For the last few months of proofing my poetry manuscript I have been mulling over the idea of abandoning the sonnet form as my core form for poetry creation. During the composition of my short series, The Orange Seed, I experimented with different shapes and invented a few rhyming schemes, creating a quintet, quintet, quatrain structure that I enjoyed, even though it made the mathematics of rhyme scheme even more restricting than before. I was also constantly plagued by the feeling that if such a bastardisation of the standard norm of the genre was such a good idea then the odds were that someone would have produced it sometime within the last four hundred years. I checked and it doesn’t look (on the surface at least) that anyone had. The main reason for this is probably that such a stretch from the origins probably cripples the very definition of the sonnet as a word and, definitely as a poem: it is no longer a sonnet.
I have now accepted that I have to explore other avenues of expression and experience the freedoms that accompany less constricting poetry, albeit hopefully avoiding the disease that is free blank verse.
In an attempt to finish this small chapter of my writing with something of note I decided to pen a sonnet for my father-in-law and friend, Don Robertson Cole, who died on May 26th in Edinburgh. Don had lived with cancer for over five years and although I only knew him personally for just under one year, I honestly feel that my memories of him outspan that period tenfold. The spark of his creativity seemed to jump from him and he told me that he would wake up with a poem, almost complete, in his head. I was fascinated by his blog and our conversation regarding literature, composition and life, and immediately recognized the wealth that lay within him. He took an interest in my writing too and we formed a short (but significant to me) epistolary relationship between our blogs. I remember the first time I read his poem, Chimes, and felt compelled to write my comments immediately. I could have written far more that day but it seemed somehow intrusive to delve any further into the intricacies of his relationship with Anne that rose from the screen like melodies. That particular poem was one of two that were read at the celebration of Don’s life that we all attended six days after his death, and one that I will carry with me throughout the rest of my writing. In our short relationship Don taught me, without knowing or wishing too, that my work was too convoluted and that the simple tunes and rhythmic patterns that ran through his lyrics and poems were far more accessible because of the simplistic value and beauty within. Don would have never counted (at least I don’t think he would have) how many conjunctions fastened his adjectives and nouns and if his word choices repeated themselves. He just wanted to convey his feelings: something he conjured in visual art as well as letters. The very diction of his work had the power to scan his life through subject and dialect and his memory of childhood, parenthood and every other hood that the world labelled around him was as crisp as the next, always managing to project the old horse of his recollection into his life today, in more ways than one; always steadfast in his own opinions whether or not they collided with those of his family and his upbringing.
Lastly, I would like to make a short comment about the work he produced that addressed his illness. He quoted an old friend of his by saying, ‘Do not look at me with coffins in your eyes.’ Such a sentiment sits perfectly with the cancer crabs dancing on the beach above his bed in an awareness that seemed, to me, to state a point, his point, about his approach to cancer and to life. His daughter, my wife, told me that she knew he was frightened, and I know that such an idea has affected her enormously. This is empathy and sympathy of love: a love encapsulated within a family such as the Coles. This, itself, is poetry. I cannot imagine anyone ever disliking Don Cole, and I honestly mean that. There is no way I could ever have learned enough from the man, no matter how much time we had been afforded to write and comment. I do not think that a more unique individual ever crossed my path or at least I would have to stretch to recollect. I hope that this passage’s existence or anything contained within does not offend anyone, especially his family and friends, and it will be swiftly removed if it has.
This is my final sonnet; my sonnet for Don Cole. I named it, The Lighthouse, because to me, he was a Lighthouse. He seemed tall, no matter how sick he felt on any particular day. He never believed there was much in the sky above him with the exception of the birds and the clouds but he, to me, had an emanating glow, a rotational glow that did not glimmer when his back was to you but continued to shine in his humour, his acceptance and his voice. That glow is still apparent in his memory, his writing, his wife and children, and his painting.
BMC 2012
The Lighthouse
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
Dylan Thomas
The lighthouse towers to nowhere yet the glow,
The rageless beam, rotates. The pain that crowns
Your life in Art pulsates our evermore.
I saw that pain in droplets on your brow.
For I am but a selfish man, my throat
Line swells for me, what I have lost in you:
Preceptorship that bussed it west and true
On halting-tram-lined-brain-swirls that we wrote.
If endlessness was just, was simple, life
Would mirror death, conjoined and pasted smooth.
But endlessness is nowhere in our psyche
Of sight, our light for life in plaster proves.
For I am but a selfish man, I know,
And no more will your vision ebb my flow.
barrymillercole 