"Unholy Sonnet 16" by Mark Jarman

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-My thanks to Mr. John! 

-Matthew from Sleerickets

-Mark Jarman (now I just need a Luke!)

-Anglo-Saxon verse revisited

-Hemistichs, caesuras, accentual alliteration

-Richard Wilbur's "Junk" 

-The metrical decay of mid-century poets

-Formalism as emotional discipline

-Mark Jarman's "Questions For Ecclesiastes" and "Zeno's Eternity"

-Mark's review of Wilbur's Moliere in the Hudson Review

-John Donne's "Holy Sonnets"

-Flannery O'Connor

-Phonetic slant rhyme

-How caesuras can make lines feel funky without being funky

-Donne's Holy Sonnet VII

-The many ends of the world

-The Sermon On the Mount

-The cosmology of Lurianic Kabbalah and Tikkun Olam

-Felix Culpa

-Sexual innuendo

-To live in sin is to see the world through hell-colored glasses

-Tragic enlightenment through sin

-An unsettling double-meaning

-The meaning of an "unholy" sonnet

-Charles Baudelaire

-William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell"

Text of poem:

Unholy Sonnet 16 

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed 

the ones we promised not to. While we drove 

We talked about the afterlife and love, 

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed 

by roadwork, in an idling parade 

we couldn’t see the head or tail of. 

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff, 

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid. 

And we agreed the analogues for hell 

came to us everywhere we looked in life. 

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find 

a metaphor or likeness. Not until 

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end, 

did we have something to compare it with.