For me, sonnets were always a lovely source of order. I fell in love with Shakespeare in my 8s and 9s in my grandmother’s library. In English class in high school we read his sonnets and I found I loved him just as much. In high school and in college, when my life – academic, personal, whatever – was overwhelming and out of control, I found that numbering the lines on a sheet of paper one through fourteen and struggling through some iambic pentameter and a good old abab cdcd efef gg brought some semblance of order. It was like therapy.

Wonderful show. My I leave one of my sonnets for you – from my New England world:
THE WINTER THERE
When autumn came we went to see the trees
and let the small boys slide down hills
on burnished leaves. We smelled the winter there.
It stalked us from the pond, and we
were eating fallen apples when we saw
a cluster green and fresh with Christmas pine.
We trimmed them all with toys from many journeys
recalling each by name. The laughter caught
in wind and trees like billowed kites. The sky
filled up with snow. We fed the flame a log
and mellowed brandy in the half-filled glass
invoking words that once were warming there.

Across the seasons doors remain ajar.
Our visit done, we raced back to the car.

Someone on your program just now read a lovely poem by a poet from Detroit about his father getting up on dark cold mornings and making a fire for him…But somehow I didn’t catch the name of the poet. I would so like to know who he was and whether the poem you read is included in the sonnet anthology.

In this era of Twitter, the encapsulated, rocket-launched emoticon-holding missive brings the modern haiku, the 140-letter, not 14-line dagger.
Maybe in the pre-printing press age of oral literature, in Homeric times, poetry was to be sung, chanted, with sonnets as “little songs,” the stepchild of grand literature.
But maybe not now in the age of printed words.
I think that poems now are less verbal music and more the sequence of imagery, as one caller attributed to Shakespeare’s special strength, more imagery than song. At least, I think the way many poets read out loud is off somehow. Way, way off. Maybe modern poetry is meant to be private, encrypted meaning in very special wrapping paper. Lovers find them at their own good time. As readers of books find their choice not as an assignment but after careful perusal.
I think poetry, even sonnets, need to aim to other generations, to other cultures, not only to those we might be courting.
But I also think the encapsulated missive (poetry?) has special meaning for children, for pre-reading-age children. A child can be captured by the verbal music and then “unpack” the meaning over the course of life, until different layers reveal their meaning. Such poems maybe need more tum-te-tum, more sliding-down-an-icy-slope rhythm, than is currently stylish.

Love the show! Takes me back to my English major days, when I read this Wordsworth sonnet about sonnets, and the comfort of working within the form’s limits:

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

I have never been interested in sonnets before but, I found my summer reading.

I put a copy on reserve at the library and hope to have it in my hands soon.

Though not a sonnet, when I first read the words: ‘Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.’ a new world so heightened and raw became alive to me.

Add to that the track by E.E. Cummings, and I’m hooked.

To Constance Clark: The poem is “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, always one of my favorites. You can see it at

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/those-winter-sundays/

A great show. I was surprised nobody mentioned Christopher Marlowe’s justly famous description of the sonnet as “infinity in a little room.” Best ever. Says everything the commentators were saying, but in 5 words. Talk about compression. And it would be nice if Spenser had been given his due credit for bringing the sonnet into English. But there’s no question that Shakespeare is still the mountaintop every sonneteer must scale.

My personal favorites: Shakespeare’s Nos. 29 and 73; Spenser’s No. 1 from The Amoretti; Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,”; and, of course, Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Thanks for your terrific show, which I was listening to while driving in my car. Like Constance, I also missed the name of the Detroit poet, whose sonnet about his father was read aloud. Can you please tell me his name and where I can find the sonnet? Many thanks, Geri Shaw

Heard part of the show on my lunch break and will go back and listen to the rest. In the meantime, here is a sonnet that has always impressed me. “The Silken Tent” by Robert Frost. The entire sonnet is one sentence.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Tom – A fantastic show!

Despite this environment of so many important news stories that need to be explored and aired out (and you do so well), could I request that you devote one show a month to poetry?

So very rare and so very special, to hear on the radio.

Thank you very much!

Thank you to Colleen Carney for posting the Wordsworth sonnet. I’d never seen it before, it’s wonderful!

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I’m certain you cannot post the full text of the poems on this site because of copyright complications. However, perhaps a list of the poems read on the program. I hear several I liked, but don’t know who wrote them or their titles. I’d like to look them up.

Quincy Bay

Yes, I’ve known
Her sloping shoulders
Rocky shores and
sandy sholes;
Her watery hips
Deep and swift
or slow and
ebbing;
Known the
curve of her
back and fathomed
her willowy depths;
known as anyone who long has
walked this shore may know.

I am now going to follow any programs on art, history, poetry, literature, music – I was dumbstruck by the
beauty of your show on The Sonnet – Congratulations

Please do more !!!!!!!!

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