Tonight's Reading

An all-sonnet reading tonight at a park in Saint-Lazare, Québec. Poetry and Music Under the Stars: Six different sonnets. Sonnets, after all, are songs.🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

 Fibonacci. Didn't write sonnets, but his mathematical sequence inspired my Fibonacci sonnet, "To the Iron Goddess of Mercy." It's all about pattern out of chaos.  ☕

Hopkins, of "Pied Beauty" fame, gave me the idea for my own curtal sonnet, "Plain Beauty." This will be my final poem. Line 10 1/2 is to die for. Or to live for. 💟

 Milton and his 20-line "caudate" sonnet, was a challenge, but I've written two lately, and will read my "Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning." 🎨

Shakespeare. The Bard. First on my reading list tonight is my Shakespearean (aka Elizabethan) sonnet, "Where All the Ladders Start", the title inspired by William Butler Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion".  My poem deals with the roots of artistic inspiration. 🖊

 Spenser. The most difficult sonnet form IMHO. Well, maybe the Pushkin is harder . . . I'll be reading "Hornero", about the Uruguayan bird similar to the North American ovenbird. The rhymes weave their way down the fourteen lines, sort of imitating the chambered nest of said bird. The poem ends in a couplet meant as a friendly jab at my free-verse friends.  🐦

Petrarch.  I'll be reading my Petrarchan (aka Italian) sonnet, "Pointing Home". I've kept the rhyme scheme, but have used slant rhyme throughout. 🏡








Dudes, all.  :-(.  Although . . . I recently wrote a three-sonnet sequence, "Shakespeare's Sisters", inspired by a chapter in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  I'm waiting to hear back from the publisher.  Wish me luck. It's a humdinger. 👧👧👧