ORIGIN: Sometimes, I dream and wake up in paintings. I dream the oftenest of Goya, of being on his walls, the real walls in the Maestro’s long lost home, LA QUINTA DEL SORDO. Inside that house, Goya painted 14 masterpieces, including SATURN DEVOURING HIS CHILD, on the walls of 2 rooms. My Goya poems come from these dreams. Also, a lot of them spring from a misalignment of memories, dreams, and expectations. I remember the dreams, I dream of what I remember and I expect to dream more than anything I remember.

RHYME SCHEME: “Alive on Goya’s Wall” is an inverted Shakespearean Sonnet. The Master used this rhyme scheme for his sonnets:

A/B/A/B
C/D/C/D
E/F/E/F
G/G

In my Goya sonnet, I reverse the end-line rhymes to a first-line placement for those rhymes. In other words, each word at the beginning of every line rhymes with their counterparts per Shakespeare’s scheme:

I/not/I/caught
Papa/His/Papa/This
blood/Breath/flood/breath

Always/always

To my knowledge, this approach to rhyming in poetry is novel. And it’s no gimmick. The practice is a subversion of expectations for the experience of verse to the human ear. Not unlike Goya’s subversion of expectations for the experience of the uncanny for human emotion.

Too often, poets do paintings injustice, by simply repeating an emotional state typified by the painter’s personality. American poets are quite good at this bad practice, which is why I am not American in my writing. My Goya sonnet reexperienced an emotional reality essential to that painting’s aesthetic power to demand attention to itself.

Of course, I don’t explicitly name the painting in this sonnet. No need to.

FUN FACT: I wrote some of these poems on a wall. In prison.