and in the weaker pages of The Formalist.

[Dick Davis]

Sam Gwynn’s Shakespearian sonnet about Shakespeare’s plays is a delight. There’s first of all the simple pleasure to be had of watching him keep to the form, which he does of course; then there’s the more self-flattering pleasure of identifying the plays as they go by us one by one (some take a bit longer than others – I had to pause at line 6 for example). There’s also the way the relation between something from the past and its modern version seems compounded both of disgust ("How could TV listings be so crass as to characterize Hamlet in that way?") and affection ("Hey, this is fun!") - a mixture that is quite typical of a number of Sam Gwynn’s poem, which often seem to say something like "OK, so we’re crass, but there’s a mordant joy to be had from acknowledging that and playing with it for a while". And though the poem seems so modern it is very close in feeling to a number of Shakespeare’s own sonnets, which similarly play with disgust compounded with pleasure. As a grumpy, irritated list it even has a very specific precedent – Shakespeare sonnet 66 ("Tired with all these for restful death I cry"); as in this poem, Sam’s has one item per line, and keeps a similar grammatical parallelism between lines; the difference is that Sam doesn’t veer away psychologically as Shakespeare does in the last couplet, he simply leaves us dangling, and it’s this unresolved quality that makes us see that his is emphatically a modern and not a renaissance poem.

[nyctom]

Call me ignorant, but I thought a sonnet had to have some kind of volta, some kind of turning point in the argument. But I don't see one here. What makes this a sonnet and not just a very witty fourteen line poem? How flexible is the sonnet form before you start to question whether the writer is taking TOO many liberties with the form? Does a sonnet have to have a volta?

[Dick Davis]

It's true that almost all sonnets have a volta at some point. But there are exceptions. Sidney's "My true love hath my heart and I have his" has no volta, and it's certainly a sonnet. The volta in early Italian sonnets is often very tenuous (eg in Cavalcanti's "Avete 'n voi li fiori e la vedura"), and the sestet in many of the sonnets of Heredia, perhaps the greatest writer of French sonnets, often intensifies the argument - goes further along the same way - rather than turning it in another direction. It's true though that sonnets with _no_ shift of tone at some point, like Sam's, are relatively rare. But they do exist.

[Hugh Clary]

For stuff this clever, I can forgive the missing volta. Hey, I forgave Elizabeth for it in her How do I Love Thee, so the precedent was already set.

[Tim Murphy]

I spent a sleepless night, (worrying about whether Dick would find the enter reply button), and line after line of Gwynn's pentameter precis of entire plays kept coming to me. I've not committed the poem to memory, so that's memorable speech. Sam delights, as do we all, in "found pentameters." One year at West Chester he went to a student bulletin board and jotted down several funny ones. Five years ago Tim Steele lectured here on the centrality of the pentameter in our speech, and gave us these:

I'm sorry, but my paper will be late.

I really think I should have had an "A."

You haven't kissed me since we got engaged.

Sam has by no means sent us his best sonnet, just the one I wheedled out of him to launch this discussion. This and the others may all be found in No Word of Farewell, Story Line Press.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Essentially a one-joke novelty poem, perhaps, but oh so deftly elaborated. My imitation below is all over the place, scrambling for cleverness at any cost. Gwynn, on the other hand, uses the title, epigraph and opening line clearly and economically to delineate the rules, then stays in bounds for the rest of the game, executing each play with elegant finesse.

(The Richard II and Julius Caesar lines are sufficiently nonspecific that they could conceivably apply to other plays. The same can be said, however, of my As You Like It and Much Ado lines. Plus, I only manage to thumbnail 12 plays where Gwynn does 14, and only nine of my choices don't appear in the sonnet I'm imitating.)


INCOMPLETE WORKS

(after R.S. Gwynn’s “Shakespearean Sonnet”)

Trojans play sex games, Greeks lay wily plans.
Rape and dismemberment inspire a pie.
A newlywed takes orders from her man.
A duke says, “Do me or your brother dies.”
Two pairs of twins, long parted, meet again.
From verbal sparring, true love comes to pass.
Witches’ predictions drive a thane insane.
Rude magic gives a queen a piece of ass.
A jealous king’s wife feels a wint’ry chill.
A girl dressed like a boy acts like a girl.
(Beaumont and Fletcher lend a helping quill;
A cult of knuckleheads reveres an earl.)
A Christian court takes interest in a Jew.
A sorcerer bids his stormy art adieu.

[Roger Slater]

Well done, Chris. I trust you won't take offense if I suggest that the poem you pay tribute to is superior, however. What makes Mr. Gwynn's poem superior, I believe, has a lot to do with the consistent tone he takes in each of his lines. Each line perfectly mimics and satirizes the way the writers of tv listings might condense the plot of a particular play (line 1 of the sonnet was apparently from a real tv listing). Your poem, though, simply presents a series of very humorous plot summaries, but only some of them use the dead-pan plot summary device, while others achieve their humor by broader, less dead-pan comedy.

I know you weren't looking for a crit of your poem, Chris, and I make my observation only to mention a strength in the Gwynn poem that I hadn't considered earlier. (For the record, I've already seen a couple of other sonnets you've written that are wonderfully skilled and funny).