Although I'm not writing the nearly daily sonnets anymore, I still plan to try the themes suggested here, even, I think, the one on drowning New Orleans. Next up on the list, the figure of the heart, was suggested by Chris Murray. Unfortunately for me, two books I'd ordered, Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher and Springing: New and Selected Poems, were waiting for me when I got home yesterday, and I found this:
ONE IS ONE
Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world—though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
and thrill its corridors with messages.
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel and brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent
since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.
Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,
and joy may come, and make its test of us.
I've got serious some work to do if I want to do better than that for invention and energy, and I may not be able to do it—but there are things that bother me. Before any talk about those things, let me say that I like the poem. It was the first thing I read when I opened Bird Catcher, and after reading it I was excited to read the rest of the book. I'm about half-way through the book, and I'm still excited. Now let's go.
The stanza breaks, especially the second, are odd. The first splits the second quatrain, but there really is a strong shift in the sense, which might justify the break. The second splits a sentence with an enjambment across the stanza break for no reason I can discern. The breaks almost seem to be an attempt to disguise this Shakespearean sonnet as something else—but what? And why?
The rhymes, too, are problematic: rest of us rhymed with test of us is wonderful, but locked/shocked, though/no, and do/too are dead flat ordinary; walls with brawl is lazy; agent just doesn't rhyme with eloquent; and rages with messages is no better. But it's not that kind of poem, you say: why expect full rhyme? And I answer, four of seven are full rhymes, and three of those are boring. Why be charitable for the others?
What about meter? The last line of each stanza is IP, with a perfectly ordinary hypermetrical unaccented syllable at the end of line 12. The last line, in particular, seems as it might be deliberately regular, summing up the couplet and the poem and closing that one wonderful rhyme. But the rest is a hodgepodge of tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter. Line 7 seems to be heptameter and 8 to be trimeter. The parsimonious explanation is that meter didn't enter into her calculations at all, and even the last line is accidentally regular.
What's going on? The stanza breaks don't look like a sonnet; the pattern of rhymes and sort-of rhymes do; the strong reversal at the couplet does; the meter doesn't exist. The poem gestures at the sonnet and disguises the gestures and ends for all the world as if it had been a sonnet all along.
Maybe it is. But I think of a story Willis Barnstone tells, in the introduction to his The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, about his work with Borges, translating Borges's sonnets. They had a very friendly working relationship, but one night, instead of calling or visiting himself, Borges sent a messenger about a particular rhyme: "Borges thinks you should try harder."
11:32:46 PM 
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