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jlangholzj
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since 2008-07-17
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0 posted 2008-07-22 11:17 PM


Phoenix Rising-JWRL

Weeks after the destruction has been cleaned,
bystanders continued their normal lives.
Two those who crashed, nothing was as it seemed,
'twas hollow behind the gaze in their eyes.

Their bodies were mauled with scrapes and scars,
and much like a car, you can wreck your heart.
It can be fate, our own cause or the stars,
healing, it's hard to find a place to start.

Tokens of the past, they carry their weight,
Remind us of all of it that we've done.
It may seem simple but surely it ain't,
'way from the memory he cannot run.

Though all that remains may be badly charred,
A phoenix rises, free of scrapes and scars.



Here's a second shot at a sonnet.
Thanks for looking fellas, and fellets!


Note: has been edited for spelling

[This message has been edited by jlangholzj (07-23-2008 07:38 PM).]

© Copyright 2008 jlangholzj - All Rights Reserved
Not A Poet
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since 1999-11-03
Posts 3885
Oklahoma, USA
1 posted 2008-07-23 12:14 PM


If you want to write sonnets that others agree are actually sonnets, you should probably start by studying sonnets that everyone agrees are sonnets. In the English language that would be Shakespeare. After you have mastered that, and others agree that you have mastered the form, then you might try creating a form of your own that you might get away with calling a sonnet.

The universally accepted form is three quatrains and a closing couplet. All right, you have that.

The next constraint is all lines should be iambic pentameter. None of yours meet this. The complete rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b c-b-c-d e-f-e-f g-g. Your second quatrain meets this but nothing else does. Your other rhymes are near rhymes. Maybe one such miss could be accepted in a sonnet if absolutely unavoidable and the words chosen were truly worthy otherwise. This many is simply not acceptable. The following are not rhymes: cleaned/seemed, lives/eyes, weight/ain't, charred scars.

Next, an obligatory turn is expected beginning with the third quatrain although sometimes it is found at the couplet. Actually, you do have a rather weak one here that you might get by with although something stronger would surely enhance the poem.

After all this, check your spelling. Few things are more distracting than poor spelling in a poem. For example: in S1L3, two should be to. In S2L1, maulled should be mauled. In S3L1, tolken should be token. What's with the apostrophe beginning S3L4? Is that 'way supposed to be away? if so then why not use away? If just way then the apostrophe is wrong.

Finally, you have some serious grammar flaws and your punctuation is just all over the place. But, we can fix those lesser problems later, after it actually becomes a sonnet, as everyone recognizes, that is.

I hope this rather negative critique does not discourage you. It is meant to help. In fact, I think you have a very reasonable first draft here. Your content is somewhat interesting if a bit obscure. But, that too can be fixed, probably easier than you might think.

Last, of course, this is all just MHO. As such, fell free to listen to what you think valid and ignore all the rest. I am a confessed sonnet junkie and would like to see you work out the problems in this one.

Pete

moonbeam
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2 posted 2008-07-23 05:00 AM


Hi

As Pete has pointed out, there is not much about this that meets the criteria of a "formal" sonnet.  And the faults he points out are (more or less) all valid.  But Pete is a die-hard formalist! and most contemporary poets would agree that the description "sonnet" can apply to poems that do not necessarily conform to all the criteria Pete has listed.

I'm actually totally in agreement with everything BobK wrote in his replies to your other poem (including incidentally his views on Shakespeare's sonnets and plays).  I think what Bob was trying to get over to you was that it's good to understand the "rules" before you break them!  By rules I mean simply the historic, and some would say archaic, demands of the various forms of poetry.  Bob was trying to demonstrate the idea of metrical lines and "feet".  That's a great place to start if you want to write ANY poetry even free verse.  "Hearing" stress patterns is pretty important.  So have another look at Bob's comments on that.  Just to help you, Pete wasn't quite right when he said that none of your poem was written in iambic pentameter - the last line is in fact perfect IP:

a PHOE/ nix RIS/ es FREE/ of SCRAPES/ and SCARS

Can you hear the "da DUM" pattern?  And there you have indeed 5 feet.  Do you follow that?

My own personal view is that while contemporary sonnets may legitimately break some of the old sonnet rules - slant rhymes are perfectly ok for example - there does have to be some underlying pattern.  14 lines helps! And a regular rhyme scheme too.  But Pete is right in the sense that it's probably best to know the historic formal background against which you are writing.

He's also right about your spelling which is offputting to say the least.  Try and use a spell checker or a dictionary.

Finally, in a workshop forum, it's nice to give something back by letting other people know what you think about their poems.  Have a go a some really close reading of other poems here, and then tell the writers what you do or don't like about their work and WHY!  You'll find it will help you to see problems with your own writing too.

Oh, and check out Bob K's comments on graeshine2006's recent thread.  Some really good advice there.

Best of luck

M

jlangholzj
New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8

3 posted 2008-07-23 08:25 AM


thanks for the help,


but did the thought ever cross your mind that it is SUPOSED to be spelled TWO.....maybe i was trying to get at something there........

chopsticks
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since 2007-10-02
Posts 888
The US,
4 posted 2008-07-23 08:27 AM


Dear sonnet writer,

I say this so you don’t become to discouraged .

Outside of most of the above , everything else is ok..

Balladeer
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since 1999-06-05
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5 posted 2008-07-23 08:55 AM


Actually, that thought didn't cross my mind. Neither did the thought that "their" in the second line may have been a purposeful deviation of "their". When there are so many words spelled incorrectly, you lose the ability to work in double entendres intentionally.

The presentation (and spelling) is very important. Misspellings distract from the thought behind the poem, which is not the way it is SUPPOSED to be

moonbeam
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6 posted 2008-07-23 04:53 PM


If you wrote "two" intentionally then you graduate from a misspelt word to a grammatical nonsense - congratulations!

Seriously, if you want to progress in your writing you need to take on board the good advice you have here in this thread and your other one and move on from trying to justify your mistakes or errors.  After all, we all make them and those who are wise and receptive learn from them.

And by the way, you might like to check out the spelling of the mythical bird in your title (repeated in the last line).  Or was that intentional too!?     

M

[This message has been edited by moonbeam (07-24-2008 03:01 AM).]

jlangholzj
New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8

7 posted 2008-07-23 07:34 PM


Granted, I do not have an english major, nor is grammar my strongest point. but how many of you could tell me what the intergral of 2X^3 + 3/4X + 3 is ??

:P

my point being yes, this sonnet has more holes in it than a block of swiss cheese. I just quick wrote this down here to gain some feedback, which i thankfully have. I'll look at it some more, and refine it to everyones suggestions here. I was not trying to justify my mistakes but rather explain that one, the only one. quite frankly I've probally made several mistakes in this response already!    



Weeks after the destruction has been cleaned,
bystanders continued their normal lives.
Two those who crashed nothing was as it seemed,
'twas hollow behind the gaze in their eyes.

Their bodies were mauled with scrapes and scars,
and much like a car you can wreck your heart.
It can be fate our own cause or the stars,
healing; it's hard to find a place to start.

Tokens of the past they carry their weight,
Remind us of all of it that we've done.
It may seem simple but surely it ain't,
'way from the memory he cannot run.

Though all that remains may be badly charred,
A phoenix rises free of scrapes and scars.


There, spelling corrected. It's a start :S

Ryan
Member
since 1999-06-10
Posts 297
Kansas
8 posted 2008-07-23 10:09 PM


(1/2)x^4 + (3/8)x^2 + 3x + C
chopsticks
Senior Member
since 2007-10-02
Posts 888
The US,
9 posted 2008-07-23 10:09 PM


How many of you could tell me what the intergral of 2X^3 + 3/4X + 3 is ??”

Negative on that one for me jlangholzj

jlangholzj
New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8

10 posted 2008-07-24 12:12 PM


(1/2)x^4 + (3/8)x^2 + 3x + C

HA! LMAO

looks like someone knows a little calculus.


seriously though guys, thanks for the feedback. Although it may not be my stong point, I'll work on it some tonight.

-john

moonbeam
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11 posted 2008-07-24 03:13 AM



quote:
Granted, I do not have an english major, nor is grammar my strongest point. but how many of you could tell me what the intergral of 2X^3 + 3/4X + 3 is ??

The thing is John, we are not presuming to post in a forum devoted to higher math.  If I was intending to do so I'd make darned sure I learned the basic building blocks before diving in.  And then if I did make a few fundamental errors and these were pointed out to me, I'd be grateful, not defensive.

We are here to learn about poetry, and what else we are professionally (or otherwise) proficient at is kind of irrelevant is it not?  I mean take Pete for example - I happen to know that he's a part time high wire trapeze artist with a mean half butterfly back drop dive to his repertoire which is a marvel of the mid-west.  But you never see him flaunting that here at CA - well not much anyway, heh.  

Nobody here is going to worry if you make the odd error in the process of learning (and you certainly don't need to be an English major, in fact some would argue that might be a disadvantage for a poet), just so long as you accept the help you receive in the right spirit.  

Incidentally I find it's helpful sometimes to step back from a poem you are working on, read some good contemporary poetry, read and comment a little here at CA perhaps.

M

cauchy3
Member
since 2008-06-10
Posts 61

12 posted 2008-07-31 04:11 PM


Are you talking about armies or vehicles. Pheonix rising all flying get in fighting.
Amercia soldiers

Bob K
Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208

13 posted 2008-07-31 05:54 PM





     I have found sonnets to be a regular pain in the can for many years.  Some folks seem to have a knack for them, and some folks don’t.  It’s much too soon to tell with you, though I suspect that if you don’t let yourself get too discouraged here, you’ll do just fine.  

     Let’s cut them down to size for a second.  As near as I can figure out, sonnets started out as the most incredibly stupid love notes in the history of the world.  The tradition they started off in was called “Courtly Love,” in which only the nobility was supposed to take part.
If you were a knight in somebody’s court, you were supposed to fall in love with somebody like the Lord’s wife, and you were supposed to send her tokens of your love and write her love poems and win her love, but nobody was supposed to do anything about it.  Some of the great tragedies from the middle ages are “whoops!” stories, where the knight and the lady actually did do something about it.  Arthur and Guinevere, a great love story, got “whoopsed” by Lancelot, King Arthur’s most famous and trusted knight.  Courtly Love.

     By the time the Courtly Love tradition had filtered down to the point where more everyday people were using it, it still had that absurd twist to it.  The first great Sonnet writer we know about, the Italian, Petrarch, had a crush  that he never satisfied and spent the rest of his life writing about it.

     Dante, another sonnet writer, saw a woman for a few minutes on perhaps two occasions in his life.  His sonnets were all to her.

     Michaelangeolo, the painter and sculptor, wrote a famous long sonnet sequence himself, apparently one of the most beautiful piece of writing in Italian.  He wrote them to a woman he was friendly with, a nun.  Getting the picture?

     Sonnets were also fashionable.  If you were a happening kind of guy, a smart man about town, a sophisticated bozo of some sort, you were supposed to be able to show it.  One of the skills that you should have been able to master, just to show what a with-it guy you were, was , believe it or not, writing and reading.  In fact, those skills were so valuable in England and through most of Europe, that if you could show them (especially in latin, mind you, but I believe English was generally good enough) you could get what was called privilage of clergy, and the first time you were supposed to be executed for murder, they’d let you off  by simply branding your thumb.  No joke.  This actually happened to Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright, who was a friend of Shakespeare’s.

     Writing sonnets was a way for people to write special things back and forth to each other as well, love notes, more or less private messages that were worth a lot of time to get just right, even ways of having family fights.  There is some evidence that a good part of Shakespeare’s sonnets were part of a family fight to get the Earl of Southhampton, if memory serves correctly, to make a good marriage, specifically with the daughter of the guy who’d been serving as the Earl’s guardian until he reached the age of majority.
The guy was also Chancellor of England, mind you.  Apparently, the Earl didn’t swing that way, and never married at all.  Sonnet as part of a family quarrel, and love poem both.

     There’s some suggestion that the sonnet that Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote Ann Bolleyn, the Wife of Henry VIII,. almost got Wyatt’s head removed, and may have certainly played a part in Ann Bollyn losing hers.  Sonnet as text message.  

     Things that help sonnets along.  Sometimes it helps to think of sonnets as personal messages, from me to you.  The only question in each sonnet is probably the identity of the you.  Imagine there’s actually somebody there you want to talk to.

     (Heaven knows there are other ways to write sonnets.  I’m simply offering you one way here that may clear up some of the troubles you’re having without blaming you for the problems themselves.  A lot of the problems simply come from not being clear about how you can think about what you’re doing and whom you’re doing it with.)

     You can get the trick of this by pretending you’re talking with either the person you love best in the world or the person you hate most, and directing everything you’re saying to that one particular person,  Don’t try to talk fancy, talk the way you talk to this person if they were actually there, in that vocabulary.

     Next, get your rhythm up to speed.  Here you’re going to be using iambic pentameter, so you want to practice talking in iambic pentameter for a few minutes.  Sit down at a table, and tap the rhythm out,

te DUM, te DUM, te Dum, te DUM, te DUM     (pause a bit)  

te DUM, te DUM, te Dum, te DUM, te DUM     (pause a bit)  

te DUM, te DUM, te Dum, te DUM, te DUM     (pause a bit)  

te DUM, te DUM, te Dum, te DUM, te DUM     (pause a bit) .


     You don’t need to stop here, you should go on a bit until you can feel it in your hands, from the tapping.  Then start saying it along with the actual tapping.  I mean saying the actual te DUM parts; you don’t have to say the (pause a bit) part.  Enjoy feeling self conscious about this, it’s a signal that you’re actually starting to get the rhythm into your bones, but don’t stop quite yet.  

     When you can feel it in your bones, then stop.  Sleep on it.  The reason I say sleep on it rarther than continue is that the sleeping helps you learn.  The next day  do the tapping and speaking until it feels normal again, and this time start to add words to it.  While you sit there.  Make sure the words fit the tapping.  You may have to do this more slowly, because some of the words won’t fit, because they simply don’t go te DUM, they go some other way, and you’ll have to pick and choose the words.  Do it slowly, but keep to the rhythm, and you’ll find that you’ll be able to slowly pick up the speed over a few practice sessions.  Sleep between them.

     Have fun, this is supposed to be playful, so you may find some wacky and interesting things start emerging.  Write them down if you like them, you may find places for them at some future time.

     I have been known, I tgell you in confidence, to choose my rhyme words before I actually write the poem, and simply play with ways of fitting them in with a proper sort of order.  I want my poems to have a maximum amount of fun attached.  I think that’s a very good thing overall.

     Anyway, just thought I’d share some sonnet thoughts, and I hope you enjoy at least a few of them.  I’ll be out of town starting Friday night for about ten days, so if you respond during that frame, I won’t be able to respond.  Before or after, yes.  Good luck.  BobK

Not A Poet
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since 1999-11-03
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Oklahoma, USA
14 posted 2008-07-31 07:09 PM


Quite an essay there Bob. Thanks for all the new information. Well, new to me anyway. I like your approach to training oneself for a particular structure (sonnets in this case). Mind you, there are those who will discount it as "too strict" but I'm prepared to stand behind you on it.

Pete

BTW, I do hope our writer comes back with more.

Bob K
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Posts 4208

15 posted 2008-07-31 09:12 PM




Dear Pete,

          It's an experiment, not a prescription.  When I make suggestions, I'm afraid that I sound like I's so sure of myself that I must be right.   Ho! Ho! Ho! as the three farmers said.

     But think for a minute about how to get iambics in your ears.  We don't really read aloud to each other any more, so the cadences of the great hymns we used to know so well really aren't there unless we're regular church goers, and our churches are actually using the old hymns instead of more relevant, and I use the term with both admiration and sadness, material.

     People don't read Shakespeare aloud in their family circles any more.  Tennyson and Longfellow aren't bestsellers that families would read aloud.  Kids today are told not to even move their lips when they read because it'll slow them down.  I knew a woman who was proud as a peacock at having read Moby Dick in 45 minutes and passing a test on it, too.  By golly, she understood that content cold.  Think of how fast she could have read the Gettysburg address or The Bill of Rights or The Ten Commandments, and that's without even having to pay attention to style.

     So I was looking for a way to get the feeling back into the writing, and to actually experience what iambs are like, and what it's like to feel your way into an iambic line.
It'd be nice to have it in your bones.  Not many people today have had a chance to read as much iambic material aloud as our ancestors did, so they might have that experience.  

      But imagine waiting for the next few Cantos of Don Juan to come out, and imagine reading them aloud back and forth to your friends, and how darn funny they are when they're read out loud and if you have some grasp of the current events of the time.  Imagine the wacky figure Byron cut at the time.  Living in his rooms at (Oxford?) with the menagerie, including the enormous flatulent Bear of whom he was so fond, studying boxing and fencing with his gimp foot, and all those mysterious and naughty stories.  And all that wicked nasty verse.  These were people with iambs running through their veins.  Ah well.

BobK.

jlangholzj
New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8

16 posted 2008-07-31 11:18 PM


boy that is quite the essay! a VERY informative one at that! oh I will be back with more. :P

I've been working on it every other night or so before i go to bed. I'll learn from everyones comments and hopefully build something in the end.

I guess to better explain the big push that I had here with the sonnets, I might as well tell the story behind em'.

I met this absolutely wonderful girl, deep brown eyes, long brown hair and a personality that would melt stone. the only probelm is, she isn't that stong willed. Her boyfriend was treating her rather badly, so i helped her through it. The first sonnet that i wrote was an attempt to show her how messed up I was too. (it had the right effect, she said she teared up when she read it, but it was a day too late) then after the break-up, i poured my soul into this girl only to have her go back to her boyfriend in the end......

SO! this is why I said earlier that it's easier for me to write sonnets when i feel them. literally. again, i'll keep chiseling away at it and get something back to you!!

Bob K
Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208

17 posted 2008-08-01 02:37 AM




Dear jlangholzj,

           love's a great reason to write.  Don't make any of this stuff keep going if it feels like work.  The idea is to have fun and to feel a little bit of excitement, like you're playing a new and fascinating game.

     You might try writing a poem composed entirely of lies, you know.  Those are fun, too.  Sometimes the bigger the lie, the closer it ends up being to the truth.  Try a page of them some time, a line or two a piece.  Pick the best of them and check it out.  Don't take my word for it.  Let me know how i turns out for you.

Best, BK

jlangholzj
New Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 8

18 posted 2008-08-03 08:29 PM


round......2


Weeks after the destruction had been cleaned,
people will return to their normal ways.
Two those who crashed, nothing was as it seemed,
Empty, hollow eyes were behind their gaze.


Their bodies were scattered with scrapes and scars,
and much like a car you can wreck your heart.
Sometimes its our own and others the stars,
Healing ishard to find a place to start.


Tokens of the past they carry their weight,
Remind us of all of it that we've done.
It may be simple in another state,
Away from her memory he cannot run.


Though all that remains may be badly burned,
A phoenix rising once more has returned.



the 3rd line in the 3rd set is really wordy, and I'm working on it. the different state thing kinda worked out nicely! She lives in a different state, and the "state" of your being. that just happened on its own! :P

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