Word: sonnets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Facts of Life sounds more like truth than filmdom. Here is my September 1960 vintage sonnet, "Were I His Mistress...
...which he first struck the tone of most modern Anglo-American poetry - spare, objective, unornamented, elliptic. Dante, the medieval troubadours, and his pet hate-love Whitman had been his tutors, but he had done the homework of craftsmanship. (In one undergraduate year he had written a sonnet a day.) Though stripped for action, many of Pound's lines still retained the lilt of romance. In An Immorality, he wrote...
...anthill with a sticky pink tongue almost two feet long ; an immense gorilla that one moment crashes through canebrake like an express train, and the next sits placidly sucking a palm stalk ; a vast herd of zebras plunging, as they plunge in Roy Campbell's vivid sonnet, "Barred with electric tremors through the grass/ Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre...
...tonight!" Through a loudspeaker a voice called, "Monsieur Bejart is wanted at the concierge's!" When things quieted down, Puck emerged from a wicker basket, wearing a pair of baby-blue wings, and three saucy minxes (Titania, Hermia. Helena) bumped and ground their way across the stage. In Sonnet for Sister Kate, an untamed shrew in an orange wig and a southof-the-navel decollete shimmied front and center, then disappeared into the wings, where she was received by the chatter of an offstage machine gun. In Lady Mac, a racy temptress in slinky black writhed atop the piano...
Doing a stage version of E. M. Forster's novel, A Passage to India, is a little like trying to rewrite the Bhagavad-Gita as a sonnet. In the 36 years since its publication, one of the 20th century's great novels has again and again mocked the attempts of adapters; its widespread profusion of scenes and its intricate undertones to a clash of cultures long eluded the stage. Last week in Oxford, the professional Oxford Playhouse proved that the job had at last been done, and successfully. The adapter, in her first try at drama: Santha Rama...