PAD Day 27: Props to Will S.

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWruMo: (1) Write a poem whose title is a direction, such as "East", "South by Southwest", "Into the Woods", etc., and (2) write a "Shakespeare sonnet remix". As Maureen describes it: "You can pick a line you like and use it as the genesis for a new poem. Or make a “word bank” out of a sonnet, and try to build a new poem using the same words (or mostly the same words) as are in the poem. Or you could try to write a new poem that expresses the same idea as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, like 'hey baby, this poem will make you immortal' (Sonnet XVIII) or 'I’m really bad at saying I love you but maybe if I look at you adoringly, you’ll understand what I mean' (Sonnet XXIII)." I only realized when I was most of the way through my rewrite of Sonnet 18 that it was one of the examples that Maureen cited here. I also realize that there's a lot of mixed vernacular in here - I doubt most millennials, for instance, really talk this way. But oh well, I had fun with it


Sonnet 18

by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Like, Sonnet 18

(props to Will S.)

What's up with you and summer, anyway?

Okay, you're prettier, but not as hot:

You know, the wind will blow the blooms away,

And summer's three months long - that's all it's got.

And man, that sun is brutal in July,

Except when it gets dimmed behind a haze,

And pretty stuff gets tarnished, by and by,

By bad luck or by nature's aging rays.

But babe, to me your summer is forever,

Your foxiness, I think, will never fade,

And when Death comes you'll answer, "Like, whatever,"

'Cuz you live on in verse; you've got it made.

      So long as geezers wheeze and peepers peek,

      So long this poem makes you look on fleek.


The other thing I did for the "Shakespeare remix" was to make a wordbank, based on Sonnet 29 ("When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes..."). I took one word from each line of that sonnet and made it my word bank to create a new sonnet. The fourteen words were fortune, outcast, deaf, curse, rich, possessed, art, enjoy, thoughts, state, lark, earth, sweet, and kings. (I also, more or less coincidentally, used "heaven" and "desire", both of which also appear in the sonnet.) What I came up is a bit of a screed against the "One Percent". (The title satisfies the Poetic Asides prompt):

Toward Heaven

O, all you kings and all you would-be kings,

Who horde your fortunes like you were obsessed,

Deaf to the world, the desperate state of things,

Who on a lark count what you have possessed,

Who enjoy art for its appraisal price,

Who see the earth as something sweet to plunder,

Whose starving masses you don't think of twice,

Now turn your thoughts toward Heaven - do you wonder

how hard it just might be to get you in,

Your avarice no blessing, but a curse?

While being rich itself is not a sin,

Your selfishness made your position worse.

Embrace philanthropy as your desire

Or you'll be outcasts, twisting in the fire.