[New-Poetry] Marching orders for the Sonnet

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/06/december/barnstone_e.html 
 Manifesto On The Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics  
PRINCIPLE I: MAKE THE SONNET NEW 
 
To quote Ezra Pound, the poet must "Make it new." William Carlos Williams took Pound's dictum to mean that poets must be relentless avant-gardists, the shock troops of the new. Thus, for Williams, "all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line 'says'? There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning. . . ." Williams was so focused on inventing new (i.e., free verse) forms that a fixed form such as the sonnet was to him mere repetition, the stamping out of the same product again and again by a factory press. The form for Williams is the content. 
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