What Is A Sonnet?

Recently On The Sonnet Board

• Whine Press

  Uncork an idle glance and you may find a bottled chapter, late year, unrefined for lack of lack-of. Had I only jacked off --this is how I have, of late, attacked my proclivity for morbid self- infliction. One Stepford year for each twelve steps and nothing to show but a wholesale compulsion to milk prior suspicion. Stale from the get-go, I sniffed that latex cork. Bouquet? A telegraphed advance. How we insist on stupor wide awake. What dork piles error atop blank terroir, just me? Nah, vintage dudes whine much the same old bitch: Lust. Faint hope. Not knowing which from which.   - 2 days ago

• Flashpoint

  The cornrow man with the black fist came down hard on the skinhead man who was spraying Aryan Twilight on the wall. Each bright crown saw viscous red. New mothers knelt, praying on King Sreet as word spread like a flash fire to Roundhouse Square. All denizens knew the blinding light of front-and-center hue could scorch whole city blocks. The tripwire? Bus strike. Heat. Giant rats. Who could really say? Standing on ceremony, then his head the Mayor dabbed his Charter at the red profusion. No pale gesture could allay that dawning crimson impulse. With despatch the mob would prove the Shining City's match. - 2 days ago

• Flashpoint

  The cornrow man with the black fist came down hard on the skinhead man who was spraying Aryan Twilight on the wall. Each bright crown saw viscous red. New mothers knelt, praying on King Street as word spread like a flash fire to Roundhouse Square. All denizens knew the blinding light of front-and-center hue could scorch whole city blocks. The tripwire? Bus strike. Heat. Giant rats. Who could really say? Standing on ceremony, then his head, the Mayor dabbed with his Charter at the red profusion. No pale gesture could allay that dawning crimson impulse. With despatch the mob would prove the Shining City's match. - 2 days ago

• Notes Between

  Notes Between i have been pondering stolen moments all that we must hold back to, dammit, breathe-- the pea-green weight of blank fog, rude portents in the mail. To dwell upon is to seethe at how little has been vouchsafed. Crack the sky with an off-color joke and wham! your tribal garb's back, a retrograde black ink writ year dot. get along and shazam! arbiters construe your slumber for cool equanimity. i hate five dollar  words marked up to lie, language as a tool for pinning Bob to the mat. a holler is never called for. you must emit unbidden to outrun tracts of deep shit - 5 days ago

• Clink

  there, in moments captured by glass too soon emptied of nighttime wine, i saw your face flung forward, glorious apparition, drunk moon between clinks. epiphany is a race to squeeze something in of value. Not to be unseated by the store-bought. No, I mean that in your buzz when you laugh, for all the world behind store glass, a gaffe shatters through. they will never capture that for sale while supplies last. so they'll deny our hallmarks. merchants mark-up the dull splat discounting the times we could all but cry down a revolution, kick out the jams, marry the wine press, embargo the drams. - 5 days ago

• The Crisfield Ferry Advocacy Group

  They angle for a ferry. Should it come the boon will lift all listing boats with rich abundant tides. Though not all windfalls sum. The ledger misses tolls unmet, by which one means two lives unclasped for want of craft, a vessel in a bay, unbroached expanse. Sea is a longing that trade, fore and aft, struggles to fulfill. Strait lines look askance at unmet needs no trinket nor exchange can hope advance. Full impacts don't assess in hotel stays, per capita, loose change. How we compound our shortfalls! I confess the crossing holds remote hope out to me of one who can't be purchased 'cross the sea. - 9 days ago

• Rev. Devil's Lake

  Rev 2. Here was no sudden devastation, no roar to shake the air as a flooding river crested towards the town, no rumble in the ground to signal collapsing barricades upstream, no flaming portents in the oil-slick air. No, this ruin swelled within, unseen. A slow and grinding pressure welled up from below. It licked past bones, blind and cold, caressed the rotten wood of unremembered caskets: a numb and paralyzing chill. We ignored the warning signs: the creeping nearness of the lake, the dock now wavering underwater where once we sat and talked; the price required for gold complacently forgot. --- Rev 1 It’s like a postcard: the white house flanked by perfect firs reflecting in a mirror-still lake, with fuschias doubled down the eaves and ducks that swim below the windows so that the half-drowned door looks normal - a builder’s whim - not the evidence... - 13 days ago

• Existence

  In a recent thread, I was told, "Mike, you can analyze a sonnet or poem until it doesn't exist any more. You've just got to take it as it is." What do we say about this? Gosh, if I could really analyze a sonnet of my choosing into non-existence, I might give it a try. But, really, does anyone really believe that this is the way to approach a poem in a workshop? Take it as it is? What, then, is the point of posting it? It just is. It can't be any better, but then it can't be any worse. It is written in stone pixels, or might as well be, because we are not to analyze it. Was I analyzing? I thought I was appraising, critiquing, giving feedback that might be worth the poet's time to consider, so that it might then be worth the time I spent giving the poem my consideration. Guess not. Take it as it is. Stop trying so hard. Let it go. Nobody really cares about poetry.... I hear crickets in the gathering dusk. Fireflies. Noseeums. - 2 weeks ago