A Sonnet I've Written for Class

Not Really as Such

I’ve painted my fingernails multiple hues
With polka dots, triangles, squiggles and squares
In purples and pinks and in crystalline blues
It earned me some notice; it earned me some stares
And compliments came from the art-inclined kind
When I copied some painter with painstaking care
With miniscule pen and with pigment so fine
You could see every strand of the mother’s brown hair
As she carefully washed all the dirt off the feet
Of the child she held, so rotund and so pink
I also did still-life, a bowl filled with beets
Or a basket of raspberries washed in the sink
Though none of it mattered, not really as such,
‘Cause he didn’t act like he noticed them much

Perhaps I Should Get More Sleep...

I walked past the rehearsals of "Antigone" yesterday. They are going to put that on in Pegasus Theatre (I'm not sure if they spell it with the "re" or the "er" ending, but does it really matter? We all just call it Pegasus.) I know a few of the people in it, working on it, doing the lighting and so on. I almost wanted to go in and snoop, but I let them do their thing uninterrupted.

I tell you what, I was on the crew for the opera UCO put on a while back, "Perichole," and seeing some of those people (my sister'll know eXACTly who I mean) brought me right back to the fun-filled days of hefting potted plants and maneuvering the houses. Oh God the houses, remember that? Well, sorry, more than likely you don't, because only the crew called them that. They were the big set pieces that looked on one side like the outside of buildings, and on the other side like the inner walls of a dungeon. We had to make a very quick set change, we only had a few minutes, where we had to turn the houses completely around and get them into position before the curtains opened. It was delicate. It was tricky. It was aggravating. And then it was beautiful, genius, like clockwork.

The people that work at Mitchell Hall are brilliant. The set designs are just unbelievable. You should have seen what they did for "Metamorphosis" a few semesters ago, when I was taking my Scene Shop class. Good Lord. They built a pool. On stage. Under a gigantic chandelier. Which we put together. Tiny little bits of wire threaded through thousands of tiny little holes in the metal rings which held all the little glass diamond chandelier bits. We spent two hours in shop. Two hours, nonstop. And I got maybe fifty little wires put in. Maybe.

And then they took it apart. Sigh.

Oooooh, bevor ich gehe! Es war sehr interessant! Gestern, vor meiner Screenwriting Kurse, ein Mann sprach im Flur mit einem Handy, und er hat DEUTSCH gesprochen! Ich liebe das! GUT Deutsch. SCHNELL Deutsch. Sehr ausgezeichnet. Sagen Sie ihm nichts! :D

A Weary Scholar's Pantoum

Such typing - typing! - all day long...
Sore dactyls worn down to the nub...
Technology's incessant song!
It can't be helped, and there's the rub...

Sore dactyls worn down to the nub...
Alas, alack, it is my fate...
It can't be helped, and there's the rub...
A poem's due, it can't be late...

Alas, alack, it is my fate...
I'm stuck in here until I'm done...
A poem's due, it can't be late...
I wish to God I had a gun...

I'm stuck in here until I'm done...
Technology's incessant song!
I wish to God I had a gun...
Such typing - typing! - all day long...

Villainous Villanelles

Dr. Rice had us try and write one in class today. We got fairly far. We'd come up with our two lines that repeat incessantly, and we'd gotten half of the poem written down before class was over and we had to stop. Each line of each stanza is in iambic pentameter, which is the simplest thing about it. The rhyme scheme is almost impossible to explain in AB format. I'll do it like this...

toe
tree
grow

foe
me
toe

blow
knee
grow

know
glee
toe

show
sea
grow

no
fee
toe
grow

Notice how darn often the words toe and grow are used. Those are the exact same lines every time. If I'd written the whole thing out, let's just make something insane up right now and say the lines are "Today I found a bunion on my toe" and "I watched the stupid thing just grow and grow."

That means that every stanza will say one or both of those lines. Goodness.

The good thing is, the poem my group was constructing was actually kind of cute. We used "down" and "frown" as our two that kept repeating, and for the middle lines that all rhyme we used "elle". It was working, I tell you.

You just try and write a good Villanelle. It's not easy.