Shakespeare's 99th

My favorite Shakespeare sonnet is #99. Not coincidentally, this is the one most derided by critics. Why, you ask? Because it's rough, even clunky. Because it has fifteen lines (some scholars have noted that other fifteen line sonnets exist, but this is the only one of Shakespeare's 154 to stray from the standard fourteen lines). Because the imagery is so very plain compared to most of the other sonnets.

But if you're trying to read through the sonnets in one go, or even over the course of two or three days, Sonnet 99 is a breath of fresh air. It's not perfectly crafted, every possibility thought out four steps ahead. It is, no matter its faults, different, and that is absolutely necessary. I only wish it came earlier in the sequence.

This isn't so much in praise of imperfection as it is of difference in texture. I would praise imperfection, but that could unfortunately lead to some of the art I saw last Friday in downtown Portsmouth. There were three galleries we visited with wonderful art. But in one of them, even the mistakes appeared calculated. Which meant that in pieces of art that were utterly controlled, even the errors were controlled, which meant there was no tonal shift, just the appearance of one.

One reason I love open mics is because of the shift in texture over the course of the evening. Wednesday night at the Cantab was wonderful. The open mic didn't have quite the variety one sees at a good Mic Check, but I also grant that even Mic Check doesn't always have that variety. That's the nature of an open mic. But there was an old man, perhaps with Parkinson's, acting out the first scene of his one act play (I'm not sure any of us could make sense of it). There were first-timers talking about love and hate and the usual, and sometimes managing to spark their language from what could be burned-out materials. There were regulars who did free verse, sonnets, LangPo, and more. There were poets responding, through poetry, to other poets' works. And at no point during the open mic did everybody sound like everybody else. Sure, there was overlap, but we got about 2 1/2 hours of widely varying material.

Then came Shira Erlichman, who doesn't sound quite like anybody else. At some point I should do a blog post just on her work. Seriously. She's got a successful style and rightfully so, but she understands, as a feature, how to vary her poems such that the texture shifts. Serious to funny, lyric to narrative, abstract metaphors to concrete details. She never gets so entrenched in her own "voice" that it becomes background noise.

Unfortunately, that's what happened for much of the slam. I'm not saying this as sour grapes (I got my ass handed to me - but I generally do in slams). Rather, the poets who competed and made it to successive rounds sounded like slight variations on themselves in those successive rounds. The guy who won absolutely should have won, though the woman he knocked out in the second round was pretty good. But even he found a voice/style that made the judges like him, and he kept doing that thing. I realize that's part of the game of slam, to find a winning strategy. But as someone who still holds out hope that there is artistic value in the very process of slamming, I want to see more people take risks in the slam itself. Once you've won the audience's favor, see what you can do with it. Risk that favor such that you give the audience something they were not expecting.

On a similar note, that is, texture, I've been reading Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse by Darcie Dennigan lately. It's the latest winner in the Poets Out Loud series. My friend Karin Gottshall is a previous winner. I find that I can read Karin's book Crocus in one day, not because the language is easier (though it is), but because the book is more textured. The words never become so consistent that they fade to page. This isn't to knock Corinna - I am blown away by various poems so far and immediately purchased the book upon reading a few in the bookstore. But it's not the kind of book I can read more than two or three poems at a time. Am I just expecting the wrong thing from it? Is it wrong to want a sore thumb, a scratched coin, an error in the middle of the book?