Next up, a poetry form that plays with the idea of reinterpretation: sonnet crowns. Iliana Demas will share a selection from Bruce Snider’s sonnet crown called “Devotions”.
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When you play the game of telephone, you sit in a circle and whisper a secret phrase to the person next to you. Once the phrase gets passed all the way around the circle, the last person shares what the phrase has been turned into.
A sonnet crown is a poetic game of telephone. Sonnet crowns consist of multiple sonnets, with the last line of the first sonnet being the first line of the second sonnet, and so on and so forth. The last line of each sonnet transforms and adapts as it bleeds into the next sonnet, creating a beautifully interwoven poetic sequence.
Today, I will be reading an excerpt from Bruce Snider’s sonnet crown, entitled “Devotions”. Bruce Snider is a contemporary poet from rural Indiana whose writing often revolves around the queer pastoral, everyday life, and absence and loss. “Devotions” is a moving sonnet crown about a gay couple struggling to adopt a child, and I particularly love how narrative-driven it is.
Here is an excerpt of “Devotions” by Bruce Snider:
1. Nothing passes, Lord, but what you allow.
Mornings the milky sap on my knuckles
burns. Last night the piglets fought then suckled
in the barn. Still no word. Our one cow
grazes but won’t come in. The pamphlets say:
Patience is required. I say, let’s try again
but John blames the state, the neighbors, the way
we wrote our bios, filling out the forms.
Across the road our neighbor starts his truck
while God, feather by feather, downs a wren —
swollen, its black eyes shiny, small dark tongue.
In the drainpipe, something slithers wet and stuck.
A race runner? A ground skink shedding skin?
Lizards, John tells me, can’t bear live young.
2. John tells me: lizards can’t bear live young.
Another of God’s mysteries: hard rain
muddying the corn. The kind woman
at the agency said, it takes longer for certain
types of couples. Trash smoke rises like prayer,
the neighbor burning insulation from his shed.
He shows his son how to bind fence where
a crippled chicken pecks at scattered feed.
They talk, lean close. Rusted toys fill
the side yard: old trucks, a bicycle tire,
a punctured red bucket now a sieve.
In the back acre, ram mounts ewe, the whole
field coupling late spring. When John walks by,
I kiss him. Most days we keep to ourselves.
3. I kiss him most days. We keep to ourselves
by the roadside. Two greasy boxes; a sign:
FREE. We take the runt, her warm body beside
us in the truck, milk-breathed and unwormed.
I imagine her shuddering out of the womb, wet
ground covered with slime. Strange to think
of her moving inside some animal’s gut,
the source of each day’s warm alien kick.
At home John makes her a bed from old
field shirts, a soap and vinegar bath for fleas
while in my lap she chews my hand and shivers.
I brush her fuzzy scruff, the too-large head.
She nips at my finger that holds a piece of cheese,
her wet tongue asking what a man can mother.
Thank you so much for listening! I hope you enjoy the rest of our special broadcast.
For WNUR News, I’m Iliana Demas.
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