Sonnet Help!

Listen to the following link IN OUR TIME which contains a special episode on sonnets (do you hear quiz).

You should also check out the following: sonnets.org

And read chapter fourteen: "PATTERN" in your textbook, STRUCTURE, SOUND, AND SENSE.

The hybrid sonnet form will cause you the most trouble.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

The Sheep Child

The following is according to James Dickey, the author. The full text can be found here at the University of Illinois website.


"The Sheep Child" comes out of the most horrible thing anybody ever told me in my childhood. A boy named Dick Harris once gave me to understand that a man and a sheep can conceive progeny. I asked him if that was really true and he said, "Oh sure, everybody knows that! Way down on the south side of Atlanta there’s this museum, and way back in the corner where nobody would ever look, there’s this little thing like a woolly baby in a bottle of alcohol, because those things can’t live. I could probably find out where it is, and take you down there and show it to you." He never did, thank God! To this day I’m afraid to run into him again, because he might still take me down there and show it to me! But one day I thought this was a possibility for a poem, and so I wrote it. I took the situation seriously and tried to discover some of the implications of what such beings might be like.

I believe that farm boys develop a kind of private mythology that has the effect of preventing too much of this sort of thing from going on. It doesn’t prevent all of it, you understand, but it keeps it within reasonable bounds—whatever they might be. The first part of the poem is a recounting of the farm boys’ legend of the sheep child in the museum. But the second part of the poem is supposed to be spoken by the sheep child himself from his bottle of formaldehyde in the museum. I don’t know what other defects or virtues this poem might have, but I think it can hardly be faulted from the standpoint of originality of viewpoint, at least in the latter section!

I intended no blasphemy or obscenity by this poem at all. I tried to the best of my ability to write a poem about the universal need for contact between living creatures that runs through all of sentient nature and recognizes no boundaries of species or anything else. Really the heroine of the poem is the female sheep who accepts the monstrous conjunction and bears the monstrous child, because in some animal way she recognizes the need that it is born from. I tried to give the sheep child himself a double vision of the destiny of man and animal.

Friday 11/04/11

Today we will look one more time at sestinas and then move on to reviewing last year's AP Poetry Question and sample responses. This should give you an idea of types of poetry prompts.

Your homework for the weekend is to define and find examples of the following types of sonnets: Italian, English, Spencerian, and Hybrid. Note: Think about how each sonnet form works and where the TURN comes. How does form = idea? What types of themes does a sonnet form invoke?

John Ashberry

Go here for an critical essay on Ashberry's sestina

Also here is some help HERE

Pantoum or Villanelle

Remember your assignment for tonight is to write a pantoum or a villanelle poem.

SESTINA

A French syllabic poem of 39 lines with repeating end words. The thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestets and one tercet. The tercet is called the envoi. The six end words are picked and reused in a particular order. Lines can be of any single length; the length is determined by the poet. The end words shift according to the following pattern:

1
2
3
4
5
6

6
1
5
2
4
3

3
6
4
1
2
5

5
3
2
6
1
4

4
5
1
3
6
2

2
4
6
5
3
1


TERCET:
1 2
3 4
5 6

The Sestina

One of the most complex forms. Here is an overview of the form from poets.org

The sestina is a complex form that achieves its often spectacular effects through intricate repetition. The thirty-nine-line form is attributed to Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour of the twelfth century. The name "troubadour" likely comes from trobar, which means "to invent or compose verse." The troubadours sang their verses accompanied by music and were quite competitive, each trying to top the next in wit, as well as complexity and difficulty of style.

Courtly love often was the theme of the troubadours, and this emphasis continued as the sestina migrated to Italy, where Dante and Petrarch practiced the form with great reverence for Daniel, who, as Petrarch said, was "the first among all others, great master of love."

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end-word repetition to effect a sort of rhyme.