~/jeffreymoro/posts/2025-07-30-sonnets

I have been derelict in writing these past few weeks, to no small shame given that I got through two posts of this blog slash newsletter slash thing and immediately fell off the wagon. Mea culpa. My excuse: that I have been packing up my life in DC and moving it, after months of stops and starts, to Baltimore. We’re mostly unpacked. The cat is unfazed. I have spent more money than I thought even possible. It’s an adjustment, a good one, I think.

I set a few private rules out for myself when I started writing this blog. One of them was: no writing about writing. Too often, in the absence of other topics of discourse, online writing becomes intolerably self-reflexive, turning ever inward on itself. Online eats the world like that. You’ll recognize this in any nascent social media platform: all the posts, at first, are about the platform, for lack of anything else better to say. I wanted this blog to be about things in the world. But I am going to bend this rule a bit now, if only because writing is also a thing in the world. Mea maxima culpa.

I have been trying to live without my phone more. I’m not very good at it. I cling to it, an accessory appendage. I delete apps, set up blockers, nothing really works. Like a smoker, I still need to find my gum: something to replace the compulsion. For a week or so, I tried writing sonnets.

I am not a poet by trade. I have the good sense not to show any of them to you, so don’t worry, you’re off the hook. I started writing them because I didn’t feel like downloading Wordle and I wanted some kind of word puzzle to occupy my time. I gave myself another rule when writing them (can you tell I like rules), which was that I couldn’t use any kind of rhyming dictionary. The sonnets became trials in scansion, which I appreciated for, if nothing else, the chance to exercise some atrophied parts of my brain. Most of them ended up being in trochaic pentamenter, an uncommon meter. Most sonnets in English, thanks to Bill Shakespeare, are iambic. duh DUN duh DUN duh DUN and so forth. Trochees are the opposite. DUN duh DUN duh DUN duh. They’re less naturalistic, more martial. The lines end in unstressed syllables, what we call in the lit crit biz “feminine endings.” This made it a bit harder for me to come up with rhymes. Habit/rabbit; clover/plover; flowers/bowers; I gravitate to nature writing everywhere, it seems.

The process, which I gave up after a week because packing just got too hectic and also the candy-colored dopamine drip of my phone was too alluring, got me thinking about how rare poetry is in my daily life. I read it on occasion, I can quote the requisite number of lines befitting my degrees, but I can’t say it’s a frequent presence. Writing it, even less so. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few years: the nearly comprehensive shift in Western culture away from “art” as a practice that all humans engage in some capacity and towards “art” as a commodity, created by a rarified class, and bought and transacted by everyone else. I play piano. I’ve played it nearly every day for two and a half decades. Apart from when I was taking lessons as a child, I’ve never given a performance. It’s art I make privately for myself, which brings me great joy. Why not poetry too?

When I was in undergrad, I took a class on “traditional” Japanese literature, which for Japan scholars means from around 600 to 1600 CE. One thing that has stuck with me from that class over the years was learning how important poetry composition was to the social life of the royal Japanese court. The ability to fire off a quick waka (it’s like a haiku with a couple extra lines) could mean securing a promotion, the favor of the Emperor, or the attention of a courtesan. It’s absurd to imagine in 2025: trading poems as a way to secure one’s social status, to even participate in some kind of social life. Writing has become so diffuse, audiences so fickle (or absent): it’s something I’ve been struggling with these past few years, as so much has changed about ecosystem of letters, whether online or off-. How do you write when you don’t know if you have an audience, a community of readers, of fellow writers? Writing, I suppose, has to become a compulsion: something you do anyway, no matter who’s reading, commenting, criticizing. It’s a better compulsion than scrolling, at least.

Today, it’s hot. Surface-of-the-sun hot. We’re wrapping up our second, maybe third heat wave of the summer. I hope it’s the last. Here’s The Weakerthans: