​Sonnets
Theresa Rodriguez
Shanti Arts LLC
www.shantiarts.com
978-1951651350
Released July 2020
$12.95 (print, soft cover, perfect bound)
80 pages
https://www.amazon.com/Sonnets-Theresa-Rodriguez/dp/1951651359/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Rodriguez+sonnets&qid=1610750494&sr=8-1
 
 
Theresa Rodriguez was called "The Sonnet Queen" by one of her other appreciators following a recent public reading she gave. While there are a few other women, and not that many more men, who have written and published sonnets in our time (not exactly a popular genre compared to the fad of 'instapoetry'), she is the only contemporaneous 'female sonneteer' I know of—which is to say, the only woman who has written many sonnets, a la Shakespeare, and published a book exclusively devoted to the craft.
 
In his literary criticism, William Empson showed a subtle attention to what he called “the singing line.” In her new collection of poetry, Sonnets, Rodriguez raises this concern for the musicality of verse to a spiritual level. Take the first stanza of ‘The Sacred Harp:’
 
The music, oh the music starts, and we
Begin to sing in skillful harmony;
Begin to sing in sweet simplicity;
Begin to sing in deep complexity.
 
As both a poet and a trained classical singer, Rodriguez is more consciously aware of the musicality of poetry than most, and it is not surprising that other poems in this collection such as ‘The Piano,’ and ‘Oh, When I Hear,’ also take music as a subject. Most are of course not directly about music, per se, though all display the melodious qualities of regular meter and perfect rhyme. Those that do take music as their surface-level subject are really avenues of exploring larger themes: a panegyric to a Steinway as an expression of ideal beauty, suffering as a path to “where a truth, so sacred, may be found,” and, in ‘The Sacred Harp,’ the worship of God’s mystery.
 
In just these three poems, Rodriguez’s work captures what poetry (and I would add, most great art in general) is meant to do: to capture truth, beauty, and goodness. Poets, those writers who carefully order their words to make of it a musical language and to use metaphors liberally, are those beings most suited to drawing comparisons in the order of creation. Rodriguez seems to implicitly understand this idea that poetry is, perhaps after pure music, the straightest vehicle to God. ‘Sonnet for the Sonnet-Maker,’ is addressed to God Himself, and draws our attention to how the elegance of iambic pentameter dominates so much of the King James Bible:
 
You know the beats and rhythms, the iamb
Which pulses like a crippled-legged walk;
You, with the force of one who said, “I am
That I am,” in iambs you will talk
Of truth and beauty, pain and sorrow, all
And nothing, touching both Heaven and Hell
In what you speak and say…
 
“Cripple-legged walk” is a brilliant detail: a phrase that at once mimetically describes the iambic line, and with it our relationship to God. It finely illustrates Aquinas’s concept of analogical predication, and how words may be understood two different ways as they apply to two different levels of being. God, “I am that I am,” knows the “beats and rhythms” of the iamb, and communicates to us in His “cripple-legged walk” because we, as bipedaled, fallen creatures, must use words to hobble towards He who soars. In ‘Sonnet Sonnet’ Rodriguez repeats this imagery with variation to refer to the three poets with sonnet forms named after them. Being mere mortals (though ones who approach the divine closer than others), the “cripple-rhythmed beauty” of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Spenser is emphasized for their more delimited abilities to exercise “Condensed and distilled thought,” rather than to touch Heaven and Hell or to recall the void.
 
In ‘CCP and Falun Gong Sonnet,’ the first-person narrator awakens on an operating table with one or two less internal organs: “Go, invoke / your party loyalty as I am cut / And mutilated.” From communing with the deities in golden ages of yore, we have degenerated to living in a Kafkaesque world where the muse is an anonymous bureaucrat singing of zoning laws.
 
Rodriguez expresses her own sense of belief in opposition to pernicious modern tendencies in the sonnet, ‘In This Post-Christian Era,’ as well as in a number of other poems in the collection that explore her faith. These tend to come in the latter half of the book; they are preceded by reflections on the art of sonnet-writing and relationships, and precede in turn final poems on the decay of time. One might roughly divide the collection into four sections dominated by these themes (though there are also a few on political and historical subjects interspersed throughout). The move from writing, to love, to God, to the passing of things would seem to be no accident, and this framework offers further proof that Theresa Rodriguez is an artist who speaks to the soul.
 
The straightforwardness of many titles (‘Spenserian Sonnet,’ ‘Petrarchan Sonnet,’ etc.) are mirrored in the candor of Rodriguez’s personal, often self-conscious, reflections on all of the topics mentioned; and the variety of sonnet-styles she mixes (sometimes within a single poem) echo the variety of topics. The pathos of certain poems is balanced by a mimetic wit in others. In ‘Enjambment sonnet,’ the lines begin in terse sentences that give way to longer ones that flow over, preventing isolation between lines. The weight of the line is shifted to the beginning and middle rather than the end, as the addressee is enjoined to
 
Dissent! The point
Is to surprise. Surprise! Then negate
All smoothed-out evenness.
 
The carefully chosen end word “point” gives a sense of periodization before rushing us along to the next line, as the author “negates” the usual expectations of the poetic line. The brief imperative, “Think!” is sandwiched at the midpoint of the line before the final couplet. “And then think more,” we are told. Theresa here shows us that the art of poetry, while inventive, is more than mere spontaneity. In the equally clever ‘Five Minute Sonnet,’ the narrator opens the first stanza relating doubts as to whether such a thing can be done, increases in confidence during the second stanza, and describes the flow of how, “The lines just come so quickly to my mind,” in the third, until hitting writer’s block in the final couplet. Artlessness in art is not really a thing, aside from occasional brief spurts as the one that resulted in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ following waking from an opium dream. Lacking drugs for stimulation, most examples of effortlessness are only apparent—the Muse only descends upon one after long reflection. Examples of pure spontaneity that contemporary free-verse poets often brag about are simply the results of museless minds.
 
In poems like ‘Annelid Sonnet,’ ‘Cut Sonnet,’ and ‘Homeless Sonnet,’ each titular analogy is at once partly autobiographical, a description of her subject matter on love or pain, and a metaphor for the artistic process. In ‘Sonnet of the Hardened Heart,’ she employs crustaceous imagery to create an analogy with the relation between flesh and spirit:
 
Care less, I warn myself; bother no more
With inner crevices: prying the shell
Like scabs (rough, oozing, sore), which crust, but tell
Of tumults against the psychic seabed floor;
It is in vain.
 
She goes on to pile images on top of one another to convey a sense of being “entombed” within her existence: “the meat” is like “newborn skin” and “the vaginal flower.” The effect on display here is an example of William Empson’s second of the seven types of ambiguity he describes in his book of that name: when two or more meanings are resolved into one for purposes of building psychological complexity.
 
Rodriguez often undertakes to explore her conceptual themes through a repetition of abstract words. Most of these occur in poems about the self-reflexivity of writing, and occasionally in poems about capturing the divine. In ‘Earl of Oxenford’s Sonnet’ she defines a term with itself (“For truth is truth, and you do shake a spear…”) to justify the narrator’s euphoria in discovering the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. In ‘Form Sonnet’ there is the nested identification-turned-negation of
 
….the freedom that free form can miss.
 
For freedom in most freedom is remiss
In finding beauty in this poetry.
 
Rodriguez here highlights the contradictory nature of free verse: that through its own lack of discipline it loses the quality it seeks to define itself through. Referring then to her own penchant for poetic structure she writes, “In building such some scoffers might dismiss: / But such is perfect perfection to me.” Here the placement of “perfection” upsets the hitherto perfect meter of the stanza, creating an ironic effect.
 
This placing of the same abstract term adjacently to itself as a different part of speech occurs in several other poems in the collection. In ‘The Simple, Stalwart Faith,’ she asks, “Where is the light / that lit this darkened darkness?” She could have used ‘deepened,’ to modify “darkness” or some other synonym of ‘intensified’ to make her point, yet she chose to use the same word to emphasize the depth and doubling of a metaphysical condition once was “lit” by “light.” In the next line, “Now I strive to say regurgitated prayers,” she further emphasizes the sense of monotony to the rituals that underlie her doubts. Some might see the use of abstractions in this way as a weakness that undermines the purpose of poetry, whose strength lies in the use of sensual imagery; Rodriguez, though, seems to use them to careful effect in most places in a way that reflects her themes.
 
The William Empson quote about “the singing line” cited at the beginning of this essay is better applied to Rodriguez than even Empson himself—a modernist poet whose verse reflects his admiration for scientism by employing objective diction, and as such can sometimes falls rather flat. Rodriguez writes in a straightforward and clear style, and while her poems operate on different levels, there is little that’s overtly contradictory in a head-scratching way. With a few possible exceptions, the reader seldom stops to invent interpretations or tease apart multiple meanings that must be held in the mind at once. These are poems that can be appreciated by the average literate person, as well as the more sophisticated enthusiast.
 
Theresa’s website is www.bardsinger.com.

Susan Moorhead writes stories and poems from New York. Her poetry collections are The Night Ghost and Carry Darkness, Carry Light. A librarian by trade, she is happy to be always surrounded by books.

​     A collection of poetry reads like a journey, the poet's journey, of course, but also our own as we travel with them, responding to their work. Poetry En Plein Air is a collection of previous work and new poems by Marianne Szlyk.
     In the opening poem, "The Poet of Spotsylvania", the poet laments "I want to stay home where my yard grows all the words, images, and rhymes I need for my poems. Nevertheless, I get in my car and drive north to work." The poet may long to stay put but these are poems of motion, traversing towns and cities on both coasts, exploring farther flung destinations and timelines - listening to a young woman sing in Khmer in 1967 in the haunting poem, "Listening to Electric Cambodia", flying into Poland in "Flying into Warsaw in Another Life", "of people who look like me but swish and swallow vinegary consonants that burn going down an American's throat."  A cruise ship "sneaks between the stony gray beach and the icebergs" as the poet notes "this is not the Antarctica she imagined". We are inside photographs in Maine, submerged in paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rothke, in thoughtfully observant ekphrastic poetry that will have you pause the next time you are in a museum or a gallery as you try to see paintings untie their secrets and give themselves to you in the way poems such as "At The Water's Edge" do - "But the house's heart is dark and sweet with sage and lavender, with the scent of grass and lake." or in "Imagining Empathy", "They reveal only the aquarium's warm salt water, making this room a womb where one woman entrusts her observations to another."
     The poet is also the force behind the blog, The Song Is..., focusing on poetry responding to music, and that love for music is apparent in so many poems, in "Summer Solstice on U Street", where saxophonist Gary Bartz lifts those listening to a place where "the scent of mango dusted with chili powder and cinnamon trickles in...we taste fruits we don't know the names of." or in "The Jazz Harpist Lies Sleepless", alive to wakefulness, where the traffic outside her window sounds like the Pacific surf, like "the music she cannot write down at night" as she "hushes her crashing thoughts from the hours most women her age do not keep."  This sensitivity to music continues  in the attention to noises in city neighborhoods, in quiet woods, even in an abandoned house, a favorite poem in the book where "Summer rain curls up in the tub...empty hangers chatter in the bedroom closet." In "At Mile Zero on SR 26", "Turn on the radio. Stations weave in and out like drivers in city traffic." and we are tuned to her sensory details as we travel with her.
      Within the title of the book, the term "En Plein Air", refers to the practice of painting outdoors, where the artist is exposed to the weather, the changing light, the immediacy of the moment.  Much like these poems, where the keen observant eye captures how the way birch trees in North Carolina "glint the way odd, white threads do in a quilt of blues, browns, and greens" , and where a chicory tree stays strong "when the air is like bus exhaust and the sky is a dull ache." With alert, fresh metaphors and beautiful imagery made all the stronger for their meditative accuracy, these poems like this book wills you to notice things, the big moments and top notes, of course, but more importantly, the small necessary brush strokes that build a work and transform the canvas into art.

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.​​

“That’s a purl stitch.”  I showed my younger sister, Joy, the ‘back’ of the item.
    “Doesn’t look like a pearl to me,” she shrugged, “and it isn’t too different from the other side anyway.”
    “Pearl,” I spelled out the letters, “isn’t purl. And they’re not the same.  See how nubby the purl is compared to the knit side.”
    “They both look knit to me.”  
    I pushed the needle tips into some of the already rolled up wool to secure them, then followed Joy into the next room.  “Want me to show you?”
    “Nope.  You like doing stuff like Mom does but I’d rather dance my ballet steps or read.”
    I did like the creative things my mother showed me how to do; she made some interesting looking sweaters-matching hats with knitting needles, and pretty blankets with only a single crochet hook which seemed fascinating as I hadn’t yet asked to learn that technique.  But I realized I was going to hand-do things I’d never ever seen her make.  I’m a teen and can think for myself!   And I even had a friend who was a boy!  Not really a ‘boyfriend’ but I had a thought for a gift for him: I’d knit argyle socks, so popular, but mine would be my color choices.  I had no idea how hard that was going to be.
    A diamond shaped, multi-color pattern, with about 68 stitches I’d have to cast on the metal needles...  Knitting was important during World War II as family said soldiers’ feet got cold and hand made warm socks were good items to send overseas.  Same with sweaters, which my mother did and sent to her brothers. Now that the war is over, they still wear them. None were complicated argyle, however, nor multicolored and needing many colors that I’d have to constantly knit; those separate yarns were called bobbins.  I could not ask my mother for help, and, in a way, this pleased me as only I could do this and not the ‘teacher’ in her!  Perfect for my new-teen sense-of-self.
    I took 26-cents and walked to the candy store, that also sold newspapers and magazines, and bought an issue which would show me how to knit intricate argyle socks.  “Solid color diamonds, and bisecting but diagonal lines.”  Why does this sound so difficult.  I picked up another magazine with directions and the language was more suitable.  I gave the quarter-coin to the cashier and left feeling incredible.  I didn’t even use a penny on my favorite-as-a-child sugar dots candy affixed to white long paper strips!  I really was engrossed in creating a pair of argyle socks. The instructions told me how to join the many colors I’d be using and create strength in that union so the strands would not separate as the wearer pulled up his socks many times.  I felt quite excited.
    First thought was that I’d be using one knitting needle that is semi-circular but has tips on either end; after all, socks are round.  No. I was to knit with two from the top down and then sew the seam but make it quite invisible.  Hm.  Complicated.  I like complicated and can do this!   
    By college, I’d become so efficient that I could make any argyle size and color combination I wanted and give as gifts to friends who were boys or actual boyfriends.  Since drinking beer, for many of them, was a sign of adulthood in an era where one could not register to vote until age 21 but could be drafted into the armed service at age 18, I found a pattern to knit beer mugs design into the socks and use fluffy angora wool knit in to create the foam.  Patterns were still 25-cents: I needed #1 size needles and bobbins in small quantities.  Well I knew that.  Cast on 72 stitches, keep the tension constant, pare down after the 36th row to knit the heel.  In between there was the instep that had to be counted, and so forth.  Reinforce the heel using purl stitches.  I laughed out loud remembering my sister and the word purl vs pearl.
    Yes, I carried five courses each semester, plus two mandatory years of gym that gave zero credits, did extra-curricular activities.  There’s always time to create!  My mother mailed me 100% French angora yarn that was the fluffiest available.  Even though I’d been ‘showing her’ that I could go beyond cable-stitched knit sweaters and such, she didn’t envy but was proud.  Imagine that. 
    The angora felt silky and when this pair was completed, I put them in a drawer.  My dad had already died and I’d once knit him plaid socks, and that type was intricate, came out perfectly, and I never did plaid again.  I realized I wasn’t going to do ‘trendy’ again either as I associated education with the look of the library and all the books that held words/ thoughts/ history/ philosophy;  the big mums being sold at entrance to the outdoor football stadium for dates to buy for the girls; what I’d learned that I already knew would never be wasted –such as chemistry as I understood how fabrics were made, as an example.  I didn’t drink even beer as all alcohol smelled like cough medicine.  
    When I became engaged before grad school, my fiancé was still in medical school.  I took the knit socks from where I’d kept them in my mother’s house, and gave them to him.  Eventually, in 1974, The Smithsonian’s Division of Costume accessioned these, angora still quite fluffy, displaying such in its “Suiting Everyone” exhibit as these represented an era.  
      Joy never learned to knit and her pearls encircle her neck.  Machines churn out argyle pattern sweaters or hats from acrylic yarns.  25-cents doesn’t even buy a candy bar. Those childhood sugar dots are available online, retro candy, for $2.99.  In my thoughts, I am often where I’d bought my first how-to-knit-argyle-socks magazine, a quarter coin plus a penny secure in my pocket to exchange for the printed matter, yet being so excited I didn’t use the cent to pick up the sweet treat.

​

    “Where does the Tooth Fairy live?”  I wiggled a tiny protrusion affixed to my upper gum.
    “Not so far that she can’t get here when that tooth comes out,” my mother replied.
    “Hm.  Good.”  I made short movements with my tiny fingers to hasten the ejection.  “What happens if Santa comes the very same night as my tooth is under a pillow?”
    “They won’t come at the same time,” my mother answered and nodded her head noting she was positive.
    “Well I am going to stay up all night and see Santa, but I’ll hide a little so he won’t see me and leave too quickly.  I’ll sit on the stairs and listen for him.  Then I’ll just peek into the living room and run up to my room before he sees me!”    
    On Santa night, I sang songs and did twirling dance-steps I made up.  My mother played the piano and we gathered around that also.  The crepe paper outfit she’d designed allowed me to feel quite special, and I was able to wear my Mary Jane patent leather good shoes.  All of the relatives ate food it took her all day to prepare, and we celebrated her twin brothers’ birthdays on the 24th of December.  They didn’t comment about my crepe paper, but liked my dancing. 
    My flaxen hair had been cut very short as the barber said that would make it grow in thicker; there was not enough to clump up to hold a crepe paper big bow.  I didn’t like being propped on a board in that man’s shop, and I think he was used to boys’ hair anyway, and the big cape covered almost all of me  Older sister had hair thick enough to braid.  I don’t think she had to go to that barber shop!
    The kitchen had so many dishes and pots piled up; would my mother be up all night washing and drying them and Santa wouldn’t come because she wasn’t asleep?  Maybe Santa’s helpers would magically wash and dry and leave only piles of clean plates and silverware!  If he had enough elves, that wouldn’t delay getting to the next house now, would it, I wondered?
    The twin uncles opened their birthday presents.  The little sterling things my mother polished that held cigarettes for everyone was getting lower; my dad, who didn’t smoke, got up and filled it.  I had candy shaped like a cigarette and the tip was even colored red as if it were real even though the whole thing was sugar.
    Why won’t everybody go home so Santa can get to our house before he gets too tired.
My baby sister was already in her crib, so didn’t all the family think they should leave!  Finally I was sent upstairs to get into my pajamas.       
    Some neighbor said Santa doesn’t exist.  How would she know just ‘cause she didn’t ever see him for real.  I turn a button on the living room’s big radio and voices come out, sometimes talking ones and sometimes singing ones.  And if I don’t like what I’m hearing, I can turn a button next to the ‘on’ and a different voice or music comes out at me.  I just can keep doing that and when I’m tired of hearing anything I can turn the thing the other way I first did and everything inside that box gets quiet.  Isn’t that magical?  I don’t see these people in that radio but they exist.  Exist.  That is a really grown up word.  Daddy’s car also has this magic radio and it is right inside the car by the front!
    Sitting in a a great room my parents said was a theatre, I saw a man pull a real rabbit out of his hat.  And when he pulled a scarf from his pocket, more and more and more of those just kept coming out.  It was real.  Tooth fairies are real.  Santa is real.  Don’t grownups know anything you can’t see is real.
    I woke my older sister so we could sit quietly in the middle of the staircase; we weren’t so far down that Santa could know we were there, and weren’t too far away from our rooms if our parents heard and we had to run to our beds. I don’t think I fell asleep but I never did see or hear Santa sliding down our chimney. When I tugged my older sister’s arm and we tiptoed down the rest of the flight we could see filled stockings hanging from where we’d put those very same ones empty, and the floor in front of the fireplace filled with wrapped presents.  
    How did I feel when I found out that magic was an illusion, the tooth fairy had been my parents, and Santa wasn’t an actual human who could service the entire world in one night: privileged I had the chance to believe that for a brief time in my life. 
    

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