A sonnet a day
Jul. 30th, 2002 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrRob still has not fixed the computer. He was going to do it today, he said, but Things Came Up.
Am running out of patience.
While listening to public radio at work, I heard a teaser for a story about one of my mentors, Jane Yolen. Unfortunately, my work took me away from the radio for a bit, so I missed it, but I gathered that her husband has cancer, and she has been responding by writing a sonnet a day. The station called this upcoming story "The Radiation Sonnets." (You will be able to pick up the link to listen to the audio here later tonight, if you have RealOne Player).
I thought about this, setting oneself to the discipline of writing a sonnet a day. I have only made very tentative stabs at poetry over the years, whereas Jane is a very accomplished poet. If I tried writing a sonnet a day publicly, say for this LiveJournal, I am very sure I would embarrass myself. Yet I don't have any trouble writing a LiveJournal entry a day, or an entry in my private journal. I do understand the discipline necessary to write a little each day, and poetry is simply tightening that discipline up even more: I will write a little every day AND that little I write will consist of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, following a specified rhyme scheme.
As I said, I didn't hear the radio story, but obviously, Jane has been working through what was happening to her husband by writing those sonnets. What does that added component of discipline (making her writing a sonnet rather than, say, just a LiveJournal random entry) add to the working-it-through-ness of the writing? Is it that sonnets are simply more beautiful, and so there is more aesthetic pleasure when the writing is accomplished (the musings of the heart are formally carved, patterned, carefully caged in that iambic pentameter). What does adding pattern--and perhaps beauty, if you're a really accomplished poet--do to the emotional work of the words?
Hmm. Must think more on this. [Tangential thought: Have a vague memory of reading an essay of Matthew Arnold while in graduate school regarding the necessity of beauty in good writing. Or perhaps John Gardner's On Moral Fiction might have some germaine points on this topic; can't quite remember, since it's been years since I read that, too. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Or any other essays on the uses of poetry, based on its nature as a taut form of writing?]
Cheers
Am running out of patience.
While listening to public radio at work, I heard a teaser for a story about one of my mentors, Jane Yolen. Unfortunately, my work took me away from the radio for a bit, so I missed it, but I gathered that her husband has cancer, and she has been responding by writing a sonnet a day. The station called this upcoming story "The Radiation Sonnets." (You will be able to pick up the link to listen to the audio here later tonight, if you have RealOne Player).
I thought about this, setting oneself to the discipline of writing a sonnet a day. I have only made very tentative stabs at poetry over the years, whereas Jane is a very accomplished poet. If I tried writing a sonnet a day publicly, say for this LiveJournal, I am very sure I would embarrass myself. Yet I don't have any trouble writing a LiveJournal entry a day, or an entry in my private journal. I do understand the discipline necessary to write a little each day, and poetry is simply tightening that discipline up even more: I will write a little every day AND that little I write will consist of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, following a specified rhyme scheme.
As I said, I didn't hear the radio story, but obviously, Jane has been working through what was happening to her husband by writing those sonnets. What does that added component of discipline (making her writing a sonnet rather than, say, just a LiveJournal random entry) add to the working-it-through-ness of the writing? Is it that sonnets are simply more beautiful, and so there is more aesthetic pleasure when the writing is accomplished (the musings of the heart are formally carved, patterned, carefully caged in that iambic pentameter). What does adding pattern--and perhaps beauty, if you're a really accomplished poet--do to the emotional work of the words?
Hmm. Must think more on this. [Tangential thought: Have a vague memory of reading an essay of Matthew Arnold while in graduate school regarding the necessity of beauty in good writing. Or perhaps John Gardner's On Moral Fiction might have some germaine points on this topic; can't quite remember, since it's been years since I read that, too. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Or any other essays on the uses of poetry, based on its nature as a taut form of writing?]
Cheers
