Bob Rodriguez

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, just one city south of Oakland. I fell in love with poetry at a very early age. In grade school, I was always asked at year’s end to write a poem, recounting major events of the past nine months, and showing gratitude to the teacher for the wonderful job she had done with us that year. These poems were fairly rudimentary, but they went on for pages. I honestly don’t know where my capacity for volume, at such an early age, came from, though most of it was in A-A-A-A, B-B-B-B, etc., four-line-per-verse, rhyme scheme. I was never much with readin’ and ’rithmatic. But almost from the time I could hold a pen in my hand, I was taken to another world—a wonderful place where everything I could imagine could become real—real to the extent I could write it down and there it would be, potentially forever.

I studied screenwriting for about five years, and then television writing for about another five years. Since you’ve never heard of me, it’s a safe bet that neither of those panned out. That was when I returned to acting, believing that as an actor, at least I could be seen whenever I performed. You never know who’s going to be in the audience, or who might read a review, right? The irony is that it took a Shakespearean scene study class, where I was re-introduced to “scansion”—analyzing the meter in each line of verse for what additional meaning might be drawn from the timing, beats and shifts in The Bard’s poetry—something they could never get through my thick skull back in high school—that I finally got this verse poetry stuff. I finally understood what this iambic pentameter jazz was all about. I felt sort of smart—for about a minute. That’s when it hit me: if I was taking this class to better communicate to audiences what Shakespeare meant by the words he used and the way he used them, it could only help my acting if I tried my hand at writing some classical verse, myself.

And so began my passion for rhyming verse. Since then, it has grown into an all-consuming near-obsession. In a little over two years I had written over one hundred Shakespearean-styled sonnets and a handful of Petrarchan-styled. These sonnets comprise my book of sonnets: “Forgotten Knight: 121 Classically-Styled Sonnets on Contemporary Themes.”