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Book details
  • Genre:POETRY
  • SubGenre:American / General
  • Language:English
  • Series title:The Wild Sonnets
  • Series Number:5
  • Pages:112
  • Paperback ISBN:9781667884462

The Wild Sonnets: Volume V (401-500)

by Nicholas Korn

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Overview

The latest volume in the Wild Sonnets collection (for 2023). These 100 poems rhapsodize on how to overcome doubt, make love stay, realize one's purpose and ambition, live fully in the face of mortality and see the greatness in everything and everyone around us – and, of course, finally in ourselves.

Description

NOTES ON THE WILD SONNETS | FROM NICHOLAS KORN 

Each of these books is like an art gallery – and you move from poem to poem the same way your would move from painting to painting (or sculpture, for that matter) at an exhibit.
 
I don't create the Wild Sonnets as messages – I create them as heightened experiences that refer or connect to different meanings that life presents us in its random and various ways.
 
I want these poems to combine an urgency of expression with a mastery of expression. I see the art of poetry not as the delivery of thoughts and feelings, but the elevation of thoughts and feelings to be simultaneously emotive, imaginative – and even physical and visceral – by a rich and dynamic use of language.
 
For me, poetry is the opposite of cliche. And that means cliche phrasing and cliche ideas. It's about creating an experience for the reader or listener, that is both unique and shared.
 
I want each Wild Sonnet to bring readers to a higher level of thinking and a deeper level of feeling – at the same time. 
 
This is my obligation to both the art and the audience.

Reviews for The Wild Sonnets: Volume V (401-500)

Everything is aerial, and has its element of awe
Nicholas Korn is a poet of incredible energy and verve--of process and vision. His Wild Sonnets may be the longest sonnet sequence ever written. It's truly bewildering in its scope, and still growing before our eyes. But these poems are also wild with content--dailiness, observation, philosophical insights, and a stunning sense of purpose. The language is lush and Korn's approach is reverential toward the history and elegance of the form, while also keeping its eyes and ears in/on the 21st Century. As a sonneteer, Korn exists in the future-past or the past-future, but in any case he has a foot in both worlds, like Gregory Corso or Guillaume Apollinaire. Certainly the spirit is bardic here. Korn knows that poetry sings! But it also flies and blows around and stumbles a bit when it drinks. I can't wait to see how it continues to develop!

– Matt Hart | Head of Writing Program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati

Great book, and impressive creative project
This book is part of an ongoing writing project. One of the most impressive and ambitious creative endeavors I know of. These sonnets talk about life, love, time, and everything we are. It is interesting how the author has kept and changed the sonnet form. They are wild and yet delicate, like a wild flower. Pick a book, then pick a sonnet. You will not regret it.
– Manuel Iris | Poet Laureate of Cincinnati, Emeritus

Touching, beautiful and so on point!
Nicholas Korn's Wild Sonnets resonate the stuff of our lives. They will touch you and speak to you in the way that life speaks to you. This is a must read. And if you haven't done so, check out his YouTube readings of these poems.
– Alissa S.


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. Mr. Korn has since published a new volume of 100 Wild Sonnets every year.

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 the Wild Sonnets, visit www.wildsonnets.com.

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