[Roger Slater]

Sometimes you see a poem by someone who just uses the word "sonnet" to sound cool, even though the poem has nothing to do with any aspect of sonnet-ness that an educated reader would recognize. And sometimes you see a poem that the poet calls a "sonnet" because the poet assumes/hopes that the reader will understand at some level how the poem is like a traditional sonnet and how the poem is unlike a traditional sonnet, with part of the "point" of the poem being precisely that tension/counterpoint. Unfortunately, I find the former more common among today's poets, and all it does is appropriate a word for no legitimate aesthetic reason, but I also find the latter from time to time and I have no problem with that at all. It's remarkable that we don't have the same sort of discussion with regard to any other traditional form, a fact I attribute to the exalted mystique of the sonnet that bad poets attempt to use to dress up their own imperfect offerings, and good poets use in a way that pays homage to the form while departing from it in various ways.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Well said, Roger.

Nemo

[Martin Elster]

I agree with Aaron that Spence’s poem has several attributes that we associate with the sonnet form. It includes the traditional Shakespearean rhyme scheme (using slant rhymes instead of perfect rhymes), a clear volta, and mostly iambic feet (but heterometric instead of the expected pentameter).

I also like Roger’s post.

But I wonder why Spence didn’t just name the bird “who leaves the land behind, / Making flight his home” — such as the common swift or the albatross. I guess he wanted us to guess.

[Ted Charnley]

Aaron, thank you for posting this, and thank you to Jayne for moving it here. It’s a relief to see a discussion here relating to prosody rather than politics, particularly given the number of knowledgeable poets on this forum.

Four years ago, in a workshop on sonnets at West Chester led by Becky Foust, I participated in a very similar discussion. As we have here, there were a range of opinions then as to what constitutes a sonnet. We also identified the traditional characteristics of the sonnet, including those that Aaron has listed:

14 lines;
iambic pentameter meter;
a pattern of end rhymes;
a “turn” or volta; and
subjects involving “courtly love,” love at a distance or the unobtainable love object.

Obviously, at the traditional end of the opinion range, less variation from these characteristics is tolerated. It sounds like Jayne’s views would fall near or at this end, as would Lewis Turco’s. Whatever else you might think of Turco, he has probably forgotten more about form and meter than the rest of us will ever learn. In his Book of Forms (Revised and Expanded, 2012), he wrote this:

People often ask whether a poem that is fourteen lines long and rhymes but is not written in iambic pentameter is a SONNET. It is true that the term originally meant simply “little song,” but this question was settled long ago by Dante and Spenser and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning (not to mention Longfellow and Robinson and Frost and Millay): if the poem is not written in . . . iambic pentameter lines (if in English), then it is not a sonnet.

Turco goes on to acknowledge that

[r]hyme schemes of the sonnet have traditionally been allowed to vary, as has the number of stanzas; and the volta or “turn” roams around a bit, but a “sonnet” in our tradition must be fourteen lines of rhymed accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter verse with a volta preceding the final stanza. Anything else is either a quatorzain or a nonce form . . . .

At the other end of the opinion range, any or even all of the traditional characteristics of the sonnet form are fair game to vary or ignore while still considering a poem to be a sonnet. Like many of you, I have experimented by varying some of these traditional characteristics; in my case mostly by writing in accentual verse, using alliteration with or without end rhymes. In any event, and without getting into the practice of announcing the form of a poem in its title or body, I question how important it is to categorize or label the form when reading or critiquing. A good poem is a good poem, whatever we call its form, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Nevertheless, Aaron has raised an important point about poets playing off of the reader’s expectations of the sonnet form. This strikes me as an significant part of the craft of formal poetry (with other forms as well), but it may often go unappreciated these days. If the reader is not familiar with the traditional form, where do these expectations come from? Similarly, if the poet has not bothered to first learn and work in the traditional sonnet form, how can he or she play off of it? I personally believe in learning to work within the rules before beginning to break them; that way, when I do break them, it will be purposeful and not randomly out of ignorance. Sadly, I think Roger is right that it is more common among today’s poets to use the word “sonnet” to sound cool about a poem that has little connection with the form.

For what it’s worth, in the workshop mentioned above, our consensus seemed to be that a poem need not contain all of the traditional characteristics of a sonnet to be considered a sonnet, as long as it employs enough of them to be recognizable as such. Again, this relies on an educated reader, but it’s the best compromise I’ve seen between the two ends of the opinion range regarding what constitutes a sonnet.

Ted

[Jayne Osborn]

Just in light-hearted vein, honestly...

I'm the only Brit (apart from Mark, who hardly ever agrees with anything I say, anyway ) and also the only woman who's expressed an opinion - and I still disagree with the lot of you!

This example is not a sonnet. It has vague similarities to a sonnet. I'm sticking to my guns - someone must agree with me, surely? (I can live with it, if not!)

Jayne
Cross-posted with Ted: Hey, mentioning me in the same sentence as Lewis Turco has made my day, Ted!
IMO the buzz word in this debate, that you mentioned, is "recognizable". Yes, if it's recognizable as a sonnet I'll grant that it's a sonnet, but Spence's is still just a 14-liner as far as I'm concerned.

[Aaron Novick]

Ted, thanks for that. I think your post gets at something which both Walter and I tried to get at earlier: the question of why you would call something a "sonnet". I see two approaches.

The first approach, nicely manifested in the Turco quotes you posted, is to see the function of the "sonnet" label as fundamentally classificatory: there's a certain class of poems, the sonnets, which are grouped together based on certain criteria. When we call something a "sonnet", we place it within that class. Now, as is always the case with classification, there's no fact of the matter: we, the classifiers, decide what to classify, and our justifications can only be pragmatic. There's just no question of whether the traditionalists or those with looser criteria are "right"—it's literally a senseless thing to ask. But there is a question of utility, which will depend on the aims of the classifier.

(Sidenote: Turco's claim that Dante et al. "set" the range of what counts as a sonnet is nonsense; it's just a basic misunderstanding of what classification is and is for. That's not to say that nothing can be said for his decision to define a classification around Dante et al.-inspired restrictive criteria. But he's wrong to pretend that Dante et al. writing as they did has any more power over us than we ourselves choose to give it.)

The second approach, which is mine, and Walter's, and possibly yours, is that the function of calling something a "sonnet" is not to classify it at all, but to set the reader's expectations (what the poet does with the expectations, so set, is left open*). It might be tempting to see me (and Walter, etc.) as engaged in the same project as Turco, merely less restrictive about what counts as falling within the sonnet category. But it's really a rejection of Turco's project of defining what "the sonnet" is once and for all. The sonnet, if it's anything, is a tradition, a living, changing thing, and Turco's categorical approach just isn't adequate to that tradition—not because it's too restrictive, but because it's categorical.

*Roger is surely right that many poets call things "sonnets" without meaningfully playing off these expectations.

As for whether readers will get the play with the form, it's tempting to see this as a worry for formal poets specifically, but I don't think that's right. Most readers are naïve about technique in general, and will miss a lot of what's going on, at a technical level, in the poetry they read. Other readers will not. (I'm sure many posters here—including myself—frequently miss what free verse poems are doing, because we're used to meter.) A poem that plays with the sonnet form (or any other bit of poetic history) is, for most readers, going to work or not independently of that play. But it may enrich the experience for those who do know. That seems to me ineluctable, and not worth lamenting.

[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

If this is regarded as a sonnet, then you could argue that any 5-line poem is a limerick, couldn't you?

I think that's a great analogy. As I said earlier, Spence's poem has some of the characteristics of a sonnet (14 lines that rhyme and a turn), but it's not iambic pentameter, so maybe it's merely a quasi-sonnet or sonnet-like. If it didn't have "sonnet" in the title, I wonder if I would have thought of sonnets at all, instead of it being a 14-line heterometric poem.

PS - On the other hand, Alan Hovhaness has written many pieces that he calls a "Symphony," although they are not in the traditional 4 movements, and the first movement is not in sonata-allegro form. He also has composed a piano sonata titled Sonata: “Mt. Chocorua,” which is not in the traditional sonata form at all. But it's a fantastic and amazing piece and I have listened to it many times and it's one of my favorite solo piano pieces by a modern composer.

[Ann Drysdale]

To call a poem a "sonnet" implies that it is a little song. To call it, for example, a Petrarchan of Shakespearean sonnet puts it in uniform. Then we can carry out an ad hoc inspection and sneer at the angle of its epaulettes or find fault with the way the sunlight bounces off its buttons. Otherwise it is simply a little song, small and entire of itself, a work of Aaron or Orwn or Annie. It is theirs and is what they say it is. If they choose a received form and wear it openly, they can be court-martialed if it breaks the rules, but otherwise, it must surely be judged as a poem and its title accepted as part of it.

Once upon a time in another life, I won second prize in the National Poetry Competition with a fourteen-line poem that ended with a couplet but whose unambitious rhyme scheme did not fit a classical pattern. I didn't call it a sonnet but the judges did. I trousered the money and said nothing but was later asked by the Poetry Society to write a piece for their members' journal on "The Sonnet".

I wrote a piece with that title, of twelve roughly equal paragraphs. The first eight detailed the classical requirements, the remainder dealt with the variations and the integrity of the title. Then it came to the following conclusion:

"Further examples? Seek and ye shall find. The sonnet is, au fond, a state of mind."

[Julie Steiner]

M.A. Griffiths posted the following poem on 2003-03-19 to the site Burgundy, in response to the Mad March Hairbrain Not-Sonnet Challenge: “Write a sonnet that is not in pent or tet, not iambic, that is not 14 lines, and yet somehow satisfies a form.” Griffiths’ entry was voted the second-prize winner. (No, I did not save the winner.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Blue Geranium

Enchanted by the picture on the label,
I bought the pack. Ah, those blue-eyed blue
flowers, profligate as grass seeds.
When I looked more closely, I could see
pale roots in the dry compost,
fragile as dead babies’ fingers,
pressing against the plastic bag.
You have been neglected, my geranium;
you were prepared, then overlooked. 



I slip you gently into a white bowl
to soak in warm water. You are valued
now, loved. Grow, you bugger, grow.
Star my summer with deep blue
and I will feed you, water you, protect
you from slugs and snails, I can do that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For me, the idea of sonnet-ness haunts the poem just enough to lend a dollop of gravitas to what I would probably otherwise regard as merely pleasant candyfloss.

I agree with those who say that how the poem benefits from what it does with (or against) the sonnet form is the important thing, rather than a pass-fail grade on whether it meets the technical requirements for sonnethood.

[Cross-posted with Annie.]

[Mark McDonnell]

Annie and Julie, I love both of your posts.

You make a good point, Julie and give a great example. Even without any of the technical requirements of metre, rhyme-scheme, amount of lines, a poem can still feel like a sonnet. It can self-identity! And conversely a poem can have all, or most, of those things and not feel like one. It's about the small journey, the working through of something, whether wrestling with the self or the past or something in the world, and some kind of conclusion which can range from revelatory to a dead end. Roger's idea that the sonnet has acquired a 'cool' so that contemporary poets will label their efforts as such is interesting. I had no idea they were considered cool ha.