Sonnet For The Palouse

A week or so ago when I was in Half Moon Bay, I bought a used copy of Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare and read that while on vacation.   Historically speaking, London in the late 16th century was a volatile, fluid, albeit interesting place.  The state spying on its citizens, Protestant and Catholic enmity and political intrigue, and the thought police of church and state together.  Yet still people got up to all manner of unbeknighted enterprises.  Like staging plays.

Any discussion of Shakespeare necessarily touches upon his sonnets.  They were apparently published as a pirated edition some time well after he had written them.  In fact, Bryson said the form was already considered a bit passe' by the time Shakespeare's sonnets came out.  And I thought the form an Elizabethan stalwart.

When I graduated with a B.A. in English, the head of the department surveyed my transcript and said, "How did you ever manage to get through here without reading any English writer past Shakespeare?"  That wasn't entirely true; I took classes such as "Native American Creation Myths," and "19th Century  Feminist Literature."  I just didn't read any actual English or American poets, novelists, or essayists after Shakespeare.  Call me idiosyncratic.  No matter.  He approved me.

The sonnet as a living, vital poetic form died long ago.  RIP.  My fond hope is that the ghazal will make a successful transition into the English language, with all its rich possibilities, and replace the staid and outworn forms of verse trailing along behind the car like so many clattering cans after the wedding.

30 years ago, I was doing some writing.  I'd sent some poetry to a fellow teaching in the Graduate Program at the University of Washington and he invited me to an ongoing workshop.  It was a shark pool; very competitive.  But at one point, we all had the assignment to write a sonnet.  So I tried my hand at it.

Having partly grown up on a farm, I thought I'd write a paean to the land that shaped me in so many ways -- the Palouse, a geographic anomaly formed by Ice Age floods, ancient lava flows, and the subsequent centuries of wind and dust.  This is the poem that came out, entitled "Sonnet for the Palouse."

 I walked those hills for years and ate their dust;

listened to the earth turn, watched wheat grow

and served the sentence of my father's choice.

The silent sky just burned, intensely blue.

Restlessness defeated by expanse:

what was there to do, where to go?

Winter made a nondescript advance;

pastel shades of grey and quilted snow.

If I could rip the mask from off that place,

what sudden inner vista could I cull?

Would night reveal a warm effulgent face

or day undress in dark and light annul?

Though years ago I fled its vacancy,

this landscape circumscribes and mirrors me.

It sounds a little nihilistic to me now.  I no longer feel that way about that land; I would write an entirely different sonnet now.  But that's how I felt at the time -- I was still dealing with the shadows and ghosts of my childhood passage through that locale and it would be years before I was free, free to simply experience the energies of the land as they really are, to feel rejuvenated and uplifted by the land's intrinsic power.

I can see I'm going to have to attempt a new sonnet about the Palouse one of these days, if I can gird my loins and gather my wits.  Until then....