Sonnets From The Ill-At-Ease

An Exercise In Writing

This project was formally begun Sunday, November 27, 2005. I had challenged my wife two days previous to give me a list of seven words, which I would then use in a sonnet. She asked if I wanted her to post a request for the same to her writer friends on the Internet. Foolishly, I said “Sure!” Could be a mistake. Within the first several hours, I had lists which included words like ”plasmodesmata”, “synesthesia” and ”kumquat”.

Oh, the horror...

Why sonnets?

I used to write a good deal when I was younger. I fell in love with the beauty of Shakespeare's sonnets in Mr. Turner's 8th grade English class at Roosevelt Junior High in Hamilton OH. Later, as an 11th grade student at Garfield Senior High, I was introduced to Richard Wilbur by Mr. White, the coolest teacher ever to walk the planet.

For a while, I dabbled in fixed-form poetry, but found it too limiting. I'm guessing it more lack of discipline and skill than any inherent limitations in the form that caused me to write so poorly, but acknowledging that would have required me to take responsibility. It is always better for the ego to blame lack of success on a fickle, failing muse than on one's own good head and heart.

I had written a great deal of free verse over the succeeding years and actually felt some of the lines to be quite good – yay me! But I found each piece lacked something. I was in Germany in 1984 and I pulled out my old English Lit folder from Mr. White's class, with all of my graded,commented papers and all of his mimeographed hand-outs. I still have that folder in my desk, in my office here as I sit typing. In there, I found Wilbur's “Mind”, “The Juggler” and “Still, Citizen Sparrow”. After reading and rereading them, I found wonder again.

Here was a man who built structure solid as bone and laid it over with words that were chosen with care and precision to elicit meanings and feelings the words never would have known had he not married them in verse.

Parke Godwin did even more for me in teaching me a deeper love for the language, for bringing two words together "just so", for hearing music and majesty and wonder again. Read "Firelord". I fell in love with the Arthurian legends when I read Howard Pyle's Arthur in a Reader's Digest condensed book when I was five - I've read every one I could find ever since. There's no lovelier nor more powerfully alive Arthur than Godwin's. If you can read his passage on Trystan getting kicked in the arse by his own horse and the several lines that follow, without finding your laughter choked and replaced by tears without warning, then you need a visit to the hill below the fires...

These two, more than any others, made me want to find a voice. From Wilbur - the elegance, the structure, the surprised marriage. From Godwin - the music, the poetry, the hope. If I could navigate these two and find a voice uniquely mine, I might be able to touch someone as they'd touched me, without dishonoring or compromising either of them.

So I started.

I had a very productive time in the mid-to-late 1980's, some output in the early 1990's, then nothing in this new millennium. Until recently, I just couldn't get the pipe unblocked. Marriage happened, kids happened, work happened. I allowed tragedies and trifles, with equal force and license, to rise up and tell me who I was, how I'd failed. We are what we hear, and we speak more to ourselves than anyone else speaks to us.

Things are changing now. Children are growing and leaving to start their own lives. Love finds new ways to call to us. I still long to be great and noble and good, all at once (not likely, but a dream worth the effort). And I find I still have things to say.

I'll journal and write essays time-to-time, but I keep coming back to Shakespeare and Wilbur and Godwin and what they have given me. The only way I can think of to find that voice in me is to build the skill. Good intentions are damning, so I choose to do the work.

Again – why sonnets? They're fixed form, demanding enough of structure to teach me discipline and require more of me than the writing I did in the early 1980's. I've been too long away, and these will be the baby steps that begin to teach me my craft again. I have no idea what this will become and only some notion of what it can become. But the work is good and clean and honest and, therefore, worth the doing.

The title? All apologies to Mrs. Browning, it felt fun. And this undertaking, which has already made me very ill-at-ease, is going to require some fun.