Poem Therapy: Sonnetesque - Lynn Emmanuel

28 October 2012 3:14 P.M.

Sonnetesque

I love its smallness: as though our whole town
were a picture postcard and our feelings
were on vacation: ourselves in mini-
ature, shopping at tiny sales, buying
the newspapers—small and pale and square
as sugar cubes—at the fragile, little curb.
The way the streetlight is really a table
lamp where now we sit and where real
night, (which is very tall and black and
at our backs), where for a moment
the night is forced to bend down and look
through these tiny windows, forced to come
closer and put its hand on our shoulder
and stoop over the book to read the fine print.


---
abab cdcd efef gg. Blank verse. Iambic pentameter. 14 lines.

And that's it, the not so secret formula to one of the most beautiful forms of poetry.

Without Shakespeare's sonnets, how would we speak of love? Would we speak of love?

Lynn Emmanuel is one of my favorite poets. If you haven't read her, google and read everything. I'm not kidding.

Her "sonnet" is not traditional, other than it adheres to 14 lines. So what. It's sonnetesque. It is also beautiful. 

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