JB's+UFG+Reflection

I cannot write a traditional sonnet. I have spent hours upon hours reading them and thinking about them and still, I cannot come up with one on my own. I could barely write one complete quatrain in a rhyming sonnet, even with on-line resources such as a synonym-finder.com or rhymer.com. Also, because of the way I work, which is to completely backspace and start over, it is difficult to demonstrate draft details such as half-lines and the constant change in direction and word substitutions (however, I did paste into the wiki examples of my earliest attempts of two different sonnets). I thought about what it meant to grow old and also about becoming a mother—two things that I have strong feelings about—but even having an interest in a topic couldn’t help me put my thoughts into a rhymes.

Ultimately, I discovered that contemporary sonnets do not have to rhyme. I found several sources that support this new variant. One wrote: “Stretched and teased formally and thematically, today’s sonnet can often only be identified by the ghost imprint that haunts it, recognizable by the presence of 14 lines or even by name only.” Another cautioned that to write a sonnet in blank verse, the sonneteer had to pay particular attention to meter and the development of the metaphor. I found several examples of these types of modern sonnets and decided that I would follow this style, but still would be recognizable by a “ghost imprint” of sonnets past. In my interpretation, I kept the14 lines and followed the Petrarchan structure of octave and sestet, with the volta (turn in the action) coming in at the beginning of the sestet. I kept to strict iambic pentameter with only 1 line having 11 syllables, but this is acceptable in the meter because the 11th is a short stress. I also tried to explore an argument using nature to create a sustainable metaphor.

I truly hated this project at first, so much so that I was at the point of giving up completely. I definitely will have empathy for my future students! I didn’t feel like I had enough time, although, in all honesty, I probably could have spent another 15 hours trying to write a traditional sonnet with no solid end result. I was so frustrated by my inability to produce something, //anything//, that I question my writing ability now even more than I did before this experience. Ironically, I chose to take on this genre, which was (and still is) as far out of my comfort zone as I could imagine for myself, because I wanted a challenge, which makes the disappointment run a little deeper. I describe the process as disappointing because I couldn’t help but feel like I was circumventing the challenge and that by writing a “modern” sonnet I was simply justifying failure. However, I think this is only because I came to the project with a preconceived notion of what constitutes a sonnet’s poetic form. Consequently, ignoring a major element of that form—the rhyme scheme—I felt like I wasn’t writing a //real// sonnet. It really made me question the idea of genre and what qualifies a piece of writing as a particular genre. The emotional versus intellectual reaction to my final draft is quite interesting and I don’t know what it means in terms of how I perceive my approach to and understanding of sonnets or genre. Although there are one or two places I kind of forced a syllabic stress, all-in-all I am pretty happy with my final version because I know it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

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