Second Week Exercise


An Abstract Sonnet

Background

The American poet Ted Berrigan decided that a sonnet did not have to follow all the rules that school teachers like to insist on.

Berrigan had been reading lots of Shakespeare’s sonnets and suddenly had an idea. He went home and cut up some of his old poems and arranged them into fourteen-line poems. These were the beginnings of his ‘sonnet’ series.

The Shakespearean sonnet tends to contain the following:

• fourteen lines
• an interlaced rhyme scheme
• a rhyming couplet
• a speaker ‘I’ addressing a ‘you’ (a handsome youth or unattainable lady)
• an argument concerning love and the passing of time

An Abstract Sonnet need not observe all these rules.

Instructions

Take your piece of writing and cut it up into one-line sections.
Look at your lines. Read then attentively and with fresh eyes and ears – what do they suggest not only in terms of ‘meaning’ but also in terms of sounds, textures of words, registers of language, phrase structure?

Start arranging your lines with a view to composing a fourteen-line poem.
Do not think that it has to have a ‘normal’ meaning or ‘deep’ symbolism.
Work intuitively – go on instinct, what grabs you, what amuses you.

Allow sound patterns to lead your composition. Rhyme does not only exist at the end of a line. You can exploit internal rhymes which will allow your lines to ‘sound’ right. Don’t be limited by end rhymes.

Play with different arrangements – write them down as they emerge. If some lines just don’t seem to fit or sound right, put them to one side. They might be useful for another composition. Or you might find you have a set of variations!

Keep in mind that you are collaging – in a way this is using language more like a painter uses colour. You are ‘painting-writing’. Your final poem might lack ‘normal’ meaning but be full of sense(s).