Poets and Poems: James Tweedie and “Mostly Sonnets”

While the sonnet may be the poetic form most closely associated with romance and love, poet James Tweedie uses it for a wide array of other themes and subjects as well – daily life, daydreaming by a river, a Christmas memory, travels through Scotland and Ireland, the beauty of a sunset, and even a pandemic disease like the Black Death.  

His Mostly Sonnets: Formal Poetry for an Informal World includes 37 sonnets. The collection also contains 16 other poems that use traditional forms. Tweedie’s poetry depicts an eternal order underlying a superficially chaotic world, an understanding that sometimes myths – like the romantic view of war – need to be challenged, and that we have much to learn from history. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Brad Lussier and “How Does He Love Me?”

Brad Lussier was studying for his degree in English and American literature at Brown University, and he discovered not only the sonnet form of poetry, but also a love for the sonnet. Graduation, family, work, and career intervened, until, years later, he joined a local theater company. And there he rediscovered his love for the sonnet.

As he notes in his introduction to his collection of sonnets, How Does He Love Me?, the sonnet has something unusual about it apart from its rhyming and meter scheme. It may be the only poetic form intended for an audience of one. The sonnet is most closely associated to love poetry, and a poet doesn’t write a love poem to multitudes of people. Traditionally, sonnets are all about passion, desire, admiration, adoration, and all the other intense emotions that result from a person’s love for another.

 

 To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

An Epic Told in 500 Sonnets: “The Gift of Life” by Amanda Hall

Poet Amanda Hall has a gift for writing sonnets, such a gift, in fact, that she’s created an epic story of unrequited and rechanneled love and told it in sonnet form – as in 500 sonnets. 

This is no easy feat. Writing a sonnet requires poetic discipline. The English sonnet (think William Shakespeare) is a poem of 14 lines – three quatrains of four lines each, concluding with couplet. It has a rhyme scheme of ABAB / CDCD / EFEF / GG. Traditionally, the sonnet is written in iambic pentameter – each line has 10 syllables in five pairs, with the stress on the second syllable.

 

The sonnet is the poetic form most associated with love (thanks again to Shakespeare and also Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning). It is an intensely personal poem, written for a reading audience of one. It shares characteristics with the love song; in fact, “sonnet” means “little song.”

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Andalusian Hours”

If you read, you’ve been there. It may be a single book, or it may be an author. It may be a literary work, or a popular novel you pick up at the grocery store. But each page shouts that you’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who occupies your mind and knows you as well as you know yourself.

I can name the books when that’s happened to me: The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; A Whispered Name by William Brodrick; The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa; Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You by Fred Chappell; Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. There are others, including a short story. I first read “A Good Man is Hard to Fund” by Flannery O’Connor in the 1970s, and as soon as I began reading, I knew with dead certainty what exactly was going to happen. As bizarre as that story was and remains, it is about the American South I grew up in and recognized.

For writer and teacher Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, the kindred spirit is that same Flannery O’Connor.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

World War I: Mary Borden – Nurse, Novelist, Poet

In 1916, Mary Borden was 30 when she found herself managing a field hospital on the Somme River in France. Casualties were pouring in from the front; the Battle of the Somme started July 1 and would continue for months. Ultimately, more than three million men were involved, with a million casualties. On the first day of battle, the British alone suffered more than 57,000 casualties.

And there was Mary Borden and her hospital staff, watching the carnage pour through their hospital doors. She found solace in writing poetry.

An American, Borden was born in 1886 in Chicago to a man who would make a fortune from silver prospecting in the American West. While she was at Vassar, her father died, leaving her a large fortune. She began to travel, met and married a British missionary in India, and then returned to London with her husband in 1913. She discovered the women’s suffrage movement and became one of its most ardent activists.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.