Friday, May 28, 2010

T.G.I.F.

Thank God it's Friday. Now the weekend starts.
He's off to have a few beers with his friends.
As he leaves his desk he quickly departs
As the work-a-day world comes to an end.

His friends, already there when he arrives,
Order for him a cool, refreshing mug,
They greet each other with some strong high-fives,
Though one of them misses; he's such a lug.

He likes this bar with its chips and salsa,
Which balances the bright and foamy froth;
One friend tells him what he thinks of NAFTA
Another that he's dating a girl goth.

This place is like a temple where they can retreat
And where they can recover from the too long week.

3 comments:

Dan Gurney said...

A bounty of sonnets. You make writing sonnets look so easy. You write 14 line jewels. I love them.

If your sonnets weren't so good, I'd be tempted to try writing one. That's a poor excuse, I know, for not attempting one, so, once the crush of the school year is over and time opens up this summer, I may give sonnets a try.

Jim714 said...

I hope in the future to write about a syllabic approach to the sonnet. I think the way to start sonnet writing is to think of the sonnet as a Ten-Fourteen poem. I mean that when I think of Quatrains I think of them as Five-Four (meaning five syllables per line, four lines) or Seven-Four (meaning seven syllables per line, four lines). Similarly a Sonnet has ten syllables per line, fourteen lines.

The way to start writing sonnets is to write poems that have ten syllables per line and have fourteen lines. Don't worry about rhyme schemes, turns, divisions, etc. Those will come over time. As one starts writing in the basic sonnet form, rhymes will appear; take advantage of them. Grammatical structures that work in this context will become apparent over time. Ways of dividing the fourteen lines will emerge, again over time.

If one takes a syllabic approach one can learn to write sonnets in a basic way just by sticking with the syllable and line counts; all the other features of a particular style of sonnet (Shakespearean, Petrachan, Spenserian, etc.) can be added after one gets an overall feel for the basic shape. They can be added if one wishes, or one may discover different ways of coordinating the counts, or one may settle on one or two traditional ways of treating the overall sonnet shape.

Hope this makes sense,

Jim

Dan Gurney said...

Yes, it does. I'll give it a try when a topic comes along that feels too big for the forms I'm using now.