I've been getting ready for Thursday's all-day workshop, which I'll be inventing alongside 35 high school students. That number is somewhat daunting, but all are involved in local gifted-and-talented programs and are, I'm told, eager to write. So write we will.

I've decided to do a sonnet session with them, but without pointing out that the poems are sonnets or focusing on the end rhymes. One thing that I've noticed, and remember myself from high school, is the way in which rhyming facility (which comes naturally to many wordy kids) obscures and often negates any real comprehension of how a sonnet works grammatically and dramatically. So one ends up with a laboriously rhymed yet motionless piece: and once those rhymes are in place, students feel so locked in by their own facility that they cannot even begin to imagine revision.

In her presentation last year at the Frost Place, Charlotte Gordon reminded me that, in many ways, the first word of the line is more important than the last because it controls the syntactic shift. It moves the poem along. If you study the first words of the lines of a sonnet, you can see that very often they feature modest linking words or transition words, words that stack clauses or move rhetorically toward a culminating perception. For instance, look at the first words in this very famous poem:

Sonnet

Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

What I Under Is Upon And For Will Thus Nor Yet I I A: not an earthshaker among them. But what a poem they have written.

P.S. I've added Scott Hill's blog to my permanent link list. Scott's a high school English teacher who is also a poet, and lately he has been writing so well about his reading that I can't stop checking his blog to see if he's put up another post. I really look forward to discovering what he has to say, and I think you might enjoy his perceptions as well. Scott has a more modernist eye than I do, but his open curiosity and beautiful, sweetly funny writing style suit me perfectly. Plus, he takes good photographs.