NaPoWriMo 2019: Day 27

Today’s prompt: “‘remix’ a Shakespearean sonnet.” (http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-seven-5/)

Sonnet 130: Remix

Sure, she ain’t no beauty:
some may say she’s ugly,
or to be more kind,
she’s plain. But, oh, her mind!

Her hair is just hair,
never silken thread there.
Her breath stinks, her eyes
are dull, but seriously, you guys?

She’s amazeballs! So she’s brash
and loud, and her ‘stach
needs to be shaved every week,
and her knobbly joints creek.

She’s as perfect for me
As ever someone could be.

I made several attempts to undertake technologically-mediated remixes of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. I enjoy exploring ways to integrate technology into the poetic process. But nothing I did felt successful, so I abandoned that approach.

I love Sonnet 130 for its explicit rejection of romantic ideals. Shakespeare literally lines up all the standard tropes of Elizabethan troubadour romantic poetry and shoots them down. This isn’t an ode to poetic love—this is the kind of love real people get to have in the messy real world.

So I thought: let’s try a poem that similarly rejects the aesthetic standards I usually seek when I write my poetry. I wanted to inject a similar winking self-reference to current language phenomena (my silly catchphrases = Shakespeare’s romantic descriptive tropes). I also tried my hand at rhyming couplets, which I never do.

I won’t say I think this is a successful poem. But it’s two days overdue and I need to get something posted for this prompt. And it was fun to play around like this.