[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

[Bob Grumman]

JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> 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..."
Why use the term, "sonnet," at all?  Call everything a poem. 

I had a broken phone line so was dis-Internetted for thirty hours or 
so.  Nearly committed suicide.  Had one thought about naming in poetics: 
Who would go along with the idea of a one-line heroic couplet?  I still 
hope to write something brilliant about why we should stop calling 
everything a sonnet--although I think I remember that at one time all 
lyric poems in English were called sonnets. 

Too zapped by phone line trouble and my usual over-extendedness to 
contribute more to this thread--at least for a while, if it keeps going.

--Bob G.


>  
> 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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