In Which Carmen Hearts Petrarchan Sonnets Like Woah

I was in poetry class on Wednesday, and we were listening to several of my classmates present what they'd written for the day. About halfway through, my professor raised his hand to cut off whoever was speaking and said, "No more rhyming. You guys are rhyming, and it's killing your poems. You have no idea about how to work a rhythm into your rhyme--rhyme is only a part of rhythm. So until one of you can show me that you've mastered at least one kind of rhythm that makes sense, you're not rhyming for this class." (Have I mentioned how much I love the fact that my professor never neglects to get straight to the point?)

But anyway, I took this to be a challenge to demonstrate understanding of rhythm--how better to show it than to write something in iambic pentameter? Namely, a sonnet?

So I did some research on the form, read about four million of Shakespeare's, and decided I didn't like his rhyme scheme. Digging a little further into the variations on the sonnet, I discovered the Petrarchan Sonnet, a form with an octet that rhymes ABBAABBA followed by a sextet that rhymes XYZXYZ. I'd found my calling.

Of course, that was all way before I discovered just how much of a pain sonnets are to write. I mean, they look all nice and innocent, sitting there with their fourteen lines and little declarations of love. But woah are they hard to write if you really want to get honest iambs without any of those little cheating apostrophes and fake accents. I sat down to write the first one, a sort of experiment, and ended up concentrating on it so hard that almost two and a half hours passed before I reemerged into reality. It ended up fairly well for a first effort, but I wasn't satisfied with it, so I ate a handful of Wheat Thins and sat down for another long session of gritting my teeth and rearranging accents. The result, in a rough-draft form, with an entirely sub-par fourth line:

Astonishingly Witty Title to be Inserted Here

I’ve never been a poet true to heart;
My words too often falter, flag, and fail.
I try to sing my love to no avail:
My verses are not erudite or smart.
And often, when I’ve found the nerve to start,
My praise falls flat, my interest starts to tail
As I’m not Shakespeare; faced with him I pale
And my poor phrases cannot count as art.

But yet I always manage to enjoy
Another round with paper, pen, and ink
Resulting in another lot of fluff.
I give you sonnets brimming with my joy
(I cannot fathom why--what you must think!)
But then we kiss, and that’s excuse enough.

Take that, professor!

In Which Carmen Takes Big 30 Test, With Rather Anticipated Results

( Big 30 Test, Gakked from teaghlach )

In Which Carmen Gripes About Parental Interference

I can't think straight. Like, literally, every time I sit down to write or draw or even just read, I end up doodling or tapping my fingers for about five seconds before getting up to do something else. I annoy myself, so I know I must be annoying my family and my friends. And the thing of it is, I know why I'm doing it. It's my default stress reaction, which I got under control this November when I had about a million things a month to get done, but which is now back full force with my parents breathing down my neck about money.

I think that this time it's the Trachtenberg Scholarship I'm scared of. It's this wonderful package for DC public school graduates--it includes tuition, room and board, living expenses...to go to GW. And the way I stand now, as valedictorian of my school, I stand a very good chance of receiving it. There's only one problem, though.

I really really really don't want to go to GW.

So I'm not going to go there. And I shouldn't even have applied, because even though I told my parents explicitly that they were not to pressure me to take the Trachtenberg, they're doing it anyway. At the time, however, GW was my safety--a place I knew, a place I could get a free ride, a place that I'd be comfortable with even if I, say, got hit by a bus tomorrow and ended up a paraplegic and couldn't really handle the Midwest. Safety.

Now, Mom and Dad are mentioning the Trachtenberg every other breath. They're living up to their word in not exerting any direct pressure on me, but they're parents--they know the power of the Guilt Trip. Offhandedly, they'll mention how tight the whole Money Situation will be when I'm at college; in the next sentence they'll extol the virtues of living in downtown D.C.; before I've had a chance to escape, they'll have moved on to how I'm going to have to work summers in college to pay for even a little of how much it's going to cost. And then they drop the Trachtenberg Bomb. "We'd get you a nice place in D.C." they say. "We'd never visit."

Except they would visit--incessantly, in fact--and I dislike GW with a passion. I'm not going there. Period. But if they make me feel guilty one more time about turning down the Trachtenberg (and okay, I put myself in the position by applying to GW in the first place but still) I'm going to murder someone.