In many disciplines, research precedes execution. A hypothesis is formed, sources are gathered, and the work unfolds according to a plan. Poetry rarely behaves this way. Poems often arise in moments when accumulated experience and emotion suddenly condense into form, long before the poet fully understands the mechanics that produced them. Inspiration arrives first; explanation follows later. In my own practice, research typically occurs retroactively. The act of revision becomes a kind of archaeology—an attempt to understand puzzles the mind has already constructed. For this reason, the trajectory of poetic inquiry is rarely linear. It tends instead to be circular.
This circularity helps explain why my first book of verse continues to function as a springboard decades later. Many of the ideas that now occupy me began there in embryonic form. At the time I was too busy writing new poems to perform any sustained post-mortem on the earlier ones. Only with the vantage of time—and now being well into my fifties—have I begun to unpack the impulses that originally produced them. What once appeared to be casual interests have, over the years, metastasized into deeper fascinations and, in some cases, outright obsessions. Among the most persistent of these has been a fascination with recursion.
From an early age I was drawn to works that played with reversals and cyclical structures: palindromes, word squares, optical illusions, and recursive narratives such as Alice in Wonderland. These ideas surfaced repeatedly in my writing long before I consciously examined them. In retrospect the recurrence of these structures now seems less accidental than inevitable. They formed a quiet through-line in my work long before I began analyzing them critically.
The only time I consciously attempted to begin a poetic project with research was a long-abandoned sonnet cycle titled The Forum, conceived loosely as a modern analogue to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The project consisted of one hundred Shakespearean sonnets inspired by Roman historiography, particularly Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and the histories of Suetonius and Plutarch. In retrospect the result was largely unsuccessful. The poems often read less like poems than like lectures. The rhetorical scaffolding overwhelmed the emotional core, and the project was eventually abandoned for nearly twenty years.
Yet the effort was not wasted. During those years I continued writing poems informed by the rhetorical rhythms and idioms of Roman prose. That influence surfaced indirectly in a number of later works, particularly a series of sestinas—Via Sacra, Lupa Noctis, Retrogradatio Cruciata, Twelfth Night Masquerade, and The Song of Heraclitus. None of these poems required active research at the moment of composition; the research had already been internalized. In that sense, the years spent writing—and eventually abandoning—The Forum functioned as a kind of apprenticeship. What initially appeared to be failure was actually the slow construction of an internal technical vocabulary. I prefer to think of those years not as failing but as iterating.
Eventually the only way to salvage fragments of The Forum was to abandon the conventional Shakespearean sonnet entirely. In its place I developed a new form, the Sestonnet, in which each poem consists of two Shakespearean sonnets followed by two inverted (mirrored) Shakespearean sonnets, with a concluding coda called the Acta Iterata. The name is borrowed from the adjudicative rhetoric of classical discourse. Rather than moralizing, the Acta Iterata presents a form of reflective residue—a closing gesture that registers argument without resolving it. Out of the hundred sonnets originally drafted, only sixteen survived within this revised architecture, accompanied by four Acta Iterata. Yet the larger project clarified the structural problem that had originally undermined the work: rhetoric had been mistaken for form.
THE CHIASTIC HELIX SONNET
One poem that continued to trouble me, however, was an early blank-verse piece titled The First Coming, published in Fountain Street in 2000. The poem uses the Laocoön sculpture as its central metaphor, and for many years I regarded it as juvenilia—an exercise in extended metaphor that never quite cohered. I eventually dismissed it as little more than a strange experiment in free association. But the poem lingered in my mind, largely because I remembered the experience that had produced it. In 1998 I had seen the Laocoön sculpture in person, and the figure left an unsettling impression on me: a sense of coiled motion frozen in marble. The poem was my attempt to articulate that sensation, though at the time I did not fully understand what the sculpture had shown me.
The First Coming Laocoön is still looking up sadly before his own devouring, wondering if this immense snake fell from an emasculated god. Before antiquity, gods shook the columns of their temples, the marble cracking through the clouds like thunder, a dress rehearsal before the buggering of Ganymede. With indolent grins they allowed the snake to writhe in a leafy copse, a tendril rising with the moon licking at its canopy until the first woman could be born.
The insight arrived years later during a guest lecture in one of my classes. A colleague, John Hermanowski, was presenting examples of anatomical research used in professional modeling practice, and one slide in particular stopped me cold. In the presentation he overlaid double-helix curves onto Bridgman’s anatomical drawings and then onto the Laocoön itself, demonstrating that the same torsional structure appears in both master drawings and classical sculpture. The overlay traced opposing curves moving throughout the sculpture, revealing a dynamic system of counter-rotation embedded in the figures. Seen this way, the torsional structure of the body became unmistakable. The curves and counter-curves mapped across the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to a double helix.
At that moment several lines of thought converged at once. For years I had lectured on the Greek principle of chiastic movement—the system of opposing forces that produces contrapposto in classical sculpture. Polykleitos’ canon relies on precisely this logic: tilt against tilt, curve against counter-curve, tension balanced by release. But the Bridgman overlay made something else visible. The movement of the Laocoön figure does not simply cross. It spirals.
This realization connected immediately with another long-standing fascination of mine: the famous SATOR square, a five-word Latin palindrome that can be read in multiple directions and contains the hidden PATER NOSTER cross at its center. For years I had entertained the idea of constructing a poetic structure that behaved similarly, a form capable of recursive reading. Yet strict palindromes collapse quickly beyond a handful of words. A fully palindromic sonnet would be impossible. The solution, therefore, was not to replicate the palindrome literally but to build a structural analogue.
The form that emerged from these converging ideas is what I call the Chiastic Helix Sonnet, an inverted Petrarchan variant. In this structure the terminal words of the poem follow a Petrarchan circuit that reverses itself between the octave and the sestet, while the initial words of each line follow the same sequence along the poem’s central spine.This dual constraint produces mirrored inversions between the left and right columns of the poem. At the midpoint—the Lexical Torsion Point—the two circuits cross, functioning as the structural pivot. From that moment forward, the directional flow of the poem reverses, creating a pattern of recursive symmetry. The poem therefore behaves like a linguistic double helix, with two parallel strands twisting around a central axis and meeting at a point of torsion where the structure inverts upon itself.
The Lexical Torsion Point extends the Sextain Pivot employed in my Mirrored Sestina, though the governing constraint differs. In that form, only the terminal words invert at the exact midpoint of the poem, a requirement that eliminates the envoi and forces the structure to close through lexical inversion alone. In this sonnet, however, the inversion is more immediate and structural: the octave and sestet are reversed in place, producing a chiastic architecture in which the poem folds back through its own framework. Rather than delivering a conventional sense of terminal resolution, the design destabilizes closure and redirects the reader toward the beginning of the structure itself.
The effect is recursive. The final lines mirror the initial ones so that the opening and closing word—Laocoön—becomes both point of origin and point of return. In this respect the poem behaves like a linguistic Crab Canon, advancing forward while simultaneously implying its own reversal. The structure also resembles Escher’s recursive drawing Drawing Hands, in which the image folds back upon itself and the act of creation becomes its own cause. The poem therefore concludes not by terminating its movement but by sealing a circuit, inviting the reader to return to the beginning and trace the helix once more.
Because the poem is written in loose accentual-iambic hexameter, the lines are unusually long. When indented properly, the lineation produces a visual spiral descending the page, so that the typography itself begins to echo the form’s underlying structure. In this way the poem’s appearance reinforces the governing principle of the design: lineation enforces the double-helix structure. At the same time, this elongated line disguises the mechanism on first reading, masking any immediate recognition of a Petrarchan sonnet beneath the surface architecture.
Hexameter was chosen deliberately. As an even meter of six beats, it possesses a natural symmetry that supports the poem’s mirrored construction, allowing the lines to behave like paired segments within a rotating structure. The meter also accommodates the poem’s unusual constraint: the central “spine” is composed of terminal words drawn from an inverted Petrarchan sonnet, which must remain fixed while the surrounding language bends around them. In many cases this lexical obligation pushes the line well beyond the compression of iambic pentameter, requiring a longer metrical frame capable of absorbing the pressure. The resulting hexameter line therefore serves both structural and practical ends, providing the symmetrical measure necessary for the helix while giving the poem enough horizontal space to carry its inherited terminal words without breaking the rhythm of the form.
Despite its recursive mechanics, however, the form is not a palindrome. The terminal words invert between the octave and the sestet, but the poem does not return to its starting point in perfect symmetry. The final lines break the circuit. Visually the structure resembles not a square but an arch: a form that mirrors itself around a central keystone while resolving asymmetrically at its base.
Seen from this perspective, the Chiastic Helix Sonnet is not the result of a single act of invention but the culmination of a long feedback loop between observation, research, and revision. The original poem that inspired the structure was written in 2000. The anatomical insight that revealed its latent geometry arrived decades later. Only then could the earlier work be re-engineered through a form capable of expressing the torsional logic that had first inspired it. In that sense, the form represents not merely a new poetic container but the completion of a twenty-eight-year cycle between experience, curiosity, and return. This will also be showcased in SONNET FORMS, for a more formal analysis of how the helical structure more specifically informs the narrative.
Lastly, here is a closeup of the pillars in my first visualization of the poem, which (like an Offrenda) was more of an arch. While I had already fleshed out the lexical torsion point, I had yet to visially connect all the dots, to pull the helix structure out of the form.
Click here for all high-resolution Chiastic Helix Sonnet assets.
THE SATOR SQUARE SONNET
As with the Chiastic Helix Sonnet, this form began not as a theory but as an experience: a memory that lay dormant for years before I recognized in it the architecture of a formal system. To call it a sonnet outright would be misleading. Aside from the fourteen lines we associate with the traditional form, the Shakespearean rhyme scheme is concealed internally, occurring on the seventh word of each line. In this way the sonnet survives not as a visible scaffold but as an embedded mechanism. Where the Chiastic Helix drew its structural logic from an iconic sculpture—its physical torsion informing both the poem’s function and its lineation—this form grew out of the rodeos I attended as a child in rural Kansas. What impressed itself upon me was the simultaneous restriction of time and space: eight seconds allotted for the ride, contained within the strict geometry of a rectangular arena.
Seen retrospectively, the event resembles a living sonnet. It possesses a discernible beginning, middle, and end, but more importantly it operates as a pressure system: a deliberately constructed environment designed to subject human bodies to acute tension. Yet unlike the classical sonnet, it does not culminate in adjudication or thesis. It proceeds instead through curvature and recoil. Its ending is provisional, because regardless of victory or failure the bull returns to the gate and another rider steps forward.
Recognizing the arena as a container led me to investigate the craft and culture of bull riding more closely. In doing so, it became apparent that a conventional sonnet, even in its more elastic variations, lacks the spatial and kinetic capacity to account for the violence, torsion, and cyclical motion of the ride itself. The form that emerged therefore reflects the intersection of three long-standing preoccupations. The first is my persistent, perhaps quixotic attempt to construct a truly palindromic poetic structure, inspired by the Sator Square—a recursive linguistic device that has long functioned as a kind of private white whale. The second arises from my professional instincts as a filmmaker and animator, disciplines that encourage attention to motion, balance, and spatial dynamics. The third is more personal: the impulse, common to middle age, to revisit formative environments not as memoir but as systems worthy of renewed analysis.
The resulting poem is not autobiographical. My brother, who appears in the narrative, was never a bull rider; in fact, we were merely children—ten and eleven years old—when we sat in the stands at those rodeos. The poem therefore performs a speculative act: it imagines a life in which we remained within the cultural circuitry of the Midwest rather than departing from it. In that sense the poem does not document experience so much as reconfigure it, transforming an inherited spectacle into a procedural structure that attempts to register the kinetic reality of the ride. It is therefore appropriate to begin not with metaphor but with the arena itself—seen from above, as an engineered space whose geometry quietly governs everything that occurs within it.
A top-down view of the rodeo arena reveals the geometric logic that later informed the poem’s structure. The arena is formally a rectangle—a contained field governed by rails, gates, and the chute—but the motion within it tends toward circularity. The bull’s torque, the rider’s counterbalance, and the cyclical buck patterns all generate rotational paths within the rectilinear frame. In other words, the arena functions simultaneously as square containment and circular motion, a dual geometry that becomes implicit in the diagrams that follow.
This diagram grows directly out of the arena blueprint shown above. What first caught my attention in that plan was the cross-shaped division of the space, an architectural necessity that inadvertently suggests a conceptual one. The intersecting axes partition the arena into four quadrants, and from this geometry emerged the idea of both a spine and a rotational axis governing the movement of the bull and rider. Without recognizing that underlying cross, it would have been difficult to conceptualize the rider’s passage through successive states of tension and correction. The structure recalls the logic of the Stations of the Cross, in which physical movement through space marks a ritual progression through stages of ordeal. The analogy is not theological so much as structural: the cross organizes experience into sequential moments of pressure.
Within the arena, each quadrant corresponds to a distinct modality of the ride. The first is psychic anticipation at the chute; the second introduces the mechanical violence of the buck; the third becomes a rotational struggle for equilibrium; and the fourth resolves into bodily recovery—or failure—within the limits of the system. What appears chaotic from the stands therefore reveals itself, in plan view, as a sequence of forces unfolding within a constrained field. The arena becomes not merely a container but a diagram of passage, where the cross-shaped axis organizes the oscillating motion of the ride into interpretable phases. In this sense the geometry of the arena quietly anticipates the formal logic of the poem itself, where containment and rotation combine to produce a structured field of pressure.
This leads to the next stage of investigation: the actual movement of the bull and rider during the ride itself. By plotting the bull’s forward trajectory and comparing it with the rider’s continuous balance corrections—both operating around the animal’s spinal and rotational axis—a recognizable pattern begins to emerge. What initially appears chaotic resolves into a sequence of alternating displacements and recoveries. Each buck cycle—leap, kick, twist—pushes the rider off equilibrium, while the rider responds with rapid counter-adjustments designed to regain alignment along the bull’s spine.
When these forces are mapped against the bull’s forward motion, the resulting path resembles a series of zig-zag vectors. The bull drives the system forward through bursts of torque, while the rider continually redirects his balance in response to those forces. Over the course of the eight-second ride, this interaction produces a repeating oscillation between displacement and correction. Recognizing this pattern proved foundational to the formal logic of the poem. The zig-zag configuration that emerges in the diagram becomes, in the poem itself, a spatial notation of that struggle for equilibrium—a way of translating the mechanics of the ride into the geometry of the page.
Like the Chiastic Helix Sonnet, this form is also based on torque, but here the motion is contained within the “arena” of lineation—a series of interconnected boxes that regulate movement while making its pressures visible. Both forms are highly prescribed, mirrored, and recursive systems for examining movement under pressure. We shall examine this Z-configuration more closely after a brief consideration of the sonnet space re-engineered as filmic reality, since this perspective ultimately determines both the mechanics and the meaning of Eight Seconds in Nowata.
If we apply this same logic to a typical camera setup—say, for storyboarding a rodeo broadcast—it immediately begins to delimit the number and placement of cameras that can meaningfully describe the event. As I have said elsewhere, perhaps ad infinitum, I think primarily as a visual artist and filmmaker. If I cannot see an action clearly—either as an isolated gesture or as part of a sequence—I cannot adequately describe it. The act of description depends first on orientation. Before any analysis of motion can occur, the field in which that motion unfolds must be established.
This leads to a broader thesis about the interconnectivity of the arts: every medium must first articulate space. In film, editing rarely begins until the establishing shot situates the viewer within a coherent environment. Only once that spatial orientation is secured can the sequence move into medium shots and close-ups, which derive their meaning from that initial frame of reference. Music functions similarly. Arrangement is not merely about melody or harmony but about spatial placement: where the singer sits in the mix, whether the drums are centered or panned hard right, whether the bass grounds the middle or recedes behind the ensemble. In both cases, orientation precedes interpretation.
In short, all formal arts may be understood as containment systems—music, writing, and the visual or applied arts alike—but film makes this principle especially visible. Aspect ratios function as literal containers for a convergence of disciplines deployed in the service of narrative: cinematography, music, animation, editing, writing, and performance. The figures and elements operating within these frames are subject to tension, since meaningful narrative movement depends upon stakes. A similar dynamic is at work in these visual schematics, which frame and organize the words of the sonnet within a defined structural field.
These principles govern the structure of this poem. If the macrocosmic field is not first understood—if we cannot see the arena, its axes, its constraints—then the granular movements of the rider and bull become unintelligible. The purpose of the graphic, therefore, is not decorative but explanatory. It establishes the spatial logic of the event: what the viewer sees, in what sequence, and why. Once that field is clarified, the poem can begin to operate within it, translating the choreography of the ride into a readable formal system. In this sense, the diagram performs the same function as an establishing shot. It orients the reader to the geometry of the arena so that the subsequent movements—the torque of the bull, the rider’s balance corrections, the zig-zag progression of force—can be understood not as chaos, but as motion unfolding within a defined and intelligible space.
If I were to use this camera map to explain the sequence, I would begin with cameras 3 or 5, which provide the establishing shot. We would then cut to camera 1, covering the chute, the gates, and the waiting riders. At the moment the ride begins, the cut moves to camera 2, which tracks the bull and rider through mid-arena. From there, camera 3 takes over, capturing the oncoming rider, the turn, and the southwest diagonal trajectory toward camera 4. The same principle applies at the next midpoint: camera 4 assumes coverage as the rider advances toward it, turns, and begins the final eastern trajectory toward camera 5. Camera 5 then frames the approaching—and now struggling—rider as he is about to lose his grip, before being bucked from the bull just prior to the eight-second whistle. The shot lingers on the bull, either following its movement toward the exit (camera right) or tracking it as it circles back toward the gate.
The diagram proposes the arena not merely as a physical enclosure but as a partitioned field of pressures. When the circular riding space is overlaid with orthogonal axes, the arena becomes divided into four conceptual quadrants, each representing a distinct modality of experience through which the rider moves during the ride. These quadrants—psychic, social, spiritual, and physical—are not literal geographic zones within the dirt ring so much as shifting states that arise as the rider traverses the space. The cross that divides the arena therefore functions less as a cartographic device than as a structural armature, revealing how the ride unfolds as a sequence of transformations across multiple domains of pressure. What begins internally, as fear and anticipatory tension within the rider, gradually becomes externalized as spectacle before the watching crowd, while simultaneously escalating into ritualized bodily struggle with the animal itself.
Within this framework, the rider’s movement across the arena can be understood as a traversal through these four modalities, producing the Z-shaped trajectory illustrated in the diagram. Each diagonal shift corresponds to a transition between pressure fields: from psychic anticipation to social visibility, from ritualized preparation to raw physical confrontation. The arena thus operates as a contained system in which internal states and external forces become spatially legible. The partitioning of the arena into quadrants transforms the ride into something not unlike a sequence of ritual stations—moments through which the rider must pass as the ride progresses from anticipation to instability and finally toward resolution or failure. In this sense, the arena’s geometry does not merely host the event; it reveals the structural grammar through which the event unfolds.
Now that we have the overarching documentation of the riders, their movement through the arena, and the way that movement maps onto the poem’s quadrants and structural logic, we must return to the earlier graphic that partitioned the space itself: the Sator Square. That partitioning is what will eventually generate the rotational axis. Yet the axis cannot be established until the spines are first constructed.
Why? Because the spines define the outer borders of the container — they are the poem’s semantic palindromes, the enclosing limits within which all motion occurs. Once these are in place, the axis can be understood as a secondary palindromic structure: one palindrome read forward in literal sequence, the other derived more loosely from the governing architecture. “Loosely” here is essential, since the rotational spine never needs to reverse within the body of the poem itself; its reciprocity is structural rather than procedural.
The most critical step in this process, therefore, is the creation of the semantic palindromes that form the spines. For this reason, I have returned to the perfection of the Sator Square, whose bidirectional symmetry offers a model of containment, rotation, and structural inevitability.
My central takeaway from the Sator Square is its lattice logic — the way letters are fixed within a grid that both contains and generates movement. In this form, however, the lattice operates at the level of words rather than letters. Moreover, the lattice cannot achieve perfect symmetry, since only odd-numbered sequences produce evenly divisible sides. This diagram therefore serves a dual purpose: it prescribes the exact number of words required while also establishing the orientation of the axis and the mirror hinge.
The poem thus begins to function like a kind of crossword construction. We first establish the upper and lower semantic-palindrome spines, then set their vertical counterparts, completing the enclosing box. From that containment, the cross-shaped rotational axis emerges. Absolute semantic clarity along the axis is required only in its forward movement, since the reverse reading is never presented as a verse in the poem. Unlike the lower spine-envelope, which is reiterated and must therefore sustain intelligible meaning in both directions, the axis functions primarily as a structural engine. It needs to hold formally rather than lyrically. In this sense, a degree of looseness becomes an advantage: the construction of a semantic palindrome is already exacting enough without imposing the additional burden of full poetic coherence in both orientations.
The significance of the downward axis is twofold. First, although it remains concealed within the body of the poem as a Shakespearean sonnet structure, it reasserts itself in forward sequence at the poem’s midpoint — the mirror hinge. At that moment, the latent architecture becomes legible as recurrence rather than reversal. Yet the ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme governing this vertical descent does not appear visibly along the horizontal axis.
The most important word in the entire poem is the rotational axis itself: control. The quadrants are defined by it, and the whole poem turns upon it. That word must therefore be chosen with the utmost care. Here, control is the adhesive force that holds the entire structure together: thesis, antithesis, and caudate at once. Nothing escapes its purview.
The upper envelope spine is first established in its primary, legible orientation across the opening line of the poem, read left to right in normal order. This same sequence is then reiterated vertically as the column of initial words, again proceeding downward in the same forward order. It appears a third time in reverse orientation, recovered by reading upward through the column of terminal words, beginning at the final line of the poem and moving backward toward the terminal word of the first line. Thus, the upper envelope spine manifests in three directional states:
1. Horizontally, in forward order across the first line.
2. Vertically downward, in forward order through the initial-word column.
3. Vertically upward, in reverse order through the terminal-word column, read from the poem’s end.
We must now be equally precise about the lower envelope spine. First, it is constructed as a semantic palindrome of the upper envelope spine, completing the enclosure by reversing the meaning-sequence while preserving structural equivalence. In its primary horizontal manifestation, the lower envelope spine also reads normally from left to right. Accordingly, the lower envelope spine likewise manifests in three directional states:
1. Horizontally, in forward order as the semantic palindrome of the upper envelope, appearing at the bottom of the poem in verse 14.
2. Vertically upward, in reverse order through the left initial-word column, beginning with the initial word of the final line (silence) and proceeding backward toward the initial word of the first line.
3. Vertically downward, in forward order along the right boundary through the sequence of terminal words, functioning as the structural counterpart to the upper envelope spine’s descent through the initial-word column.
Through these parallel reiterations, both envelope spines establish the poem as a fully enclosed container governed by reciprocal semantic palindromes.
The rotational axis cannot be constructed until the envelope spines are fully established, since the axis depends upon two shared hinge-words: fear and crowds. These words are generated by the completed lattice of the spines and therefore cannot be determined in advance.
In its legible state, the axis is read only once, from left to right, in the near-middle of the poem. Its vertical descent is structurally embedded within the poem’s center, where it is concealed inside a rhyming Shakespearean sonnet form. Because this downward movement is never presented in a readable sequence, its return does not need to function as a strict semantic palindrome. The axis operates as a hidden engine rather than as a displayed verse.
At the core of this structure lies the governing word of the rotational axis: control. The completed spines make this word inevitable. It serves as both thesis and thematic fulcrum — the point around which the poem’s pressures, movements, and quadrants revolve. Anyone wishing to replicate this method must therefore give careful consideration to the selection of the primary rotational-axis word, since it becomes the cynosure of the entire architecture, determining not only the poem’s structural coherence but its conceptual gravity.
Now that we have semantically stretched the canvas, it is worth pausing to observe the structure itself. If one proceeds into filling the remaining quadrants without fully internalizing this architecture, the process inevitably becomes one of reverse engineering, which is both inefficient and structurally dangerous if the armature is not already secure.
The white space of the quadrants is not incidental; it is essential. This space will eventually hold the poem in its realized form — both as a holistic composition and as a series of self-contained micro-poems generated by the lattice. For that reason, this is the moment to think strategically about how the arc of the character or situation moves through the proscribed grid. One must determine, in advance, how pressure accumulates, transforms, and resolves across the quadrants.
In practical terms, this means clarifying three things before writing begins: the initial state, the evolutionary movement, and the terminal condition. Because this structure does not rely on a conventional volta or overt turn, the transformation must be embedded invisibly within the spatial progression itself. The quadrants become the vehicle of change; the reader experiences development not through a single rhetorical pivot but through cumulative rotational pressure.
It is therefore useful to treat this stage as a form of structural dramaturgy. Each quadrant should be assigned a distinct mode of pressure or thematic function, ensuring that the poem’s movement feels inevitable rather than imposed. When the armature is correctly conceived at this stage, the subsequent act of writing becomes less an invention than a fulfilment of structural necessity.
This schematic represents the final stage of preparation before writing begins — whether one intends to compose the poem holistically or quadrant by quadrant. As noted earlier, the progression through the structure is akin to a set of stations of the cross: it is essential to determine how the characters move through the Z-shaped spatial logic of the form.
In this instance, the desired evolution was from the psychic to the physical, while accounting for the competing pressures of the social and the spiritual. From a distant, structural vantage point, the poem may appear to be governed primarily by social and physical forces. Yet the inward terrain is equally decisive. One must ask: how does the rider internally adapt to the psychic pressure of fear, to the atmospheric conditions of the arena, to the anticipatory tension that precedes action?
Similarly, the spiritual pressures must be articulated. Do the riders pray? If so, to whom — to a higher power, to ritual, or to a magnified version of the self? These questions determine the tonal and conceptual trajectory of the quadrants. They shape how pressure accumulates and transforms as the poem advances through its prescribed lattice.
Once this architecture is firmly established, the remaining work becomes one of fulfilment rather than invention. The poet moves from lattice to meaning, from a holistic vision of the poem to a functional framework, and finally to a series of interdependent moments that progress toward an inexorable terminus.
This final lineated arrangement makes the demarcation of structural zones clearly visible; however, one cannot meaningfully analyze the individual quadrants until the poem is first apprehended as an integrated whole. Even then, it is important not to become overly fixated on reading the quadrants as fully autonomous poems. Although it is possible — and I will demonstrate later — to construct looser interpretive pathways that allow such readings, the governing logic of the form does not require strict semantic independence at the quadrant level. Just as the reverse orientation of the rotational axis is never presented in a legible forward sequence — and therefore does not bear the full burden of semantic palindrome — the quadrants may selectively incorporate or omit axial vocabulary in order to maintain local coherence. Structural fidelity takes precedence over rigid lexical symmetry.
Lineation here is as critical as it was in the Chiastic Helix Sonnet. The poem assumes a rectangular disposition, modeled in part on the physical geometry of the arena itself. This space is inherently bifurcated: multiple events unfold within a single evening, and the structure must accommodate simultaneous pressures and overlapping temporalities. The resulting layout therefore functions not merely as a visual arrangement but as a spatial dramaturgy, guiding the reader through zones of intensifying experience.
The structural logic of the form may be understood through several overlapping precedents derived from the Sator Square. At the most visible level, the poem establishes a square containment system, whose borders are defined by reciprocal semantic-palindrome spines. Within this enclosure emerges a cruciform axis, analogous both to the central TENET hinge of the Sator grid and to the concealed Pater Noster cross configuration, in which meaning is organized around intersecting vertical and horizontal orders. This arrangement also recalls the classical quincunx pattern, a five-point spatial logic that generates four quadrants around a governing center.
In this poem, the quadrants function as stations of experiential pressure — psychic, social, spiritual, and physical — through which the character’s trajectory acquires rotational inevitability. The square provides containment; the cross provides motion; and the governing axial word operates as the poem’s structural cynosure, binding lattice, progression, and thematic force into a single architectonic system. As we will discuss later, the ‘invisible’ verses one can extract from each quadrant act as hidden caudates, much like the Ghost Caudate (or Triple Form Sonnet), but there is no codified formula for extracting them; they are looser in aggregate, and therefore more sensory than specific.
Quadrant I
Once gates break, riders hold breaths;
Gates shudder till that moment.
Break that rank bull, brother—
riders learn quickly how to count rhythms.
Hold tight now— soon his body will echo
breaths, now contract into a panicked prayer;
fear becomes atmosphere, rhythms echo prayer.
Quadrant II
Fear crowds the blood, quickens mercy before silence—
dust becomes some weather all men have felt before:
the atmosphere above the chute holds no given mercy.
Before the horn, how breath quickens—
every hard kick, straight through the blood.
He nods once, grips the bull rope.
Control bares hidden forces; tilted fences surround crowds.
Quadrant III
Fear becomes atmosphere, rhythms echo prayer;
crowds then angle forward,
the horn blares and the bull’s
blood hammers in his ears,
quickens—until finally the arena is tilted.
Mercy leaves his grip
before he can make the whistle—
silence before mercy quickens blood
Quadrant IV
He bares his back to them, embraces his fear.
The bull’s hidden rage breaks loose in sharp hot breaths—
forces rear and plunge hard, while his hold
is tilted on its axis, toward the waiting riders,
the fences rush sideways past him, before the break
riders surround him, the charger wheels to the gates.
The crowds fear, breaths hold—riders break gates once.
If you look back at the earlier lineated form, you can begin to extrapolate how these quadrant-verses were derived. The process is not rigidly mechanical. At times I borrow directly from the axiomatic vocabulary of the rotational spine; at other moments I deliberately set those words aside in order to preserve local clarity or tonal continuity. However, this freedom is not arbitrary. If an axial word is omitted in one quadrant, it must be structurally recovered elsewhere. The system therefore operates on a principle of distributed obligation: lexical pressures may shift location, but they cannot be entirely evaded.
It is also important to stress that this step is optional and diagnostic rather than essential. The quadrants are not presented to the reader as discrete poems; they remain largely invisible within the finished architecture. This exercise exists primarily as a way for the poet to stress-test the form, ensuring that the lattice can sustain multiple interpretive pathways without collapsing its governing logic.
In the following example, I will demonstrate how these distilled quadrant-verses may be understood as rotationally organized around the central thematic axis — CONTROL — showing how pressure accumulates, migrates, and ultimately resolves through the poem’s prescribed spatial movement.
Here is a visualization of how the mini-poems rotate around the governing rotational-axis word, making the poem’s progression more immediately legible in spatial terms. These schematics are neither arbitrary nor strictly necessary for composition; rather, they function as expository instruments, clarifying the internal mechanics of the Sator Square Sonnet. They allow the poet — and, at a later stage, the critic — to perceive how pressure is distributed, transferred, and intensified across the quadrants.
What becomes most evident in this diagram is the circular logic underlying the poem’s apparent zig-zag movement. The structure advances directionally — psychic to social, social to spiritual, spiritual to physical — yet it also operates as a recursive loop, continually returning to the central condition named by the axis word: control. Each rider must pass through a comparable sequence of emotional and conceptual stations, though the tempo and emphasis of that passage will vary from individual to individual.
In this sense, the form accommodates both shared ritual progression and personal contingency. Fear becomes atmosphere; atmosphere becomes action; action becomes reckoning. The rotational design ensures that these experiences are not merely sequential but cumulative, building toward a moment of irreversible consequence. The rider’s task, structurally as well as narratively, is to negotiate these converging pressures — to master fear sufficiently to endure the ride, and, ideally, to remain mounted beyond the decisive eight-second threshold.
Lastly, we arrive at the complete schematic, the armature in its fully realized state. Seen in this unified form, it functions almost as a Rosetta Stone for anyone wishing to reconstruct the mechanics of the Sator Square Sonnet. What had previously appeared as a sequence of isolated procedures — establishing envelope spines, determining the rotational axis, distributing pressure across quadrants, calibrating lineation — now reveals itself as a single integrated operating system. The diagram becomes less an illustration than a methodological map, a kind of poetic recipe book whose steps may be followed, adapted, and re-applied across different narrative or thematic terrains.
At its core, the schematic demonstrates how containment and motion must be engineered simultaneously. The outer square defines the limits of the experience: it is the arena, the ritual ground, the jurisdiction within which events unfold. The cruciform axis, by contrast, generates kinetic inevitability — a rotational progression that compels the poem forward while also returning it, recursively, to its governing center. The quadrants function as stations of pressure, staging the transformation of perception into action, action into consequence, and consequence into reckoning.
Because the system is architectonic rather than ornamental, it can be applied wherever a subject demands structured escalation within bounded space. The most suitable narratives are those in which individuals must pass through predictable yet intensely felt phases of experience: rites of passage, contests of endurance, moral ordeals, initiatory trials, or any situation in which internal and external pressures converge within a fixed temporal or spatial frame. Such subjects benefit from the form’s ability to render simultaneity — psychic fear alongside social scrutiny, spiritual invocation alongside physical exertion — while preserving the sense that all movement ultimately resolves around a single governing condition.
Thus, the question of relevance becomes one of pressure and inevitability. What stories unfold within containers? What experiences recur in cycles even as they appear to move forward? What human actions are measured against thresholds — of time, courage, faith, or control? Wherever a narrative requires both ritual repetition and irreversible outcome, this system offers a disciplined means of shaping the material. The schematic does not dictate content, but it does demand that the chosen subject possess enough structural gravity to sustain rotation, recursion, and return.
Final thoughts: By the early medieval period, pattern poetry reached a remarkable level of structural refinement in the figure poems of Rabanus Maurus, especially in the above image of the cycle De laudibus sanctae crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross). In these works, the page becomes a tightly organized lattice in which letters operate simultaneously as continuous text and as elements within a larger geometric design. Crosses, grids, and nested configurations create multiple possible reading routes, inviting the reader to experience the poem as a unified visual-theological system rather than a purely linear composition.
I discuss these structures in greater detail in the SONNET FORMS section; here, however, I place the example immediately after my schematic to demonstrate the strikingly identical architecture—a correspondence I only recognized later and therefore present retrospectively at the end. The principal generative influence for Eight Seconds in Nowata was the Sator Square, which clearly belongs within this broader lineage. Together, such works show how recursive patterning can operate across several simultaneous scales—lexical, graphic, and symbolic—anticipating later developments in fully architectonic poetics.
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THE DOUBLE FORM SONNET
As with many of my invented forms, the Double Form Sonnet did not emerge through linear procedural design but through recursive experimentation — a circular process of drafting, inversion, and structural re-evaluation. Early iterations were driven primarily by thematic inquiry into charismatic authority and ritualized power, drawn from personal experience within Pentecostal Christianity. At that stage, the poems remained formally conventional, even when rhetorically ambitious. Only later did I begin to test more radical manipulations of inherited structures. One such experiment involved inverting the Shakespearean sonnet while preserving its terminal rhyme governance. Although this produced a compelling directional disturbance, the deeper formal logic remained elusive. The decisive breakthrough occurred when memories from my undergraduate training resurfaced: performance art exercises governed by spatial grids and strict temporal containment, alongside concurrent studies in sacred architectural procession. It was through the convergence of these embodied and architectural experiences that the operational principle of the Double Form Sonnet finally clarified.
In the performance module that proved formative, students were required to enter an illuminated square within an eight-by-eight lattice and generate unscripted narrative movement within a fixed thirty-second interval. I progressed counterclockwise across the grid, beginning in the northeast corner and concluding in the northwest quadrant. Each timed transition intensified the action: agitation increased, gestures became more animalistic, and with each interval I removed an article of clothing until the performance culminated in a deliberately savage state.
Opposite me, another performer advanced in parallel along the reverse axis, adopting the role of a detached observer — a clinician or researcher — whose neutrality amplified the ritual dimension of the encounter. These improvisations revealed the aesthetic force of constrained sequencing: transformation occurred not through explanation but through regulated movement across partitioned space. In retrospect, the Double Form Sonnet reenacts this spatial dramaturgy. Its concealed Petrarchan descent charts forward progression, while the inverted Shakespearean terminal sequence administers retrograde judgment. The poem therefore stages brutality not as episodic event but as procedural inevitability — a ritualized passage through a tightening field of structural pressure.
Meanwhile, I was also taking art history courses, including an elective in Indian Art and Architecture that began with Chaitya halls and the Gupta period. From the first lecture I was struck not only by their sculptural drama but by the consistency of their spatial logic: elongated processional halls terminating in an apsidal shrine, within which a stupa functioned as the sacred cynosure. Around this central mass extended a clearly defined ambulatory path, establishing ritual movement as a primary architectural principle rather than a secondary devotional gesture. Worshippers circumambulated clockwise—aligning themselves with solar motion and auspicious cosmological order—while counter-clockwise movement, though not formally prohibited, was widely regarded as destabilizing or inauspicious. What fascinated me even then was how this rotational grammar of devotion appeared to recur, consciously or unconsciously, in sacred architectures far removed in geography and doctrine.
Symbolically, the stupa participates in a broader family of axial sacred forms across South and Southeast Asia. Early aniconic traditions frequently centered worship around vertical or mound-like markers understood as condensations of generative or cosmic force. Over centuries these were formalized architecturally into reliquary monuments and eventually into governing ground plans for monastic complexes. In certain Buddhist contexts this axial logic was extended further through mandalic organization, including swastika-derived spatial diagrams that mapped ritual movement onto cosmological geometry. Whether read as emblem, orientation device, or metaphysical diagram, such forms articulate the same underlying principle: sacred space is structured through rotational procession around a stabilized center—an architectural enactment of the axis mundi comparable in symbolic function to the omphalos at Delphi or later cruciform Christian plans.
Upon further investigation, it became clear that one need not leave India to observe analogous spatial strategies within Christian architecture itself. Catholic and Orthodox churches in regions such as Goa and Kerala frequently preserve apsidal sanctuaries, strong axial nave progression, and in some cases residual or implied ambulatory circulation zones that echo the processional logic of the Chaitya hall. The Syrian-influenced Orthodox church illustrated here presents a particularly striking parallel. Although doctrinally distinct, its spatial hierarchy similarly organizes worship around a sacred focal point—the altar rather than the stupa—while maintaining a geometry that encourages directional movement, ritual orientation, and processional awareness. In both structures, architecture operates not merely as enclosure but as choreography: belief is spatialized, and devotion becomes a patterned movement around a consecrated axis.
What I was unable to perceive at the time was the connection between these spiritual frameworks and the real-time performances I was staging with my classmates. Only now, nearly four decades later, do those experiences resolve into a coherent structural intuition. The broader implication is that much of Western art unfolds within circumscribed geometries—most commonly the square and rectangle, and more occasionally the circle—forms that impose compression upon language, image (whether fixed or moving), and the human body within staged environments. I have come to see little distinction between the pressures exerted by these shapes across media. This recognition proved decisive in shaping the poem’s architecture. I altered the initial lexical governance to follow a vertical Petrarchan descent, effectively embedding a concealed retrograde motion within the sonnet’s forward narrative surface.
It was during this phase that the figure at the poem’s center underwent a transformation. The charismatic Southern pastor who had initially animated the drafts gradually gave way to Rasputin—an unorthodox visionary whose authority derived precisely from his willingness to enter the public sphere against expectation and direction. His name is ubiquitous, his legend improbably persistent, and his death already archetypal; I therefore resisted dramatizing events that history had sufficiently mythologized. Instead, I determined that he—the wolf—would circle the narrative field of his own life, even as he is himself encircled by equally predatory boyars. The Double Form Sonnet accommodates this strategy because it begins structurally with the couplet. By refusing the conventional terminal rhyme-pair closure, the poem grants Rasputin a forceful entrance yet denies him a ceremonious exit: he arrives rhetorically amplified and departs within a diminishing acoustic field.
Studying the historical photographs sharpened my imaginative entry into the poem’s dramatic field. However mediated Rasputin’s story may be in biography or film, the intensity of his documented gaze alters one’s sense of proximity; the figure ceases to be merely legendary and becomes spatially present. This visualization helped clarify several moments of structural doubleness within the sonnet. Because the young tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia was the condition that first drew Rasputin into the tsarina’s orbit, the line “Soon the empress sends her women after him; / dawn to dark, where blood finds no release—” was designed to operate as both historical reference and suggestive ambiguity. On one level, it evokes the pathology that made Rasputin indispensable at court; on another, it hints at the eroticized mythology surrounding his influence over aristocratic women. Such lexical bifurcation is central to the poem’s engine, allowing narrative pressure to accumulate without explicit exposition.
The Wolf True peasant-dark, that Siberian claw— drawn out of birch and ice into their law, gone soft with silk but animal, the skin, to Petersburg, his hunger dressed as peace. Soon the empress sends her women after him; dawn to dark, where blood finds no release— upon her boy, he breathes his mudded word construed as covenant—the bleeding stilled. Again he feeds; again she calls him Lord, kneeling as the boyars measure out his will— before the feast must turn to discipline— condemn him to the ice-locked room, shriving every rank and matted sin; unmoored into the gloaming, out of view.
The structural turn occurs just beyond the octave, where the boyars enter the poem’s jurisdictional space. Their presence introduces a second register of doubleness: they appear to be gauging Rasputin’s resolve — measuring his “will” in the sense of psychological force — yet the same word gestures toward the legal instrument of a death warrant already forming in secret. I intentionally rendered the assassination sequence in muted, almost archetypal terms. The poem’s primary interest lies less in dramatizing the well-known details of his murder than in completing the retrograde circuit that the form itself demands. Rasputin must traverse the full rotational path of the sonnet’s concealed architecture, effectively circumambulating his own life rather than pursuing external prey. The schematic below clarifies this backward vector, illustrating how terminal rhyme and initial lexical descent collaborate to guide the reader through a counter-directional narrative trajectory toward an exit that feels structurally inevitable rather than theatrically resolved.
The central takeaway here — and across this page more broadly — is that I write visually. I am continually constructing devices that allow me to see a poem’s movement before or while I compose it: lexical lattices, fixed camera framings, architectural schematics, or supplementary images drawn from photography and fine art. These visual frameworks help me stabilize both the poem’s internal logic and the spatial progression of characters and forces as they move through constrained environments.
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THE GHOST CAUDATE SONNET (or “THE TRIPLE FORM SONNET”)
This section introduces my most recent invention, the Ghost Caudate Sonnet, first tested in a poem responding to the story of Count Ugolino. As with much of my work, the form did not precede the narrative. Instead, a visual encounter — in this case with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s sculptural treatment of Ugolino — provided the initial conceptual spark. The process was neither linear nor systematic; rather, it unfolded through recursive experimentation, revisiting earlier drafts and reinterpreting past artistic experiences until a structural solution began to emerge.
Carpeaux’s rendering of Ugolino alters the emotional calculus of the well-known episode. Unlike the Laocoön group, where serpents visibly bind the father and sons, Carpeaux’s composition suggests an invisible force — hunger itself — that links the figures in a shared field of doom. The result is a psychological rather than purely physical entanglement, a configuration in which paternal failure becomes the organizing axis of the scene. This thematic proximity to other figures explored in Hallucinations, including Rasputin, reinforced my interest in how inherited narratives of catastrophe can be re-contained within highly regulated poetic structures.
Many of my sonnets could be described as ghost sonnets, a modern variation in which the traditional fourteen-line frame remains perceptible while several of its governing mechanisms are deliberately loosened. Strict rhyme schemes, regular meter, or sharply staged voltas may be displaced or partially erased. What persists is the residual pressure of the historical container: the reader senses expectation, argument, and terminal compression even when the load-bearing elements have been redistributed. In this sense, the ghost sonnet functions less as a literal execution of inherited rules than as a memory of form — a structure haunted by its own precedents.
The Ghost Caudate Sonnet extends this spectral logic by introducing a concealed secondary structure within the visible poem. Historically, caudate sonnets appended additional lines or terminal clusters that complicated closure, often serving satirical, juridical, or rhetorical purposes. Such extensions did not simply lengthen the poem; they altered its adjudicative rhythm, reframing the authority of the closing gesture. While poets such as Milton more frequently destabilized sonnet logic through enjambed syntax and redistributed turns rather than literal caudate additions, the broader tradition demonstrates how terminal authority could be delayed, qualified, or re-purposed.
In this variation, the cauda is internalized rather than appended. A sub-poem operates covertly within the primary architecture, producing what might be called a procedural echo. The poem appears to progress conventionally, yet beneath its rhetorical surface a second sequence of obligations is being fulfilled. This creates a three-tiered system of containment — visual, lexical, and adjudicative — in which meaning must be coaxed into legibility through attentive rereading. The hidden structure functions as a dispassionate response to the overt narrative, compressing judgment while expanding the field of retrospective authority traditionally assigned to the couplet.
Formally, this system relies on three extracted “spines” derived from canonical sonnet traditions: a Petrarchan spine governing initial words, a Spenserian spine operating at medial positions, and a Shakespearean spine determining terminal rhyme. Because the Shakespearean sequence anchors the poem’s sonic closure, the overall structure can give the illusion of being conventionally English even as its deeper mechanics diverge sharply from that expectation. The poem must therefore be composed from the hidden lattice outward. One constructs the fixed lexical grid first, then writes the visible poem as a responsive body. The process resembles solving a crossword puzzle in reverse: structural necessity repeatedly forces revision of the spines themselves until temporal modality, narrative voice, and rhetorical pressure align.
In this sense, the Ghost Caudate Sonnet may be understood as a reverse caudate. Rather than extending beyond the sonnet’s boundary, the form generates an internal adjudicative tail that the poem must answer. The visible narrative becomes secondary to the invisible juridical logic that governs it.
According to the historical record, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was imprisoned in the Torre della Muda in Pisa with two sons and two grandsons, though later artistic and literary treatments often compress or reorganize this number for compositional clarity. In his monumental nineteenth-century sculpture Ugolino and His Sons, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux resolves the group into a tightly interlocked pyramidal structure in which three youthful bodies visibly support and encircle the father’s imploding will. The triangular armature is not incidental: it stabilizes the violent emotional torque of the scene while simultaneously dramatizing enclosure. Critics have long noted that Carpeaux’s treatment departs from neoclassical restraint toward a proto-expressionist intensity, privileging psychological compression and corporeal entanglement over idealized proportion. While the work is often compared in ambition to sculptural landmarks such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa or Michelangelo’s David, its true innovation lies in converting narrative catastrophe into spatial inevitability. The bodies become architecture; anguish becomes load-bearing.
This triangular logic provided a crucial visual antecedent for what evolved into the Ghost Caudate or Triple Form Sonnet. A fourth vertical channel would have imposed excessive rigidity, while a dual structure had already been explored in the Double Form Sonnet. Three spines allowed for escalation, counterpoint, and adjudication without collapsing into symmetry. The number itself carries deep cosmological resonance. Creation myths across cultures frequently organize experience into triadic systems: the Norse cosmology of Yggdrasil linking realms of gods, men, and the dead (ending with the Ragnarok); the Biblical sequence of Eden, fall, and eschatological reckoning (Armageddon); the Hindu Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and the Christian doctrine of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In each case, the triad functions not merely as symbolic ornament but as a governing engine through which time, judgment, and transformation are processed. John Donne’s invocation of the “three-personed God” in his Holy Sonnets further demonstrates how theological number can generate rhetorical pressure within lyric form.
Ugolino’s own political biography reinforces this structural inheritance. As a Guelf noble accused of capitulating key Pisan strongholds — including the three strongholdds of Castelvecchio di Compito, Castelnuovo di Val di Cecina, and Viareggio — his historical narrative is already triangulated by loss, betrayal, and siege. In Carpeaux’s sculpture, these surrendered towers find a visual analogue in the rising configuration of limbs and torsos that cage the father at their apex. Transposed into poetic practice, this configuration evolves into three governing columns that function simultaneously as compositional scaffolding and as the echo of prison bars. Narrative energy must move through these vertical channels, yet the very act of progression intensifies the sense of confinement. The triangular stability promised by mythic and theological precedent is therefore complicated by juridical containment. Structure becomes not merely a device for balance but an instrument of sentence. Within the Ghost Caudate framework, the triple spine speaks with dispassionate authority — not as decorative symmetry, but as spatialized judgment enacted across the duration of the poem.
The voice of the Ghost Caudate in this poem is specifically Cassius — what remains of what was originally conceived as a dialogue. The formal solution, then, was to internalize that exchange: Cassius becomes both the invasive voice within Ugolino’s psychic field and the concealed adjudicative voice embedded within the poem’s structure itself. He operates simultaneously as tempter, analyst, and echo of starvation’s delirium — the condition in which thought fractures and begins to argue against itself. In this way, the form mirrors the experience it contains: a divided consciousness under pressure.
The sculpture above depicts one of the principal architects of Caesar’s assassination. In Dante’s Inferno, Cassius is consigned to the lowest region of Hell — Cocytus — where he is eternally devoured in the mouth of Lucifer alongside Judas and Brutus. Here, however, I reposition him within the fourth ring, allowing him speech, mobility, and—most importantly—perspective. He becomes a figure who can see across time and narrative strata, consistent with the governing logic of Precedents, where speakers are less characters than enduring jurisdictions of voice. For a tonal reference, see The Tribunal, which also features a related caudate extension—the Acta Iterata—delivered by Marcus Brutus.
The etching to the right is Gustave Doré’s rendering of Ugolino’s final moments, drawn from his canonical illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. As no authenticated images exist of the interior of Ugolino’s prison within the Torre della Muda (later incorporated into the Palazzo dell’Orologio in Pisa), the cell persists primarily as a literary and artistic construct. Doré, like Carpeaux, therefore participates in the long visual reconstruction of a space that is historically real but imaginatively reconstituted. The Ghost Caudate Sonnet enters this lineage not by documenting the cell, but by rebuilding it as formal architecture: a chamber of voices, pressures, and judgments from which there is no rhetorical escape.
In 2001, skeletal remains attributed to Ugolino della Gherardesca were examined by a forensic team led by Italian paleoanthropologist Francesco Mallegni in an effort to evaluate the long-standing accusation of cannibalism derived from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXXIII). DNA analysis, dental inspection, and microscopic study of bone wear revealed no evidence that Ugolino consumed human flesh during his imprisonment in the Torre della Muda — later known as the Tower of Hunger (Torre della Fame). The findings instead support death by starvation and complicate literal readings of Dante’s narrative, suggesting that the episode functions more powerfully as moral and political allegory than as verifiable historical record. In this sense, the legend of cannibalism persists less as forensic fact than as a formal mechanism through which literary tradition intensifies themes of betrayal, punishment, and civic collapse.
Nevertheless, if nothing is definitive, it remains fertile ground for artists and storytellers. In this instance, I have chosen to print the legend. If the account is apocryphal, then the suggestion that he consumed his own kin is all the more incendiary — which is precisely why the historical and forensic details above are worth sharing. I present the final poem here, followed by the Ghost Caudate beneath it. It is important to remember that the caudate came first: it is the concealed skeleton upon which the sonnet itself was constructed.
After Carpeaux (A Ghost Caudate) Ugolino dreams behind the heavy doors, his growing hunger reverses to plenty, the doors— mercifully unlocked. What removes currents, a voice reproves, firmly resists the flow of power, Arno’s ebbing forces soon secured. The count wakes, and moves shadowed on the floor before his weeping sons, between verges of daylight, the narrow shafts on the walls, searches beyond those inner corridors—where new hope precedes below dreams, where a shadow can overtake all miracles— Pisa’s sudden forgiveness for Ugolino’s crimes, their freedom, then coastal waters beyond his vision; where his family ingests towers in perfect rows. Swallow, a voice summons them: conceives to keep its hidden form. Take the youngest. Total the bones tomorrow. Unfolding terrors reveal his heirs. Power is this— unspoken schemes are always eaten first.
The ghost caudate below, composed of Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearean spines respectively, is embedded across three vertical vectors: the initial words, the median (fifth-position) words, and the terminal words of each line. The structure remains deliberately invisible at the level of ordinary reading, operating instead as a latent architectural system that organizes motion, pressure, and adjudication beneath the poem’s surface.
[Ugolino reverses currents, Arno’s shadowed verges, searches below Pisa’s coastal
towers, conceives total power.
Heavy doors—firmly secured before narrow corridors—shadow Ugolino’s vision;
swallow hidden, unfolding schemes.
Hunger removes power, moves between walls, precedes miracles—then ingests them:
youngest heirs first.]
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DEAD MAN’S SLIDE AND THE WELLINGTON AVALANCHE DISASTER: A DAY ON THE IRON GOAT TRAIL
Not every poem in this section represents an invented form or loose variant. Research may also be applied in a more traditional sense—augmenting narrative architecture rather than exploring exotic lexical profiles. In Dead Man’s Slide, we encounter a relatively straightforward three-part English sonnet cycle commemorating a historic event, inspired entirely by a visit to the site of the Wellington avalanche disaster deep in the Cascades.
The day trip, sponsored by Atlas Obscura, proved both physically and spiritually demanding (the latter I will explain further on), as the site required a strenuous hike several hours into the mountains. The infamous snow sheds—massive concrete defensive structures constructed by the Great Northern Railway to shield passing trains from the region’s violent winter avalanches—were presented to the group as the principal attraction. What began as an almost prosaic exploration of turn-of-the-century ruins gradually assumed a darker tenor, punctuated, as advertised, by the strange and isolated remains scattered across the mountainside.
These structures were built in response to one of the deadliest avalanche disasters in American railroad history. In late February 1910, after more than a week of relentless snowfall in the Cascade Mountains, two Great Northern trains—the Spokane Express and a westbound passenger train—were stranded near the small railroad settlement of Wellington, Washington. Snowdrifts blocked the line, immobilizing the cars on an exposed stretch of track beneath Windy Mountain. Railway crews and passengers waited for conditions to improve, unaware that the unstable snowpack above them was steadily accumulating lethal pressure.
In the early hours of March 1, a massive avalanche broke loose. A wall of snow and ice swept down the mountainside, carrying with it timber, rock, and debris. The force of the slide hurled locomotives and passenger cars hundreds of feet into the forested ravine below, crushing wooden structures, severing the tracks, and burying the wreckage beneath tons of compacted snow. Ninety-six people were killed—railroad workers, travelers, and residents of the settlement—making the catastrophe one of the most devastating winter disasters in the Pacific Northwest.
Rescue efforts were slow and perilous. Survivors and recovery crews labored in freezing conditions, cutting through twisted iron and frozen drifts by lantern light, often forced to suspend their work when new slides threatened the site. Bodies were recovered over days and weeks and transported down the mountain by sled. In the aftermath, the railway expanded and reinforced its system of snow sheds along the line, enclosing long sections of track beneath heavy protective galleries designed to deflect or absorb future avalanches. Many of the concrete foundations and fragmented walls encountered along the Iron Goat Trail today are the remains of those defensive works—somber engineering responses to a landscape capable of sudden and catastrophic violence.
Descending into the site makes the scale of that catastrophe legible in ways no archival account can fully convey. By means of fixed safety cables—similar to the kusari chains used on difficult approaches on Mount Fuji—we worked our way down the steep ravine toward the remaining wreckage of the Great Northern passenger train buried by the slide. At the bottom, a memorial plaque commemorates the ninety-six lives lost on that fateful morning in 1910, transforming what first appeared an exercise in historical curiosity into an encounter with a landscape still charged with consequence.
The resulting poem was originally far heavier on exposition, reconstructing the disaster more dispassionately and tracing the order of events that led to the recovery of the bodies and the attending of the dead. Yet the turn was always there, distributed across the three sonnets as though they were quatrains; the final poem is therefore the turn writ large. This is often the advantage of the cycle: rather than forcing each sonnet to pivot independently, the architecture allows a single reorientation to gather force across multiple chambers. The poem’s research was twofold: immediate, physical encounter with the site, followed by later archival and historical reading. At face value, Dead Man’s Slide concerns the avalanche that destroyed the Great Northern train at Wellington, along with the doomed settlement itself. The facts are dramatic enough that my earliest draft risked reading as mere reportage, as though fidelity to the dead required a refusal of interpretation.
That is one danger of research: one may accumulate so much detail that the heart of the poem is briefly misplaced. What compelled me to write was not only the event’s historical weight, but the experience of moving through the surviving snow sheds, tunnel, wreckage, and memorial ground near the river’s edge. As with certain other poems written in response to place, I began from immediate impression and only later supplemented the work with documentary particulars. Dead Man’s Slide is an admixture of both methods: extemporizing the framework at the site, then refining it through later research into the names, testimonies, and stranger surviving details omitted by the commemorative plaque. But I was never interested in merely restaging the catastrophe. By the turn, the historical material has been made to support a second argument altogether: the emotional wreckage of a relationship that could not be honorably resolved.
That private pressure was bound up with the excursion itself, though I understood this only imperfectly at the time. What had seemed a historical outing later acquired a second, more intimate charge, and the poem’s final movement grows from that retrospective recognition. The avalanche remains the poem’s literal subject, but by the third sonnet it has become something more than historical reenactment: a figure for misalignment, for desire complicated by conscience, and for the terrible fact that one may arrive too late to innocence but still too early for speech. Much of the original reportage was therefore stripped away. A few names and details remain, but the poem now relies less on documentary accumulation than on formal pressure to carry what could not be said directly. In that sense, the later revision rescued the poem from its earlier dutifulness. What had once been only competent historical verse became, through structure, a poem with a deeper and more divided allegiance.
Dead Man’s Slide I. In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight at Windy Mountain. Snow sheared from its shelf, fell like a body from a great height, took Bailets Hotel, took the track itself, took cars and men and mailbags in its run and drove them through the dark into the trees. The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone. The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees of iron: boilers split, pistons bent, sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines. They counted ninety-six dead from the rent of snow and steel, laid them along the lines, and sent them down on sleds. The mountain held the rest; the river held what bled and cooled. II. Two lawyers jumped from Twenty-Five and lived. They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel, came down end over end and rose half-given to breathe again. Below them lay the funnel of dark and quiet—Jesseph, Merritt, snow packed in their cuffs. A whiskey flask went round, the proof passed hand to hand. Yet just below, they found Ms. Starret pinned where branches wound her to the wreck. Her infant lay beneath her breast, the crying gone. Another son they cut free living, blood along his teeth, a stick drawn from his head. The work was done by lanternlight. The snow came down anew and covered what the night let through. III. You brought me here among the dead, among the names fixed at the rim— a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed. You knew what weight I’d carry in. The wire burns between my hands, above the cliff where alder closes over ruin. What did you want? I bring you nothing of the relic kind—no leaf from Bhutan, no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth, nor canine splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary— I only cede the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine, the ash of our own catastrophes shook from the severed veil and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail.
The process of writing the poem—and researching the event through materials from the Library of Congress as well as various documentary sources—has now come full circle, returning me to my primary practice: filmmaking. I am currently developing an animated short, tentatively titled Wellington, which extracts one salient thread from the poem—the presence of the deceased children. This will not be a literal adaptation or narrated version of the poem, but rather a tone piece in which a hunter encounters what he believes to be a young girl in the Cascades. She shapeshifts between a bear, an elk, and a raven, each animal leading him incrementally closer to the crash site and, ultimately, to her grave.
Along the way, he seeks refuge from a blizzard inside one of the abandoned snow sheds, where he builds a fire and falls into a dream. In this dream, the avalanche and train disaster reappear not as historical reconstruction but as a symbolic fantasia—an oneiric sequence of images that blends documentary reality with a hyper-stylized landscape of memory and dread. As the animated stills below suggest (offered here only as a small sampling), I have carried forward the idea of the container or armature that governs the poem’s structure, now exploring how similar frameworks can also organize and compress moving forms.
In both my research and artistic philosophy, I continue to return to a central conviction: that the arts are fundamentally interconnected. Each discipline employs analogous principles—dynamics, alternations of tension and repose, and the presence of invisible structural armatures that shape and contain time, sound, image, and narrative.
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