For David Humphreys
It will take an outsized cape to swaddle
this nation. It whips in the wind over
a car dealership, provides no comfort,
though the edges are not frayed, nor colors
faded by sun and dust. Frantic growing
pains threaten to pull us apart. This drape
for coffins arrives on flights from around
the world, folded, fails to offer comfort.
Have we surrendered any hope for peace?
Now that we have stripped the carcass in search
of truth, can survivors learn to release
pain, anger, hunger for retribution?
The past a web of promises and deceits,
is it possible our democracy might cease?
I have always taken pleasure in working to a larger canvas. In the past, these have included:
Danse Macabre, a survey of plagues that have afflicted humankind down through the centuries. My master’s project for the Creative Writing program at University of San Francisco, it allowed me to revel in historical research and play with dialogues between the Messenger of Death and a variety of victims. In included a great deal of experimentation with text and layout which may be a contributing factor to it being unpublishable.
In the Middle of the Journey, an exploration of Dante’s Commedia with Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam as guides. Again, playing with design on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper makes life more difficult in terms of finding an editor or publisher.
The Book of Hours, captivated by the numerous Books of Hours displayed at the Getty Museum during the time we lived in Los Angeles, I wanted to create a guide to spiritual life that spoke to the history of private devotions that existed beyond church traditions. It became large, unmanageable in the revision.
An Alphabet of Romance, published by Finishing Line Press, explores love in a series of poems that follow the letters of the Hebrew alpha beit.
This time, the canvas is that of a form, the sonnet. I had recently put together a selection of sonnets for reading and discussion in the Senior Studies poetry group. It included examples of Italian (written in English) and English sonnets with their variations and the American sonnet, which is something of a late arriving free bird. Included were the works of June Jordan and Terrance Hayes. This overlapped reading Diane Seuss’ Frank Sonnets, for the PDXAP Book Club. As far as I could tell, at this point, to write an American sonnet one needs to: Know the rules, select which ones you want to honor, and leave the rest behind.
Surrounded by sonnets, I spent an idle moment searching a library catalog for a comprehensive book about the form. Out pops The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, edited by Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith. OMG! This book represents a Herculean effort to publish and to read. I may never finish it. Being in dialogue with each sonnet I have read so far doesn’t exactly speed up the process.
With the early examples, my instinct is to argue with the idealized portrayals of America, while soaking in the beauty of their language. The Prospect of Unity is my reaction to David Humphreys’ “Sonnet III: On the Prospect of Peace, in 1783.”
Humphreys celebrates the arrival of peace, but not without a stanza dedicated to war’s horrors- the battlefield and its chaos, the exhaustion of survivors, and death. As a volunteer soldier, he witnessed it firsthand. In his sonnet, he envisions the genesis of a nation. In form, his first stanza has four lines, the following two are each five lines. Iambic pentameter. Rhyme scheme: abab, acacc, dedee. Each stanza break indicates a volta. As he watches peace arriving, he turns to see the conflict that came before. As he turns away from that darkness, he looks toward the future and finds it dazzling.
More than two centuries later and on the other side of a civil war, there are many divisions within the United States, a great deal of flaming rhetoric, and very little reconciliation. Or so our sources for public information tell us. It worries me. I seek comfort. I long for unity. In looking for a place to start a political sonnet, a flag seen from the car earlier in the day provides the central image: A failure as a swaddling blanket, a reminder of the universal cost of conflict. I turn from the symbol to the questions that concern me. I offer questions, not answers. I am more interested in dialogue around those questions than in prescribing solutions. As to form, I beg off meter in search of meaning. I offer an octet followed by a sestet. Repetion/rhyme at the end of lines three and eight of the first stanza and a scattering of fricatives. Lines one, three, and six rhyme in the second stanza. Here I find the ghost of a suggestion that unity depends on agreeing to play by at least some of the same rules.
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