It is hard for me to pinpoint my inklings of love of the spoken and written word. Likely it goes back to some evening when preparing to go to bed. The soothing sense of being seated in my Mom or Dad's lap while her/his voice embraced me with a bedtime story. My hope is every person who reads this has at one time experienced that and if not will choose to pass it on anyway.
Some of you may say, "Ok i get the book/lore thing, but why sonnets?" Why indeed?
All i can say to answer that is although i did not always realize why i was drawn to sonnets, drawn like a magnet to steel i was! What follows is the best i can do to explain it: for me the sonnet is the best literary form for combining imagist and narrative traditions.
Most poets strive to distill experience into compact phrases whose purpose is like the frame's relationship to a painted picture. Part of the imaginative journey within the artist's painted rendition occurs because the viewer fills in the world outside the frame with the mind's eye. The world suggested by well crafted poetry is no less of a high definition experience for those who choose to read carefully and often.
From a 20th-21st century viewpoint, the happy accident of the similarity of the border of fourteen lines of ten syllables per line to the frame of a Kodak snapshot has struck me. And in the hands of Shakespeare and other accomplished Sonneteers, the progression of the Elizabethan form through three stanzas of exposition tied up in a couplet bow more than provides the beginning, middle, and end we learn to love in a parent's lap.
So it is with this introduction i open up this blog of sonnets in hopes there are those out there who have had (or will have) the exact same attraction to Sonnets that i have.
Pluto Corsini
June 10, 2014
Parade
You hand popcorn to me and say, "Recall
what you will of marching passers-by today,
but heed this, son: never converse with the tall
one--the drum major (knees high) while on his way!"
It gums up the whole works when you do. No crash
from cymbalist as she boxes helmeted ears! An "Ow"
follows when the trombone slide pokes her in the sash.
The oboist, now too familiar with the horn guy and "Pow!"
One tooth gone with the wind in the reed
broken off: and all for your major exchange!"
You domino the entire scene and we feed
until a jumble of 76 unpopped kernels remain.
Before we know it, here come the sweepers;
and far down the street the big bass boom whispers.
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