2020 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE GOOD SIDE OF THE COVID YEAR

I regularly talk to an old friend on the landline, a really old friend. He’s 91 and lives alone. He doesn’t have access to the internet. He says things now are worse than they were during the War. And he says it with feeling. Gloom pours down the phone line. I replace the receiver with a heavy heart.

It’s so unfair. I haven’t suffered badly this year. My house is warm and light. There are plenty of lovely walks round here. I’m in good health. I live on a pension (no need to worry about my job). I’m half of a couple, so there’s always someone else in the house to talk to, or moan about Boris.

Still, there are huge absences. Children. Grandchildren. Friends. And listening to BBC News is like adding weights to the lid of a cosy coffin. Best not to put the radio on. Best not to watch TV. Best to stay safe. Stay well. Hide until it all goes away.

But the public anxiety’s like fog trying to get in the windows. What can we do to counteract the gloom?

I’ve got into the habit of counting my lockdown blessings, some of which are a bit weird (spoiler alert).

Often I’ve found myself guiltily happy, since I’ve done better than many of my friends, some of whom are not just isolated, but also ill or depressed. One has died. I miss her.

Anyway here’s my list. If you have positives of your own, please add them in the comments box. Help to offset the dark.

Good things from the year of C

I’ve learned to make butter by shaking double cream in a large jam jar. Now I do this regularly. And I went back to making cakes. GREAT cakes.

I found some mung beans at the back of the cupboard. They must have been (no pun intended) there for years and years. The good news is that if you soak them in water and leave them in the dark overnight, and then bring them into the light and wash them gently three times a day, they still SPROUT. So we’ve had quite a few Chinese stir-fries with home-grown bean-sprouts. Strangely satisfying.

After a bout of sciatica, I began to do breathing and stretching exercises every morning. Lovely. So good for me. And walking every single day, sometimes as many as three walks. I limited desk work to three hours. So now I’m fitter than I was. More energy too (though alas not for desk work). (Yes, the sciatica gradually went away. It was a message.)

I started listening to science podcasts while doing the stretching exercises. Marvellously educational.

Sat and read. Sat and read. Sat and read. Sometimes sat in the sun and read.

Decided to stop drinking my two glasses of wine a night, not least because it was starting to become three. Discovered Marks & Spencer’s alcohol-free G&T, an oxymoron in a can. After this, all sorts of mocktails and juices. Discovered I’m much calmer without my alcohol fix, and apparently fewer migraines. Definitely better sleep.

With the help of the sewing scissors, I removed the wires from my bras. What have I been putting up with all these decades?

I have learned to jog, though only for short stretches. I have finally experienced that endorphin kick other people talk about. Yay!

Masks are a pain, but they help prevent chapped lips. Most useful. Also going through the freezing cold vegetable aisle in Aldi is much warmer when wearing a mask.

Cleaned the whole house for the first time in years. Poor spiders. I have even cleaned the windows! We can see the trees properly. And I’ve finally cleared all the weeds off the concrete block paving in the back garden. It almost looks respectable.

I’ve begun to talk regularly to my cousin Wendy on the phone. We’ve never really known each other, though we were born only a year apart. But now we do.

I have walked through the trees every single day. I started in spring, then summer. Then the amazing autumn golds, swishing through the leaves. Now the bare winter woods. Already fresh green spikes of grass finding their way through. I didn’t know I liked walking in the rain.

New breakfast: oatmeal porridge every morning (so much better than the kind made with oats).Learned to love maple syrup. Good on the oatmeal porridge with a little cream (though my other half will only eat salt).

Good grief — I haven’t had a head cold in a whole year!

I have practised the ukulele in the conservatory with rain beating on the roof. My time keeping isn’t very good. I bought a metronome. I practised the ukulele with two metronomes: the rain and the actual metronome.

In all our twenty-three years (or nearly) together, my other half and I have never spent so much continuous time together. By some miracle, we still get on well. We were sorely tested in November when some pipes burst, and the repairs dragged on for weeks and weeks (still not finished). Adversity can drive people apart; it can also bring them closer.

I used to see my two grandchildren every week. I took it for granted. Since March, I’ve seen them only four times in all. But each time has been the quintessence of joy.

Have only filled the car up with petrol three times since March. More money to spend on coffee, poetry, and presents to post to the grandchildren.

The sky has been more beautiful this year than I ever remember: crisp, and clean, and clear. No vapour trails. Just amazing cloud formations. A free show every single morning. Never the same twice.

We have lovely neighbours.

NOT SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES

Frank Wood died recently at the age of 95. HappenStance published a pamphlet of his work in 2012.

So that’s the ‘Wood’ in my title.

We won’t be seeing Frank again, though his voice — unapologetically plain-spoken — can still be heard in his poems. And always will be, for as long as such poems are heard.

But the ‘trees’ are also the poetries. Today, with dozens of poem-texts whirling round the globe every second, there are great forests of poetries, in which one could get lost for all time. Yes, I know that’s a horribly mixed metaphor. Forests don’t whirl round the globe, unless you think of Wordsworth’s Lucy ‘Whirled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’ (I always felt for Lucy).

My point is that the writing trajectory of a poet like Frank might be seen as ‘unimportant’. Poetry was a lifelong interest for him, but he didn’t start writing it until he was well into his forties. He didn’t win the National Poetry Competition. He didn’t publish to popular acclaim. He had a modest circle of appreciative readers (and fellow writers).

Frank did succeed in placing poems here and there in the small press over several decades. He co-edited a small magazine for a while, played an active role in Suffolk Poetry Society, had modest wins in competitions, and there was a pamphlet: Racing the Stable Clock. He was a practising poet who kept practising.

His poetry ‘career’ might look like not much, as these things go. It was more than it seems.

He always sent me poems during the HappenStance reading windows, and latterly I encouraged him to send them whenever he wanted to — which was still about twice a year. It was rare to get a batch in which there wasn’t at least one I thought outstanding in some way. He was a wit, with strong opinions. Often, he made me smile. But sometimes his poems opened out into sadness, and I would stare out of the window and think, and think some more.

I believe the writing of poems brought him joy. It wasn’t about getting famous, or building a reputation as a ‘player’. He found poems joyous things to make, worthwhile creations, like well-made chairs. They made him happy.

I won’t forget him. Right to the end of his long life, he was writing self-critically and with acuity.

I’m appending one of the poems from Stable Clock below. It’s short. And yet (to me) there’s a whole world below the surface. The father who wrote the sermons was the same father who was gassed in the First World War, the same father who once ‘killed a German face to face’ and who, when it came to questions about that war, ‘would never talk about it’. But his son wrote about him, a lifetime later.

Writing the Sermon

My father was known for his sermons.
He used to grade them according
to the number of pipes he smoked.

Three pipes spelt hell
for next day’s congregation —
and that was only the notes.

As his neighbor, who kept hens, said,
When you go out to feed them,you don’t
have to give them the whole bucketful.

FIFTEEN BOLD ASSERTIONS ABOUT POETRY

1. There is no universally accepted definition of what a poem is.

2. There is no agreement on what a poem is not.

3. Prosody is the study of versification.

4. ‘Versody’ is not a word.

5. Versification is the art of making verses.

6. A stanza is a verse paragraph. Sometimes it is called a ‘verse’.

7. A verse is made of verse, and most verse comprises verses.

8. The canon is not a weapon, and does not have balls, although it sometimes feels as though it is, and does.

9. Alfred Austin succeeded Alfred Lord Tennyson as poet laureate in 1896. He wrote a verse autobiography, The Door of Humility,
which nobody alive has read.

10. The ink used in 99.99% of poetry publications is black.

11. A list poem is usually formatted vertically and left-justified i.e. it does not list.

12. If a list poem is entered into the National Poetry Competition, it could be said to have entered the lists.

13. Writer’s block is even in Wikipedia. But this is not a problem. A computer can write poems for you. Here is my latest.

14. More poets are alive than dead. They thrive.

15. More poems are dead than alive.

Lino print by Gillian Rose

THE LOST LAST POEM

I put off finishing the poem a good while ago. There was a bit of a muddle in the middle. It needed plenty of time, and I didn’t have plenty. I never have plenty.

Today it occurred to me that it’s been over a year — it might even be nearly two — since I last looked at it. But the last line keeps coming back to me. Gotta be telling me something.

It’s the last poem in a long set. A long set that I want to make into a book. It’s ten years since my last book of serious poems came out. You can put things off too long.

I can put things off too long.

So I go to the electronic folder to take a look. Oh. It’s not where I thought it was.

Where is that folder? I know what it’s called. ‘Find’ comes up with four copies of a 2003 folder. Not the one I’m looking for.

But I’m cool with this. I’ll find it.

Systematically, I search the usual places. My hard drive; the USB sticks I take on holiday; the desktop of the laptop; the Cloud. It’ll show up.

Except it doesn’t. Bummer.

The end of the poem is taunting me. It goes like this (the line breaks may not be right):

So now tell me, she says,
what you’ve done with my pearls.

This might not sound riveting. But I tell you there was a tricky back-story before those lines. A tale that was the last tale to be told in the bigger story of Mr and Mrs Philpott, who began in a Rialto publication in 2003 and might be finally at the end. Except I’ve lost the end.

I might once have panicked. But not these days. I know how things get lost. I know how to find them. (I know there are too many poems in the world already.)

I go to my ring-bound paper files, where I print and file every poem. Well, nearly. It seems I didn’t print this one. Or if I did, I didn’t file it.

But I remember putting the poem into the large file I’d made of all the poems. The WHOLE SET, which amounted to a great many pages. And I printed that file. It’s in a perspex wallet underneath the mountain of books and magazines on the table beside the stove.

And this turns out to be true.

Except when I printed that WHOLE SET, the last poem hadn’t been added. I might have guessed, since the plastic wallet is dusty. But at least its physical existence proves I did create a file of more than 80 pages. Because here they are.

But I worked on several versions of the last (and longest) poem. I remember this absolutely clearly. It has to be somewhere.

Two hours later, I can confirm the Pearls poem is not somewhere. It is not even in the back-up drive of time-machine-saved files, most of which could be jettisoned with impunity. I must have been keeping it in the Cloud, in the same folder as the book file to which it was to be added. I must somehow have deleted the whole folder, no doubt thinking I had a copy on the backed-up hard drive. It happens.

Nobody else has seen that poem but me. It might as well never have existed. They call it The Cloud for a reason.

Idly, I riffle through the stack of metal trays on my desk, where I keep all sorts of odds and sods. Letters, poems, bills, cartoons, pictures. I also go through them regularly and throw old poems away. But not this one. This poem is there.

Nearly three A4 pages. It’s THERE.

It’s not the last saved version, because a whole lot of stuff is horribly wrong with it. I fixed some of the muddle, I know I did. I’m not even sure it’s a good poem, now that I read it again. Maybe I should end with the one before. Maybe it was meant to get lost.

On the other hand, one of the reasons for getting poems published (if you’re lucky enough to be able to) is to save them from oblivion, at least temporarily. Or to ensure that they get lost in the right way, i.e. by being forgettable for most readers.

So now I had better help that to happen, if I can. It’s time.

When Zoom is doom

‘She left the web, she left the zoom’ (‘The Lady of Shalott’)

For poets inhabiting the online world, all sorts of virtual spaces (and opportunities) are springing up. Most publishers (I am no exception) are delivering online events to help promote books. We learn as we go.

People are using many different platforms. Zoom (‘In this together. Keeping you securely connected wherever you are’) has the most memorable name, and I think it might yet get into the dictionary, like hoover did – when a brand became the generic term. Wouldn’t that please the Zoom people?

But all sorts of other platforms are on the go, with their various not very inspiring catchphrases. For example:

ClickMeeting (‘We help you stay connected’ — unambitious but at least short)
Zoho (‘Your Life’s Work Powered By Our Life’s Work’ — what’s with the capital letters?)
Webex (‘Webex is here when the world needs to connect, communicate and collaborate’ —not a catchphrase, practically a paragraph!)
GotoMeeting (‘WE’RE HERE TO HELP’ — please stop shouting)
Microsoft Teams (‘Nothing can stop a team’—oh YES it can!)
Periscope live streaming (developed by Twitter: ‘See what the world is seeing’ — ho-hum)

But yes, Zoom (‘In this together. Keeping you securely connected wherever you are’) is the best name, though limp catchphrase. And in the UK, at least, Zoom seems to be the most popular right now, at least for ordinary people as opposed to giant organisations, whose employees use the one they’re told to use (which is frequently one they don’t like).

All but one of the poetry events I’ve attended online recently have been Zoom affairs. I spent time exploring both GotoMeeting (and GotoWebinar) and Webex, but it seemed to me Zoom was easiest to use. Also it has the advantage of being the one I’m getting most used to.

Not that I like everything about it, by any means. And there are many things I don’t understand. For example, having read carefully about headsets, I don’t understand why the sound quality I get through mine is worse than my Imac’s own microphone. Okay, so one of the headsets was cheap but the other was £25.00 and I thought it might have something to offer. Nope.

I have learned quite a bit about things that go wrong.

Like that sometimes my computer’s camera stops working, and I have to restart the whole shebang.

Like that when I select ‘record automatically’ in Zoom settings, it doesn’t record automatically.

Like that Zoom is unhappy about screen-share when the document shared is set to ‘full screen’, though sometimes it’s ok.

Like that sometimes nothing works right, and it is not the user’s fault. Sundays may be bad days.

Today, for example, the Zoom website status indicated that all sorts of things weren’t working. ‘Our team is continuing to investigate this issue.’ I can bear witness to the fact that there most certainly was an issue.

When its good, it’s very very good. When it stops working, Zoom is doom.

But for any virtual conferencing technology, watching poets’ faces while they read poems, with variable sound quality, is a mixed blessing. Some events share the poem-text at the same time, though. That adds a little something that you don’t usually get at a live reading.

Zoom events where attendees can use public chat are … risky. Sometimes the contributions are, let’s say, less than tasteful. And when chat comments pop up in the middle of a reading, it’s distracting. Terribly tempting, too, to send a sarky message about the presenter to a friend (a bit like whispering during a poetry reading). Just wait till you find you’ve sent it publicly by accident.

It’s distracting too, when some of the attendees visible in video windows are eating lunch or (as in one recent instance) applying moisturiser.

Having been to live open mic events where the poets left one by one after they had delivered their two minutes-worth, I suspect precisely the same happens online. A bit like Pass the Parcel, except the final one to unwrap the paper is entirely on their own.

Some attendees turn their video off so they can continue to listen while making dinner, without anybody seeing what they’re doing. This is actually quite sensible, though maybe not ideal at a poetry event, when you’re secretly hoping people might be concentrating.

But maybe the key issue for any of us at online events is motivation. We sign up because we think it might be interesting. But after the novelty of the first few has worn off, what’s in it for us? When you go to a live poetry reading, you know you’re going to see some friends, probably have a convivial drink and an outing. But on the web?

From a publisher-host’s point of view, one reason for zooming is to sell books. So one could argue, that from the attendee’s point of view, a reason for going is to find out whether or not you’d want a copy. Is that enough to offset Zoom-fatigue? What else can online events offer attendees?

I don’t think it works to transfer the content of a typical poetry reading into an online event. It’s a different medium and something different needs to happen. If it’s a live event, it might include some conversation, some insights, a bit of background on the book, a bit of enjoyable gossip. There may be aspects of audience interaction too that would draw people in and make them feel involved. Something to be learned that you can’t get any other way – that’s what I most like in an online event. I like to leave the meeting feeling I know something I didn’t know when I went in.

That’s if the technology works!

Essential Zoom terms

Zoom-gloom—low mood after Zoom events
Zoomophobia—fear of Zoom events
Inzoomnia—lack of sleep after too much zooming
Zoomo sapiens—new species of virtual human
Zoom-tomb—deadly boring Zoom event
Zoom-exhume—post-Zoom analysis
Zoom-grooming (don’t ask)
Zoomba—a virtual dance
Zoom-Vrrrroom—the energy boost from an inspiring online event
Rule of Zoom—rough estimate of length of Zoom event
Nom de Zoom—ability to change one’s name at Zoom event
Back to the Zomb Therapy—a new birthing technique
Bride and Zoom—virtual weddings
Zoominating—reflecting during a Zoom event; alternatively: eating grass during a Zoom event
Superzooman—Zoom participant with special powers

What C-19 is doing to poetry publishing

Last week four poets wrote offering me the opportunity of publishing their work. When I read the first email, I was gobsmacked. The message (the same was true of the other three) made no reference to the current C-19 situation. Just the usual I have been writing for 4 years. I attach X poems on the theme of revenge/archery/cryogenics/dementia. I believe they will appeal to a wide range of readers. Do let me know if you would be interested in publishing etc. etc.

Numerous poets are at home at the moment, social distancing or self-isolating, or checking their stock of paracetamol. Clearly some of them are also pitching to publishers. Is this a good time? Ho-hum. Think about it from the publisher’s point of view. In fact, that’s what our best-selling title How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published suggests. It also says that ‘strategy’ is vital in getting work published. But it doesn’t explain what you’re supposed to do in the middle of a global pandemic.

What are publishers doing right now? Apart from looking for toilet rolls, there’s a good chance they’re worrying. About book sales. About new titles, and forthcoming books. About cancelled launches. About closed bookshops. About postponed events (where poets would normally shift some books). About having already printed too many copies. Will their distributor keep distributing, and if so (with most bookshops closed) to whom? Will their printer go under?

Meanwhile, printers are worrying about publishers. Will planned print runs go ahead? Will publishers want fewer copies? Will they defer printing until later in the year, if at all? Will they be able to service the loans on their fiendishly expensive print machines?

Everybody’s doing their best. Big print companies are still running so far, with distancing protection for their staff. Publishers and event organisers are doing online launches and live streaming. Online sales are being brandished. The Poetry Book Society is working hard to turn a drama into a growth opportunity.

But the key factor is uncertainty. Nobody knows how all of this will affect the tiny niche that constitutes the poetry book market.

Whatever each publisher’s long-term plan may be, the current priority is selling this year’s titles. New proposals can wait.

Here, we have a mountain of boxes in the hall and under the stairs. The mountain contains new pamphlets (Nancy Campbell’s Navigations and Annie Fisher’s The Deal) and two books to be launched in May (Alan Buckley’s Touched and Charlotte Gann’s The Girl Who Cried). We have no room for more boxes.

Can I find readers for these new titles? Over the next couple of months (when, yes, I will be doing online launches) we will see. It’s a fascinating chance to do things differently, and the publications are fabulous. I believe we will manage it. But there’s a lot to learn. Every day the powers-that-be (or the powers-that-were) tell us something we aren’t expecting.

On the good side, poetry’s a long game. Publishers plan for posterity. But we need to sell books right now. It’s essential to keep the cycle moving, which is how we afford to publish the next poets.

So back to your poetry publishing strategy. Perhaps you hope to place a book or pamphlet with a good publisher in the next year or so. How doyou plan round the current situation? Here’s a suggestion for the next three months.

Read. Read poems. Old ones, new ones, winning ones, unnoticed ones. Make your own anthology of your favourites and notice who first published them. Learn a couple off by heart (while out on your daily walk). Get right inside them like an old coat. Note down tricks you can try yourself, lines that you love, and why. This feeds into your writing. It’s the holy grail, the creative source.

Write. Make poems. Ditch them. Make more. Work on old poems and make them stronger. Send to magazines that are still going strong. Get them, if you can, accepted by top online (and paper-based) outlets, so somebody (not you) may notice and share them on social media. By all means enter competitions: the organisers need the money now more than ever, and if you win, or place, it’s another good profile-raiser.

Review. You may not be confident about writing reviews, but anybody can manage two lines and a star rating on Amazon. Or a whole paragraph on goodreads, my favourite social media site (even if it is owned by Amazon). Or try an OPOI on a poetry pamphlet. Poets notice who reviews their work. Publishers notice who reviews their poets’ work.

Buy books. Select judiciously. Feed your reading programme and publishers at the same time. If you think publishers don’t notice who buys books from their own website, you’re wrong. What’s the magic factor in getting a collection published? It’s when the publisher already knows your name (for the right reasons) before you make an approach.

If you absolutely cannot resist emailing publishers with proposals, at least remember to ask after their health, since they (and their loved ones) may not be in great shape. Check out the submissions page of their website first. Don’t send uninvited poems (they’ll delete them). Ask whether they might possibly be in a position to look at some.

Good luck —but good planning is better. After three months, review the situation and revise your strategy. You can find free planning sheets here.

p.s. If you’d like an invitation to HappenStance online launches, the first of which will be in a couple of weeks, please make sure you’re signed up for notifications on the home page of the website.

Unwrapping the WrapperRhymes

11.STORY-BOARDS.jpg

So the WrapperRhyme exhibition DID happen!

It happened at STAnza, Scotland’s poetry festival in St Andrews.

It happened while gatherings of people were still going ahead (though nobody coughed or sneezed).

How lucky we were! One week later and we would have been scuppered.

I hope the photo-gallery on this page will show some of the preparations (I haven’t done this before). The strings of regular-sized WrapperRhymes were suspended in the display area of Innes’s bookshop. Outsizes and ‘rebels’ were in folders.

There were typed versions to read as well (since many rhymers have colossally illegible handwriting) in the folders.

The 3D Wrappers (e.g. boxes of tissues, cheese, chocolates and tubs of ice-cream) were on shelves.

There was a corner for Tunnock’s products alone, and a chair to sit in while writing your own rhyme and pinning it to the board supplied (lots of people did this).

Or if you preferred, you could sit in the boat. It was challenging getting that boat up (and down) the stairs, but we thought it was worth it.

Jenny Elliott and I orchestrated two talks on the WrapperRhymes, and some rhymers came along to read their rhymes (once they had located them, in the air or in a folder). At the end of each talk, the audience sang a WrapperRhyme about tinned tomatoes to the tune of Tom Jones’s version of ‘Delilah’. They sang with such gusto that book-buyers downstairs were slightly alarmed.

Now the exhibition is dismantled so I am in process of boxing and labelling everything and putting it in plastic boxes, which will go into our roof space. Ultimately they will be housed with the HappenStance archives in The National Library of Scotland. So if your WrapperRhyme is in there, a bit of you will be saved for posterity, fully identified and catalogued. They should be there long after Covid-19 is a distant (albeit painful) memory.

We had some merry merchandise too, including WrapperRhyme bookmarks and WrapperRhyme beermats. If you order anything from the website, you’re highly likely to find one of each in your parcel.

Huge thanks to everybody who contributed. It was wonderful.

The story of the WrapperRhyme project

HappenStance at StAnza

This weekend it’s all stations go preparing for StAnza, the poetry festival in St Andrews which runs from March 4-8^thand to which poetry lovers from far and wide will flock. They’re packing their bags right now.

An extraordinary variety and range of performers will feature. These include some I know rather well.

For example, there’s Gerry Cambridge,who will read from his new book The Light Acknowledgers on next Thursday afternoon.

And there’s Nancy Campbell whose HappenStance pamphlet, Navigations, is officially published on the date of her afternoon reading next Saturday (but you can get it right now, if you want a copy before that). She is featuring at a poetry breakfast too, which is live-streamed earlier that same day, so can be watched at home. So even if you can’t make it to StAnza, StAnza can make it to you.

If you entered the WrapperRhyme challenge, you too (or your work, at least) will also be on display all week in J G Innes’s bookshop (upstairs gallery). If you can’t come, I will take photos once Jenny Elliott and I get the whole thing on display. It’s looking marvellous even in its disassembled form.

And if you think poets are not all in the same boat, you may change your mind when you see the boat in the WrapperRhyme exhibition. If you are at the festival, please come to the talk on the Friday afternoon if you can, especially if you have a WrapperRhyme on display. This event will be participative!

There will be a HappenStance flashmob again too. Not Edward Lear this year, but Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, and although all flashmobs are absolutely secret, I can reveal that early on Saturday evening in the Byre café something might happen.

Poets are often a bit intense. But they’re also allowed to have fun.

SONNET OR NONNET?

During the last ever reading window, there were many sonnets. This form (unlike the villanelle) is close to my heart, so sending some to me ought theoretically to be a good thing. But I’ve been thinking about sonnets for more than half a century (because I am OLD) and of course I’ve written them (or attempted to) at intervals. So I may be harder on them than anybody else.

A few centuries ago, when sonnets first became popular in courtly circles, the formal rules were clear enough, though even then not fixed. In the sonnets I most love, which include Shakespeare (of course) and Wyatt and Sydney, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie and Eleanor Farjeon, it’s the tension between constraint and experiment that gives me pleasure. I love this particular way of tying up human consciousness in an electric box.

So I thought I might explain — as much for myself as anybody else — how I read a poem that looks like it might be a sonnet. Is it a sonnet or isn’t it? And what difference does it make what you call it?

If the poem looks sonnet-ish (size and shape) my mental checklist pops up. If more than one box is ticked, I figure the poem could be thinking of itself as a sonnet. Before anybody gets aerated, I’m not suggesting any of these characteristics are essential. Only that they are to me the most obvious indicators, based on the English sonnet tradition.

Sonnet indicators

Calls itself ‘sonnet’
14 lines
Metrical pattern: most likely iambic pentameter
Lines of 10-11 syllables
Shape — an oblong box, perhaps with a gap just below the middle.
Lines of irregular metre but five strongly stressed syllables in each line
Lines of regular length, syllabically or metrically
A structured rhyme scheme
An argument: opens with proposition, shifts to resolution
A ‘volta’ (or turn in the argument/thought) at or about the ninth line
An 8-line + 6-line structure (octet and sestet) (marked by stanzas or rhyme scheme or ‘turn’)
A rhyming couplet at the end
A structural pattern created by line-end words (hard to define: may not be rhyme so much as deliberate similarity)
High level of compression/intensity focussed round a single idea

If the poem doesn’t have 14 lines but does have a clear ‘turn’ about two thirds of the way through, it may well be thinking of itself in sonnet terms. George Meredith’s sonnets in Modern Love (which was modern in 1862) had 16 lines each.

And if the poem has 14 lines and one (at least) of the first four is in regular iambic pentameter, it certainly suggests something. (Contemporary sonnets with no regular metre will often have at least one such line.)

But if it’s in seven two-line stanzas with no ‘turn’, no rhyme, uneven line lengths, and no metrical pattern, I will wonder whether the term ‘sonnet’ is relevant.

On the other hand, if it’s in seven two-line stanzas rhyming abba abba cdcdcd, I will think SONNET.

If it’s in seven unrhymed, two-line stanzas of loose iambic pentameter, I will feel it’s going sonnet-wards.

None of this is about being right or definitive or exclusive. It’s personal. I am just trying to explain, as a practising poet and poetry reader, my thinking.

Suppose the poem calls itself: ‘Sonnet for Eliza’. Eliza’s sonnet has fourteen lines of irregular length, no metrical pattern, no rhyme or sound structure that I can detect, and apparently no ‘volta’ or any of the other features on my list. I might, therefore, assume the poet is offering it as a ‘free verse sonnet’. But I find that term a bit of an oxymoron and, to be honest, I’m not convinced a free verse sonnet is something to aspire to. This is not a criticism of the poem as a poem.

However, everything that calls itself ‘poem’ stands in some relationship to whatever else is called ‘poem’, just as all visual art asserts itself in relation to a culture and tradition of visual practice. So any poem that calls itself ‘sonnet’ has a relationship to the sonnet tradition. Being aware of that tradition can give added aesthetic pleasure (in the same way that sampling a good malt whisky is enhanced by intimate and informed acquaintance with other quality malts).

Sometimes the relationship between a poem and its traditions is defined simply by doing none of what might be expected. So there’s some mileage (though it is hardly novel) in calling something ‘sonnet’ when it conforms to nobody’s expectations of that form. The most extreme example of this may be Don Paterson’s ‘The Version’, a prose piece with a volta (a kind of joke about a sonnet that vanished) extending over three pages in a book titled 40 Sonnets.

When it comes to learning sonnets by heart (I recommend this to anyone trying to write them), a structured sonnet is the most pleasurable kind. Getting it by heart allows you inside the mind of the poem and therefore the poet. If the sonnet isn’t beautifully constructed, you’re unlikely to get far. If the manufacture is high-quality and durable, each and every phrase will seem inevitable and, at the same time, surprising.

You might start with some of the HappenStance sonnet cards. Each contains a sonnet I recommend, and we produce new ones regularly. I apologise if one of them turns out to be by me. You’ll find these in the HappenStance web-shop.

If you learn any one of them by heart, they’ll last a lifetime — which is more than you can say for Glenfiddich.