Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
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Monday, September 12, 2005

Well, jeez, I don't really know.

I played at playing guitar for a long time, at first in a vain attempt to impress strange women (and only strange women were impressed) and later, after I married one of the unimpressed, for occasional amusement. At 38 I came home to find she'd taken my daughter and left, so I bought a mandolin—that or lots of whiskey—and 14 years later I'm a far better mandolinist than guitarist.

People ask me which was easier to learn, or which is easier to play, and I can't answer either question. It's hard to remember just how long it took before playing a guitar more than 10 minutes didn't cause cramps, how long before I developed calluses that let me play without pain, how long before I could reliably play the full F or Bb chords at the first fret, but I know it was a long time. A month after I bought my first mandolin I was playing in a band. Is the mandolin easier? Hell if I know. I know playing guitar helped with starting the mandolin because I already had some strength and dexterity in my left hand, and I've worked much more steadily at mandolin than I ever did with guitar.

So when I said yesterday that writing alcaics was hard I really mean that writing sonnets, or anything using the traditional English accentual-syllabic meters, didn't help me much trying to write alcaics. Unlike moving from guitar to mandolin, or even guitar to clarinet (which I also play at playing) all that previous work seemed to be worth diddly.

But are alcaics in any essential way more difficult than sonnets? I doubt it. I've just read more sonnets, more pentameter, and I've certainly worked hard at writing more. Had it been the other way around I suspect a sonnet would have had me thrashing. In fact, I know they did. I showed my first sonnet to Lew Turco about 25 years ago, when he was a visiting writer at the University of Louisville and I was teaching Creative Writing. "You're a pretty literary guy, aren't you?" he said.


My struggles are viewable (I don't know about readable) at the Draft House. For more felicitous handling of the stanza, see Auden's "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" or the first half of Tennyson's "On Milton."


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