Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader Read Online Free PDF Page A

untroubled by his tin ear. In re O.J., he asserts, “Of one thing I am certain, this will not be my last sonnet about the matter.”
    I felt a warm rush of fellow feeling for Mr. Kunstler, because I too have been a writer of bad sonnets. Cleaning out my file cabinets a few weeks ago, I came upon the following example, titled “Interview with a Soldier”:
Oh sure! I guess I’ll cheer like all the res
    When this is through and we can all go back
—
    Sometimes I think this stuff is like a test
    Of nerves, and one more sleepless night, you’ll crack.
    It’s funny
—
little kids all want to fight
,
    But later, when you get your card, it’s
—
well
—
    It’s different, not so great. And now, at night,
    You tell the world, shut up or go to hell.
    A hero’s death is fine
—
I’d hate to crawl
    Away to die. You’re nuts to think you go
    To Hell … This Catholic
—
he prayed and all
—
    Blown up
—
I think they found a finger, though
    But Christ! It came damn near me
—
I’m okay
    Though, Nothing happened bad at all that day.
    “Interview with a Soldier” was dated May 21, 1967. I was thirteen. I wrote it for Miss Farrar’s ninth-grade English class at the Marlborough School for Girls in Los Angeles. At the time, I knew as much about being a soldier in Vietnam as I knew about sex or politics, two of my other favorite poetic themes, but that didn’t stop me. I thought my sonnet was as brutal and sophisticated as anything ever written, a trenchant cross between Siegfried Sassoon and J. D. Salinger, but deserving of extra points for cramming all that nihilism into a mere fourteen lines.
    I happened to leave my yellowed copy of “Interview with a Soldier” on the bedside table, where it was spotted by my husband. George and I have few secrets, but during our ten years together I had never shown him any of my poems. This may have something to do with the fact that when George was in his twenties, he was a
real
poet, who published in places like
Ploughshares
and
The Southern Poetry Review
.
    “Hmmm,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It scans well.”
    Sometimes I think that my tombstone will read, “She scanned well.” For, alas, George had summed up my essential character in three words. Beneath my sonnet’s hard-boiled exterior—it was no mean feat to work in “Hell,” “Christ,”
and
“damn”—cowered the soul of an unregenerate goody-goody, a priggish little pedant who would no more have permitted a rogue trochee to sneak among her perfect iambs than show up in Miss Farrar’s class with a smudge on her monogrammed school uniform.
    It was a grievous blow when Miss Farrar tacked up the class’s star sonnets on the bulletin board and mine was not among them. Her favorite was about the Acropolis. Twenty-eight years later, I still remember that its author called the Parthenon “a ruined crown.” It never occurred to me that this metaphor alone was worth a hundred of my entire sonnet; all I noticed, in my wounded condition, was that my rival’s verse
didn’t scan
. It was only at sixteen, when I read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love …”) and Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (“Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!”), that I realized that these poets had failed to stick to iambic pentameter not because they couldn’t but because they didn’t want to.
    By that time I had written twenty or thirty sonnets, of which—I know this will come as a grave disappointment to future anthologists—only four are extant. In form, they were all Shakespearean (three quatrains and a couplet) rather than Petrarchan (an octave and a sestet), because Shakespearean sonnets, having seven rhymes rather than only four or five, were easier. (My success-grubbing disposition craved a certain amount of challenge but was loath to assume an optional handicap that the more philistine members of my imagined