Posts Tagged sonnet
Sings up to which Joey has been (a poem about a song of a poem)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 12, 2017
What I wrote were some mere rhyming words.
What I got was this wonderful song
by a friend with whom I get along
that I met on a ship full of nerds.
’Twas the cruise, as you might have inferred,
of that singer of many dings-dong.
We were one thousand five hundred strong
and a blue plastic uke was conferred
upon each of us on the first night
so we all could repeatedly tune
and observe it was never quite right.
The performers had hoped to attune
us to not make such fun of their plight,
but we did, sure as schooners will schoon.
∎
I’m working on/playing with a few other silly poems to update you on that up to which I have been, but meanwhile, have a song version of the last one! How cool is this?! I met Joey on the JoCo cruise and he’s learning to use one of ‘the cheapest possible ukuleles that do not get classified as industrial waste‘ that Cards Against Humanity provided us all with.
This poem is another of these weird Petrarchan-sonnet-like-things in anapaestic trimeter. They said at different times in the cruise that there were either 1700 of us or 1500. I’m going to guess that the first number includes the performers. In any case, 1500 fits the meter better (as does 1600, if you want to take the middle ground.) As I process my cruise footage, which is most of what I will be doing in my spare time for the next few months, I am implementing Jonathan’s suggestion of making a supercut of tuning. If you have footage of tuning at events on this cruise that I wasn’t at, and you’re happy to send me clips of it, let me know so I can add it to the supercut.
Things up to which I have been (a poem)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo, News on April 8, 2017
(Note: there is no grammatical reason not to end a sentence with a preposition. I just wrote the title this way for comic effect.)
I’ve been busy in so many ways
and my blog’s gone from quiet to worse
so for poetry month, I’ll be terse
with my news in prosodic arrays.
Here’s a list of my works and my plays —
check the links if you want to immerse.
I’ll explain it all further in verse
in new posts in the upcoming days.
I’ve performed and I’ve published and coded,
got a job, got a fan page, and masters
in linguistics and web dev and showed it
with a site to find safer rhymes faster,
took a cruise, got some footage uploaded,
and wrote poems when I could be arsed to.
That was some kind of Petrarchan sonnet in anapaestic trimeter; what in the bard’s name am I doing? I’ve been wanting to update my blog for some time now, but I keep doing more things that I want to blog about and it seemed like any blog post doing them all justice would be too long. I also still want to make improvements on, or upload footage of, many of the things I want to blog about before blogging about them. I have been posting a bit more often on the fan page, though, so like that if you want to stay informed.
The only way to clear this blog backlog (ack, blog backlog!) is to blog, and it’s Global Poetry Writing Month (also known as National Poetry Writing Month, though a nation is rarely specified) so if I blog something, it should be a poem. I’ll be blogging poems, perhaps daily, until I have poem-blogged about all the things from the last 11 months that I wanted to blog about. Consider this poem the table of contents, or the tl;dr version of blog posts to come.
If you’re also participating in GloPoWriMo, and need some inspiration, try my random rhyme generator. Someone suggested that feature when I told him about the accent-aware rhyming dictionary I made, and I promptly spent my free time on that instead of making the other improvements I had been planning, such as clarifying when ‘faster’ rhymes with ‘arsed to’ (hint: it happens in most accents where ‘can’t be arsed‘ or indeed ‘arse’ is used) and when it rhymes with ‘amassed a’. But more on that in a later blog poem.
Heartbleed (the love poem)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 10, 2014
Let’s synchronise our beating hearts and I’ll
lay open just for you my very soul,
secure that you would never take control.
So, [End Of File]
Well thank you for your frankness; I’ll compile
some poems of my own uncensored whole,
that you may take a key companion role,
and take this key to tour my domicile.
My dear, do you not see that you’ve been played?
My heart’s not big; I sent but lies to you,
and used you for your private information;
I felt inside your sockets and got laid.
I understood what hearts are meant to do
is bleed with force to drive the circulation.
For those who have been out in the real world for the last few days instead of living in an internet-enabled cave like the rest of us, there’s a serious bug in OpenSSL which allows private information to be leaked to malicious users in much the same way as illustrated in this poem. It means that you should probably change your passwords on any site that had the buggy version of OpenSSL installed, provided it has been fixed; if the site hasn’t been fixed yet, there’s no point changing your password since the new one could still be hacked. Here is one list of servers and their status with regards to this bug; there are probably others. The bug is called Heartbleed, because it happens when a client sends a ‘heartbeat’ (to keep the connection alive) and pretends that it is sending more data than it actually is, and the server doesn’t check this, so when it tries to respond with the same data, it sends a random assortment of its own data the size of what the client said it had sent.
The ‘SSL’ in OpenSSL stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer‘, which is supposed to be what keeps secret information safe on the internet, but this bug made it more open than secure. I made sure to include the words (or derivatives thereof) ‘Open’, ‘secure’, ‘sockets’ and ‘layer’ in order (with an additional ‘lay’ for luck) in the poem, so that the lying no-good user is in fact an open, secure, sockets layer.
If you have been living in the right kind of cave, you might be interested in seeing the code change which caused the bug.
I’ve never understood what ‘bleeding heart’ was supposed to mean. Bleeding, forcefully and rhythmically, is the heart’s primary function. Maybe its only function, but you never can tell with biology. If there isn’t blood coming out of your heart, you’re in very bad shape. You should get that looked at even before changing your passwords.
Addendum: I should perhaps point out that the heartbeat has nothing to do with synchronising anything; that’s just a sappy thing lovers sometimes talk about which seemed like a good way to get heartbeats into the poem. Don’t expect anything in the first quatrain to be accurate; it’s a malicious SSL client talking. Also, here‘s an article someone I know from JoCo Cruise Crazy wrote about Heartbleed, which seems like it has some useful links and information; I haven’t read it thoroughly yet, though, so for all I know it has a nice introduction and then an end of file marker.
A Guide to Understanding the Redefinition of the Sonnet
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 1, 2014
The sonnet is a noble little song,
that rambles with loquaciousness of yore.
In times of Twitter, quatrains are hardcore;
an octave and a sestet’s just so long!
And so decree the OED: So long!
The fourteen lines expected heretofore
will henceforth shrink by one per year or more.
TL;DR: yo, Shakes, ur doin’ it wrong!
Like tweets, the turn seems rash and vain and fast,
but nobody would dare to redefine
if all existing verse would break the rule.
So here’s the sanctioned way to fix the past:
just never read beyond the thirteenth line.
(Unless, of course, you’re not an April Fool.)
Queen of Diamonds: A Tale of Two Dinosaurs
Posted by Angela Brett in Dinosaurier, Writing Cards and Letters on October 14, 2012
This dinosaur’s preserved for all to see,
so you and I can tell how life got wings.
That dinosaur’s preserved in you and me;
its atoms passed the years in living things.
“This dinosaur the fossil represents,
has lasted so much longer than I will,”
that dinosaur (in human shape) laments
while cleaning off a bone upon a hill.
This dinosaur’s remains lay still through eras
to show us that its kin were once alive.
That dinosaur’s remains run through chimeras
though consciousness of neither can survive.
This dinosaur thinks nothing in its head.
That dinosaur as well will soon be dead.
Yesterday I went on a fairly spontaneous trip to the Jura with some friends. We parked the car in a Jurassic park, and saw some dinosaur tracks; not too surprising, I suppose, since the Jurassic period was named after this region. I’ve hastily put up a few unedited, barely-viewed photographs; you can read more about what’s in them at the dinoplagne site.
Anyway, a friend said something about her remains not lasting that long, and it occurred to me that if everything were fossilised there’d be nothing left to make new things with, and we were actually made of atoms that had been in dinosaurs. I didn’t think that was necessarily good enough to write about, but I still hadn’t come up with a better idea by this evening. In search of a better idea, I looked at last cycle’s Queen of diamonds (which I think is better than this one, although it’s a little weird) and was reminded that there’s such a thing as a sonnet, and they only take 14 lines and have plenty of structure to help the uninspired writer fill them in. So I wrote this first draft of a sonnet about dinosaurs. Oddly enough, odd-numbered lines in odd-numbered stanzas, and both lines of the final couplet, start with spondees instead of iambs, or at least that’s they way they should be read.
Queen of Diamonds: Crossing Over
Posted by Angela Brett in Ireland, Writing Cards and Letters on December 21, 2008
I look up to the sky in search of you,
to sunlight that you hide your soul above.
You’re on the other side, in heaven’s crown,
in happiness, but I, in longing, weep.
It’s lonely here relying on myself
to hug myself inside and think of you.
I’ll reach the other side and we will meet
Already I am dying for your touch.
The fates are working for us, I’ll be there.
I’m crossing over, sole to interrupt
the festive fuss to mark your change of state.
Around the Stanford torus that’s our world
I’ll take a pleasant stroll to be with you
before we both embark for wedded life.
Eight of Hearts: Two-part Harmony
Posted by Angela Brett in Holland, Writing Cards and Letters on July 27, 2008
Let’s sing together in our own harmonic,
Let’s cry out all the words we need to say.
Let’s irrigate our souls with liquid tonic
until the final doubt is washed away.
But you’re the star, you’re telling your own story
to crowds of singing parrots, humming birds.
Although I’m just a moon, reflecting glory
I paint my own self-portrait with your words.
You radiate the lyrics from your core
of feelings I can never see inside.
I catch your eye in rapturous rapport,
no matter if our hearts don’t coincide.
You shine to see us moons all sing your song,
We beam to know a star will sing along.
Four of Hearts: Alice and Bob
Posted by Angela Brett in CERN, Writing Cards and Letters on June 29, 2008
I gave a note to Isaac meant for you,
but Marvin changed my message to a curse,
and though the barb that reached you wasn’t true,
you shivered at the harshness of my verse.
The next time I made sure to use a code,
So such a change would never fit the rhythm.
But Eve was smart, and understood my ode,
Her friends took part, and took our secret with ’em.
Embarrassed by such semaphore of hearts,
I used entangled light to write my note on.
But Eve still looked, and such a look imparts
an altered quantum state upon the photon.
To heχ with fears of stickybeaks or malice
Dear Bob, I’ll shout, I love you, signed, your Alice.
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