I fiddled about with the sonnet a bit earlier this year: at the time I was thinking of the sorts of sonneteering undertaken by Renaissance English poets, not so much in the specifics of the form but in the uses that it was put to - love lyrics competitively composed, not so much about love as mastery (of form, I mainly mean). At the time I wrote a couple of unrhymed 14 liners on pornography, more or less in response to this thought - I'll attach one of them (probably best not read in the company of children, as pretty crude in more than the formal sense).
Of course, there's far more to the sonnet than this one note reaction, so in the also attached attempt I've made for class, I tried to stay roughly iambic, used the turn and stayed within shouting distance of traditional sonnet subject matter. I did decide against rhyme (perhaps the villanelle used up my rhyming capacity for October...): I am very fond of the Armitage poem that Paul circulated, so in this, followed his lead.
It is an interesting question, how much of the form is required to retain the classification, though I think jettisoning one element in any outing does it no real injury.
It’s interesting that many of the contemporary versions I’ve looked at do employ some version of a rhyming scheme, at least a slanted one, though they often bear no relation to the traditional sonnet scheme – Paul
Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel springs to mind, but then I suppose tricking around with poetry’s parts is his modus operandi, regardless of the form under consideration. I think in the end, as with other forms, that if it doesn’t have the elasticity required to carry a contemporary poetic impulse, then it’ll fade away except in the context of these sorts of exercises: part of the kit in the poet’s gym, as it were.
Here’s a two part blog on the sonnet I found while I was thinking about this, in case anyone’s interested:
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/335-The-Trouble-With-Sonnets.html
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/336-Tactics-For-Contemporary-Sonnets.html
And here’s the Dana Gioia sonnet that’s mentioned in the blog:
http://www.danagioia.net/poems/sundaynight.htm
Here's my sonnet for this week:
When you are a beekeeper
You come in cold from the garden, with rain
blistering your glasses, a blackening
coming under the greens and yellows left
in your wake. You come in flaring, Autumn’s
rough wind ruddling your skin, drying your lips,
to trip over the traces of your life:
soiled bear, Duplo, discarded sweeping brush.
You come in damp, prefiguring Winter -
but here’s the warmth of your house to greet you,
and the space you’ve been clearing in your mind -
gravelled, fenced, softly humming - follows you
and is echoed by us, love, in the early-lit kitchen,
with shrieks, a kiss, tea-steam: your hands’ work like
the coming summer’s bee-song, and honey.
And here's the earlier, cruder effort:
Pornography 1
The blonde has no name. Best that way. She eyes
the camera or does not eye it, eyed in all time zones,
nameless in every country: offers up a generic, her own
shaved cunt transformed. Anybody’s. She does not look directly
at anyone: eyes skate past, maybe to the clock behind you
in your crumpled room, where you are shaded, hunched.
She cannot hear you breathe. The blonde does not care
who you are. She is twenty, or sixteen, or thirty eight:
you do not care who she is, or how long she has been here.
Now she is stalled, cock in mouth, buffering: if you were
a dentist, you would know that look. Streaming again,
your breath not eased: it has a wet sound to it. From the screen,
grunts, off-timed: here, the men are machines,
doing work you cannot do with your own hands, for you.