No one has any illusions about this being art.
Poetry doesn’t work like that anymore.
She went on to say that poetry is elementary and that poetry isn’t rigorous.
I would like to learn astrology and use it to track the economy and the stock market trends.
Zagging is a new form of chilling.
Don’t judge.
It’s what they call that where the punches slide off.
The truth is I don’t like having to write this.
When one has finally captured one’s desire and found it horrible, real living can
commence.
Note on the Text
These 555 sonnets are made with found lines and precise measures, a database and text analytic software. I crunched Shakespeare’s sonnets for word, syllable and character averages, and these are my new measures. The lines’ oddities are their own, the arrangement is mine. After the text analytics and data entry, many ways of assembling are found. I hold to the turn (when I think of it) and that sonnets are poems of a certain size, but little more. Something in excess of the lines passes through, it’s that I’m chasing.
John Lowther’s work appears in the anthologies The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (University of Alabama Press, 2003), and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems (Negative Capability Press, 2015). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young, is forthcoming from Lavender Ink. His website: http://lowtherpoet.wordpress.com.
