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In this follow up to my last blog I would like to take a look at some of the variations on the sonnet as a form. The five poems below are all essentially 'sonnets' but they have their own peculiarities & nuances.

The Spensarian sonnet


One day I wrote her name upon the Strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she), that ...

The Ten Questions on Everyone's Mind
(following in the wake of examples by Petrarch'sLove, Virgil, Antiquarian... and probably a number more by this point in time)

1. One book that changed your life- This was initially a difficult question. But eventually I came up with three. The first would be J.L. Borges' Labyrinths. Borges undoubtedly opened me up to the endless possibilities of Post-Modernist literature... and art. Where I had been initially hesitant about the self-consciousness ...

The wierdest thing just happend. I was putting away left-overs from dinner, and I had one container with some corn in it, and another with mashed potatos, and I went to get the lids for the containers. And I am 100% certain I put the lid on the mashed potats first becasue I remember picking it up and snapping the lid on and than I turned around to put the lid on the corn, and the lid was already on it. And I just stood there looking at like, ok I know I picked up the mashed potatos container first. ...

Thomas... playing with staple guns during maze construction for the Halloween Howl a year ago. He's so easily amused. ^^


This is how he'll dress when he kills me repeatedly for the Howl this year. I, for the record, am being forced into a wedding dress. ...

ORIGINS

This is an emended version that I posted in the lesson plans section of this site.


The sonnet has always been difficult for many people to describe. If you ask what a sonnet is, most people would probably reply “a fourteen line poem”. Many poets would call a fourteen line poem a quatorzain just to distinguish it from a sonnet proper, whatever that actually is. Some may even add that it was a ‘fourteen line poem’ in iambic pentameter. In fact the sonnet ...