I like my tuna rare

For those of you out there who might be thinking "hmmm ... well, if that's a sonnet then my name is Mujahideen" - here are two statements by Bernadette Mayer to switch the points and derail your thinking:

"I like the sonnet form because it gives you the chance to develop some thought, and then come to a conclusion. It's all totally false -- that's not how you really think, but in a way, it is how you think, so that's why sonnets are interesting. Sonnets pretend to reflect the way you think. That's always been my theory."

and

"I would just say write any way you want. You can make the lines short, or long. And looking out the window is a good way to write a poem. A good way to write a sonnet is to walk fourteen blocks. Write one line for each block. I knew a poet, Bill Kushner, who used to do that. I used to see him all the time with his notebook on the street. You can do it easily in a city, because there are all these words around."

I suppose it really comes down to where you're coming from (and where you'd like to arrive). If the idea is to mimic some 500-year-old artefact then let's do 14 lines of iambics and look up the other rules in the Oxford Companion to Literature.

However, if the idea is to see what might end up using the rules as a ruse ... well, read on ...