I guess I think that if you're going to call something a sonnet that isn't, strictly speaking, a sonnet, you should at least be doing something interesting with the form.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
While I'm asking questions about sonnets -- how did proved and loved rhyme? Was the o in proved pronounced like we now pronounce the o in loved? Or the opposite?
The OP Romeo and Juliet clip here rhymes "love" and "remove" on a vowel closer to modern "love."
6: Thanks, lourdes! neb isn't helping at all.
"He has a sky-blue originality of utterance", though.
"Reading Mr. Robbins's best stuff makes you feel something new is being flogged into existence.... He has a sky-blue originality of utterance." is the sort of praise for a poet that one is disinclined to credit.
11: I understand that one of his best works begins "Across the pale parabola of Joy".
This poetry is a good example of how something being too long to be worth reading is not just a matter of word count.
You jackals. People liked his stuff quite a bit the last time I linked to it.
Time and chance happeneth to us all.
Ankle-biters, the lot of you. These aren't that bad, and I kind of like having poetry show up.
The TLS has an unevenly chosen poem of the week. This one's very nice, though it loses something in English. Do any of the classicists have opinions about Kavafy?
I like this couplet:
Full fathom five Osama lies.
The blue-chip Dow industrials rise.
But this couplet --
You might not be aware of this.
The ant's a centaur, more or less.
Makes no sense to me and doesn't rhyme.
17: I'm not a classicist but I love Kavafy. It was lurid who introduced me to "The God Abandons Anthony."
I love Szymborska too, actually. This dual-language selection is interesting for anyone who has a bit of Slavic (be it ever so little) and is curious how they scan in the original.
18: Ants, like centaurs, have six limbs, but I'm afraid the immediate sonic echo I got was from this.
20: That poem is probably more at my level.
I'm only a semi-classicist, but my opinion of Kavafy is that he wrote in modern Greek, which is incomprehensible if you've only studied the ancient form. He's great in translation though.
Having trouble singing these to The Yellow Rose of Texas.
Funny, I was just thinking of how pleased I would be if this were the last time in my life "The God Forsakes Antony" went running through my head every hour of every day. It sure ain't the first.
Robbins is a talented guy willing to take on an awfully high risk of aesthetic failure. I mean awfully high. His brain is not wired like ours.
I liked them, though I don't think they'll be seared on my brain.
I don't think calling them sonnets is that much of a stretch. It's a kind of iambic scatameter
I certainly like "iambic scatameter".