Sonnets Made Accessible -- Baxter Puts A Modern Twist On An Old Form Of Poetry

------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW

"Sonnets from the Mare Imbrium" Bart Baxter will read from "Sonnets from the Mare Imbrium" Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way N.E., Lake Forest Park. Information: 206-366-3300. -------------------------------

"Sonnets are a special form. They're concise and elegant," said Seattle poet Bart Baxter. The 18 sonnets comprising his third poetry collection - "Sonnets from the Mare Imbrium" (Floating Bridge Press, $8), which won the 1999 Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award - are his "reaction to rambling 20th-century free verse," Baxter said in a recent interview.

Sonnets are 14-line poems of (usually) 10 syllables each, including a final couplet. Shakespeare wrote more than 100 of them in the late-16th and early-17th century, but although the form is old, it's not outdated.

Baxter thinks the bard was "casual about his sonnets," that to make them appealing he took liberties while still respecting the form. Baxter, too, invokes license. His colloquial language, contemporary ideas and, often, Northwest settings have a distinctly modern flavor. "I like people to read my poems without thinking of the form," he said, "and I strive to make poetry accessible . . . well, maybe not to the monster-truck crowd."

In "Sunday at the Tide Pool," the poet and his dog observe their own version of church. In the mountains, Baxter pauses to consider lichen, the lowly flowerless plant whose symbiotic union of fungi and algae produce a weak acid that breaks down rock to form soil and, thus, supports all life. It is a humble, silent witness:

"Above the tarn,

between echelles

of ice and indigo,

it stays alive, if only by degree,

throughout the seasons, watching the earth prepare/

for jubilation . . ."

Two lighthearted yet serious sonnets praise the goodness of St. Pauli Girl, a beer, while "The Magician's Beautiful Assistant" directs our eyes and minds toward a comely assistant, only to have the upstaged main attraction "wondering if it's really him they've come / to see."

Three sonnets are set in Florence, three others mountain climbing in the Cascades. "On the Twenty-first Birthday of Vincenzio Galilei" bridges both backdrops and time. The famous astronomer Galileo Galilei "focused the pale light of men's / imaginations" for his son one special evening after supper.

". . . They saw galaxies expanding,

stars exploding, lineaments

of God's face in the moon, the Pleiades,

men's eminence and men's inconsequence.

But so much more can my son see the better

if I can help him understand the latter."

Baxter, a pilot for Alaska Airlines, has received many honors for his poetry, including first place in both the 1994 MTV Poetry Grand Slam and the 1998 Seattle Poetry Grand Slam.

A "poetry slam" sounds like a bizarre form of wrestling, but Baxter explained that it's a competitive reading that is worth experiencing (poetry slams occur almost every Wednesday at 9 p.m. in Pioneer Square's OK Hotel).

"The first half of the evening is a respectful, thoughtful"' event, when poets present new work. Then in the second half, three judges - folks drawn from the crowd for any number of strange reasons - rank poems, which are read in three rounds of five to six poets each. With scores from one (lame) to 10 (terrific), each poet's three rankings are totaled, with the highest-scoring poems moving to the next round. Eventually, there's a winner and a booby prize. Along the way, the audience enjoys everything from bad to wonderful.

"Baxter is a good reader," said Peter Pereira, one of the editors at Seattle's Floating Bridge Press. "Sonnets of the Mare Imbrium" won the publisher's fifth annual competition for Washington poets. The contest attracts 100 to 125 entries yearly, and from these submissions, two poetry anthologies called "Pontoon" have been printed, with the third being put together now.

Baxter's sonnets fulfill his goal: They make poetry accessible. Some speak of a "you," a particular someone Baxter has in mind, perhaps, but also you, the reader. Fiction writers, too - especially in the short story - have had their vogue of this second-person approach and found it engages readers, encouraging them to step into the writing and to accept a role.