Well, a more jocose note to conclude on is this poem--
a lighter less serious poem I guess.
But you all know what sonnet diction is.
It's that phony kind of diction bad poets
fall into when they try to write sonnets.
Full of poeticisms.
And this is why it seems to young writers today
most sonnets are pretty awful or good enough
for E E Cummings, Dylan Thomas maybe.
But most young writers are not going to do sonnets
because they're awful.
Most are awful, so is most free verse awful.
Most all poetry is awful.
Most.
But I realized that if there's such a thing as sonnet diction,
there are also a lot of words which have never
appeared in sonnets before.
And I thought it might--
try to find-- might be fun to try to collect some of these
and write a sonnet using a whole lot of words that didn't quite
know where they were and had never been in sonnets before.
I mean, words like skedaddle.
You don't find that in sonnets.
Or a word like bamboozle, at least you don't find it much.
Well, I got quite a collection of these
and then I went through the dictionary
to get enough to write the sonnet.
And it turned out to be about the West,
about a bad guy who stole the good wife girl and also
his money and ran off with it.
And then I realized--
the muse told me that this is the story of Helen of Troy.
That too was a frontier incident in history.
A man ran off--
it was.
A man ran off with a woman and that's
how the Trojan War started.
So I called this Agamemnon Before Troy.
This is what-- in T S Eliot we might
call juxtaposing present and past or something like that.
Agamemnon Before Troy, and I found a quotation
from the German historian Ranke--
er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.
Which is something like he'll show exactly--
he'll show how exactly it happened.
The historian he's talking about.
And then I put these words together
like this, "A traipsing from a shindig guy unsettles.
Three floozies and a blather in buckaroo
wangled the whole caboodle and skedaddles.
You in cahoots with that shebang skidoo.
Saying if you're the critters I suspicion you varmint
saying they're going to have foot far.
Valsartan galoot since filing for conniptions.
Well, there's a parcel--
there's a posse hustling here and they're
fixing to put the kibosh on shenanigans
by land and scalawags and the colobus.
Horns waggled, such palaver with bamboozle and coyotes
gets my dander up.
Vamoose, vamoose.
Toting spandilicks and acuity to.
Their itching for a wang, dang, howdy, do.
And that's how the Trojan War started.
Thank you very much.