Kooser’s Column 165 features a Robert Bly sonnet replica, “Seeing the Eclipse in Maine.”
Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry
While serving as the U. S. Poet Laureate 2004 to 2006, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser launched his series of weekly columns called American Life in Poetry. These columns are offered free to newspapers to dramatize the value and just plain fun of poetry and to demonstrate how poetry enhances life in America.
Kooser’s Commentary
Kooser introduces the poem: "In ‘The Moose,’ a poem much too long to print here, the late Elizabeth Bishop was able to show a community being created from a group of strangers on a bus who come in contact with a moose on the highway. They watch it together and become one. Here Robert Bly of Minnesota assembles a similar community, around an eclipse. Notice how the experience happens to ‘we,’ the group, not just to ‘me,’ the poet.”
The Poem
This poem is an American (or innovative) sonnet. It has no traditional rime scheme nor meter. It is essentially prose in sonnet form; nevertheless, it proffers three quatrains and a couplet as it tries to imitate the Elizabethan sonnet stanzaic form. Shakespeare, however, will get no competition from this versifier.
Here is the first quatrain of “Seeing the Eclipse in Maine”:
It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.
Please visit American Life in Poetry for the rest of this verse Column 165.
