Extravagaria Workshop Wiki

ThreeSonnets

Here are three sonnets. Two are explicitly about creativity,

and so meet the criterion of being relevant to the workshop

theme, but therefore run the risk, as standalone works,

of being annoyingly self-centered and self-referential to

the general reader. The middle one is simply the latest

draft of something topical I happened to be working on.

(I really wanted to write something new and original about

creativity, but just couldn't pull it together this week.

All my zorch is going into making slides for technical talks

and building a gazebo with my son in the back yard.)

I like to trap a thought in fourteen lines;

One hundred forty syllables suffice

To tell a tale of virtue, or of vice.

Stretched on this frame, the rhyming scheme combines

With grammar to make delicate designs,

First dim and vague, then polished and precise.

I read the whole thing over once or twice,

Then decorate with punctuation signs.

Once I have captured it, and demonstrate

It has the proper shape and form, octup-

Let and sextuplet, with a turn, and see

Its beauty, like a butterfly's, I wait

A moment, breathless, then I open up

The jar, cry "Fly away!" and set it free.

As we filled the next deep hole in the weeds,

George said, "She was one of the lucky ones."

Cracked dikes and morals had loosed megatons

Of liquid chaos. "One guy drowns; one bleeds,

Shot down while looting Wal-Mart for life's needs:

Food, water, lipstick, DVDs, and guns.

Her sin? She was thirsty, drank, got the runs

She died of others' deaths, not her misdeeds.

The levees crumbled; she'd heard the alarms

But had no car." Then I asked him point-blank,

"Why call her lucky?" "She reached her last aim.

She wrote with Magic Marker on her arms,

Her legs, her chest

so when we found her rank,

Half-rotted corpse, at least we knew her name."

I think of all my best stuff in the shower:

I lurk within glass walls and mental haze

While steam assaults my skin and water sprays,

And when my wife calls, "It's been half an hour!"

(Ten minutes is the most she will allow

Herself) I stumble on some oddball phrase

My right brain lobbed into my left-brain maze.

I finger words upon the foggy door,

But soon they fade. I must refresh, retrace,

Remember. But the window of my brain

Clouds up as well. Recite! Rehearse! And then

Towel off! Where is that paper, and a pen?

What scraps survive are scribbled here

in vain:

There is no ink that time cannot erase.

GuySteele

In retrospect, I suppose all three have to do with "creative writing".

GuySteele