Info: The North Carolina Writers Network West will sponsor a reading to celebrate poetry during National Poetry Month on Friday, April 26, at the Rathskeller Coffee Haus in Franklin. The reading will start at 7 p.m. in the Coffee Haus, located directly below Books Unlimited.

The celebration will be an open mike reading. Audience members are invited to read for up to five minutes, either their own poems or poems by published poets of any style or era. A sign-up sheet will be available starting at 6:45 p.m.

Last year’s celebration drew close to 100 people.

Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series celebrating April as National Poetry Month.

I’m always looking for new perspectives on poetry, new ways of understanding what poetry is and what it can be. A few months back, I had the opportunity to interview poet and novelist Robert Morgan and couldn’t resist a few poetry questions. Though poetry is enjoying a rebirth of sorts these days in coffeehouses, SLAM competitions and festivals, it has the nagging reputation of a crusty, old professor reciting iambic pentameter in a monotone voice. Why do people have such a hard time relating to poetry? Why does poetry seem so esoteric, so elusive, so incomprehensible to a great many people?

The trouble with poetry, Morgan explained, began with the popularity of free verse. You don’t remember lines from free verse, he said. To illustrate this point, Morgan often asks his students if they can recite a line of poetry — any lines they know. Invariably, the lines that get recited are the ones with rhymed verse or attention to a strict rhythmic pattern. In other words, the traditional verse poems are the ones we tend to remember, not the more modern unrhymed free verse from the last century and a half.

How about you? What poetic lines can you remember? Can you recall poetic lines like these?

“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse ...”

— Clement Clarke Moore
“The Night Before Christmas”

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I
pondered weak and weary...”

— Edgar Allan Poe
“The Raven”

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Paul Revere’s Ride”



“In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row...”

—Lt. Col. John McCrae
“In Flanders Fields”

Armed with this insight, I went to City Lights Bookstore in Sylva (one of the finest independent bookstores in the region) and perused the poetry section, hungry for some classical verse. I stumbled across Great Sonnets, an anthology edited by Paul Negri and published as part of the thin, inexpensive paperback series known as Dover Thrift Editions.

Sonnets? Weren’t those the courtly gems written so long ago by the likes of Shakespeare and charming fellows with frilly collars and titles that began with “Sir”? How could any of that dusty literature be relevant to the angst-ridden, post-modern Survivor world of today?

Then I flipped through the pages, only to find that some of my favorite poems were, in fact, sonnets — “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and “To the Evening Star” by William Blake.

I discovered sonnets written by Shakespeare, Milton and John Donne, yes, but I also found sonnets by Robert Burns, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe. On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, there’s a sonnet called “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, which includes the famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free....” So many of the masters tried their hand at sonnets. The great Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote some 500 sonnets. Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets published in 1609 are considered among the best in the English language, perhaps the most famous of them being “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

The sonnet took on a new luster for me that February day. I no longer snubbed it like some unruly school boy being told to sit still by a prudish headmaster. Instead, I began to respect the sonnet’s polished design and yearned to master its style. Some poets champion the sonnet as the perfect art form, an immaculate balance between logic and emotion, right brain and left. It challenges the writer to chisel a graceful sculpture of 14 lines using a strict rhyme scheme.

The sonnet is thought to have originated in Italy sometime around the 13th century and was later made famous by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374). When these Italian sonnets were translated, English poets took up the form with fervor. Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmond Spenser, William Shakespeare and many more made the sonnet quite popular in England, and poets throughout the world have continued to keep it alive. The more modern poets include the likes of Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

At its basic definition, the sonnet must be 14 lines long. The original Italian sonnet, also known as the Petrarchean sonnet, has a specific rhyme scheme composed of an octave (a stanza of eight lines) followed by a sestet (a stanza of six lines). The last word of each line makes a rhyming pattern so that the first, fourth, fifth and eighth lines all have the same rhyme (i.e. day, way, play, stay). Meanwhile, the second, third, sixth and seventh lines all share their own rhyme (i.e. know, grow, show, flow). So the octave rhyme is abbaabba. The sestet can be a mix of rhyme schemes but generally involves three new end rhymes (rhymes at the end of a line). Each time there’s a new rhyme introduced, it is designated by a new letter, so the rhyme scheme for the sestet could be cdecde. It could also be cdeedc or cdeecd or cdccdc.

The sonnet requires much more thought than simply coming up with lines that rhyme. The critic Charles Gayley explained that in a sonnet, “The octave bears the burden; a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an historical statement, a cry of indignation or desire, a vision of the ideal. The sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or doubt, answers the query, solaces the yearning, realizes the vision.”

The other traditional sonnet form is the Shakespearean sonnet, which follows a specific rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. The rhyming couplet at the end of a sonnet tries to sum up the idea presented in the poem. There are other rhyming variations on the sonnet — and some do not even rhyme — but they continue to be 14 lines long.

Try your hand at the sonnet. Think of a topic — love offers infinite opportunities — and jot down your thoughts. Having written a few sonnets myself, I’ve noticed that it can be a lot like learning the mechanics of a golf swing, a tennis serve or an aerobics workout. If you try to concentrate on all components at once, you can’t seem to do any of it.

When a poem is just beginning to take shape, I try to let it all hang out without paying attention to mechanics. It’s the articulation of feeling that’s most important. Rhymes can be changed, lines deleted, phrases rearranged. Just get down the feelings first and then go back and edit. Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll discover the rhymes and the rhythm will come out naturally with the feelings.

So try writing a sonnet. You never know what 14 lines will conjure up.