Sonnets, P.S.

In the post I just published, “In Celebration of Sonnets”, there is a new feature: audio clips of me reading the first four sonnets. This did not translate into email, at least not in my inbox. It is there on the website: www.winonamedia.net. To find the post with ease, return to the original emailed post and just click on the blue headline!

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Love technology!Sonnet Ice Heart

In Celebration of Sonnets: Sonnets by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, & Leslie Schultz; Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest 2014

I love sonnets. I have been writing them since I was in college. I respond to and create both the two dominant classic forms, Shakespearian and Petrarchan, and have attempted a few Spenserian sonnets. I have a whole host of fourteen-line poems that are variously sonnet-like, and discerning readers will have noted that the poem I published here last December, entitled “Winter Walk”, was an entwined double sonnet of my own devising. Some years ago, at the turn of the year, I was able to channel the grief I felt at the anniversary of my father’s death into art: in the space of twenty-four hours, I found I had written a five-sonnet sequence.

Sonnet Ice Heart

Why sonnets? They are the perfect size to establish, develop, and then reverse or sum up an idea. With fourteen lines of iambic pentameter one has 140 syllables at one’s disposal. A poet whose work I revere, and was very kind to me as a mentor, Amy Clampitt, told me that when she had a poem that was going on and on and she couldn’t tell where the heart of it was, she would try writing it as a sonnet, because that always clarified the essence of the work at hand. I enjoy the rhymes or slant rhymes, depending on the choices of the poet–I especially love to read a poem and then review it to realize it is a sonnet when I didn’t first observe that because the rhyme and enjambment was so skillfully handled. I also love the turn a sonnet reliably provides. Sonnets have enough room to be discursive, even chatty, but they are also succinct. They take just over one minute to recite slowly, with expression.

When Tim and I married, we included a favorite by Shakespeare in the service.

Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

William Shakespeare

 

 

This sonnet is one I know so well that I have it memorized. I have even tailored it by one syllable to make it more universal: in the last line, I change “man” to “one”.

 

Sonnet two roses
For our tenth wedding anniversary, I wrote the following sonnet, in the Shakespearean style for Tim.

 

Midsummer Song
(August 6, 1998)
for Tim

 

So now our marriage completes its tenth year.
Surely this occasion is consequential,
but how to pluck one day apart, to say, “Here
we celebrate”? Fuss seems tangential,
after-thought. Each day unfolds like a rose,
gold or crimson, in its turn, opening to sun;
then, as petals drop, the heart is free to close,
to brood and transform, to ponder two-in-one.
A decade ago, we publicly pressed our lips
together, setting sail into these middle years.
A start, but a loss, too. The honey of rosehips
tastes of tart autumn, tinged with cold and tears.

 

Each flower holds it sleek, obsidian seed.
I hold fast to you. I know what I need.

 

Leslie Schultz

 

 

Below, I have included some sonnets in the other dominant English-language form, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet: two by William Wordsworth and one by me. (How to tell these two sonnet forms apart? The rhyme scheme is the first clue. Shakespearean sonnets end with a rhymed couplet, and the couplet supplies the “turn”. Petrarchan sonnets only occasionally end with a couplet–in some variations–but the logical turn happens much earlier, usually in the ninth line.)

 

Sonnet

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us. Late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

 

William Wordsworth

2014 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest: Deadline 

As many of you know, the 2014  Great River Shakespeare Festival/Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest is now open.  Full Contest rules and details are found at GRSF.org/SONNET. This contest is now in its seventh year. For sonnet writers all over the globe, it is a wonderful chance to compete in a range of sonnet formats and tones–from Shakespearian, Petrarchan, and non-traditional metrical and rhyme schemes, from straight-forward love poems to humorous observations, story-telling, and impassioned social commentary.

Contest organizer, poet Ted Haaland, has edited a beautifully made anthology of the sonnets from the first five years of the competition (2008-2012).

sonnet Cover Melody

Sonnet Back Melody

This Melody Weaves In and Out, showcases the possibilities of the sonnet form. Copies are available for $10.00 (postage included), and proceeds are added to the pool of prize money for future sonnet contest winners. If you’d like your own copy–to inspire your own sonnets or simply to enjoy–send a check for $10 and your mailing information to:

Sonnet Ted's Address

Ted also says, “This year, to mark this 7th annual Contest, the 3rd in memory of Maria, you are invited to join us at a Sonnet Contest “Kick-Off” event on Saturday, April 26th (during National Poetry Month) beginning at 11 AM, at Jefferson Pub and Grill’s 2nd floor meeting room, here in downtown Winona on Center Street.  This is a free event, and is held on the last day of the Mid West Music Fest.  Room seating capacity is around 60, and since this event is a first for us, we’ve no idea how many to expect, so we encourage promptness. This is an opportunity for some of us to learn about sonnets, and others of us to read sonnets,either their own or those of favorite poets.  We anticipate that Winona’s present and past Poets Laureate will be attending.  We will have a drawing for a book of collected sonnets spanning several hundred years, and, of course, coffee and snacks will be available. Since some of us can’t seem to avoid rhyming, we say, ‘Come & celebrate Will’s skills with quills.'”

Sonnet Pink Rose

Tintern Church of England School for Girls
(Melbourne, 1973)

With plaits and dresses neat, we stand
to see the sheep and shearer meet.
We have our cotton gloves in hand
to fan away November’s heat,
and we pull our stockings to our knees
while Third Form herds its project in.
The black-faced ewe weights down the breeze;
her rank coat makes the shearer grin.
“Stand and deliver!”  He grabs the ewe,
wrapping her legs in one strong hand.
His shears are rough and bite a fold
Of clumsy skin.  As bright as dew
The blood drops bead, then scatter on the sand.
Despite the heat, I shiver, shorn and cold.

Leslie Schultz

The above sonnet was written some years ago, and it is based on a memory of an enrichment event at an Australian girls’ school I attended. (Interestingly, I never heard anything about Wordsworth’s masterpiece, its long title usually abbreviated “Tintern Abbey”, until I was a senior in college.)

I entered it in the Maria W. Faust Contest in 2013 and was awarded a prize. I have already addressed an envelope for this year’s submission, and am listening intently. I have several sonnets that I might send, but if I catch wind of an engaging iambic pentameter line, who knows, I might find myself with an even better candidate. Stay tuned! Better yet, try your hand at a sonnet and send it in to the contest!

Maria

Portrait of Maria W. Faust

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
“So long this lives and this gives life to thee.”
(William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII)

Roses in front of the beautiful Northfield Public Library

Roses in front of the beautiful Northfield Public Library

Scorn Not the Sonnet

 

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

 

William Wordsworth

 

Sonnet Rose

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