To the Anonymous Collector Who Paid $10,000 for a Pelvic X-Ray of Marilyn Monroe

To read this poem, head over to James Maynard’s Substack, And Now, A Sonnet. 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.

To the Anonymous Collector Who Paid $10,000 For A Pelvic X-Ray of Marilyn Monroe | X.P. Callahan

CRAFT NOTE: “To the Anonymous Collector” has fourteen lines, like a traditional sonnet, but it doesn’t have the regular end-rhyme scheme of older sonnets, which is still seen in many contemporary sonnets.

The poem follows a strictly syllabic scheme, alternating lines of nine and seven syllables, 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 “To the Anonymous Collector,” a nontraditional sonnet with features seen in other modern American sonnets. I performed it last November for the One Full Wit Reading Series hosted by Amanda Krupman and Tishon Woolcock at Visible Voice Books in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland.

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.