Tasha Robinson for NPR, 17 October 2015
Pop Sonnets author Erik Didriksen has been writing poetry most of his life. “I grew up with a knack for rhyming,” he says. “When I was little, I used to write my grandparents poems. There’s a poem [the family] dug up recently — I wrote an ode to pickles. Which is ridiculous, but this is what you have to write about as a 6-year-old. It doesn’t scan at all. It’s just lines with rhymes at the end of them.”
Didriksen went on to other, more involved ways to use that rhyming talent, including a high-school band and a songwriting stint as part of his bachelor’s degree in music technology. And with Pop Sonnets, the 27-year-old New York software developer has achieved something funny, intelligent, and much more complicated than a few couplets about pickles. Pop Sonnets is an outgrowth of Didriksen’s popular Tumblr, where every Thursday, he reinterprets a popular song via Shakespearean dialect and through the rigid 14-line iambic pentameter of an English sonnet. In his hands, the opening lines of The Jackson 5’s “ABC” — “You went to school to learn, girl/Things you never, never knew before” — becomes this: “Thou hast the hallow’d halls of learning sought/ to see the murky depths of knowledge plumb’d.”
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