Experimental Sonnet course at The Poetry School

A little blog piece for my upcoming Sonnet Course at The Poetry School. It begins:

Let’s start with Desert Island Sonnets. What 7 sonnets do you treasure the most?

So let’s start by cheating and having the whole of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I enjoy the cycle and the epic that the sonnet can offer, and having all of them by the palm tree will if nothing else help with counting ‘the clock that tells the time’ (‘Sonnet 12’). Then we’ll need some animals in the pot, so I’ll be taking John Clare’s double sonnet, the sonic gem ‘The Marten’. I’ll want to continue by thinking about the sonnet as a visual form; existing anywhere and everywhere, so next is Mary Ellen Solt’s ‘Moonshot Sonnet’. Perhaps, after, something a little political with a capital P: I’m fifty-fifty between Wordsworth’s ‘On The Projected Kendal And Windermere Railway’ and Sassoon’s ‘Attack’. Umm? Last on the list are Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets (a collage sequence), the humour of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘You jerk you didn’t call me up’ and reduction and palimpsest in my own one-line Sonnet from Plants which goes: ‘Thirteen lines dumped. Fourteenth July Owe Six.’

Read more here - https://poetryschool.com/theblog/how-to-write-a-sonnet/