Thursday, December 1, 2016

Advent

The Christmas music on the radio
Used to annoy me. Frankly, it still does.
But overlaid upon it is the glow
Of thinking about you. The little buzz
Of sharp annoyance that I used to feel
Is now transmuted into just a sigh
That mixes into it the very real
Discovery that when I hear it I
Am, by its mere existence, turned to you.
I cannot help but in that moment see
That you, and every little thing you do,
Are more important, more alive to me
Than that which used to make me ill at ease
And thus the music finds a way to please.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

A is for...

No, I have never been a Hamilton.
At most and at my best I am a Burr:
Watching and waiting for the slow-built stir
Of something calmly and obliquely done
Though no less fully. What I have begun
Will finish. What I stop will not recur.
It's true, I must admit I might prefer
To be th'eclipse and not the setting sun;
To have them marvel at my very sight
As at a wonder, point and gawk and stare,
Instead of bidding all to all goodnight
Without surprise, as if I were not there.
Yet which is greater: sudden unchecked power
Or influence on every single hour?

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

On a Plurality already Forgotten

Life must, although it feels so wrong, go on,
Though everything about us is just worse;
And I, as ever, process it in verse.
The joy and hope I had is sadly gone
And dark has swallowed what appeared a dawn-
A blessing harshly tuned into a curse.
But vain it seems it will be to rehearse
The loss. The sun itself is pale and wan.
We must go on. In pain if not in bliss
Never forgetting that we hoped for her
Nor letting them pretend we were not there.
Let no one think when they remember this
She was not worthy, or we did not care,
Or there were more of them. Insist we were.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Cubs

There is a world in which we never left:
We moved uptown, became what you become
When everything is usual. Bereft
Of any reason to do otherwise,
We settled in--a common, routine hum
Of day to day. What everyone would do:
A situation full of unsurprise.
I was I had been, you were as you;
We got a dog we walked beside the lake
(You're still allergic, so no cat in sight).
I wonder what those two of us would make
Of what just happened. Would it be delight,
Or would they wish that they were us, away
From all the madness sweeping yesterday?

Friday, October 14, 2016

Fall

To look at her has always been enough,
No matter what is up, to make me smile;
And if she should, after a little while,
Glance up at me, it would take sterner stuff
Than I am made of not to slightly puff
And turn the smile to a grin. I file
Such moments in my memory, a pile
I dive into whenever things get rough
And wallow in remembrance of her look.
I cannot now pretend I do not pray
With every glance at her that I can steal
That she will once again turn from her book
And brighten up a cold October day
Indulging my continued mute appeal.

Suburbia

The sprawling joy that is contentment seems
In many registers to fall just short.
It's not the desperation past alloy
That toys with them that wander out to court,
Nor the ecstatic and electric charge
That pulses through the lover newly won,
Whose every movement tells the world at large
That he is sure he is the only one.
No, it has passed beyond such commonplaces
Inhabiting the very earth and air
Such integral and unacknowledged spaces
That to some eyes it almost isn't there.
Yet without air or earth, where would we be?
If I lack you, in that place search for me.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Slef

I am no better than I have to be
Nor am I, at my worst, as good as that;
When called to be much better, I am flat,
A harsh note out of perfect melody.
There is but small hope for improving me,
Since I must do it as self-autocrat
And all the cheap solutions are too pat
To help me help myself. Alarmingly,
However, those around me seem to think
That there is something in me more than this
And tell me as I claim I'm past my power
That I am not, as long as I don't sink
Into a self-discouraging abyss
But let myself be me, and therefore tower.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Inferno

As I return from a relaxed vacation
Flying a metal tube up in the air
I pass above extensive conurbation
That seems to be entangled everywhere.
How can I tell where New York finally ceases
Or where Connecticut begins to be?
Where is New Jersey? In how many pieces
Should I divide the single thing I see?
Up here it seems so easy to unite
What those below believe to be distinct,
And would, if told to come together, fight
Rejecting all suggestion they are linked.
But which is true, you ask? I cannot tell
Perhaps we need the circles in our hell.

By Cause

I cannot look directly at the sun
Yet I am sure it shines, since I can see;
The air I breathe is visible to none
Nor can I show the proof of gravity
Except to say I'm still upon the ground
And breathing, so they both are surely here,
Just as the ambience of petty sound
Proves something presses on my waiting ear.
The wind unseen can cut, afflict, or balm,
Demonstrating as it does its presence
Remembered even in the dead of calm
Despite frustration at its evanescence
So is it, love, observing you apart:
You must exist, since I still have a heart.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

King Street 3

Here beside the shores of Puget
Where the ocean meets the land
I'm aware that tempus fugit
Time must fly and cannot stand.
As the sky sweeps down to meet me
Fog and cloud and dripping mist
Family too will rush to meet me
Fortune hardly to be missed.
Yet I find it something lacking
If alone in lacking her
Whom I could not, in my packing,
Bring along, though I'd prefer.
But since she would be afar
Anyway: well here we are.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Not Platte

Why the hell are all these rivers brown?
Do the fish, perhaps, prefer it so?
Or are they, like the landscape, beaten down
By wind and ice and unforgiving snow
Until the very essence of their flow
Is murked by the effluence of the land?
I'm sure that it must help the crops to grow
For there they flourish, as if by command,
But can it really, on the other hand,
Be best to have the water so opaque,
The color of an almost-wettened sand
Or peanut butter malted chocolate shake?
I do not know, but as it passes through
It bothers me it isn't very blue.

T

A trip like this is not best done alone;
The sights I see all very out to be shared
Whether because their beauty has outshone
The best that expectation could have dared
Or merely from desire to express
To other ears the silliness observed
It hardly matters. Neither is the less
Because the other is, and both have served
To make me wish my love were here with me;
And yet not so, for why would I impose
The journey on her? Better just to be
Myself, in day-old stubble, stink, and clothes.
The sleepless rumble of the midnight train
Is pleasure yes, but also mixed with strain.

Western ND

In theory, Big Sky country should be coming
But at the moment hills of black obscure my view;
The train beneath me mightily is humming,
As is the freight train we are passing, too,
And as the hills roll by the trees thereon
Are clumped together like a Chia pet
Untended since the 80s and far gone
So that by now its patterning has set.
In little breaks between the trees I spy
The sprawling farms I thought that I should see,
Buy as the train and I both pass them by
They do not show very impressively
Albeit I admit the skies of gray
Are not designed to set off bales of hay.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Light verse

I think in couplets when I'm tired
But when I'm woozy it gets worse
My sense of meter becomes mired
In less substantial kinds of verse
Until I force it to behave
And still pound out my thoughts in eights
Lest I begin to rant or rave
While every other line deflates.
For in my reeling state I find
That eight and six feels very right
So even meter is a grind
Whenever I'm up late at night.
But in the morning let me wake
In pentameter for God's sake.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda's Sonnet at the Tony Awards

The sonnet just got a boost in the news in the reporting of this year's Tony Awards, as Lin-Manuel Miranda, the brilliant author of Hamilton: An American Musical, recited one in accepting his Tony for composing the musical. This poem has been published with a couple of different line divisions, none of which (that I've yet seen) make it a sonnet--but I think there is a set of line divisions that would make it one.

CNN has Miranda's 'sonnet' without line divisions at all

"We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play when senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall, and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer and love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. As sacred as a symphony Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride. And thank you so much for this." 




This is probably appropriate for Miranda's well-known spoken-word, hip-hop origins, but it's not a sonnet. Sonnets have lines, meter, and rhyme. And of course they include the "thank you so much for this," which refers to the Tony award but probably isn't intended as part of the poem.

Vanity Fair has it as, basically, a ballad (four quatrains), although they don't emphasize the quatrain divisions.

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one,
Our son is her most beautiful reprise
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day
This show is proof that history remembers
We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love lasts long
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
Cannot be killed or swept aside,
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music love and pride





This isn't a sonnet because a) sonnets have 14 lines, b) sonnets are consistently rhymed, and c) it's a ballad. Ballads aren't sonnets; different lyric forms exist for different reasons and uses, and it's not helpful to conflate them. There's nothing wrong with Miranda's poem as a ballad (except that he called it a sonnet). This was how I first encountered the poem set, and it has a strong appeal--partly because the lines end up the same length or roughly so throughout. But it's not a sonnet, which is a problem given that Miranda told us it's a sonnet.

The NY Times has it as follows:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride.


(From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/theater/lin-manuel-mirandas-sonnet-from-the-tony-awards.html)

This is not a sonnet; they've made it 14 lines, but they wrecked the rhyme scheme and the line lengths end up really weird and inconsistent. Nice try, but it's not quite there.


EW reports the line divisions very oddly, dividing some lines with a virgule (/) and some with actual line breaks:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done/ She nudges me towards promise by degrees / She is a perfect symphony of one/ Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they’re finished songs and start to play/ When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers/ We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger/ We rise and fall and light from dying embers remembrance that hope and love last forever. 

Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside/ I sing Vanessa’s symphony. Eliza tells her story. [we] fill the world with music, love, and pride.


This is almost there, but like the NY Times version, it too ends up mucking up the rhyme scheme (and actually ending up as a thirteen-line poem) because of what looks like a missed line division in the third from last line.

So what do I think Miranda's sonnet should look like? This:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, 
Remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride.

 Now this is a sonnet! 14 lines, rhyme scheme, and meter. The meter changes in the last two lines of the sonnet, but this is not unprecedented: Sir Philip Sidney's great sixteenth-century sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, frequently moves from iambic pentameter in the first twelve lines to hexameter in the final couplet. Miranda's move is more dramatic, into duodecameter (twenty-four syllables a line, twice as many as Sidney's twelve-syllable hexameter), but it fits his aggressively innovative and over-crammed poetic style. The strictest form of the definitions I've introduced in my Introduction to the Sonnet (beginning here) would exclude it for the meter change, but as I've noted before in different contexts, as long as the poem builds up an expectation of consistent meter, the rhetorical effect of a sudden change towards the end can be very effective while remaining within the tradition of the sonnet.

Why does this matter? I'm sure, to many people, it simply doesn't. Lin-Manuel Miranda called it a sonnet, so it's a sonnet. But I believe that there is a reason we don't just call all poems, or even all short lyric poems, sonnets. There is a value to having standards and constraints within--and against--which to work. Writing a sonnet is different than writing a ballad, than writing an ode, than writing anything other than a sonnet, because of its particular constraints, its particular history, and its particular rules. In Lin-Manuel Miranda's sonnet (once properly set as a sonnet) we can see the particular ways in which he plays with those rules: by keeping fairly strictly to the iambic pentameter mode in the first twelve lines, the powerful expansion of the meter in the final couplet (and especially the moving "Love is love..." half-line, which begins the metrical change, going far beyond the pentameter restriction all on its own) is substantially heightened. Compare the Vanity Fair setting of the poem as a near-ballad with the sonnet setting above, and you will see that the final two lines of the sonnet are remarkable for their vitality and power in a substantially different way than the final quatrain of the ballad. This power comes not just from the words of Miranda's poem, but also from its context. Alexander Hamilton, the subject of Hamilton, was particularly known for writing "Non-Stop" (in the title of the first-act finale) and so the overstuffed last two lines are not just moving in their content, but in their Hamiltonian nature. The strong caesuras in these lines (after the last "love" and after the penultimate period, respectively) are what clearly suggested to the Vanity Fair editors that these should be line breaks, but both come more than halfway through their respective lines, which is a signal to us that they are in fact caesuras--and that this is in fact a sonnet.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

4:23

There is both something flattened and ideal
About a sunny lazy afternoon
The brief irruptions of life's movement feel
As mayflies living fast but dying soon
Leaving the statues of the rest of us
To marvel marbly at their sudden sweeps
Wondering why they choose to make a fuss
And opting otherwise. Our slow time keeps
It's insubstantial ticking soft and low
So we can half forget it ever does
And in forgetting nearly make it so
Since time unnoticed hardly even was.
So lazy days pass by immobily
As if we could not act but simply be.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Babylon

The city grew. Not on its own,
Nor by (what rot) directed thought
But by a sense it should have grown
And mild surprise that it had not,
Converted into even milder
Satisfaction that it had.
The city grown was somewhat wilder,
Though all in all hardly that bad,
And  everybody (nearly so)
Was certain it would soon be fixed
(By whom? Who knew). And so things go
By time and random movement mixed.
The city burned, of course, but then
What else befalls the works of men?

Savings Time

The night is come. The dark (of course) is here.
And yet I cannot bring myself to care.
How is it different than what came before?
Why should it matter that the light has gone?
The dark of night is not a cause for fear--
Everything that's in it now was there
During the daylight. So is there any more
Reason to be worried, to go on 
And on about the falling darkness? No.
It is a change, but it is not a fault.
And as I watch the flashing headlights go
Winking out as each comes to a halt
I think I might prefer the dark of night
When each of us provides a little light.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Sense Memory

The smell of moss that's just been touched by rain
Reminds me always of my parents' home;
The hidden house that runs against the grain,
Entered from the side, its fertile loam
Utterly grassless, with a few tall trees
Emerging from the lichen on the ground,
Its windows shuttered 'gainst the western breeze
That, broken, slowly blows from Puget Sound.
I think of setting forth beyond the gate
Seeing the broken pavement bent by roots,
The saddle-hill that drops off to the lake
And wondering if I'm already late
To catch the bus--or if its twisting routes
Have slowed it to the pace that I can make.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Up

It comforts me at night when I'm away
To know you're looking up at the same sky
And that the stars that faintly touch my eye
Are shining down on you as bright as day.
I like to feel that if I could convey
My thoughts to them, then they could turn and sigh
Them back into your ears, so that when I
Stare up and long for you, you'd know. But they
Are deaf. And so I sit and write
Keeping the starlight in my heart and pen
So it will shine to you across the screen
In every word pinned down in black and white
And when you look up to the stars again
You'll think of me, and what I'd have them mean.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Inside Out

As the cold again assaults the land
We huddle closer, desperate to get warm.
Yet I desire you as close at hand
As this in summer, when the fatal form
Of burning sunlight coats the world in bright.
The seasons change, and change, but this remains:
From heat to chill, from blooming green to white,
I want to be by you. Our love ingrains
And teaches us in being loved to love
So that each touch, each glance produces more
Whether the winter sky whistles above
Or summer thunderstorms begin to pour
Still we shall cling together close and say
Our love is warm, whatever is the day.