Yesterday morning, just after I posted my note to you, I opened my long-poem draft and suddenly understood what I was doing: I was writing a crown of sonnets. I'm not sure why it took me until the thirteenth sonnet to realize that this was what was happening. It's amazing that the form found itself because there was zero preplanning or self-awareness involved. The poem is truly an organic construction; it insisted on its shape.

Some of you probably already know this, but a crown is a set of fourteen sonnets linked by subject matter, rhetoric, syntax, style, rhyme, etc., ending with a coda sonnet composed of the first lines of all of the previous sonnets, making a total of fifteen. They were popular with the great 17th-century sonneteers (Donne, for instance), and contemporary poets still occasionally turn to them. My friend Meg Kearney, for instance, has published two impressive crowns constructed with traditional meter and rhyme: one about a bad marriage and bad weather, the other about heart ailments both medical and metaphorical.

Though I often write traditional rhymed and metered sonnets, my crown did not want to fall into those patterns. It desired Shakespearean quatrains and couplets, but otherwise it demanded independence. By the time I recognized what I was doing, I had only the fourteenth sonnet left to write and the coda sonnet to construct. Both came quickly, and I didn't need to do much tinkering to turn the first lines into a coherent final statement.

In the aftermath of this, I'm still dizzy. If I had planned ahead to write a crown, I would have been self-conscious and purposeful in a guess-what?-I'm-starting-a-cool-project kind of way. Instead, the crown kicked down my door and held me hostage for most of a week, and it didn't rip off its mask until just before tossing me into the streets.

And now I have this thing. And now I don't know what to do with it.