NEW YORK (CBS) ― Residents on the Upper East Side were in shock Tuesday night after 56-year-old psychologist Kathryn Faughey was hacked to death with a meat cleaver inside an office building on E. 79th Street and York Avenue shortly after 9 p.m., police said.

Neo — I hope this wasn’t one of your colleagues that you knew.

That said, it’s a dreadful thing. Fortunately this sort of horrible incident is very rare. But it is always a possibility when a person works with extremely disturbed people.

That’s very fine.

Another virtue — of the sonnet especially, but of verse in general — is that a fixed structure facilitates memory. Our local, sadly deceased, Thom Gunn famously defined poetry as “memorable speech…”

With that in mind, here’s one I wrote for my wife’s father when he was dying:

Mowing the Field, I Spare Convolvulus

Not only for those lovely other names,
Bindweed and Morning Glory, but the fact
Of its appearing yearly in the same
Small patch of dry hardscrabble, and its tact,
As shown by a refusal to expand,
So far, beyond its present small domain,
To cultivated corners of my land,
Pleasant white bells and wildly looping green
Stems choking other growth. Attar of rose
Is sweeter than this green scent, and lilies
Bloom lovelier but, dust filling my nose,
Sweat stinging my eyes, I’m charmed, quietly.
Why mourning? Glory, spreading like a weed,
Covers the hills, kills thought, scatters its seed.

Jamie Irons

;-(

The first line ends with “names,” and the second line starts with “Bindweed and ends with “fact.”

Jamie Irons

…and the second line starts with “Bindweed and ends with “fact.”

Jamie Irons

Plus, as you’ll see, the lyrics are very apropos to this blog.

The fragrant honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun,
And many other creepers do the same.
But some climb anti-clockwise, the bindweed does, for one,
Or Convolvulus, to give her proper name.

Together, they found them, the very next day,
They had pulled up their roots and just shrivelled away.
Deprived of that freedom for which we must fight,
To veer to the left or to veer to the right!

The lady doth protest too much, it’s hard;
We read so much about the traveled world
Yet troubled, sleep with banners tightly furled
Afraid to venture far beyond the yard

In foreign lands of blue and red are found
Such creatures who would recreate the earth
In twisted mirrored image lacking mirth
Where empty suits and cackled hags abound

What then is right for voters left to do?
When politics aside shall make men mad
And children rise to join the flavored fad
Obamanation settles into view

Some cry for ‘magined party purity
My lone ideal: border security!
-cp

Many MANY years ago, I wrote around 45-50 sonnets during a 3 month period. During the latter part of the binge and for several weeks thereafter, my friends remarked that I continued to speak in iambicpentameter.

BTW, doesn’t Forneo sound like a wonderfully decadent place to visit? If only it wasn’t just the politicians screwing you. -cp

Thanks for fixing that problem!

No, I was unaware of the group (and now I want to know all about them!), but what a wonderful song! Supremely, democratically (small “d”), and pluripotentially right on, baby!

It calls out diversity, ambidextrously speaking.

Our Convolvulus arvensis, our local wild bindweed, is considered a troublesome weed by vintners and others, and is unfairly characterized as a “noxious” weed (these things always depend on one’s point of view, I suppose) but it’s hard not to like it.

Jamie Irons

You wrote:

Let’s shed the last vestiges of stiff control
And revel in a life and art that’s free!

This line evokes one of Frost later (and under-appreciated) sonnets, entitled Etherealizing. You can find it here.

Jamie Irons

The freedom that structure brings is a fascinating topic. Structure begets new ideas and surprises, anarchy begets anarchy. We are creatures of response and reaction. Our world pushes stimuli on us and we push back with action. It is life itself. The pure ‘freedom’ of anarchy is death itself.

The 21st century has seen a strong resurgence of the sonnet form, as there are many sonnets now appearing in print and on the Internet. Richard Vallance publishes the Canadian quarterly journal Sonnetto Poesia (ISSN 1705-452) which is dedicated to the sonnet, villanelle, and quatrain forms, as well as the monthly Vallance Review on historical and contemporary sonneteers. Michael R. Burch publishes The HyperTexts and there are sonnets from well-known poets on his site. Phillis Levin edited The Penguin Book of the Sonnet in 2001, including historical as well as contemporary exemplars. William Baer has also recently published 150 Contemporary Sonnets (University of Evansville Press 2005).
Vikram Seth’s 1986 novel The Golden Gate is written in 690 14-line stanzas, similar to sonnets, but in actuality an adaptation of the stanza invented by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin for his novel in verse “Eugene Onegin.” Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is a novel in true sonnets (with villanelles and roundels thrown in for good measure) that came out in the same year.

Jamie makes a good point about “facilitating memory”. Not too long ago, schoolkids were given lots of poems to memorize. More than a few still stick with me (”T’was brillig…”, “Into the valley of death/rode the six hundred”, Kilmer’s “Tree”, some of Kipling…

I’ve always remembered [most of] G. M. Hopkins’ “The Grandeur of God”. The imagery is remarkable.

Long about the 1960s or so, we discovered that schoolkids could remember many lines of then-popular songs - but not much else.

Maybe it’s the structure that makes poetry easiesr to remember, but I think it’s also the imagery - the poetic part.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until well after my school years, so all my English classes were dismissed as a waste of time. “If only I knew then what I know now” sums things up nicely.

zzzzzzzzzzzz

Some say this class will end in “A”s
Some say in “C”s
From what I test on other days
I’d like to think that I’d make “A”s
But if it brought me to my knees
I think I know enough of school
To say that for my passing, “C”s
Are also cool
And I’d be pleased -cp