Category — Sonneteer

I got the idea from this article in The Atlantic a few months ago. I probably won’t keep the title.

Crazy Cats

So here’s the deal – T. gondii needs a cat
To reproduce, but it can live in us
And many other mammals — say, a rat.
Now rats, of course, don’t much like dear Puss.
But we do. And we make a lot of trash
Which rats do like, so what’s a rat to do?
Being small, most are cautious. The rash
Are cat food, and have fewer children, too.

Now what’s a parasite to do? Make male
Rats brave, and sexy to the females, which
Will bear infected kitty chow, and cats
Who eat it share with us, and when we ail,
T. gondii plays with us — guys get the itch
To drive too fast, and gals heat up like cats.

We Are A Kind Of Map


A buzzer-beating three-point shot reveals
We’re born to know our truths about this world,
And so is everything: a fly conceals
Itself till it’s grown wings and they’ve unfurled;
A virus has the key for just that cell
Where it can multiply; that cell, dying,
Creates an army ready to repel
The sudden viral horde or die trying.
Of course that’s metaphor, but not a lie,
Not just a way of trying to impose
Some sense on senselessness, a useless “Why?”
We answer till we like what we suppose.
There’s something might be learned when we’re betrayed
Seeing the world with eyes the world has made.

Changes prompted by comments on a mail list – if I broke it, then I’m the one who broke it.

“Sonneteer” finishes tonight with a more upbeat encounter with the numinous. Listen here.

The third and last section of Other Voices, Jack Songs, will be a rebroadcast for those of you who heard the 2008 NaPoWrimo podcasts. But the poems are in a different order, arranged for the story and not in order of composition, and some of the poems themselves changed.

We’re near the end of “Sonneteer,” the middle section of my manuscript Other Voices. Tonight’s podcast, “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God,” takes the conflation of religious and erotic language in a rather different direction than does the Song of Solomon. Listen here.

Another sonnet from my mss Other Voices, “Some Stranger,”  along with the previous “Mysterious Ways” and the next two sonnets, is an encounter with the numinous. It doesn’t go well.

The thirteenth of sixteen sonnets in “Sonneteer,” the second section of Other Voices, is “Mysterious Ways.” It involves a hurricane. Listen here.

This latest sonnet from Other Voices could have been autobiography. I was lucky. Listen here.

In the Other Voices section of the left sidebar there are links to everything podcast so far from the manuscript.

Who sought whom? Does it matter? Listen here.

This is going to take longer than the two months I’d envisioned. It really isn’t possible for me to do this nearly every night and that’s a good thing — I’ve got a life I like.

All the Other Voices podcasts so far are here, and the sonnets so far from the second section, “Sonneteer,”  are here.

I’m not sure who’s teasing whom in this one. And I’d count the puns if there wasn’t work to do. Listen here.

All the Other Voices podcasts so far are here, and the sonnets so far from the second section, “Sonneteer,”  are here.

Tonight’s sonnet podcast from Other Voices is tough, and not just because it’s Petrarchan. Its barely post-coital conversation presents a very disturbing scene. Listen here.