Sonnets Part I

Last quarter I had the opportunity to read Ted Berrigan's "Sonnets". Which was one of the most fascinating and perplexing books of poetry that I have read. In the collection Berrigan re-imagines the sonnet form and creates a poetry that is "inhabited by acquaintances, family, poet friends, and well as material stolen directly from said friends". 
Here is the first Sonnet of the collection. One of my favorite of the whole collection and one I came back to time and time again as I fumbled with writing my own:

The Sonnets: I

His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze

Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.

The ox-blood from the hands which play

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Upon his structured tomb:

Still they mean something. For the dance

And the architecture.

Weave among incidents

May be portentous to him

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

Wind giving presence to fragments.

Its both poetry of chance and re-imagining while being poetry that is deeply tied to the community around it. In many ways it embodies what I desire the re-appropriating of my blog to be. So let's begin with Sonnets!

Writing my mini-collection of Sonnets was  one of the more enjoyable projects I have undertaken. What I am reading, poems I love, music, bits of conversation are always creeping into my poetry. I am always trying to balance how much I let these things creep in and how much I try to "shut" them out. With the Sonnets I threw open the doors to creep. My desk and the floor around my desk was covered with anthologies, books, old notebooks, pages of poems, hand scrawled notes, it was sheer chaos and the energy if this chaos is apparent in my sonnets. Enjoy, and maybe write a few poems fused with lines from your favorite poems, your favorite song, what the person in front of you at the grocery store said and what over else creeps its way in.

Sonnets

I

No, No, No.

There is no room in the room that I room in.

I never met you there that time. When

I chose to instead live in the wasted dream

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

This is not Tomorrow.

Dear Neha, be careful about rooftops—

how quickly your heart beats the faster you climb.

This is my 4^th grade hand scribbling

What am I suppose to do?

Crush her heart or crush mine?

Then Pancho Villa came to town, hung the mayor.

These scribbling hands are good for climbing.

Tomorrow I will start to be happy

Today is almost yesterday.

II

No, No, No. Yes.

There is room in the room that I room in.

A campfire Girl,

Only a part-time mother and father

You told me no one ever falls in the Grand Canyon

We lost our virginity at recess.

This is thee lunch hour, a chain between your thighs,

a cut down chandelier, a book of poems

I hid from my mom— notches on my bed post.

This is supposed to be an independent thought

But it is just a strained leash.

Dear Margie,

Friendship and Love are not in my blood.

They are there for you.

III

Even the Lover Poet knows that

¿El sueño de la razón produce monstruos?

Do you hear this babe—

My voice is a carousal of lies.

Your scent saturates this, hot breath

bands with the beat— smell of sperm flushed

by men with Orange shovels.

I trembled the first time I rhymed our story:

She will always be just a kiss and a hopeful idea.

A single lie lays in the line.

dear Son of Man, its 5:15 GMT

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images.

*Next Week: the rest Sonnets IV-VI*