Welcome to "50 Portland Sonnets," Copyright 2000 by Annie Seikonia. Each page has ten sonnets. Though they do not rhyme, each of these nontraditional sonnets contains the traditional 14 lines. I welcome your feedback and comments! Click on the titles in the upper right-hand corner to go to the sonnets. They are grouped in five pages of ten sonnets each.

Below is a little summary I wrote about this manuscript:

"Fifty Portland Sonnets" is a manuscript of poems chronicling the development and disintegration of a romantic relationship viewed from within the prism of a city. These 50 unrhymed, free verse sonnets reflect physical, emotional and spiritual landscapes in flux, using descriptive imagery to convey the way in which our layered worlds converge, separate and ultimately define us. Use of the first-person is at times confessional, at times ambiguous, and at times is used to inhabit the landscape itself. One sonnet is told from the point of view of an historic statue; another is from the point of view of an antique weathervane. In other poems the speaker addresses a lover, a god, and a version of a younger self.
All together the assemblage of vibrant, imagistic verse is meant to create a multi-dimensional yet intimate portrait of a fragmented city experienced through a single poetic sensibility. Pablo Neruda's books "Love Songs and a Song of Despair" and "The Heights of Macchu Piccu" were two of the many sources of inspiration for this enterprise. Individually the poems are meant to be like tiny crystals or windows, fragmenting the universe into a microcosm as well as fragmenting a microcosm back into the universe.