For those who missed it, I talk about how my guardian angel appeared quite audibly and visibly through our first sonnet in this video here:
Madison asks at the end of that sonnet, “Who would I be?”
Who indeed? The voice was familiar, like a long-lost friend. The name and profession, “Madison Hatta, Sonneteer” came with the poems, and for those of you who've taken an English literature class or two, the sonnets are neither Petrarchan nor Elizabethan in style but are, quite simply, “Madisonian”.
At the very least, they’re a variation on a style that I used in my undergraduate Creative Writing class. Most of the poetry I wrote for that class I have long forgotten, but the memory of one lingered. That poem began, “Whenever I think that I might write a sonnet/the urge overcomes me to go sleep upon it.”
That's a nice enough couplet, but it was the third line that bothered me for well over a decade,
“The mere thought of writing in that horrible form. . .”
“Horrible form” just never sat well with me, never seemed to play trippingly on the tongue. However, I’d never had any motivation to rewrite it, so the poem languished in a file somewhere. Therefore, I was more than a little amazed and amused when the second Madisonnet that appeared reworked this exact piece, and it became:
Whenever I think that I might write a sonnet
the urge overcomes me to go sleep upon it.
The mere thought of writing in that wretched form
must be from the depths of insanity born.
Yet pen to paper is drawn ‘gainst my will;
I hope it’s for good; I fear ‘tis for ill.
But what, pray tell me, is one wont to do
in such a position, except perhaps rue
the day that she ever did read Oscar Wilde,
or Keats, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare besides?
There is no cure for it--not one that I’ve found.
Learn from my misfortune, dear listener. Sound
the alarm bells, yea, and steadfastly shun it
should forces compel you thus to write a sonnet!
You can hear it declaimed here: https://aprillynnjames.com/track/4458025/whenever-i-think-that-i-might-write-a-sonnet
Madison, it turns out, knows me quite well.