Sonnet № 94810
Dreams
flying above the highway of imagination,
taking in all the dreams be told,
their fears and joys are a creation,
about the way they mold.
i smile and cry,
and listen to their secrets behold,
and how they wish they could all fly,
and know that no one told.
so their secrets i will keep,
about their happy times,
and dream about my own dreams as i sleep,
about love and rhymes.
iâm flying above the highway of imagination,
and iâm taking in all the dreams be told.
18 comments
Trust me that I've been up and down this a buncha times in a buncha places.
The only real "rule" is 14 lines. Beyond that... soo many flavors and sooo many names.
Class dismissed.
Arrogant and ignorant at once. Nicely done. (Class my ass. Yours just got out of one, what - 2 years ago?).
How you pull an accomplished black poet born in the [19]60's (and still alive pretty sure) into a discussion about sonnets is fairly astonishing
"...for the political purpose of showing that black people can steal white peoples' art forms"
Especially with such a globally idiotic statement about stealing white "peoples" art forms - (!). How nice of you to be PC about not calling it white "men's" - wouldn't want to offend the ladies, now would we?
Hypatia - take this or leave it, cuz I'm done after this, but -
The deal with sonnets is about how it carries *an idea* NOT about the meter or rhyming structure. 14 lines is [nearly] universal, the rest is *certainly* not.
Its about _transformation_. you will see this if you read a few dozen, less if you know what to look for.
What to look for is that they take an idea and build on it, usually in 4 parts.
1. (theme is introduced, 4 lines typical)
2. (theme is developed, 4 lines typ)
3. (theme is exemplified or reflected, 3 lines typ)
4. (a logical or emphatic close, 3 lines typ)
Or, more loosely, "this thing", "is like", "is exactly like" - "THIS". A great sonnet makes these transitions in a transparent way, and may do it without rhyme, or fixed meter.
Yes, some popular types have well defined rules
italian/Petrarchan, sicilian, Elizabethan/Shakespearean/English, Spenserian, Alfred Dorn, etc etc etc - you will find these all over the web. They still perform this transformation.
even 14 lines is up for grabs, btw. George Meredith used sixteen lines, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote sonnets with 11 lines (ten-and-a-half, really). Lots of others you'll find on the web and in magazines with alternate numbers/counts. There are several contests solely to come up with new sonnet forms.
Even very well-known poets would take traditional sonnets (14 lines iambic pentameter) and mess with the meter (frost, ee cummings, etc).
Sorry for my ramblings but it really bugs me when people put on the blinders and become inflexible when it comes to, OF ALL THINGS, poetry. Its just silly and it comes from people who
just
don't
get
it.
(Racism aside)
B.) Of course I'm not racist. Just a little horus-style fucking around. After a feminist crit (I'm a big feminist crit) class Monday where I got accused of being a raging misogynist (because I sarcastically refered to myself as the empowered white male elite, which is more or less true) my wife told me I should wear a t-shirt that warns people not to take anything I say seriously. Same thing here, although IT IS WORTH NOTING that rock, rap, blues, jazz, dance, pop, and even country are derivations of African-American styles. When Giovanni, who started writing in the 60s and still teaches at VA Tech, describes her broken sonnets, she almost certainly refers to the fact of their subverting a form predominated by white people.
C.) But not necessarily by men. Most 17th century and 18th century sonnet writers, I have read (in Ms Woolf, I think), were women, because sonnets weren't taken as seriously as a form as, say, odes and heroic verse, and because they could be written quickly, between cooking dinner and putting the children to bed, say.
4) The George Meredith and Hopkins thing is a great call. I'd forgotten them.
Alice: Under the popular definition of the string "sonnet", X is not a sonnet.
Bob: But under a weaker definition of the string "sonnet", X is a sonnet.
Alice: A black person used the weaker definition.
Bob: Racist.
Alice: X is a sonnet.
I really don't know for sure. I've traveled quite a bit around the states here - seen some big lips. But I know I've seen pictures of black people with very narrow lips too - so, I guess I don't have a full representation of the population in my head.
I guess we could banter on details regarding lips, or noses or dicks, or butts. I will say this though, and it applies to physical characteristics directly - the average black person is definitely _blacker_ than the average white person.
why do you ask? Surely you are able to make that determination - or does it require stereoscopic vision?
"The average lip size for black people is:
a) greater than the average lip size for white people
b) equal to the average lip size for white people
c) less than the average lip size for white people"
Alice - yes of course black people have thicker lips.
Bello - no its just because black people don't have the same opportunities.
"Vermillion (ie, lip pigmentation) height norms vary in different ethnicities; for example, African-American males and females have 13.3 and 13.6 mm upper lip and 13.2 and 13.8 mm lower lip, respectively. North American Caucasian vermilion height norms of upper and lower lip for males and females are 8.0 and 8.7 mm and 9.3 and 9.4 mm, respectively. Consider ethnic variations of anthropometric norms when planning reduction surgery (Farkas, 1981)." qtd at <http://www.emedicine.com/plastic/top
I'm going to go with the "for genetic cooling" argument; a)
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