Mar

27

Calling All Sonnetteers.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 27, 2008 |

If you’re a poet, and especially a sonnet-writer, A Prairie Home Companion’s Spring Lyric contest is calling for sonnets. Aside from calling for “absolute originality” they’re being pretty flexible about what they consider a sonnet, too. The rules specify, “We’ll accept rhymed or unrhymed fourteen-line sonnets. We think they should be love poems, but love of what, who’s to say.” Winners receive a queen-size bed, three dozen roses, and, of course, bragging rights.

We all had it drummed into us in school that a sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (actually the OED just says “fourteen decasyllabic lines”) with a specific rhyme scheme. It’s ABABCDCDEFEFGG in the case of an Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, or there’s the Italian sonnet that has eight rhymed lines followed by six, or there are Ted Berrigan’s sonnets which are…well…It’s even been suggested that T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a series of disjointed, interrupted sonnets. And that’s okay. The word “sonnet” derives from the Italian “sonetto”, meaning “little song”.

Here’s something interesting: one of the first major sonnet writers was Petrarch (b.1304, d.1374), who wrote numerous love sonnets to a woman known only as Laura. Some scholars think she was Laura de Noves, an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. Think about that as you’re writing a love poem.

Here’s a sonnet by Eavan Boland:

Spring At The Edge Of The Sonnet

Late March and I’m still lighting fires—
last night’s frost which killed the new
shoots of ivy in the terracotta churn,
has turned the fields of wheat and winter barley
to icy slates on the hills rising
outside the windows of our living room.

Still, there are signs of change. Soon,
the roofs of cars, which last month were
oracles of ice and unthawed dawns,
will pass by, veiled in blooms from
the wild plum they parked under overnight.

Last night, as I drove from town,
the dark was in and the lovers were
out in doorways, using them as windbreaks,
making shadows seem nothing more than

sweet exchequers for a homeless kiss.

(from Collected Poems)

 


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. patty on April 3, 2008 7:30 am

    Thanks, Christopher, for posting about the Prairie Home Companion contest. I’ve been thinking about sonnets myself. I just heard Eavan Boland talk about her new anthology of sonnets on NPR. She read several. Sonnets can pack a wallop.

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