Sonnets from the C’s
Because it is national poetry month (whatever that means), and because I am just back (and feeling very recharged) from the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication), I decided to create some kind of “academic” “blog” “space.”
Because it is national poetry month (whatever that means), and because my research straddles poetry, poetics, and composition/pedagogy, I decided to compose one sonnet for every session I attended at the C’s.
My procedure/restraints were:
- Use a quote from the presentation as the poem’s title
- Dedicate the poem to one of the panelists
- Limit the poem’s language to words heard either during the session or prior to the session (en route to the session)
- The last two lines of the sonnet should construct some kind of turn or reflection that indicates what I loved about the panel or a specific paper/part of the panel
Here goes…
“in the hideous dropping off of the veil” (Poe)
for Dominique Zino
what does it mean to want nothing more
than tall spires, to experience my sentence
and feel safe in that sort of writhing.
clear, candid, sluggish—this intonation
of glorious astroturf, fractal flesh-
bots with the style and structure
of credo building, a “this i believe”
moment at the foot of a mountain
where consensus constructing is no longer
familiar and bull versus cow commentary
becomes parrot versus frog no longer
“only a metaphor” but a metaphor
in progress, a constellation in utero
ideal because the tangent is learning
Session G.19: Making Metaphor, Discovering Relations
Katherine Sohn (chair), Ruth Josimovich, Georgia Reid, Dominique Zino