The results of the 2009 Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-off are now posted on Distinguished Guest.

This morning I posted the last three finalist sonnets and issued a call for ballots.

Hope you all had fun!

The Eratosphere 2009 sonnet bake-off has begun! Everyone is invited to read and discuss the sonnets and Mr. Cassity's comments.

Dear Fellow Poets,

In choosing the finalists from the sixty-one sonnets submitted to me for this year’s bake-off, I relied on the wisdom of poets, the expertise of scholars and, of course, my own gut feelings, what I call the “goose-bump factor,” which may or may not be wise, but there it is.

My decision matrix was based on the following four main criteria (weights in brackets), all of which had sub-criteria as well:

(A) craft, sound, mechanics, images,...

In one week, I'll be posting the first two bake-off sonnets, with Mr. Turner Cassity's comments and a few of my own.

In her Introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Phillis Levin states that the sonnet is " . . . a mode of introspection, a crystallization of the process of thought, of a self arriving at self-consciousness.”

This seems to be borne out in this year's bake-off, as no less than 72% of the sonnets submitted were written in the first person,...