City Sonnets - 101

This is the last one. It's about everywhere.

I did these because …

I wanted to practice. I thought, at the start, I'd write 14 “City Sonnets”, remembering notable places I’d been to, and then write variations on the same thing a few times.

Within the first 14, some were very unsatisfactory, and I also started writing about places other than cities. I got to about 20 and thought I’d keep going. It was quite addictive.

It became an exercise in memory, and that will be the most important part for me. It emerged, not that that was a great surprise to me, that I was drawn, over again, to quite specific and prosaic memories. Not for me the flowers and trees, the inner life of beauty.

I often remembered walking and running, I remembered playing sport, I remembered cold drinks, I remembered big and powerful structures. I also very often wanted to include the names of the places and the dates (ish) in the poems. Very often the first line I thought of contained the name of the place, and it sounded good. 

That’s where I found meaning. 

I was surprised how many of them were on or near a beach, I’ve never thought myself a particularly beachy person, but there you go. I’ve been by the sea for a larger part of my life than I thought, and yet not quite lost the magical feeling it gave me when I was a London child.

Doing a series like this, so tied up with my own details, makes use of an asset I have, which is a good memory, particularly for my childhood – it is unusually good, I've been told, when it comes to names and dates; not perfect, but pretty good. It will get worse, it’s already getting worse, so this has been a very nice way to remember some things and probe that memory a little deeper.

I’ll be glad this is over, for all that it’s been enjoyable, it’s pretty limiting, writing line after line of rhyming pentameter, trying to get what you want to say into 14 lines. Sometimes that clearly has worked better than others.

I love rhyme, I think I love rhyme more than I love “poetry” (perhaps that’s obvious), but I’ve found the relentless rhyme scheme of Shakespearean sonnets hard, sometimes, to make sense of.

I’ve diverged a few times, the odd line of hexameter, the odd half-rhyme, the odd whatever else, but generally I’ve been pretty tied in to the form.

I have found, indeed, that I’ve mainly done the same thing over and over again – described a happening in a place at a time. I often started not quite knowing where I was going to go and used the writing to tap in to the memory.

Equally, there are a pretty significant minority which are made up, and perhaps triggered by a tiny part of a memory, or have almost nothing to do with the place or time they seem to. There should be more of those, really, but I’m terribly literal.

Once I’d decided on 101, I knew that if I carried on and tried to get to 101 good ones, I could go on for ever, so this is just all of them (apart from one, which I’ve left out cos it was a little mean-spirited about a recognisable event which was perfectly nice).

There we go. It took a bit over four months. Hopefully no more sonnets for a while …

WILLESBORANYWHERE

I just go places I can talk about how

I killed a scorpion with a cricket bat

When I was stoned, where I can take my bow

And say, “Aah yes, I’ve lived, no doubt about that”.

Oh, tales accrued and shared, a false index

Of pioneer spirit without the romance.

I’ll be the victim of the briefest checks

As to the valour of the circumstance.

I only go where I can escape from

Everywhere not to mention everything.

The broadening mind of a lazy long con

Leaves out the lack of the scorpion’s sting.

I only find words which are easy to rhyme.

I’ve punched in lines, now it’s punching out time.