UNI ENGLISH TEACHER Elizabeth Majerus' poem "Middle American Sonnet" has recently been published in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of the Great River Review, a literary journal.

This is Majerus' fifth published poem. She took a slightly different approach in her latest work.

"I started writing this poem because I was interested in the idea of what people sometimes call the 'American sonnet,' which is a sonnet that has the shape of a sonnet at 14 lines long, and the length of an iambic pentameter line, but it's not as formally rigid as a sonnet," Majerus explains. "It's not rhymed necessarily, and the rhythm is not necessarily in iambic pentameter."

Known to Uni students as a teacher open to new ideas, Majerus found herself overcoming some old habits as she composed the poem.

"I've always kind of resisted the sort of 'contemporary' sonnet or modern sonnet," she says. "Usually when I write a sonnet, I write a sonnet the way Shakespeare would've written it, or the way Edna St. Vincent Millay would've written it. Not that I'm comparing myself to Shakespeare or Edna St. Vincent Millay, but those are the sort of writers whose sonnets I aspire to."

Majerus had been working on a series of American sonnets when this one was born. A sonnet does not allow much room for elaboration or explanation, but Majerus knew she had some very distinct things to say. So she asked herself, "How can I say something in a short space?"

"I was thinking about the Midwest and ideas about the Midwest that are nostalgic, and associated with the past, and the ways that our America has changed and how the Midwest kind of represents that," she says.

"Middle American Sonnet" by Elizabeth Majerus

"Middle American Sonnet"

We are planted in the Midwest.
Our fish is not so fresh, our slang
months behind. We enjoy a jumble
baked in one dish. We are a simple folk.
People make symbols of our women
canning tomatoes in imagined kitchens
or socking away sale-bought meat, broad hips
nudging shut the freezer. But no one cans
anymore, and there is no we to speak of.
Our roads are lonely, or they beat a wide
path to looming stores, not ours. Few of us
farm. Every one of us has left and returned,
in passed time or in a flash of intention.
Plenty is the drug that troubles our dreams.

— Elizabeth Majerus