Poetry is in the ether

[truepenny]

People have been posting links to amazing poems left and right.

infinitemonkeys links to Philip Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb."

melymbrosia found "Choices: A Poem about Bush's War" by Marge Piercy.

rliz has things to say about James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." (I also have things to say, in the comments to her post. Just so you know.)

heres_luck posts Marilyn Hacker's amazing "Forage Sestina."

And, of course, papersky is occasionally moved to write poems, like "Candlemass," and a Le Guin-inspired sonnet, and an arguing-with-Le Guin poem, and also to post bizarre medieval Welsh poetry which is a salutary reminder that the past is a different country.

[Edited because papersky pointed out that fourteen lines do not a sonnet make.]


My Friends list gives me good poetry! I swoon.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The arguing with Le Guin one isn't a sonnet.

I hadn't even noticed it was 14 lines until you said that, I had to check. It's fourteen lines. OK. But if a sonnet is anything, in English, in all the different forms it can have, it is an octet and a sestet. That's just two seven line things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, and here I was figuring you'd just gone and invented another sonnet style. *g* Free us from the tyranny of the octave! Release us from the grinding oppression of the sestet! To the barricades, comrades!

I'll edit the post, then, because that's an annoying inaccuracy.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I did once write a sonnet without noticing. I mean I knew it was a poem, but not that it was a sonnet, and indeed I had to fix it slightly when I noticed. So I did have to check back to make sure I hadn't done that again.

Sonnets are... a particular way of structuring an argument.

I have one sonnet that I've been working on since 1985 and the damn thing still isn't right. It's about Keats.