(A slight expansion of a previous post.-TB)
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I thought this small verse I wrote was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting
sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s
engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The
distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in
college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to
bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized
personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a
more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who
appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes
something does. A side comment, the
phrase “loose fitting” comes from the
last time I bought a near pair of jeans, forty bucks worth for one pair, a cut of denim termed as
such, looser than what you would
normally purchase I suppose. It maybe a euphemism for sizes intended for those recently widened
in the waist line and who tip the
scale more than they had. None of this, though, ads gravity y to the sonnet,
which is precisely what it is, nearly weightless, but nice all the same.
Sonnet 16
A sign of the cross and a sign on
the door or just sign
yourself out if it’s a weekend pass
you’re dealing with,
sign yourself up for a moment in the
sun when you
have your tax refund check in hand,
give us some cash for
the diversions that approach the
distraction level
of morons who get their exercise
reading the labels
on records as they go ‘round and
‘round on the
phonograph, signs of life in a
living room, your parents
house and sofa, I am hiding behind a
chair before the light
switch is flipped and a panic like
business plans that come
undone where you signed a dotted
line that ends up
being a perforations around your
wrists, like you see
on butcher’s charts, you know, under
the sign that reads
NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.
Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first
response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other
than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at more structured verse. It’s a relevant to ask how
many people understand what’s meant by
an oblique reference to phonograph
record labels spinning around as they play. Good question. Who would have
thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember
years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about
various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on
the flip side".
He looked puzzled as
we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant
I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and
briefly explained that before CDs records had two sides, side A and side B, and
that the phrase meant the other side of the record. The long and short of his
wasn’t crucial to anything at hand, nor was it that interesting to anyone, but
it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural
references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to
younger adults. Existentialism returns to toss another bowling ball down that long empty hall called a mind: life is incomprehensible outside the meaning you create for it, and the terms of that meaning , subtle though they maybe, are quickly made obsolete by perversions of old definitions, and changes in technology. "Flip Side" has no slang currency. It has precisely the same resonance as that of an old man on a bus trying to tell a college student about his glory days of seeing the MC5 and the Stooges in a Church basement on Detroit's 6 Mile Road. The student's eyes are off in a stare, his head plugged into his telephone, pizza joints, barber shops and tattoo parlors stream by the passenger windows. So we should remember this : wear the moments like it were a loose fitting garment, and bring a change of clothes.