Professor Martin Bidney

A Hundred Artisanal Tonal Poems with Blogs on Facing Pages Professor Martin Bidney

I want this book to be life-giving. I've called my poems "fourteeners" because the traditional name of "sonnets" might perhaps remind too many people of high school Shakespeare and boredom brain-death.(In fact, the bard's fourteeners are a bisexual diary that could easily be a TV series-look at my Shakespair dialogues with him.) "Artisanal" suggests the care that craft-beer brewers take in choosing and preparing authentic ingredients. In my 100 poems, the components are chiefly "tonal" because I'm offering a musical entertainment. The poems are "slimmed down" to four-beat lines to give them the beauty we admire in a slender shape. And should the phrasing "tight, sweet harmonies" convey a sexual mood, that's because poetry is passion. Every fourteener is provided with its own conversational intro-a "blog." The topics range throughout my life and interests, and they include novelists, composers, philosophers, psychologists, mythic and religious traditions - an index of names at the back will direct you to these and the rest.