Incendiary Lit

Day ten is free! Take some time off sonnets. Read a pulp novel or watch a whole buttload of the National Geographic Channel. The Dog Whisperer’s been on a lot lately. Very interesting stuff. If you’re so dedicated to your craft that you’ll feel guilty, work some more on revising, and brainstorming images or verbiage that you could use as parallels in future sonnets to further intertwine your individual poems. Have fun on your time off. We’ll start back up in a couple weeks.

By day nine you should have seven sonnets written, or six sonnets and a couple free-verse ‘base poems’ so it’s time to revise. Any poems that are in sequential order and are already written, go through and look for little things that can tie the poems together, an image set or perhaps even a little phrase that a key figure in the event your heroic crown revolves around says a lot, something short though, and maybe in the different poems have two different perspectives on the phrasing, or the person even. Check the verbs and nouns, make sure there is something concrete in most lines if possible. Having actual objects is so very important to keeping the reader reading. If they get too lost in abstractions without the firm footing of concrete details you’ll never get them back for a whole crown. Readers are impatient (I know I am) and are practically looking for an excuse to stop reading your poem (in the beginning few poems at least) so try to keep everything streamlined, avoiding any double stating, like “He got into bed and lay down.” If you get “into” bed it can be assumed you’re not standing, because into actually implies that you’re laying between the sheets, or at least under a blanket. Saying “lay down” in this example, is redundant wording, and wastes your very limited and therefore valuable space. Go through all your poems and check for any rhymes that feel a little forced and look at alternate paths for that endword. Try to include some surprising descriptions, out of the ordinary. Go through all of your poems today and sharpen them. Streamline the imagery so it has some sort of connection to the other images in the individual poem. And have fun with it too. Try to include a couple dryly ironic descriptions, because readers love a little laugh in a sea of seriousness. Or a lot of laughs and a bit of seriousness. The point is, brief spots of levity helps to ease tension enough for the reader to breathe a moment without breaking the tension, so the reader’s right back where they were after the chuckle.

Now you should have a few sonnets written, if the free-verse ‘base poem’ strategy’s working for your Sonnets, write three more of those, otherwise, today is double sonnet day! Write two of your sonnets today. Try to incorporate a couple small things from previous poems, and if you can, pick one of the lines from Sonnet 15 that has a homonym (if you used the homonym suggestion) and find a way to twist the meaning of that line from what it meant in Sonnet 15, make it darker (or lighter) than how the line read in S15, utilize enjambment to make the slight switch-up in wording flow through without a hitch. Tomorrow we’ll be looking closely at the already written sonnets and working on incorporating a little more of themselves in each other. What? Well, little things like a rocking chair showing up in more than one poem because of its significance to the final poem (though not so that each poem has a flashing neon sign that says “this rocking chair is very important!” but just include the chair in passing) which will really help tie the piece  together more as a whole entity and less as 14 separate sonnets and a compilation of their first lines. Have at it: either 2 sonnets or 3 free-verse ‘base poems’ for the rhyming/syllabic impaired.  Tomorrow is a big revision day.

Day 7 should be a day of smooth cruising. Either you have an idea already plotted out from your wonderful organizational chart, or you have a free verse base poem which you can apply the same rhyming techniques as suggested in Day 6.  If you’re having problems see the last couple day’s suggestions.

If those aren’t working, go outside for half an hour. Breathe through your nose and smell the air. Try to pick apart the different smells. If you’re unsure, pick one and pretend you’re sure. Feel your feet scraping on the ground. The texture, the sound, the feeling of vibration. Look at the sky, the blue, black or grey, the clouds and birds and airplanes. Notice patterns in formation, in wildflowers or patches of crab-grass. Get outside of your head for awhile. Sometimes that helps. Spend half an hour observing as many sensory details as you can. Touch the stucco wall, sniff the dirty microwave. Taste the air of your surroundings and dissect it on your palate. Cleanse your mind for half an hour of anything work/school/sonnet-related and remember the details that you’re trying to explain, remember the experience of living. Then get back to the rhymes and syllabics/metrics or the possible poem perspectives. Consider other writers, their perspective, or famous thinkers, or perhaps better yet, unfamous thinkers. Consider what you haven’t considered, despite their silliness. Keep going.

By now most of you will be ready to coast through your next sonnet. You still have many different opening/final lines to choose from (everyone made a chart with all the sonnet’s opening and closing lines right? Since you have them already in Sonnet 15. I’ll try to make a sample word doc and upload it today, if I can figure out the stupid ftp thingy, which obviously means that it’s not I who is stupid… it’s the ftp thingamajigger). Things are sunny in Heroic Crownville.

There will inevitably be harder times to come, when the odd matchings of first/last lines confuse your subject a little. If you have any odd pairings, start thinking about how they can work together. Because they can, but it may require some non-traditional storytelling… But have faith. Even if you have to write one stinker in this bunch, that’s what the last couple days of the ILHCA are designated to help with. But get thinking on the various subjects, even if you don’t write anything down.

For those having trouble rhyming/with the form- write a free verse ‘base’ poem as described in Day 5. If you have the free verse poem already written, let’s work on shaping it. Look at the words towards the end of the line (or beginning of the next line) that really mean something- ie verbs, nouns, and adjectives for the most part. You can generally reword something to get that word at the end of the line without screwing up the syntax like a bad sonneteer or adding too many nothing words. Either check your internal rhyming dictionary, or RhymeZone and see if any of those rhymes or near rhymes can be worked into the necessary line without stilting it or sounding wrong. If that doesn’t work, look for synonyms for the nearest ’something’ word and check for rhymes for promising leads. If it still isn’t working, set the poem aside, and using the first/last line template re-write the poem without looking at it. Don’t necessarily try to make it exact, just try to write essentially the same poem without looking at it, improving anywhere you see fit. There will very likely be slight rewordings and even total rearrangements that may open doors for reworking the poem into the sonnet form.

Now that we’ve celebrated our fathers, and rested our mental rhyming dictionaries, it’s back to the grind. Write another sonnet. If you’re on track with the organization and ready to go, go for it. If you’re struggling with the form see #1. If you’re struggling with the narrative/structure see #2.

#1— @%*in’ Sonnets! Right? Rhymes and syllabics (or stupid iambs) are terribly limiting and frustrating. However, what is poetry, really, except limiting prose to the absolute essentials? So it’s further focusing the rhythms and sounds of the poem so that to the ear it is driven as much as to the eye. When you can, a good poem should always also be read aloud, even if it’s under your breath on a red eye when you have the only reading light still illuminating the plane’s cabin, which is because when we read in our heads we hear the words only in a limited fashion, abbreviated mostly to their meaning and words that you subconsciously link to that word (and their physical representation) so it’s a big jumble of meaning and brain stimuli and the sound is muffled. When you hear it, though, you are much more detached from the meaning, as you’re focusing more on hearing the sound first, then interpreting the signals into meaning, so the whole line of impression is altered and sound is on the forefront of your subconscious. The rhymes and rhythms of the sonnet play to that. They organize the sounds which form the skeletal structure of the poem, and ultimately the sequence. That’s why you’re not just writing this long poem in free verse. It’s to focus on sound and rhythm so much more than you normally would (or at least, in a different way) in free verse. However, if the rhyming’s presenting a problem, one option I’ll try to keep helping with is writing the base of the poem in free verse. Keep the first line and the last line as they must be, again, typing the first line then 12 blank lines, and the last line (both of which, of course are pulled from Sonnet 15). Fill in the middle lines with normal free verse, but keep the lines syllabics between 8 and 10, preferably with a free syllable. You’ll be reworking the lines to fit the rhyme scheme, which is sometimes much easier than writing it originally in the rhyme, and allows you to keep the content a little purer. Seriously, I know it feels a little like cheating, but if you have trouble with rhymes, or even particular line’s rhyme, you don’t initially cater the content of the poem to the rhyme. That would be more of letting the rhyme drive the poem, which is definitely not what you want to do. If you are writing free verse base poems, write at least two, because you’ll be going back and reworking the rhymes, which can take a long time to do, so keep your schedule a little more open.

#2— What Next? How do you continue, what are the individual sonnets about? Well, that depends on your original sonnet (S15). If it’s a narrative poem, or a poem about a specific significant event as I’d suggested, consider witnesses. There’s physical witnesses, people at the scene, or who saw the person/thing or accident as it happened. Consider inanimate objects like Paintings, doorknobs, plants, or even consider animals. A bird watching indifferently, a family dog terribly upset. This might be cool to get the reader out of your head and shake things up a little bit. Also consider historical figures who might have an insight into the narrative at hand, or pop culture figures. Consider acquaintances who could have similar stories in their past, or consider what could happen across town that would starkly contrast with the event of Sonnet 15. Or even across the world, the universe. Consider astronomy and ancient societies. People love to learn something in a poem, and if you can find a metaphoric parallel with an interesting, not-too-widely-known fact, be it scientific or historical, people will be into it. Extended metaphors aren’t terribly uncommon. Go for it.

Celebrate fatherhood, be merry. But when you’re in the bathroom, or anytime you find yourself alone, go through the alphabet with some of your rhymes. For Luck think buck, cluck, chuck, duck… you get the idea. Or don’t. Maybe take the entire day off of poetry.

And we are on Day 4! Today pick one of the first lines you want to adapt to its own sonnet beginning. You should have a good idea of at least a couple narrative lines. Write one sonnet, whichever number it is. You need to break the ice somehow. Remember the end line has to the same as the first line of the following poem, so what I’d suggest is type (or write) the first line, then skip 12 lines and write the ending line. This gives you the necessary framework to remind you where exactly the poem has to get to. As you’re writing think very specifically of the verbs and of concrete nouns as you’re writing. Make them interesting. After day ten there will be a little break from sonneting, and we’ll breathe a little less iambic for a few days before we set in on leg two of the ILHCA. Whee!

So by now you have a slightly more polished finale sonnet. Don’t start with the first sonnet. Obviously you’ll be re-writing all of these sonnets at one point or another, but at this moment you’re not entirely sure of where the crown’s going, admit it. If you do, and can manage to get through the entire sequence doing exactly what you set out to do, all the power to you. In fact, I’ll stand up on my chair and bow to you, if the sequence is even half decent. Amazing. I know that I almost never end up with what I set out to write, but usually the pieces fall together in an even more intriguing way, so I’ve just learned to go with it. Plan, and divert from the plan when my fingers and brain decide to (but not abandon the plan altogether).

Today there’s an exercise, but it is directly related to the sequence. Take each ‘first line’, or each line from Sonnet 15, and write two alternate next lines. Keep it either in iambic pent or at least with 10 syllables. And it has to rhyme. If you have any specific ideas for the individual poems try to experiment with two entirely different beginnings for the same idea, even if you think you know where you’re going, try a different way for this exercise. That’s 28 lines total. Whee!

While you’re going over each line trying to rhyme it, turn a keen eye on the adjectives, especially colors. Make any ordinary words extraordinary by changing them. Check the thesaurus and your brain and make every word count.

All the following posts will be much less intense, for all those that the first day (and pre-write) didn’t scare away.

Today’s plan is to work on Sonnet 15 some more. You should have a rough draft of the poem already, and if not, welcome to my world. Sorry, I work and am working on a new project also that I’m very excited about. I’ll get one done and revise tonight, I promise.

The verbs will be the first place to scrutinize. In Sonnet 15 moreso than any other sonnet each word needs to carry its own weight, as the lines are both first and last lines of separate poems. Look for common, simple words like do, did, have, was, had. They’re called auxiliary verbs. They are ‘helping verbs’ which means they help other words instead of standing on their own. A good verb is probably the strongest type of word, you shouldn’t waste a word that could really set the line apart from the familiar to ‘help’ an adjective. Adjectives are like pawns. They’re very important to the poem’s infrastructure, but nouns and verbs run the show. Even if there aren’t any auxiliary verbs, there’s always stronger and weaker verbs by comparison. Weigh your verbs against each other. Even if they’re still fairly strong, just consider other options. Look through a thesaurus. It’s not a literary crime. It doesn’t make you a thesaurus-poet. You’re not stilting your writing, you’re enhancing it. Obviously you’ll only make changes that both sound, and are more appropriate for their context. So, if anyone had hesitations about using a thesaurus, as I know many young poets are, relax. It’s like alcohol, great in moderation (and perhaps even slight excess on occasion).

Before you go through, though, there’s a little exercise. Here’s how I’d do it, for efficiency. Click here, and then open a new window. change the size of the new window so it’s less than half of the screen size. Load http://dictionary.reference.com there. Go over the list of verbs I posted (or if anyone can find a better list, please let me know) and if a particular word strikes you, look through your poem and see if there’s a place for that word in Sonnet 15. If not, write it in a file where you’ve got your other ILHCA exercises. If you don’t have an ILHCA file or folder, make one. Haha, that’s very important. Easier access means you may actually utilize these words.

And before you take off your poetic cap, look over that list of perspectives, or poem ideas for the surrounding sonnets. If you don’t have a list of ideas for your heroic crown’s individual sonnets, well shame on you. Make one now. Consider the line repetition when thinking of the sequence’s, well, sequence. Sonnet 1 begins with Line 1 of Sonnet 15. That’s the first line of your whole sequence that the reader will see. Make sure you hook them with something. Leave something interesting unanswered. Or mention something very quirky in the poem that will potentially perk the reader’s attention so they wonder if the thing (be it a porch swing with one chain broken that no one had the heart to fix, Jerome’s missing fingers, whatever) will come back. Hoping that it will. That’s what you really want to accomplish with the first sonnet. You want the reader speculating about what’s coming next, because they’ve got a long ways to go.

Try to narrow down each line of Sonnet 15 to three possible perspectives/aspects (ie poem’s contribution to the whole of the sequence). If you have definite ideas that work with particular lines from Sonnet 15, power to you. That’s what you want. The pieces to fall together. If they haven’t fallen together yet, fear not. We’ve just begun. The puzzle will begin to take shape by the end of next week, I promise.

This is no pre-write. Though the pre-write exercises will be very helpful to the forming of your heroic crown. To review the rules of a sonnet go to the pre-write day here. The heroic crown is this: A sequence of fourteen sonnets and a fifteenth sonnet composed of the first line of each of the other sonnets. To further gum up the works there’s a repetition that links together the sonnets like a brass brad. It’s the same in all of the poems. The first line of the poem is identical to the last line of the previous poem. So Sonnet 2’s first line is the same as the last line of Sonnet 1. Sonnet 3’s first line is the same as Sonnet 2’s last line. And so on. The only other caveat is that Sonnet 1’s opening line is repeated as the last line of Sonnet 14. That brings the sequence full circle, and Sonnet 15 sort of the overview or consensus.

So how do you write this? Where do you begin? The ‘artist’ opinion would be, if it’s in you just write. But that’s not necessarily applying here. So, like any overly daunting maze, we’ll take the easy route and begin at the end. Sonnet 15. It will be much easier to rework single lines into a poem than to work 14 unrelated lines into a thematic culmination that the final poem in such a long sequence needs to be. So we need to begin with the end. Easy enough.

Before we just start writing, though, realize that these rhymes are very important. Since there’s the line repetition of the last line of the previous poem and the first lines, which means that for each repeated line, there must be a rhyme from the previous poem’s final couplet, and from that poem’s opening ABAB. So each ‘first line’ needs 2 rhyming words, not just the regular pair (unless you feel, like MC Robust, who once wrote “I’m so dope I can rhyme first place with first place”. Then, since Sonnet 15 is completely first lines, and has its own rhyme scheme. So each rhyming word in Sonnet 15 will need a total of 6 rhymes (which doesn’t include the duplicate lines which will obviously be the same word). Don’t be afraid, just remember that for Sonnet 15 you want to look especially for common end sounds. Sounds like /ite/o/ed/ay/el/ etc. Go to RhymeZone and buzz around for words that are linked if you get stuck. Just keep this prolific rhyming in the back of your mind while you figure out what you’re writing about.

So you know what the heroic crown is, and are frightened, let’s get to the fun part: what’s it going to be about? Well, the heroic crown is traditionally centered around one thing, like a person. We’re going to base our heroic crowns around an event. Sonnet 15 will be a narrative (at least roughly) of an especially significant (or traumatic) event. It could be a car accident, the demolition of a family home, a drug deal shootout, winning the lottery, getting fired, suicide, or you could get all sappy and have it be about noticing the smell your significant other (perfume, nail polish, cologne, shampoo, sweat, whatever) . Each sonnet will be aiming to add a different perspective on the final poem in the sequence, Sonnet 15. Whether it’s another narrative regarding related incidents, or something from a witness’s pasts that parallel this experience, or whatever.

Before we go any further, pick an event. Decide what this whole heroic crown is going to revolve around. The great thing is that each sonnet doesn’t have to be narratively related to the poem as long as they’re thematically connected, and can be placed at the scene in anyway, via physical presence, hearing or seeing the incident after the fact, perhaps a prescient narrative before the actual incident- ie an odd coincidence. So the event doesn’t have to be some big sweeping thing, it just has to be resonant.

Now that you have the topic, before you write Sonnet 15 you have to come up with perspectives for the other sonnets. You don’t necessarily need to know all of them, but knowing at least a few will help you cater lines to that perspective, as it’ll be used as a first line (and last line) in separate poems as well as in this final sonnet. Those who did the pre-write look at your list of perspectives, evaluate them thinking of your chosen topic. Once you have those perspectives, think of a word or phrase that might be kind of unique to that person/thing’s vernacular, but not so entirely unique that it’d be ridiculously out of place.

And finally, when you’re writing this first sonnet remember that each line will be the final, and also the opening line of a poem. That means that there should be solid imagery, and whenever possible an opening for enjambment. Ending lines on actions or images is a good way to keep that enjambment open so when the line begins the poem it can continue without being endstopped. This adds variation within the repetition and makes it even less noticeable. Also, ending on an image or an action adds some extra drama or resonance to a last line like “white in the wind the scarf slipped, and then dropped.” as the final line of a poem, then the next poem begins “White in the wind the scarf slipped and then dropped / from the girl’s pale fingers…”

So:

1) Use common sounds for the rhymes in this first (last) sonnet, Sonnet 15.

2) Try to end lines as openly as you can to aid later enjambment.

3) Pick an event that is especially resonant. There will be 210 lines of rhymed poetry in this sequence (including the 28 repeated lines) which revolves in one way or another around this event. That’s a lot to ask of your reader. Keep it interesting.

We’ll work on Sonnet 15’s rough draft tomorrow, and plan out the sequence. Each day there will be suggested themes for individual sonnets, such as color themes, certain perspectives, rhymes, and research assignments to help you in the course of the sequence. Good luck!

OK, Day 1 is all about being prepared for this intricate sequence, so to prepare for that, let’s remember the fun of rhyming, rhythm and repetition. Let’s assume you’re writing Shakespearean Sonnets, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG, though there are other forms, here’s a few options with some info about the forms. But I’m going to be leading you through the English Sonnet Crown, or Shakespearean or whatever you want to call it. Let’s start out with standard sonnet rules:

1) Iambic pentameter. “The cow will jump again, the next mid-day.” It’s like a heartbeat- ba-Duh, ba-Duh, ba-Duh, ba-Duh, ba-Duh. Five poetic feet (metric units) of two syllables, the first un-stressed, the second stressed. As in: when in doubt, sound it out. Say the words aloud and find out where the stresses are. Many recent sonneteers have included lots of alternate metric plans, or a lack of plan, substituted for a syllabic line organization. What that means, if you don’t follow, is that instead of worrying about what syllable is stressed, they stress about making sure the line has ten total syllables, stresses be damned.

2) Rhyme Scheme: ABABCDCDEFEFGG- that simple. (A) rhymes with (A) , each letter represents a line’s ending word.

3) Turn: This isn’t an absolute necessity, but many sonnets have a turn around lines 8-9… just past what would be the first octave in the Italian sonnet. What is a turn? It’s when the poem takes what it’d done in the beginning of the poem and changes its direction slightly, it turns the poem so that it isn’t completely predictable. It’s the turning over of the leaf, the brilliant orange is brown underneath. If you want your sonnets to have a non-traditional approach to the turn, though, go for it!

Now, a Heroic Crown of sonnets is 15 related sonnets, usually dealing with slightly different aspects of the same subject. For the sake of this experiment, we’ll base our crown around an event. First, though, we have to consider the amount of rhyming we’ll need to do. Each poem’s ending line must have two other rhyming words within the surrounding poems (the final couplet’s pair, and the opening ABAB of the next poem) as well as having to rhyme in poem 15, which means that there needs to be 2 sets of that rhyme, with 3 separate combinations for that rhyme. We’ll do the actual crunching of numbers tomorrow.

As the rules of the crown say that there’s a repetition of last/first lines that links the poems to each other. This means that the last line of poem one is the same as the first line of poem two. then the last line of poem two is the first line of poem three and so on, poem 14 begins with the last line of poem 13, then ends with the first line from page 1. Poem 15 is a combination of all first lines. So it only makes sense to work backwards. To facilitate this repetition without seeming, well, repetitive, there is a lot of forethought required. Today’s task is research. Find 20 of the following: Homonyms (search Alan Cooper’s Homonym list free online here) Groups of 3 interesting rhyming words (my favorite rhyming dictionary is RhymeZone) which, if at all possible, have some sort of link between them besides rhyming; and also come up with 25 different possible perspectives for one event. Think the opinion of animals and inanimate objects as well as people, and don’t feel stifled by time or space or living or dead or anything. You’ll only need at most 15 of these for the final product, but having a surplus is nice when you’re narrowing down the larger implications and suggestions of the piece. You’ll find patterns in the rhymes, perspectives and homonyms that will hopefully drive a few of those earlier poems to their home. Work on that for now. We’ll begin working on forming Poem 15 tomorrow.