A year or more ago, I was reading a review of a biography of D. H. Lawrence in The New Yorker and recognized the statement that Lawrence was "in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes"—not in quotation marks in the review—was a tag from Shakespeare, and I ran through my copy of his sonnets to find it. Here it is in its context, "Sonnet 29":
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Something about that first line called to me this morning, and I found the marker already there in my copy of the Sonnets, and found that, in reading it, I experienced what has often struck me about the Shakespearean sonnet in general: the alternating rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with the "ding-ding" of the rhyming couplet at the end, strikes me as being like a tennis match, with the final couplet ringing up the final score.
Whenever such a relentlessly regular and insistent rhyming pattern lodges itself in my mind, which inevitably happens when I read such a poem, it inexorably inflects the form—and often the content—of the poem I write afterwards. The thought about the tennis suggested the content of the following, as well as the form:
When I recall the hours I spent with Dad
playing ping-pong on the basement table,
I think that was the closest bond we had:
"creative tension" is a better label.
We'd smash the ball, or sneak it over, clever,
we'd shift the serve on multiples of five,
but in my life he had the secret lever
to pry and redirect my inner drive.
Like many friends, the job I really wanted
was hypnotizing with my clarinet;
his ideas pierced my mind until they haunted
my days and dreams so I could not forget.
Fifteen years dead, he's lost his grip on me:
where I will go with that, I soon shall see.
I’m usually not very good with a straight, regular rhyme scheme: here I am annoyed by the predictability of the exact rhyme in a precisely regular pattern, but that seems somehow appropriate for the content of the poem. After all, I did once write a poem that reflects what I perceive to be the fatal quality implicit in the rhyming sonnet's structure:
Fata Poetica
Word sounds are the foundation on which all
poems are built, whether regularly
repeating the same or similarly
constituted sounds or the fabled ball
glances off the net’s edge on the first serve
or there’s no net at all; they’re in a room
that grows forever narrower like doom
as one goes further on so one can’t swerve
from the path one discovers. Notice how
the couples or the pair that played tennis
have been reduced to ‘one’ as we’ve gone on
and we won’t revisit that bright green lawn
till ‘rhyme’ becomes rime with morbid menace
and one reaches one’s end as one does now.
Here, the use of "tennis" is purely in reference to Robert Frost’s statement that writing free verse was like playing tennis without the net; a doubles match evolves into a singles match, and that evolves into one person playing against himself in a squash or racquetball court.
In the interest of total disclosure, I must reveal that my experience with tennis was very unsuccessful, involving lessons at the Y periodically over the years, long hours of whacking the ball against the wall at an outdoor practice court at a local regional recreation center, and culminating in a very humiliating half-semester of tennis in college phys. ed. When, that following half-semester, I appeared in the squash course, the instructor recognized me and told me and Denise Carpenter, who had had the same experience with tennis that I had, to square off against each other and leave when we were finished. That done, the coach focused on the other players, who could actually sustain a volley for more than two or three hits.
My experience with ping-pong (or table tennis, as it is more formally called) was with my father. He coddled me in the early years so that I learned to return the ball to him and he wouldn’t take advantage of his superiority except, of course, to win. Only in my later teen years and early twenties did we start splitting the victories. When I played—once—at the union building during college, the guy I played said, "You know, you’re not a very good player, but I can’t get a ball past you!" You’d think a college student could express himself more precisely: he meant that I wasn’t a very good offensive player, but that I had developed an excellent defense, which is what playing with my father had taught me.
Back to sonnets. I wrote "When I recall the hours I spent with Dad" this morning in the bath, in obvious response to Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 29," at least on a formal level; then, since today is Saturday, I realized that I could move beyond that if I wanted to. Weekdays, of course, I have time for the one poem, if that, and then must move on, catch the train, teach classes, grade papers, and so on. Saturdays and Sundays I can give myself time to develop. What I came up with follows:
Rooted in my Self like an ancient olive,
I produce fruit that, excessively bitter,
needs to be pickled in salty brine
until one can eat it, reminded of the sea.
I live on land as if it were tricky water,
unsure whether I have the right to live,
for we disrupt the order of things to be
the way we must, and resolve the tension with wine.
Frequently, they say I'm out of line
and I must bow my head and meekly give
my apologies for having acted too freely;
but there's a code inscribed in my very matter
that I must follow without my conscious awareness,
though I may soon learn what is my real business.
The theme, ultimately, is the same: coming into my own, after having tried to live out my father’s vision for me. The initial image is from a dream I had a week or two ago, in which "a colleague" invites me to come visit him in Israel, "since I was so close," and my visit there. When I talked about this to my therapist, I recalled an interview with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who pointed out an olive tree that was two thousand years old on his farm, and that led to the notion of rootedness. Through writing my Shakespearean sonnet, I freed myself from the strict format, and could go for a looser combination of some slant rhymes and an irregularly repeating pattern—as it turned out, ABCD BADC CADB EE, although I scramble the order of the rhymes in the three quatrains according to the constraints of the sense.
Insofar as I write poems with the net up, I am still wrestling with my father, or at least playing ping-pong with him. Through poetry, I am trying to develop into a player with a better offensive technique. We’ll see when I get there.
Don Riggs studied myth as an undergraduate, the Middle Ages as a grad student (MA, PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill), taught French on the college level, worked as a massage therapist in a holistic health center, and has been teaching English in various places for the last decade and a half.