Post 023: Post-Sonnet
these are the breaks
This month, I’ve been a part of Emily Bark Brown’s1 “Sonnet September” Doc, writing new sonnets not-quite-everyday. Looking back, they’re a snapshot of my month, beginning with Labor Day weekend and its after (“forearms stack rented fences / on top of each other, big load / them onto big-wheeled trucks”). I cloud-watch; feel the fickle of rain and humidity; ride the ferry (of course) (so much sky / grids of windows / bend to make more empty balconies”) and the occasional bike (wind, handle-arms, pedal-legs / you feel like just limbs / which you don’t all the time”). I run errands (“early to the appointment for which i / call to request that the doctor be masked / told of course and then of course they are / not”), get my vaccines (“nothing like a fever you can schedule / shoot me twice, left deltoid”), and try to process yet another surge (“how do they know, she asks / the wastewater, mom, / it all ends up in the wastewater”)—which we are very much still in.2
Some of the sonnets this month have been ten lines, others fourteen. I don’t count syllables, but some of them are tidy rectangles. Throughout, I contemplate the form itself and have been thinking more broadly, in our current equinox era of tumult, of the voltas—the turns and bends and Butlerian3 changes in our lines and lives.4 How sharp are the angles of our turns or, put another way, how jarring or smooth is our transition from one song to the next? How can we build and embrace invitations for change, redirection, and contradiction even in the steadiness of form?
Upcoming
As of September 26th, 1 in 35 people in New York are actively infectious.
Octavia, of course.
Alexis Aceves Garcia’s upcoming Brooklyn Poets workshop “The Sonnet Is Trans,” and Chae Sung’s crown workshop with exquisites earlier this year both have been coming to mind, as have sonnets by Joselia Rebekah Hughes and Terrence Hayes (re-reading American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin this month of all months has been potent. )