Into the golden vessel of great song
Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast
Let other lovers lie, in love and rest;
Not we, - articulate, so, but with the tongue
Of all the world . . . Edna St. Vincent Millay

In a half-forgotten box in my parents’ attic, there is an old black and white photograph of my sister Debby and me sitting on the lawn of the Vassar College campus, Poughkeepsie, NY, circa 1954. On the back of the picture, my mother wrote those...

Good morning!

So far, I have received a variety of sonnet forms, including the Sicilian, Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and Spenserian. Various meters, rhymed, unrhymed; voltas all over the place or non-existent. I've even received one double sonnet (which is OK as the double sonnet is a recognized form where two sonnets together form a single poem).

I just wanted to make it clear that these forms are acceptable for the bake-off, as would be a caudate or curtal, should...

In answer to a submitter's question on protection from Google, Alex has been kind enough to inform me:

...

If anyone tried to send me a sonnet this morning between 5:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, you probably did not get through due to the Google gmail crash.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sciencean...ash-fixed.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,499106,00.html

If so, please resend, as the problem has been fixed.

Thank you.

Cathy

I love the word bake-off. It takes me back to those Pillsbury Bake-offs in the '50s where some nice June Cleaver-ish housewife would win for her yummy brownies, or some other delicacy.

At the time, my father was recovering from polio (which he contracted in the spring the year the vaccine became available to the public) and my mother, age 25, was not only his caregiver and physiotherapist, but also in charge of the first four of what would eventually be her seven children, all of...