[Jan D. Hodge]

Originally posted by Michael Cantor:

Snelsonnetry, however, dumbs things down . . .

Originally posted by Jim Hayes:

I agree with M. Cantor, this form is really too easy

The form’s too easy, dumbs things down, you say? What of the sonnet? The English golden age saw thousands of them, hundreds read today--clowning, loving, mourning upon the page. Romantics too produced them by the score, Millay alone one hundred seventy-six, a hundred times that number by Merrill Moore.* Cummings wrote dozens, for all his graphic tricks. Each day more thousands flood the internet, many met with cheers (and some with booing), and not a hint of its abating yet. The form’s too easy, dumbed down, not worth doing? A form’s as good as any writer makes it, as bad as any hack who undertakes it.

*Moore taught himself shorthand so he could write down the sonnets he composed while walking between classes; he had written some nine thousand by age 25, and his “autobiography,” M, is a sequence of a thousand sonnets.
___

P.S.: As the English sonnet soon modified the Italian, so the Irish snelsonnet (ABAB CC) apparently modifies the Dutch.