Word: sonnet
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Like the subject of Shakespeare's sonnet, Jimmy Carter sits, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch, in his small private study off the Oval Office, listening to classical music and mulling over Government reports-and his future. He is making few domestic policy decisions in these waning days of his Administration, although last week he did announce plans to veto a $9.1 billion appropriations bill because the measure included a controversial provision, with troubling civil rights implications, that would bar the Justice Department from seeking court-ordered busing to desegregate schools. When enough House members sided...
...campaign might be more fun, and certainly more preposterous, with a ceremonial conversion into verse. What if Americans followed the British example, if they had a laureate to bang out clerihews and odes-a little something to mark a President's ten-point jump in the polls, a sonnet for renomination...
...Although the elements change as swiftly as the shapes of clouds, the weathercaster's three-to-four-minute performance is, in its discipline, as rigid as a sonnet or a haiku. The ritual be gins with the anchorman passing the baton with an oafishly merry transition line like: "Well, buddy, you sure did it to us yesterday, didn't you?" The weatherman casts his eyes downward with a chastened chuckle, accepting responsibility and thereby obscurely associating himself with nature's Higher Authorities...
Heaney always digs roots in his ongoing field work, and the pinnacle of his efforts comes in his Glanmore sonnet sequence. (Glanmore was the author's home for four years after he left Belfast.) These poems must be considered the centerpiece of Field Work, and are wonderfully successful in their fusion of reach and reticence. In them, Heaney also demonstrates that versification is not extinct. He chisels rhymes out of unlikely word combinations, and simultaneously knows when to interrupt his alliteration with parenthetical asides...
...actors started to carry their share of the weight of heightened political and social reality. "I think it is the most hopeful business of movies to find the perfect people rather than the perfect artists," wrote James Agee in a review of National Velvet that was like a prose sonnet to the young Elizabeth Taylor...