Evokes the same satisfaction as squishing Mario's face on the Mario 64 homescreen. Curious to see more of these, and wondering what's defining them as sonnet for you!
Viewing post in flickgame sonnet #2 comments
Thanks! It was a bit tricky to make the most of the limited variations that made possible by FlickGame's constraints (there's only 16 discrete screens available).
I'm thinking these things as sonnets with influence from Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, where he's still working with patterns of constraint and relation in the sense of a sonnet, but not necessarilyl adhering to historic formal rigidity. I like how The Poetry Foundation puts it:
"...the sonnet, Berrigan demonstrated, was not fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but rather a form essentially grounded in certain intricate relationships of cadence and meaning."
At the same time, to me there's something about the effect of FlickGame's constraint of a hard 16 screens that tickles my brain in the same way as trying to squeeze a textual poem into a tight 14-line traditional sonnet. It's *close* to a similar number of lines vs. screens, and it still requires thinking through efficiencies vs. rhythm (for example, I wanted to also make the nose/eyebrows independently wiggly but it simply wasn't an option to keep alongside the eyes and mouths).
When I re-read Berrigan's sonnets, I get the sense of them as a project he was dipping in and out of, over time, and squeezing his writing of them in and around his daily life (no idea if that's actually true). Especially when he's reincorporating and recontextualizing lines from previous ones. So I suppose I'm thinking of that kind of process here too -- these flickgame sonnets as walking the line between something I'm dashing off on a weeklyish basis but also something that requires me to zoom in, on a small scale, and think about the pacing and relationships between each screen/line. And something that's required to be attuned to their own material constraints.