Suburban, with a Halloween-ish Turn

This week’s poem is one I usually consider a Springtime poem, given its concern about that suburban blight known as dandelions. But its a bit dark for a Springtime poem, so maybe it’s a better fit for this time of year.

While Suburban is a poem of fourteen lines, it isn’t a formal sonnet because it lacks any of the accepted rhyme schemes. It is also not written in iambic pentameter.

So what then makes it a near or slant sonnet?

My Kingdom for a Volta

A sonnet can come in formal (Shakespearean, Petrarchan) or informal lines. But it has to have something that is, at essence, sonnet-like. That essential sonnet ingredient is the twist, the turn. Or, if you prefer the formal poetic term, the volta.

Volta is an Italian word for turn. But, you know, once in a while we poets like to sound fancy, so in those cases we turn to the term volta. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

In a formal sonnet, the turn comes either after eight lines or twelve. One of the principle characteristics of the turn is that it marks a place of uneven-ness. The poem is not split in half, the two portions do not appear to balance each other visually. Yet the poem manages to balance on that fulcrum point, despite the apparently inequality.

It is the content, thought or feeling, of what comes to either side of the turn which allows the two portions to balance each other out.

A Turn is Not A Trick, But It Might Be A Treat

The volta is a point where the argument changes. The thought switches from one point to another. The poem stops going in one direction and takes, you guessed it, a turn–one that the reader might not see coming.

A sonnet has one turn. Not multiple. Not zero. The thought has to move from going one way to going another–though not necessarily in the opposite direction.

A fourteen-line poem without a turn that creates two uneven parts is not a sonnet, in my mind. Also, if the part that comes after the turn can’t balance out the part that came before, it’s not a sonnet. So that’s my bare-minimum set of requirements for sonnets.

Everything else is negotiable. The scansion–formal meter or not. The rhyme scheme–or not. The subject matter (there are those who say only Love is an acceptable topic for sonnets.)

In fact, I would suggest the number of lines is negotiable too. Twelve lines? Fifteen? I think those can serve.

I don’t think a very long line works for a sonnet, but I’m willing to stand corrected if someone can show me a good example. Similarly, I don’t think that a poem of twenty or thirty lines is a sonnet–the poem tends to move too far from its see-saw arguments in a longer venue, and more than one turn tends to occur.

Well, enough of definitions. Here’s the poem of the week, Suburban:

Suburban

Not dandelions across the lawn, but
small sharp hatreds of thorny f-u
insolence squatting in paradise.

Glass shards spread like seeds
sprout a crocodile flotilla, raise
the flag: flesh beware.

And stones! More removed, more
return. Shale flats & limestone lumps
scramble zombie-esque to sunward.

Nameless shrubs and their many-
mandibled roots grasp ankles.
I’m supposed to make a life of this?

Staged amongst the mulch,
for whom are the floodlights enough?

Halloween Flexibility?

This past weekend, our subdivision celebrated Halloween, which falls in the middle of the week this year. Inconveniences like mid-week holidays shall not stand, in this & in many other towns. In addition to holding Halloween this past Sunday, the town also decreed Halloween trick-or-treating to be a five to seven pm event. Which would make it an entirely daylight outing.

However, the weather conspired against the town. It started to get dark around four-thirty. Then the youngest kids shot out of their houses at the crack of five and starting running around the neighborhood. My husband looked at the sky and started handing out candy by the handful.

By five-fifteen it was raining. The thunder and lightning was rocking-and-rolling by five-twenty. By five-thirty it was pitch black, raining like someone had turned on high-powered fire hoses, and it began to hail. Hail.

About six-forty-five the storm passed and the sky lightened up a bit. Of course, now it was close to dark. Some intrepid teens headed out in costume. A few parents who weren’t willing to give up the ghost of Halloween (sorry! I’m sorry!) sped around the neighborhood with toddlers. We held back just a little candy for stragglers, but by seven-thirty we declared Halloween dead and gone for another year.

That’ll teach the town to move a holiday. Or, well, no. Probably that is just wishful thinking on my part. 🙂 

But You Could Take A Traditional Stance

We used to live in a city that insisted Halloween trick-or-treating happened from six to nine pm on the actual date of the holiday. Regardless of the day of the week. They were absolutists, in that regard. It made the trick-or-treating more of an event, in that the whole city celebrated it together. Plus, at least some of the outing could happen after dark. But, when Halloween fell on a weeknight, it also made that day the worst rush-hour traffic day of the year. By far. Everyone in the whole city needed to be home, have their families fed, have kids dressed up, and be handing out candy by six.

So I see the appeal to moving trick-or-treating to a weekend. Really, I do. But it takes some of the charm out of the holiday.

If you enjoyed Suburban

Other posts in which I discussed sonnets, or slant sonnets, can be found here:

Standing on the Moon
You Know What This Is
Portrait of the Bouquet as Portent
Flight Arrival
No Pink Armadillo

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

As always, comments & opinions are welcome. Happy Halloween, hail-free I hope, and have a great week!