Category Archives: LoSoRhyMo

LoSoRhyMo 9: On walking out of a play

Posted on 20 November 2010 | 4 comments

The Art Student, my companion in discourtesy in walking out of the Wharf Theatre on Wednesday night, said this would be a good subject for a sonnet:

Sonnet 9: This is just to say
We walked out of your play last night
from front row seats. We’d hung in there
for five whole scenes. The script was tight,
each actor sound, the set though spare
was spot on, and the vocal coach
had nailed the accents – no reproach
on that score. All these things were fine
but almost from the opening line
I couldn’t, couldn’t feel a thing.
I’d pay to watch two monkeys fart
if done with two boards and a heart.
Last night had timing, lines that sing
and sting. It’s heart that wasn’t there.
Sometimes a pause is just dead air.

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LoSoRhyMo 8: Sydney suburbs – a sonnet

Posted on 19 November 2010 | 7 comments

Inspired by Carol Ruff’s ‘Love in cLOVElly’:

Sonnet 8: What’s in a suburb name?
Clovelly has love, Chippendale’s hip.
In Normanhurst you’ll find a man.
A gal in Wingala can’t give you the slip.
Botany’s always good for a tan
on Erskineville skin. In Killara get ill
and then get iller on Miller’s Point hill.
Oh, rest in Forest Lodge, my friend.
In Asquith quit when near the end.
We each hold a suburb dear to the heart –
perhaps it’s for Kensington you want to sing,
feel awe in Dawe’s Point or wear Kuringgai’s ring,
you’re marked by Haymarket or hard for Leichhardt.
Wherever I am on air, sea or land,
I’m connected by Ann&ale’s ampersand.

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LoSoRhyMo 7: After reading Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain

Posted on 18 November 2010 | 2 comments

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber & Faber 2010)

Blogging about Human Chain as part of my LoSoRhyMo sonneteering is lighting a penny candle to a star, and not just because none of its poems are sonnets. I  don’t have any pretensions to writing even a pastiche of Seamus Heaney. But a quota is a quota, so I’ll just say the book is something to immerse oneself in, and get on with it. I hope this makes some kind of sense.

Sonnet 7: Northern Ireland / Far North Queensland
Ask me to translate Seamus Heaney
(Derry, seggins, Upper Broagh),
I’ll try lantana, Mirriwinni,
Waugh’s Pocket – my dad’s puzzling laugh
when someone spelled that ‘whore’ – but stet
Church Latin, soil and honest sweat,
Virgil, cards: Bill Markwell, joker,
feared dona f’rentes Greeks at poker.
Wraiths of our fathers thirsting still,
voiceless now Kramastos, Markwell.
Like torches shining down a dark well
may poems give them drink until
they come back to the light of day,
beloved, but not all the way.

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LoSo RhyMo 6: My mother enforces modesty

Posted on 16 November 2010 | 3 comments

When I put up my fifth sonnet yesterday I was averaging one every three days. I’m going to have to get cracking if I’m to reach my goal of 14 in the month. I’ve been mulling over scenes from my childhood. Here’s one:

Sonnet 6: My Catholic mother enforces modesty
Our mum, mock-shocked, would cry, ‘Ooooh Venus!’
if any child by running nude
allowed a glimpse of bum or penis
(we called them ‘bom’ and ‘tail’ – less rude).
Though this was fine for either sister,
I whinged that I’d grow up a Mister,
so ‘Venus’ seemed a little wrong.
Deferring to my little dong
she’d call ‘Adonis!’ should I streak.
How glad I am (Oh yes, I glad am!)
She didn’t cry out ‘Eve!’ and ‘Adam!’,
invoke the sex-as-sin mystique.
We covered up – it was our duty –
not sinful shame, but ancient beauty.

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LoSoRhyMo 5: On reading Home

Posted on 15 November 2010 | 1 comment

Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2008)

I’m intending to write a little more about this book, probably in prose, after the Group meets to discuss it later in the week. But for now, it’s grist to the relentlessly demanding LoSoRhyMo mill. So far my sonneteering attempts have been in jaunty tetrameters. The cadences of Marilynne Robinson’s prose urge the more reflective pentameter.  First, a quote from the book.  This one come close to stating a central theme:

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa use to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.

There are plenty of pearls of wisdom like this, that are even more profound in context than out. Papa spends most of the book struggling to live up to the wisdom attributed to him here. It’s a wonderful book, though perhaps not as luminous as MR’s previous novel, Gilead. But here goes with my sonnet (and I’m afraid this one isn’t so much verse as something less than prose that’s tortured into rhyme):

Sonnet 4: On reading Marilynne Robinson’s Home
At book’s page one, the youngest Boughton, Glory,
betrayed in love, tears ever in her eyes,
returns to father’s home, rejoins his story
where God is love and love won’t compromise.
Soon brother Jack arrives, to hymns of praise
(praise God, for Jack himself’s no saint, but rather
an anti–Seymour Glass, the clan’s disgrace
much loved, lamented, prayed for by his father).
So father, son and Glory join a dance
of careful kindness, trust that’s tentative.
When stern theology allows a chance
the ailing father struggles to forgive
until Jack’s tragic truth is clear to see:
‘Cry if you want to, chum,’ he says. ‘Feel free.’

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LoSoRhyMo 4: Sculpture by the Sea

Posted on 10 November 2010 | 5 comments

Sculpture by the Sea deserves more than 14 lines but it’s LoSoRhyMo (Local Sonnet Rhyming Month) in this house so an ekphrastic sonnet is all you’re going to get from me. You could pop over to Richard Tulloch on the Road for some lovely images, wittily presented (where I’ve just seen a comment expecting a sonnet from me – no pressure of course).

Sonnet 4: Sculpture by the Sea
We walk among these waking dreams
from Bondi’s cliffs to Tamarama –
dreams hewn from wood, stone, bronze, from streams
of plastic, garbage given glamour.
Weird weed things weep; a stringybark
man meets an old horse on some dark
grief-stricken shore; a corrugated
iron pair look up with bated
iron breath; a steel key
rolls turf back like a sardine can;
smooth abstract beauty from Japan.
These dream things teach our eyes and we
look round: two shags pose grace to grace,
the shelf below’s awash with lace.

If you’re interested, the handful of sculptures singled out for mention are:

  • Jennifer Orchard’s ‘Weeping Weeds’, a gathering of her ceramic Plantpeople and Plantanimals
  • Stephen King’s “Hello Mate” which got my vote for the People’s Choice Award, pics snapped by the Art Student below
  • Hannah Kidd’s ‘The Sky Is Falling’
  • Mimi Dennett’s ‘The Irresistible Force‘
  • Any number of Japanese sculptures, but perhaps especially Keizo Ushio’s ‘Oushei Zokei  2010 Circle’ and Toshio Iezumi’s ‘M.100901’, also snapped by the Art Student, below.

Sculpture by the Sea  finishes this weekend. Do go!

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LoSoRhyMo 3: Flugtag

Posted on 7 November 2010 | 8 comments

There’s more to life, even in Sydney, than house prices.

Some honey bees in the Flugtag competitors queue.

Sonnet 3: Flugtag
Flightday: young people spread their wings
where Ms Macquarie sat of yore.
Buzz Lightyear, bees and Monkey kings,
James Cook (with convicts) try to soar
in would-be gliders they’ve designed –
fantasies to blow your mind –
Hills Hoist, muffin, wedding cake,
but most plunge straight down to the lake.*
We joined the crowd outside the fence,
groupies for The Tent That Flew
(its crew: three scouts, one kangaroo,
one son of mine). And though the gents
who judged them scored them pretty low
they were the best in all the show.

The Tent (in glider configuration) in the queue. At the mike the pilot explained that they had come the night before to earn their Sleeping with Mrs M badges, and decided to compete in Flugtag almost by accident. Theirs was the wittiest talk to the mike we heard and they flew the third furthest.

* Well, it would have been the lake if we’d been at the Minneapolis Flugtag, say. Here it was actually the Harbour. But what rhymes with ‘harbour’?

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LoSoRhyMo 2

Posted on 6 November 2010 | Leave a comment

Oh oh! If I’m to make my modest target of 14 sonnets in November I should be managing almost one every two days. I’m already falling behind and it’s only the 6th. And it can only get worse from here, for reasons hinted at in Nº 2:

Sonnet 2: Looking to buy
Flexible, unique and charming,
spacious, stylish, redesigned,
with northern sun, and traffic calming,
details of the classic kind,
potential for downsizers’ retreat
in much sought after treelined street,
we seek it here, we seek it there,
our new home could be anywhere,
in Earlwood, Petersham, St Peters,
Marrickville or Hurlstone Park,
(Burwood’s too far off the mark).
At each new door the agents greet us.
We turn up, armed  with cheques, not knives,
Buying, not fighting, for our lives

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Announcing LoSoRhyMo

Posted on 4 November 2010 | 9 comments

Everywhere else it’s NaNoWriMo – [inter]National Novel Writing Month for those who don’t retain camel-abbreviations. I’ve decided that here it’s the much less ambitious LoSoRhyMo, or Local Sonnet Rhyming Month. My aim is to write not 30 but 14 sonnets this month. Hang the quality, I’ll just get them done. I plan to stick with, or at least start out with, the version of the sonnet Vikram Seth used in The Golden Gate, and to refer to current domestic events. If (which seems unlikely) you’re drawn to join me in the enterprise, please avail yourself the comments button: feel free to write any kind of sonnet you like, and to cover any subject that takes your fancy.

Sonnet 1: On selling the family home

Our home for more than twenty years
Our haven, our Three Seventeen,
Where children's laughter, rage and tears,
And adults' too, and in between
Have filled the air, where stains and scratches,
Dents and holes, loose threads and  patches
Are records of our history
With love's abiding mystery
Was sold on Tuesday, seven thirty.
Our shell, our outer skin, alive,
We'll trade for one point five two five.
It's brick and wood, some bits quite dirty.
We'll shuffle off to somewhere new:
New owners, may it welcome you.

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