I Thought They'd Be Around Forever

Can a dated literary form—the sonnet—resonate with today's readers, as the subtitle "Sonnets for Our Time" suggests? Love…won and lost, is the sonnet's mainstay, if not its reason for being. But the sonnets in I Thought They'd Be Around Forever and the included companion volume, None So Strange As Self, besides the sonnet's mainstay, cover other topics, not identified with a form fixed in love's literary embrace: the environment, politics, human foibles, loss, race, greed, sex, death, grief, and aging.

Can a dated literary form—the sonnet—resonate with today's readers, as the subtitle "Sonnets for Our Time" suggests? Love…won and lost, is the sonnet's mainstay, if not its reason for being. But the sonnets in I Thought They'd Be Around Forever and the included companion volume, None So Strange As Self, besides the sonnet's mainstay, cover other topics, not identified with a form fixed in love's literary embrace: the environment, politics, human foibles, loss, race, greed, sex, death, grief, and aging. The challenge and beauty of the sonnet is to say what it has to say in fourteen lines of ten syllables each that informs the heart, as a well as the mind. And what greater challenge than to touch both when addressing the existential crises of our times: climate disruption and species extinction? The eponymous sonnet, I Thought They'd Be Around Forever, rises to the occasion. The Book of Koch bin Moloch, a fictitious ancient text comprising twenty-two satirical sonnets that deal with wealth inequality, is included in this book.

James A. Baumgard was born and raised in Chicago, IL. From the monotonous mid-west, he moved to mountainous Boulder, CO., where he spent a winter making and selling sheepskin coats. In a mad rush for more adventure, came spring, he headed further west, to San Francisco, alas, too late to enjoy the "summer of love." Still, he loved the City by the Bay well enough to sojourn there for eighteen years; during which he wrote computer programs to support his photography business. When family beckoned, he upped stakes and southward moved to Corona, CA., where he presently lives and writes.