Okay, one more writing post, and then I'll revert to telling you what I made for dinner and what the cat said about it.

In his conversation last week, Terrance Hayes talked about sonnet structure. As you know, formal sonnets are fourteen lines long and have standard rhyme schemes. Those rhyme schemes are broken into sections. For instance, a Petrarchan sonnet is constructed of two stacked rhyming patterns: the first eight lines follow one pattern; the last six lines follow another. A Shakespearean sonnet is constructed of twelve lines in one pattern, two in the other. The disruption in the rhyme scheme is called the volta, or turn, which Hayes refers to as "the place where the poem changes its mind." A Petrarchan sonnet changes its mind almost in the middle of the poem. A Shakespearean sonnet changes its mind suddenly at the end. Thus, if you're choosing one sonnet form over another, you've got to consider the amount of space you need for your change.

So what about the contemporary form known as the American sonnet? In the simplest definition, an American sonnet is an unrhymed, unmetered fourteen-line poem. Where does that leave the volta? When Hayes was writing his Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he decided to challenge himself to change his mind at least twice in each sonnet . . . because Americans are always changing our minds. Thus, the volta became more than a single veer; it was an electrical switch, careening the poem back and forth into new directions.

His description of this process made me reconsider the traditional sonnet forms. I've never liked the word turn as a descriptor. I've never actually known what it means: it's mealy-mouthed, secretive, a colorless teacher's manual definition. But if I think of volta as electricity, a jolt, a swerve, a shock--ah, now, that's a poem I want to write.