Coming Soon—A Puerto Rican Sonnet!

“I’ve been reading up on sonnets, and I’ve decided I like the Shakespearean sonnet better than the Italian,” said Montalvo, who, until he had the misfortune of bumping into me, had happily whiled his time away with free verse. Here’s one example:

Magic Trick

Your memory

Can’t be forgotten…

Those eyes

Will always be

Remembered…

And my feelings

Will never

Die.

Montalvo has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half, with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short lines: get in, get to the point, get out.

“It sounds almost like a haiku,” said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought. Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:

The wren


Earns his living


Noiselessly.

His response?

“What’s a wren?”

It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.

“No pierda,” I tell him. We’re going over one of his poems.

“Hunh?”

“I really think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”

Well, he’s unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s. So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come back with the answer.

“It turns out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.

“So what did they tell you?”

It was, I’m sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda sounds better,” but not by much.

“Has anybody told you about the subjunctive?”

“Sub—what?”

So we did the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the words that are daggers to the heart.  

“It’s totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do. Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”

16 to 21, his current age: five years.

And what have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus “you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what a contraction was.

Or there was the Saxon genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom and did a little drilling:

“The house of Montalvo?”

“Montalvo’s house!”

And speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words derived from Latin?

“Marc?”

Well, then it was time to get down to some good examples:

“Defecation,” I tell him.

“Ummm, Latin?”

“Shit,” I say.

“Anglo-Saxon!”

“Intercourse,” I say.

He’s so excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come from?”

He’s bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure (which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.

Who knows where this is ending up?