I'm sure I envisioned more than seventeen sonnets, which is an odd number to end on, literally & otherwise, but in August I just hit a wall. The sonnet dated 8/1 was the last poem I wrote, at least as a completed (except for "She Sells Seashells") until this year (08)
The summer of 96 was significant to me because I traveled from San Francisco back to Charlottesville, VA in July. I believe the 7/18 & 7/23 sonnets both were written on that trip. Since my time in Charlottesville (from 84-89) had been filled with all sorts of psychic commotion, the trip was a bit of a pilgrimage. Of course, the past- as always- had slipped away from tangibility into memory, where it's both lost & ever present....
Some people assumed at the time the sonnets were being written that the character "Marlowe" was literally intended to be Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe character. Though I am a big Chandler fan & read him a lot around this time, this was at most a piece of the puzzle. I liked the name in general, & I also had the (reputedly) dissolute Elizabethan poet as much in mind as the fictional LA detective. There also are both autobiographical & imagined details contained in the character quite separate from either of those two figures.
The streets referred to are in San Francisco, mostly either in the Mission or the Western Addition (or betwixt & between the two) - the places I loved to hang out & live in those days.
Needless to say (I think), my actual daily life at the time was not very much like the daily life we could picture for the Marlowe character (or the characters in several of the other San Francisco poems). Had it been, there's little chance I'd be posting these sonnets a dozen years later. But the setting also was more than a "conceit"; there was a way in which the dissipation that comes up in a number of the San Francisco poems reflected a major psychological reality; it also looked back to various misadventures from my ill-spent youth. 'Nuff said!
LINKS TO THE SONNETS
5/21
5/23
5/27
5/30
6/8
6/9
6/13
6/20
6/21
6/23
6/30
7/7
7/11
7/16
7/18
7/23
8/1