Birthing Sonnets

In April last year, coming home from taking my daughter to see her future college, I discovered the poetry of Harvey Hix.  It was in a publication called The Writer’s Chronicle, which I had picked up at an office there.  The whole magazine was filled with glimpses of the rarefied world of poet professors - interviews and essays as well as poems.  I was both entranced and put off - it was a world I could have belonged in, and might wish to, but could also see its perils, the petty competition, the frail translucency of too many years in too-confined spaces.

But Harvey Hix - I saw his poems before I read his interview.  The one that first grabbed me was called “One Sparrow,” and it had a hypnotic rhythm and an intriguing scheme of rhyme and half rhyme (a villanelle, I later learned) while telling, in clear imagery, a story that was dear to me.  So then I looked at the other poems there.  Very challenging - lots of words I didn’t know.  Words strung together that demanded to be read out loud - so brilliant with sound.  Partial rhyme that I only started to notice after many readings.  I bought his book Legible Heavens (there’s a link about it, off to the right, under Books I Mention) and spent the spring and summer steeped in it.  Phrases would come as I rode my bike, and as I slept.  I woke up one morning with the line: “I have dreamed rhymes, I will birth sonnets.”

I didn’t yet know exactly what a sonnet was, but Legible Heavens noted that one set of Hix’s poems were sonnets.  And that summer, the following poem came to me (pretty much straight out of my pen, straight out of images at my mom’s house on Martha’s Vineyard.)  It’s not exactly a sonnet, I guess.  But it speaks of my being called to poetry:

I have dreamed rhymes—I will birth sonnets:

Words gather around me like birds,

The soft summons of my rhyme puts them

at ease.  They cluck and coo, calling to

their mates and young.  Great flocks 

gather in the yard.  I don’t need

to order them.  They arrange themselves

large long-necked turkeys walking with their chicks

crows jostling each other to silence

cardinals and finches hopping closer

seagulls circling overhead

All of them will listen, all attend

All will speak, each in its perfect time

not for me but for this confluence

of meaning.  Giving purpose to the rhyme.

      
©Wendy Mulhern
August, 2010