ABOUT THIS BOOK
Although The Wild Sonnets series navigates a wide range of thoughts and feelings about what it means to be human, this seventh volume follows a thematic thread on how we arrive at knowledge and how we leverage it. The poems touch on such pathways to knowing as learning by experience, reflection, writing, reading, memory, intuition and even prediction and prophesy.
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.
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.