[New-Poetry] terror dactyls

Mon Apr 7 15:39:17 EDT 2008

 All,

 Seems to me Elizabeth Bishop wrote a "sestina" with only one word a line. Did I remember correctly? Doing something like this is of course a jest. For some reason poets from at least Petrarch onwards have seen fit to formalize the so-called sonnet, and people have more or less adhered to the form right through to modern times incl. Seamus Heaney and other living folks. I don't argue that one needs to use archaic English (heaven forbid!) to make a sonnet "feel" like a sonnet (whatever that means), but I do feel that if one wants to call their poem a sonnet there should be some effort to conform to the traditional form. There are plenty of approaches to the rhyme scheme in addition to myriad slant rhyme possibilities and possible fudging with the rhythm that still make it possible to write lots of meaningful sonnets (twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg said "There are still plenty of good pieces to be written in C Major" - the principle applies here to sonnets methinks). Of course, if one wants to call such a poem simply "poem" and go wild with it that's fine with me, if my opinion is worth anything.

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
Sent: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 3:44 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] terror dactyls

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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