This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 6, 2011 - Shakespeare kicks off one of his most famous seasonal sonnets with the line "From you have I been absent in the spring," but April finds many of us returning to Shakespeare. The greatest writer in the English language was born (and died) on April 23, which the St. Louis Poetry Center celebrates, alongside National Poetry Month, with "Do Thy Will: Fourteen Shakespeare Sonnets at Blueberry Hill" on Sunday, April 10, in Blueberry Hill's Duck Room.
Published without his supervision in 1609, the Shakespeare sonnet series broke with convention, invented a new vocabulary, and owned the form. Even though he didn't invent the pattern with alternating rhymes and a closing couplet, we call it a Shakespearean sonnet.
"Most sonneteers of his time wrote of an idealistic love that probably even they didn't believe in," says Mary Ruth Donnelly, president of the St. Louis Poetry Center. "But Shakespeare broke with the norm and took love seriously as an idea and an issue, much as we do today."
More than 400 years later, how many Shakespeare sonnets are read in marriage ceremonies, especially each spring with brides blooming everywhere in Tower Grove Park and such venues? Particularly Sonnet 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...."
"At the other end of the scale, he is cynical about flowery love poems," continues Donnelly. " 'My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.' And he conveys downright despair about love: 'For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright/Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.' We've all been there."
"Do Thy Will" features 14 Shakespeare sonnets read by members of the community, not just the St. Louis poetry community:
- Poet Laureate of Missouri David Clewell;
- writer William Gass;
- Emily Pulitzer;
- poets Stacey Lynn Brown, Adrian Matejka, and Sally Van Doren;
- Alderman Lyda Krewson;
- Linda Kennedy and Robert Mitchell, actors with the Black Rep;
- Khnemu Menu-Ra and Jessica Shoemaker, actors with the Shakespeare Festival;
- Boo McLoughlin, executive director of Craft Alliance;
- Philip Barnes, conductor of the St. Louis Chamber Chorus;
- Buzz Spector, dean of the College and Graduate School of Art and professor of art in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University.
"The St. Louis Poetry Center is committed to broadening the audience for poetry," says Lorin Cuoco, a Poetry Center volunteer consultant who works primarily on benefits. "Fourteen readers, the number of lines in a sonnet. Seven men and seven women, poets, writers, arts administrators, artists, actors, a composer, and a politician -- representatives in the region who are making art, making art happen and making public policy. One married couple for a nice turn."
Half of that married poet couple is Adrian Matejka, author of the 2008 National Poetry Series winning collection Mixology. He also teaches poetry and African Diaspora literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
"Shakespeare's sonnets were some of the first paginated poems I was introduced to in high school," says Matejka, who initially had no idea what Shakespeare was talking about. Like many of us, Matejka was introduced to poetry by a teacher who believed in strict interpretations. "If it wasn't as the scholars said, it wasn't a possibility. I was initially frustrated by poetry because of Shakespeare. But even inside of my confusion about the meaning, I heard the sounds and appreciated them."
Later on, Matejka learned more about poetry and even tried to write sonnets of his own and developed a new appreciation of Shakespeare's poems and plays. He chose to read Sonnet 116 for "Do Thy Will," largely because he loves the ending:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
"The speaker is just laying it all out there," says Matejka, "what happens when people are in love. That emotional honesty and willingness to put it out there is one of the reasons his poetry is still so powerful."
"Do Thy Will" begins at 4 p.m. and lasts until 6. Tickets cost $60, which includes complimentary wine, champagne and hors d'oeuvres courtesy of Blueberry Hill. There will also be a cash bar. For ticket information, see www.stlouispoetrycenter.org or call 314-973-0616.
Richard Newman is author of the poetry collections "Borrowed Towns" and "Domestic Fugues." He edits River Styx and co-directs, along with Adrian Matejka, the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series.