Category Archives: Writing

Caffeinated I

The two contenders joust with poetry:
A caffeine-fueled SF sonnet slam.
Fragano takes the part of honest tea
And Will is coffee’s advocate. Hot damn!
The verses fly. Will has the grounds to show
His drink produces forceful, urgent verse.
Fragano’s meditative sonnets go
To prove that tea leaves poets none the worse.
Now me, I drink them both, but take up arms
Against the two as well, if they’re not bought
From sources where the people on the farms
That grow them are rewarded as they ought.
So write your verse and drink your drinks, you two,
But just make sure it’s Fairtrade when you brew.

Part of a post to a caffeine poetry slam on Making Light (starting at about comment 79).

The Monkey Kings

This is a dark one. It came out of a conversation in mid-December, which strayed into a conflation between the three wise monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) and the three Wise Men. Everyone else was very lighthearted, but I have never found the monkeys joyous. That kind of denial of the world around them always saddens me.

O Melchior, you brought me gifts of gold
To make a crown that you refuse to see:
You hide your eyes lest kingship make me bold,
Seduce me on the heights, corrupting me.
And Balthasar, who gave me frankincense,
Is deaf to my pronouncements. Are your fears
That I’d usurp my Father so intense
That cowering, you cover up your ears?
My Caspar, bringing myrrh, forsees such loss
And closes fast his mouth, unreconciled
To thoughts of death, the shadow of the cross:
A monstrous gift to bring a newborn child.
Dear kings, this all was planned, and you might trust
I’ll do not what I choose, but what I must.

Technically, I am not very satisfied with this poem. The language is strained – I should have rewritten it a few times before posting it, but I doubt I will ever go back and do so. It’s a rare example of a sonnet where I haven’t used an octave and sestet structure, but rather three balanced quatrains summarised by a couplet. It fits the three-part structures of both of the stories that converge in this sonnet.

In content terms, I found it very easy to map the three kings to the three monkeys. Caspar, in particular, works well as the wise man foreshadowing the death of the infant receiving his gift, struck mute by the horror of what he has to convey. The others hide out of fear, but he does so out of pity. The point of the poem, of course, is that none of them have the full picture, which is deeper and more frightening than they can possibly imagine.

I do think, before I start doing these in my Christmas cards, that I will have to choose more cheery themes.

What to Name the War?

I wrote this in November, on a thread about what to call the war. It’s actually the second — the first was silly, and I am not minded to post silliness today.

Before I’d name the war, I’d ask to know
What I was calling “in” and calling “out”,
And how this situation’s like to grow.
It’s clarity we’ve been too long without.
New York, Afghanistan, Madrid, Iraq,
Guantanamo and London, Bali too;
Iran and North Korea, from the talk,
And then Peoria? and me? and you?
We move in darkness, as it seems to me
Not of fear only, but the shades of lie
That hide the places we become less free
And trumpet out the ways that we could die.
Until we get so used to constant strife
That we don’t call it war, but normal life.

This sonnet quotes quite extensively from one of my favourite poems, Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. It was one of my attempts to recast another poem into sonnet meter and rhyme. Both the octave and the sestet start off with Frost quotes, like a touchstone:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

and

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

I have always used Frost’s poem as a metaphor for the intellectual distinctions we make to parse the world, and the need to make those distinctions intelligently and thoughtfully. It is only now, writing this entry, that I realise that he wrote it in 1915, when the First World War was already underway. Though that conflict is far from his verse, I find this interesting.

Bench in the Botanics

Written today, for a picture taken yesterday.

DSC01785

Taken 9 January 2007

Beyond the hut, the gravel path turns right
To meet a branch that leads across the bridge.
And, nestled in its curve, a pleasant sight:
The wooden bench sits sheltered by its ridge.
Like half a hundred others in this place,
The seat’s a gift, and labeled with a name:
Our hostess here, whose memories still grace
This place she loved, and hoped we’d do the same.
Her unobtrusive presence here receives
Me with no ceremony, and we share
The silence as I sit and watch the leaves
Drop in the pond, and brush and braid my hair.
She is a gracious hostess, and her guest
Appreciates her gifts of peace and rest.

The only technical point I would make is that the transition between the octave and the sestet is, in this case, the transition from setting the scene to my entry onto the scene.

O Take Me

Some of my sonnets are not written rationally. It was not an easy autumn.

O take me where the Douglas firs don’t grow
In rows, but as they please. The roads will be
Awash and muddy now, but I’d still go.
As always when I fail, I long to see
The woodsmoke drifting from the chimney pipe
Above the cabin set amongst the trees;
Across the path, a dancing golden stripe
Of lamplight beckoning with warmth and peace.
O take me from this cold, uncompromising place
Built up with stone and weighted down with years.
Perhaps at home I’d rediscover grace
And find the heart to overcome these fears.
I’ve lost the sense of who I want to be.
O take me home, while there is still a me.

Technically, this sonnet uses the transition from octave to sestet to move from the dream, the longed-for forest (and this is a specific forest, with a specific cabin) back to the city where I live. Thus the pessimism – swap the order and make it present first, then dream, and the poem becomes much more imaginative, less dark.

I am a bit bothered by the false rhyme of “trees/peace”, but I’ll live with it.

Emotionally, the content is what it is. I love Edinburgh deeply, but sometimes I do get homesick.

September 11, a sonnet

This was written on Bonfire Night, 2006. I watched the fireworks with the children, then came inside to warm up and read some of the history of Guy Fawkes and his plot.

History can be as comforting as it is unsettling.

In time, September the eleventh night,
The kids will watch the rockets fill the air.
They’ll OOH and AAH in multicoloured light
With bioluminescents in their hair.
Our tragedies will be reduced to rhyme:
Some half-remembered, mistranslated song
And jumping dance, its meaning lost to time,
Details missing, names and places wrong.
Though self-renewing terror haunts our lives,
Our children, staring upward at the sky,
Remind us that their innocence survives
While we, and they, and generations die.
Resist with decency when terror stalks
It’s stronger than Bin Laden, Marx or Fawkes.

In technical terms, this is an okay sonnet. There is very little “turn” in this one, between the octave and the sestet. The only real transition is from the scene at the start to the message in the conclusion. The couplet does sum things up nicely. But the language is never clever, or particularly powerful.

In terms of content, this is a sonnet I believe in very deeply indeed. I think we exist in a historical context, and that it is important for us to remember that in the choices we make. I think (looking backward) civilisation has faced worse challenges than we face now, and (looking forward) that we owe it to the future not to overreact, or sell out our principles.

Sonnets – Why and How (Long Post)

As noted previously, I have been writing rather a lot of sonnets lately. I can name 27 that I’ve written since I started in October, though if I shake my archives out I may find another one or two lurking.

Why did you start? Why are you doing this?

On September 25, 2006, science fiction and fantasy author John “Mike” Ford was found dead in his house. Although I didn’t know him personally, he was a frequent commenter on a website that I read. He was particularly prone to extemporaneous sonnets, a trait which amused and amazed us all.

I used to write sonnets, years ago, but I stopped sometime after university. I certainly wasn’t of a calibre to match John Ford’s work. But when he died, I realised that I would like to become good at them, and that the only way to do so was to start writing them.

I look at it this way: one day, the inspiration and motivation to write the perfect sonnet may strike. But if I haven’t the skills and experience, the thing won’t get written.

So now I write sonnets. Since they’re for practice, I write them on whatever topics come to mind. I’ve even written one on my organisation’s new system for the recording of project risks. I’ve been described as an “occasional” poet, in the sense that I write for a given occasion rather than writing in the abstract. I often think of my occasional sonnets as “speed sonnets”, because, since I’m writing them for discussions that move on while I compose, I have to write fast. My record is 13 minutes, but most of mine take over half an hour.

I am doing some non-occasional work, however. I’m sending three narrative sonnets off to a science fiction magazine to see if they’re saleable. Each of them is essentially a 14-line short story, and took some 3 or 4 hours to work through.

So what, in your terms, is a sonnet?

Definitions of the sonnet vary more than I originally thought. For me, a sonnet has fourteen lines, divided into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. The octave, made up of two quatrains, tends to pose a problem or set up a situation, which the sestet then resolves. The sestet generally uses the first four lines to walk thorough the resolution, followed by a two-line couplet that sums the entire situation up.

(The problem/solution or situation/twist division between the octave and the sestet is not something I follow all the time. But it’s a useful way to structure the poem.)

I use very traditional rhyming patterns, either:

ababcdcd efefgg, or
abbacddc effegg

I know sonnetrists who use efgefg for their sestets, but I do enjoy finishing a sonnet off in a couplet, so I don’t tend to.

My favourite sonnet is by Shakespeare, but it’s not one of his stand-alone verses. It’s actually embedded in Romeo and Juliet – the couple’s first words to one another. It ends with a kiss.

[R]If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
[J]Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
[R]Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
[J]Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
[R]O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
[J]Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
[R]Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

How hard is the rhyming?

Not as difficult as one would think. The important thing is not to sound surprised when you find yourself at the end of the second line in a rhymed pair, suddenly reaching for some bizarre word to match your sounds up. (This can be funny, used correctly, but after a while it just sounds amateurish). This means planning ahead, and having some idea of the areas you’re going to cover. It also means having some alternative phrasings up your sleeve, if you simply can’t wind up at the right sound at the right time.

The important thing is that it has to sound natural. The writer must be the master of the language. A reader that senses that the language is pushing the writer around, dictating the content of the poem will lose trust in the narrative voice.

I’m averse to false rhymes and near rhymes, but I do cheat a bit on accents. There are words that rhyme neatly in one of my dialects, or in extreme cases, my idiolect, and I’ll happily pair them up. Like the following sonnet, which manages to rhyme “on” and “shone” (I sometimes pronounce it to rhyme with “Shawn”).

The day the Scotland processor came on,
The land itself was darkened from the drain
Till, windmills spinning, taking up the strain,
The nation-chip began. Control lights shone.
The code we’d woven deep into the land
The bits and bytes in heather, pine and stone,
In cities, towns and crofts, then spread, unknown,
Delivering the Web into our hand.
At Mercat Cross they read the proclamation:
We hold the world. It’s time to take control.
We argued then, for Scotland isn’t whole.
Whit? Rule the world? We cannae run the nation!
The wisest knew the row would never halt,
And sitting back, enjoyed their single malt.

(Context note: this came out of a conversation about how Scotland could take over the world, combined with my memory of a line from a James Crawford poem about Scotland as a “boundless chip of a nation”. I’m rather fond of it, though it’s one of the ones where I used feminine endings – see below – on the ninth and twelfth lines.)

What about meter?

I write almost exclusively in iambic pentameter (the link is a very good article, but if you want to skip it, just remember that an iamb goes daDUM and that pentameter means you use five of them in a line). I’m very fussy about this. I’ll occasionally use a “feminine” ending, with an additional unstressed syllable at the end of a line, but only in rhymed pairs.

Most good sonnet writers are less timid about varying their meter, cheerfully swapping spondees trochees (DAdum) for iambs and using unmatched feminine endings. But, just as I used to train with a men’s shot put to make it easier when I competed with the lighter women’s one, I’m taking a strict approach to meter just now. The meter is the engine that moves a sonnet; its pace walks the reader through the meaning. Too loose an approach to meter leaves the reader stumbling, rushing here and lost there.

A few small rules, while talking meter:

  • Iambic pentameter is really just a habit of thought, and of speech. Once you get the “ear” for it, you can write it with surprisingly little effort.
  • When we all wrote sonnets in high school, my best friend pointed out that you can’t start a line with a gerund (“building”), because they’re pretty much all spondees trochees. This was a great rule of thumb, but it falls down with two-syllable verbs (“constructing”).
  • You can use a dactyl (DAdumdum) by sticking an unstressed syllable after it; most dactylic words have a secondary stress on the final syllable. You cannot use a double dactyl in strict iambic pentameter, as I found out when trying to get “paleontologist” into one poem. It just sounds wrong.
  • Try saying your lines aloud, without tapping out the meter. You’d be amazed where the natural stresses fall in groups of one syllable words, and at how bad a poem that tries to ignore that can sound.

The thing about meter is that it matters to spoken language as well. We have words that differ only in their stresses, which can really make a sonnet work – but only if the reader trusts the meter. This one, about paid shills on blogs, uses that in the last line, drawing a distinction between “conTENT” (happy) and “CONtent” (what’s inside).

Oh, what a tangled Internet they weave
Who want to pay for shills to viral-post.
Thus do they practice, seeking to decieve,
Dilution of the thing they value most.
I mean our trust, because if this thing spreads
We’ll read with extra care — and question more —
Their zombie-filled and advert-bloated threads
Until we learn which posters to ignore.
Whoever dreamt this folly clearly knows
The cost of every word, the worth of none.
They pay a listed price for posting prose,
But not for verse, and no one’s paid to pun.
I challenge you: illumine what we see.
Be not content to simply content be.

Speaking of content…

Content in verse is a lot like content in prose. Sometimes I have something to say, and sometimes I just want to burble. I’ve done both in fourteen line stretches, and I don’t know which I enjoy more. I’ve rewritten prose comments on threads to turn them into sonnets, I’ve written over the top laudatory verse, I’ve written cautionary poetry about war and drawn analogies between September 11 and Guy Fawkes. I’ll post more of them over the next few days, if anyone is interested (or, frankly, even if they’re not).

What content I have, I tend to organise before I start writing. I don’t so much outline my sonnets as budget them, deciding I’ll spend a line on this bit and two on that. I may not stick to the budget, but it keeps me moving through the things I want to say.

The thing with content is this: I am never certain that I have anything, in the abstract, worth proclaiming to the world. This is why I like to write to suit the occasion, in a context that I don’t frame. Even so, I am increasingly conscious that my words have more weight because of the rhyme and meter. I try not to think about that too much.

And what is left to work on?

Apart, of course, from mastering all of the above, there are a number of areas I’d like to improve.

First off, there’s a lot more in the sound of language than simple rhyme. I tend to be slightly dead to the ways that I can use the sounds of words to set the tone of a line, or of the poem as a whole.

I am also conscious of the number of sonnet traditions I haven’t touched on – Spenserian, Oneidin, etc, etc. I need a wider grounding in them so that I can consciously reference different antecedents.

I enjoy referencing other forms of verse in my sonnets – I’ve echoed (and rewritten) both Eliot and Frost in sonnets, but there are some skills in that that I should like to master. Rewrites that change the rhyme structure, I find, sound wrong, while those that merely muck with the meter still work. There’s more subtlety in there.

Speaking of subtlety, I find that there’s a hierarchy within the stresses in connected English prose – not all stressed syllables are created equal. I’d like to work with that consciously, sometime, maybe by creating a pattern in the secondary stresses.

I have some funky structural ideas I want to play with, such as a linked sonnet, where the sestet of the first sonnet is most of the octave of a second, which then has its own sestet, etc. I think that would be fun. I’d also love to do a backward sonnet, preferably about time travel.

So, to sum up?

I’m enjoying writing these things, but for goodness’ sake, don’t take them too seriously. I am but an apprentice.

PNH birthday sonnet

Today the Fluorosphere will mark his birth
Whose gravity, when he has cause to write,
Can draw us all together, while his mirth
And musicality yet make us light.
His passion and his politics infuse
Discussions with his sense of what is right:
When someone challenges his deep-held views
He argues with uncompromising might.
And yet that passion is the lesser part
Of what I find that I admire the most.
I’ve seen, in quiet moments, a great heart,
And looking, find it somewhere in each post.
So happy birthday, Patrick. All the best.
Eat well, drink lots, and well, you know the rest.

Originally posted on Making Light, in honor of Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s birthday.

Baking light

The Flourosphere, a mix of wheat and white,
Is supplemented by a pinch of rye.
Though sifting helps – a bit – to make it light,
Its moral fibre level is still high.
The yeast of us can always raise the tone,
Absorbing any random trolls as salt.
We oil the dough with puns to keep it growin’,
And egg each other on (it’s no one’s fault!).
The loaf, then warmed by passionate debate
Fermenting through the proof and then reproof,
Is raised by all our kneading to create
A better world in one great floury poof.
And thus it is that we have Making Bread.
(That’s quite enough of that, now, abi – ed)

Originally posted on Making Light.

A kink in the tail

Tyrannosaurus Rex comes thumping in,
At least an acre’s worth of latex on.
His dom, a Microraptor with a grin,
Is eyeing up that cute Iguanadon.
Triceratops is green with envy for
Velociraptor’s corsetry and tights,
While cosplay Stegasaurus at the door
Keeps riff-raff out. Our Mesozoic nights
Begin like this, but often end in pairs
Among the club-ferns, just two dino guys,
The costumes off, no longer after stares,
Embracing till the sun begins to rise.
You mammals look surprised? You know there’s none
So strange as love, or new beneath the sun.

Originally posted on Making Light.