Spotlight on "not the Sonnets"
Imagine tackling the entirety of Shakespeare’s sonnet cannon with the aim of creating a contemporary and modern interpretation of the poems both in terms of subject and form.
Imagine starting where most poets end – with the rhyme – and beginning each new poem by stripping out every single word from each of the Sonnets except the last one on each line.
Imagine that in tackling the pieces completely the other way around, the primary question became ‘what subject will fit a poem whose lines end with these exact words?’
Imagine a collection entitled not the Sonnets, one which has borrowed its scaffolding from the Bard to produce a sonnet sequence which is something else entirely…
Pilgrimage
We set off before first light
the pre-dawn drive straining the eye.
Numbed by pulsing headlights, my sight
tried to race ahead, to preview the majesty
of the village beneath the hill,
a return to a bygone age
where all we imagined remained there still.
It was a pilgrimage
even if we struggled in the car
and travelling wasted too much of the day.
"That’s just the way things are"
you said. We were about halfway
stopping for lunch at noon
already resigned to our returning far too soon.
based on sonnet 7
Heritage
You stroll around monuments
plugged into a podcast of history’s rhyme
enchanted by the contents
of cabinets that strive to usurp time.
Labels promote impossible dates as if to overturn
erosion of silver, fabric, masonry
- as if such simple time-travel could burn
the scars of the past onto your memory.
Legends of love, politics, or enmity
are soaked into the walls of every room;
emotions carbon-dated for posterity
occasionally triumph over the doom
of years, allowing them to rise
and - for just a moment - replay themselves before your eyes.
based on sonnet 55
Industrial Unrest
Never consciously against the state
his principles were fathered
when a friend died, betrayed by commercial haste.
Later they gathered
galvanised by accident
and the way objection falls
on deaf ears. Their crescendo of discontent
became a drumbeat call
for change. Was he a heretic
in pleading for humane working hours?
His words, made falsely politic
by those who weaponised his call for showers
or safety gear, played to the pulse of time
and encouraged the Establishment to translate protest into crime.
based on sonnet 124
You can find readings of over 100 of these sonnets in the poetry section of Writing until the light goes out. (recorded Oct-23 to Sept-24)
