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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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." 

(From http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/entertainment/lin-manuel-miranda-sonnet-hamilton-orlando/)

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

(From http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/06/lin-manuel-miranda-tony-speech)

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.

(From http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/12/tony-awards-2016-lin-manuel-miranda-sonnet-orlando, italics removed) 

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.

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.