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Michelle Bitting: Pandemic Mask Sonnet
~ with Wordsworth, Hayes, Millay
.
Nuns don’t fret and nuns can be like children—
Good at caring less than politicians
About having to wear linen cages, separating
Viruses and life, the song of the bird
From the bone. The world’s gone mad at the wheel
While bees and seas soar for bloom, germs and chaos
Straining against reorder. Confess the shape
Of your arrogance. So. Money. So amorphous, watching
From the bleachers. Our awful servitude, says
Youth: Don’t panic! This fabric, this scanty plot
Of ground our mouths’ dark box wrestles through words
For release can strike stars—a little room set aflame.
The prison unto which you’ve doomed our voice no prison is:
Love will be enough. Only that can’t be destroyed.
Copyright 2021 Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting’s many books include Nightmares & Miracles which won the Wilder Prize and will be published by Two Sylvias Press in 2022.
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I’m fine with it being called a sonnet. Any 14 line poem counts, as far as I’m concerned.
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B, of all the sonnet’s conventions, the 14 line “rule” may be the least traditional. There’s a tradition of 16-line sonnets. One question is how many conventions can you arbitrarily jettison before your sonnet becomes a son-not? The other is why bother? Why label your free verse poem a sonnet? I suspect poetic magpies are forever attracted to shiny pieces of tinfoil, transgressions camouflaged as innovation,
novelties disguised as originality.
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As an easily distracted magpie, I’m comfortable dumping every convention if the result is something shiny. Let the grad students of the future sort it out.
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thanks Bartholomew. I think I’m a crow pretending to be an eagle.
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Not a sonnet, per se, but “Love will be enough. Only that can’t be destroyed.” is ❤️
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No, Lisa, a single line is NOT a sonnet. Why label a son-not a sonnet? To rip off whatever cachet clings to the form? To pose as a bold and rebellious innovator? I don’t get it.
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The heart emoji meant the last line was lovely. It didn’t mean the last line was a sonnet.
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Jeezus, this is NOT a sonnet. It’s a 14-line free verse piece. I get it’s fun to be transgressive, but calling a son-not a sonnet is plain silly.
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