For a change of pace . . .

. . . head over to James Maynard’s Substack, And Now, A Sonnet, to read my poem “Apologia,” featured today. While you’re there, take a deep dive into the unique, fantastic sequence of sonnets that James has been working on for almost two years. They are unparalleled in their quirky musicality and idiosyncratic voice.

Apologia | X.P. Callahan

CRAFT NOTE: “Apologia” is a persona poem, written in the voice of an obsessive, judgmental aesthete. The poem has fourteen lines, like the older traditional sonnets, and it has the regular end-rhyme scheme still found in many contemporary sonnets.

But “Apologia” follows a strictly syllabic scheme. It has ten syllables per line, whereas the typical sonnet in English is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of accentual-syllabic meter, or rhythm, in which the poetic line always has five beats but may need more than ten syllables to accommodate the natural stresses heard in English. If you’re listening to a poem written in iambic pentameter, you will notice the rhythm of five beats per line, regardless of the actual number of syllables. But you won’t necessarily hear any consistent rhythm or number of beats per line in a syllabic poem, at least if it’s written in English.

The Petrarchan sonnet, which originally developed in Italy, had fourteen hendecasyllabic lines, or lines of eleven syllables. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English poets began to experiment with the Petrarchan sonnet and gradually replaced its hendecasyllabic lines with lines of iambic pentameter. The Diary Poems, with their eleven hendecasyllabic lines, can be seen as unrhymed, truncated Petrarchan sonnets. In fact, that is the way I see them.¹

Thanks for reading the Diary Poems. I hope you will enjoy “Apologia,” a more traditional sonnet.

1. Poetics in English is a dense, complex field involving multiple technical issues and warring factions. To paraphrase Heidegger, the tinier the stakes, the bloodier the battle.