The Wild Sonnets: Volume II (101-200)

Second Edition

by Nicholas Korn

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Overview

The second book of 100 Wild Sonnets was a strange touchstone for me. Having finished the first collection, I had the intense desire to continue the work of adding new poems to the sequence, while having to admit that the lines were beginning to shift into more personal and fluid statements. The echoes of classicism still appear at times – there are poems on Icarus and Odysseus here, which are among my favorites. But the sensibility in this volume is a little more relaxed. One important milestone appears in these pages: Wild Sonnet #154, dedicated to William Shakespeare who wrote 154 poems in his immortal book of sonnets.

Description

About The Wild Sonnets
The Wild Sonnet format follows the traditional length of fourteen lines, but divides the poem into two stanzas of seven lines, each closing with a rhyming couplet. The five preceding lines are a rambling iambic, sometimes pent up in a pentameter and sometimes not. Occasionally, there are internal rhymes to give the work an echo both to the tradition of the form and to the thoughts within poem.

The feeling of each Wild Sonnet is meant to sound something like a soliloquy – as if it were an utterance coming just after a striking thought or situation. There is a stream-of-conscious sense to the flow of each stanza, a fretwork of association that circles back upon itself. The transition from the first to second stanza is meant to be bit of a break, a moving forward from the initial idea in an unexpected direction.

The structure and sensibility of The Wild Sonnets are influenced by great poets of the past, most notably: William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Donne.

About the author

Nicholas Korn is a poet, playwright, filmmaker and composer. The first volume of Wild Sonnets was published in June 2018, with the second following in October 2019. His stage play, Delirium's Daughters, was featured Off-Broadway in 2015, and his film, Revel's Rivals, won the award for Best Animated Feature at the 2012 Louisville International Festival of Film. In the early aughts, he founded and ran Stage First Cincinnati – a theater company dedicated to the ancient Greeks, Moliere and the occasional Shakespeare. As an artist, he combines classicism with a curiosity for all things digital – honoring equally the tradition and the trend. He lives in the Greater Cincinnati area. For more on current poems and projects, visit nicholaskorn.com.