Yesterday I posted a poem from my new manuscript--a poem that you may or may not have noticed was a sonnet. When I'm reading, I frequently don't notice that poems are sonnets; and what does eventually trigger my awareness is more often length (14 lines) than it is rhyme scheme. This interests me. For some reason, despite the form's relatively short length and repetitive sound pattern, a sonnet's sound does not necessarily overwhelm (for lack of a better general term) the sense. Of course there are sonnets that emphasize rhyme, but on the whole a well-balanced sonnet rings its changes more subtly--through the grammatical and syntactical logic of its rhyme groupings rather than through the rhymes themselves.

Yesterday's poem, "Home," was one of a large number of sonnets that I wrote while I was simultaneously copying out Shakespeare's sonnets. I called the project my sonnet diary; basically I sat down and wrote a sonnet about whatever happened to pop into my head, about whatever I happened to be doing that day, about whatever I happened to be reading or overreacting about. All my sonnets were Shakespearean in form: quatrain (a b a b), quatrain (c d c d), quatrain (e f e f), couplet (g g).

As you might expect, most of my sonnets were terrible. But a few were passable, and I began to find that what worked best for me was to understate the rhymes and to focus on accretion of thought. Each quatrain needed to speak to the next quatrain and then the next, with the couplet serving as a sort of end punctuation. The project reinforced my conviction that poetic language is more than just the stacking of images--which is something I see very often in contemporary work. It's a means for thinking one's way down a page. That's how Milton wrote the enormous poem that is Paradise Lost, and that's how Shakespeare wrote the tiny poem that is Sonnet 76. He didn't preplan his thoughts. He thought them as he wrote, which is why the poem is not static but supple and fluid. He guides me, as a reader, through the small drama of his sudden discovery: that he can't stop writing the same old poem. C'est moi aussi, Mr. Bill.

Sonnet 76

William Shakespeare

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?

So far from variation or quick change?

Why with time do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell my name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,

And you and love are still my argument;

So all my best is dressing old words new,

Spending again what is already spent:

For as the sun is daily new and old,

So is my love still telling what is told.