I’m a sucker for a sonnet: Petrarchan, Elizabethan, Modern, what have you. I’ve even tried my hand at writing a few, though only one has been deemed worthy of publication.
There are several times in my life when I happened to be in the right place at the right time. October of 2009 was one of those times. I had just started writing poetry more regularly and had entered the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets annual Triad contest. Beginner’s luck had brought me an honorable mention in one category, and a third place in another. So I attended my first WFOP conference. I think I’ve only missed one since.
That is where I met Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn was the Wisconsin Poet Laureate at the time. She and Phyllis Wax, who was also attending, invited me to join the critique group, The Hartford Avenue Poets. I didn’t even know what a critique group was! Anyway, like I said, my good fortune. It’s 11 years later, Marilyn has since moved to Madison, but the HAPs, as we call ourselves, still meet regularly. It was the best thing that ever happened to my writing.
All that is preface to my saying that Marilyn is one of the premier sonneteers writing today. Not to mention on of my favorite people. Enjoy the following two examples of her sonneteering prowess, which she has graciously allowed me to reprint here,
Until next time,
Ed
Pyrotechnics at Amherst
If I feel, physically, as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.
—Emily Dickinson
But which ones were they—the poems that did
this awesome deed? Whose gunpowder lines
ignited right in front of her, firing flame-red
peonies, palms, rockets, straight into her brain?
Herbert’s transcendental thunder?
Or Emerson, whose counterpoints of doom
and doubt, science and salvation, stunned her—
dazzled her with their afterbloom?
Did she survive the heart-stopping artillery
of Keats, of Barrett-Browning—the kind that flies
and detonates before it falls? Or did she,
pale target, take it right between the eyes?
How long till she came back to life again,
trembling and reaching for her pen?
first published in November, 2009, in Verse Wisconsin
Reading the Obituaries
Now the Barbaras have begun to die,
trailing their older sisters to the grave,
the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye
just days ago, it seems, taking their leave
a step or two behind the hooded girls
who bloomed and withered with the century—
the Dorotheas, Eleanors and Pearls
now swaying on the edge of memory.
Soon, soon, the scythe will sweep for Jeanne
and Angela, Patricia and Diane—
pause, and return for Karen and Christine
while Susan spends a sleepless night again.
Ah, Debra, how can you be growing old?
Jennifer, Michelle, your hands are cold.
first published in Spring, 2003, in the Cream city Review