Stuart Sinclair
I’ve chopped up several stockfish – well, sonnets –
This month, like the pike who his own ate,
Frankensteined new ones, thinking, ‘He’s on it!’
Been casting a fine line, too, in hope to so net
Specimen words. They sense the hooks on it,
And ghost away at sudden turns. Slowing it
Right down at a pitch prepared – I’ve sown it
With themes and schemes then rhymezoned it
So I know the strophe cabinet I’ll be showing it
In before I catch – on the bank I keep my store net
Hid in shade. Sometimes I look to see the zonate
Shoal shimmering there, imagine how they might sonate.
I take this angle for netting metaphors so nature
Is uncommonly mirrored in my sonneture.
I have called this new form an “endle”. The form requires that each line ends with an aural wordplay on the same word. Different grammatical forms of the word are allowed. In this case, my end word is sonnet, making the poem a self-referential endle. For example, at the end of line 4, ‘to so net’ sounds like sonnet. The form has a lighthearted quality and so part of the pleasure comes from unexpected and ludicrous stretches in the wordplay. Writers like Byron (in his Don Juan) used similar wordplays for comic effect. However, the “endle” stretches the playfulness to a new extreme. To add to the fun of the new form, I have based it on an extended metaphor to do with fishing and the idea of fish (words) being on the end of a line and it is full of fishing puns. Not only that, it is also about the process of collecting language for poetic purposes. I think all this makes the poem the first ever self-referential extended-metaphor-based meta-endle. I may be wrong and, possibly, guilty of a tautology in claiming it is both meta and self-referential. But since the “endle” is all about pushing boundaries …