Sonnets

After reading Shakespeare’s poems more closely in class and talking about their sequence and progression, Berrigan’s poems made more sense to me. Even though Berrigan reused many of the lines in his poems, where he places them gave them a different meaning. I saw the second set of poems progressing through “Dear Chris” to almost a strange plea for sanity. The repetition of lines gave me the feeling that Berrigan was stuck in a moment with all these feelings circling around him. “100,000,000,000 Sonnets” made me think about “Rewriting’s” idea about using others’ ideas and making them your own. This led me to think about Berrigan’s method. The lines he chose to repeat had to be solid to be so reuseable without seeming old and reused. The ‘rediscovering’ of these lines in different poems gave me a sort of déjà vu feeling.
William Carlos William’s take on form is interesting. He sees the lack of form in modern poetry and argues for a return to some sort of form before poets go completely wild. It reminds me of the saying “there is a method to his madness.” Berrigan had some sort of method to writing poems, but can anyone other than him make complete sense of this method? This made me think about if Berrigan actually wrote these poems to be published, or if they were just an experiment in his method.