Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

Anyone who knows my taste in poetry must think I'm jonzin' on some bad crack after seeing that headline. Take a look at my shelves: Cummings, Dove, Szymborska, Beckett. Not a sonnet that I've seen among the lot.

I don't take too well to form poetry. It can be confining to what the author is trying to convey. Form poetry often involves devotion to line structure and a certain rhythm of stressed and unstressed sounds. If you step outside of these guidelines, it isn't really a form poem and you've defeated the purpose you set out for in the first place. I've been writing poetry with great success for years and I've only written one sonnet. It was the crappiest thing I've ever written. Close to my slam poem about Mr. Rogers on cocaine, but not quite.

Needless to say I didn't have the knack of sonnets then. It was a class assignment and I found myself worrying too much about getting the right number of syllables in each line and making sure they fit the phonological rhythm. The assignment was to write a Shakespearean sonnet, which consists of three quatrains and one couplet (three sets of four-line stanzas and one pair of lines). It also follows a distinct rhyme scheme where lines one through four rhyme as "abab," five through eight "cdcd," nine through 12 "efef" and 13 and 14 "gg."

Like I said before, my product ended up being crap on the aesthetic side. I was trying to compare life to a highway. Gee, how original. But I was fifteen and full of teen angst and the teacher said we couldn't write about love, death or abortion so I tried to be Mr. Abstract. Didn't happen. Or perhaps it did, but so much to the extent that it overwhelmed itself and disappeared.

Looking back, I realize that it was my content and not how the poem was written that was bad. A good writer can take any situation, like eating a hamburger, and turn it into something mesmerizing. Sometimes I'm that good, but it only comes when I'm not trying.

I was trying to write a sonnet.

So up until a few weeks ago I still had my disdain for this poetic form. I had my first Shakespeare class on August 22 with Dr. Weiss and the assignment was to read 20 or 30 sonnets and respond to one of them. "Wahoo," I thought. Although I had to admit I was very impressed with Dr. Weiss' passion for these poems scattered about our copies of The Norton Shakespeare.

I sat down that night and took a gander at the poems. I thought, "What the heck, I'll read them aloud. It's what Dr. Weiss does."

Just then, the poems became incredible. I wasn't trying to comprehend the content or think about what Shakespeare was trying to say about such-and-such societal condition with this sonnet. I was just reading the damn things aloud. Only then did I realize how great these things really are!

I swear to you, reading sonnets aloud just makes you feel good. Maybe this is just me: I'm a poet completely enamored with the written word and this taste is maturing like fine wine within me. But I think my peers are just as smart as I am and can grasp the power the mere sound of this poetry has.

Call it a blessing; call it a catharsis; call it being smacked in the head by Willy the Shake's ghost and his sharp quill. Letting go helped me understand something I previously didn't want any part of. Maybe this could be applied to other things in addition to poetry.

I just know that the way these poems read makes me float and I could stand on my chair all day reading "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" to no one in particular. And despite my complete lack of an audience, I'd still be happy with myself.