Short and Sweet

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Doraine Bennett. You can visit her here at Dori Reads.


(Sonnet for Bonnie
by Darren Wershler-
Henry, born 1966,
Canadian poet,
writer, and critic)

What looks to be a hieroglyphic formula above is actually a Petrarchan sonnet. It is also a love sonnet, we can guess from the title. The sonnet’s message is put into a most private and intimate form, to be understood only by the writer and the recipient.

The first part is the octave. It asks the question, “Whom do I love?” eight times, or to the eighth power. The second part is the sestet. It states the answer “You” six times, or to the sixth power.

“If we define poetry as a kind of economical, expressive form,” writes the Canadian poet Christian Bök, “in which a poet must strive to speak as abundantly and as eloquently as possible, using as few words as possible, then this sonnet does constitute an efficient, if not essential, mode of expression. . . . [D]espite the fact that this poem, at first glance, appears very cryptic and austere, it is in fact a delicate, precious object, free from much of the sappiness that often plagues a rhapsodic outpouring of affection.”