BETSY WHEELER
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Non-Sonnet for the Phrase “But I
believe.”
Non-Sonnet for Oranges in Winter
& Pears, Pears, Pears
Non-Sonnet With
Its Hind Leg Limping
Non-Sonnet for Free Speech Zones
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The sonnet is a basic way of thinking
poetically. A great sonnet formalizes the
inevitability of a logical arrival that is one of the great satisfactions of
poetry, while preserving negative capability, that mysterious quality named by
the greatest practitioner of the sonnet in the 19 th
century. The most important moment in the sonnet is the turn after
the octet: the moment of the argument that slingshots
us from first looking into Chapman’s Homer to standing silent on a peak in
What is Betsy Wheeler’s original form, the
non-sonnet? The feedback-chambery internal rhyme of the very phrase makes an
argument that lyricism can contain non-sense and great thinking at once. Betsy Wheeler’s poems argue that only by
penetrating fully into and through the ordinary sense of words will we get to a
crucial emotional event heretofore only sensed in its outlines.
Sheer attention is at first the subject of
“Non-Sonnet for the Phrase ‘But I believe’.”
Time is unstable, the Basil Dove (a rare
collector’s stamp) comes alive in the mail after being “accidentally licked and
posted,” autumn is shimmering away.
Why? At the run-up to the turn,
the voice changes, speeds up, starts situating itself with an awesome lyric
confidence: “To the waitress I said wondermeat
meaning/ wonderment . Meaning I wonder where you are, and/ how you
spend your wooden nickels.” Individual line breaks catapult us from one
thought to the next. The poem stays
free as it becomes more formal. In the
tradition of the true sonnet, this poem works itself into understanding loss of
love through force of intellect and appreciation for the possibility of
words.
Other poems have the great confidence, the
exhilarating mixture of wild surmise and contemporary diction (“Last night,
while sleeping, I bent everything I own/ in half – woke up sandwiched in my bed
and tried/ to read the alarm clock’s pile of glowing language.”), and the
relentless attention of a talented, electric and generous poetic mind. I love the way they think.
--Matthew
Zapruder
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NON-SONNET
FOR THE PHRASE “BUT I BELIEVE.”
This afternoon
slowly flaking away in sheaths.
accidentally licked and posted,
the Basil Dove
heckling the rest of the
postal pouch.
Leaves faking
change and then the guard.
To the waitress I said wondermeat
meaning
wonderment. Meaning I wonder where you are, and
how you spend your
wooden nickels. Every cup
of coffee after
compared to how much I miss
you. Your
gleeful,
airless laugh. Your lashes lashing. Languishing.
Pinioned stars say I am both born and dying
in love’s
mystery. Penelope weaving and unweaving
her weaving. I say I do not believe. I do not believe.
NON-SONNET
FOR A DRYING MOON
Last night, while sleeping, I bent
everything I own
in half—woke up
sandwiched in my bed and tried
to read the alarm
clock’s pile of glowing language.
What would Martha do to a room bent all in
half?
She’s unavailable for comment now, it’s
true,
but do you, also you,
tell the truth only half of the time?
In the middle of every week and once on
Sunday,
gardeners work over the
entirety of my neighbor’s back yard.
It’s pretty loud. They have a hot tub that they never use.
I would use it. I could use a lot of things. I could use,
for instance, the
piece of paper that notates
how many times today
you thought of me.
I’ve been sitting in my cardboard office
all day. You don’t know
the half of it. And now the late afternoon light in all its warmly
cantankerous glow. I almost forgot to mention the leaves,
glazed as they are now
with tangerine. Can you see them?
COMPARTMENT
FOR HOMECOMING
Her moon is wrung.
Red halo, lipstick kiss
of cherry fire Oh—
it’s too too bright to see
with only this light.
She had been swimming.
No—dripping, she came
from the marsh, hair
spliced
with whistling
reeds. Backlit
shadows in the
upper-right-hand
corner of her mind; hands
building
a rabbit, a fist, a
five. They sign:
A ruin, this swim was. A
ruin.
Did you see the scalded shadows,
black swans not made for
mating?
It’s a playback bird choir on chirp
repeat.
Been everywhere
now. Felt it in the skin.
ELEGY
For all the magistrates who poke at our
paneled walls.
For every discarded
weapon, every necklace and every ring.
For every hunger
and the riot to fulfill.
For the terrifying
sleep. She is dead.
A spider ascends and the moon is brown like
March.
This morning he’s woven over the shrubs,
veils of silk
lifting like a fog—we
can’t see the leaves or what inner
worlds the matter needs
to speak to.
A woman is dead in a shallow—in the
shadows, a woman is dead.
That grave, not a grave, where she lays she
is dead. Pieces of earth flag
heaven to heaven. Hush-hush, and a hush—the
dew. A woman has died.
If we breathe droplets over the tray of
lace
we could—could
we?—find his wise poison.
A woman is dead. Little fish, little fish dead with her too.
For every floating candle, every phone call
never coming--
for every blissful,
splitting orgasm we covet and look toward,
our faces are so open
to little deaths,
little death.
For every fire that I have fired, and I
have, I cannot sleep between.
For I am curt and
you are killed. For we
are beaten.
And for you, little dust mote floating, you
are the lightest
shroud to creep over, and
yes, between, our dark secrets.
SIREN
The attic window is wearing a lacy
day-shroud.
Come quickly, it says, something
harrowing scampers
behind my wide white
draping. How badly
do you want to look?
I think badly.
Given the patience I know it takes to slide
slowly over smooth, white
bones toward
bee-stung lips, I’m inclined
to say you’ll
get right down to
scuttling on over there.
But if I call you nasty dreamer will
you still come
back to play? What if I
ruin all simple dreams
in one fell
swoop? Tell you that any man who goes
peeping into night-dreams
will surely find his
woman is a wolf: her
dressing gown
an eyelet veil, her
eyes beneath it stoked.
NON-SONNET
FOR
Waking to
its eyes glazed-over
while softly it hums Silver
Bells, Silver Bells, and already I
cradle
tomorrow in my mouth. All along
cloth speakers ring O
Come, O Come,
O Come all Ye until nightfall
finally comes.
I’m still waiting for a power chord, a
Russian bard,
the triumphant return
of lost marbles. Shooters. Cat’s-eyes.
Cat’s-eyes: the deepest sphere to look to,
hardest
to look at, they look
back at you, too true, saying
it was always you you you. And what now to do.
Bend down to faithful. Sidle over to soon.
Believe in the fuss that could spell the
bell-ringer.
Believe in a
NON-SONNET
WITH ITS HIND LEG LIMPING
Not last night but the night before, bardic
double-dutch skipped up to
high-stakes.
Faster, Faster! Muster the rubber soles!
Tournament for pole position! What’s
on the line needs toughening
anyway.
Who sluiced an entrance today while windy
windy weather we all
jumped together?
Climb down my rain barrel into the cellar
door,
and we’ll be: the
mackerel poor, the nevermore.
And dear Lenore!
Where is our punchy Laureate, these days?
Twee! Twee!
Cue up the beat-box; You walk and I’ll
scroll.
NON-SONNET
FOR FREE SPEECH ZONES
The wire rabbit in the looking-glass past
has forgotten his
stuttering sculptor.
One side of his visage is bare of whiskers,
thus he orbits the
realm of abstraction
and surrealist
interpretation. You want
to give him
food. I want to bend his ear
toward me and spout my
theory on the missing
bones of Paleo-Indian
I. No one listens
to the hairy bones of
the catfish. I say they
were abducted. Soon the rabbit’s barbed
cohort will arrive and
they will bind themselves
as fences made for
catching foxes. Smart little rabbit,
how do you keep from
rusting in the rain?
Wafting my hand around your borders, I test
the pickled air.
I see the tools of penning and believe you
are no cage.