[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

[JforJames at aol.com]

A form as universally successful as the sonnet is bound to attract artists  
who want to tinker
with its formal constraints or those who just want play with the  form. A 
true formalist like Mona 
Van Duyn did a series of 'sonnets' with one word per line while  employing a 
rhyme scheme. Also, 
there's to consider the break from the Italian form toward the English  
sonnet form. What did 
practitioners of the former at the time say/think about the liberties  taken 
by the latter?
 
It seems easy enough these days to stick a modifier on the term if one  needs 
to make clear
distinction: 'traditional sonnet' or 'formal sonnet' would do the trick. Or  
one could put quotes around
the non-traditonal sonnet, "In Ted Berrigan's 'sonnets' we  see..."
 
My philosophical side reminds me that poetic forms are not  like Plato's 
'forms'. There isn't a universal 
sonnet form/ideal that manifests itself in the language object we call  a 
sonnet. All forms arose 
in some arbitrary fashion from a set of rules first laid  down an often 
unknown ur-maker. So in that sense 
all forms are arbitrary and capricious. A certain14 line metered and rimed  
creation becomes habituated 
in the general practice of poets, while the twelve-liner or the  
eighteen-liner never caught on. Many claims have been for special qualities  inherent in 
14 lines (or the 8 + 6 mode), but most are specious. 
Finnegan
 
In a message dated 4/5/2008 5:52:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
jjeffreymail at yahoo.com writes:

You're  right, of course, in yawning.  It is all about the poem's worth.  I  
guess I'm just sick of all the stretching of terms to the point where they're  
useless.  And it's not just sonnets, it's poetry itself.  It's  capital A Art 
itself.  I think instead I'll go read a Shakespeare's  villanelle, or maybe 
I'm in the mood for Basho's heroic  couplets.

John


David Graham  <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:  
These  discussions sometimes make me scratch my head, but more often they 
just make  my eyes glaze over.  I agree with John Jeffrey, as it happens, but so  
what?  I'm very interested in whether or not a given poem is a good  one.  
But whether it is or is not a sonnet?  Yawn . . . .  


I'm content when someone says that a sonnet must have 14 lines and a  rhyme 
scheme; and I'm equally happy when Gerald Stern insists that a sonnet  is 
simply a "little song" and need have no particular shape.  I  probably wouldn't 
follow his example myself, but again:  who cares?  And why?




 



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