Finding the Form With Matthew King

I remember the first time I identified a poem as an irregular sonnet: it was Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”, which was in an anthology we used in one of my highschool English classes. I don’t know why I thought it was a sonnet; I just remember insisting that it was. Now, having more experience of the appearance of these things, when I see a poem with that almost-square look on a third of the page or so, the first thing I do is count the lines–fifteen, it turns out, in the Frost poem; close enough. A regular five feet per line, too, unrhymed, but not the familiar Frostian blank verse: a trochee, a dactyl, then three more trochees, eleven syllables per line, like clockwork. (I can’t stop counting on my fingers as I re-read what I’ve written here.) And a turn announces itself, too, but soon, as the seventh line begins, emphatically: Once.

I used to say it was an arbitrary life-goal of mine to write as many sonnets as Shakespeare. Some poems are easier to count toward that than others. Should I count “Yes, I Kicked a Groundhog in the Butt Once”? Arguably it’s basically a blank-verse sonnet, but its feet are running all over the place, maybe befitting such a rambling little yarn (which turns one way, then another)–truth be told, it’s really more decasyllabic than pentametric. It got to be that way because it was always going to start with “I kicked a groundhog in the butt once”, which needed just a little affirmation to work itself up into a nice line of pentameter. From there, the rest of the story (which is admittedly a half-imagined mash-up–the lady calling the SPCA is only a personification of my own superego, and the guy with the pellet gun was, in real life, talking about chipmunks) told itself, fortuitously enough, in thirteen more just-about-ten-syllable chunks–and there I had it, that respectable sonnet-esque look. It ends with a rhyming couplet, but as a coda to its fourteen-line body, the moral of the story, signalling that it’s more comment than content by separating itself and dropping a syllable in each sing-songy, just-so line.