Renee Emerson

I had set aside the summer writing time to work on my middle-grade novel draft that has been languishing on my jumpdrive for a few years now, but after deleting the horrible prologue, I’m not sure I have the energy to go back to it just yet (besides that, novels are just a different beast)

Instead I’ve been thinking about pantoums and sonnets and sestinas. Formal poetry was scarcely taught to me–not once in high school, maybe very breezily in undergrad, and a hard week in my MFA (me, crying in my professor’s office, telling her I was simply too stupid and redneck to write in meter).

I am interested in form, but struggle to hear meter. Is it the way I talk? The Southern accents I grew up with? What I read or don’t read? Though I do read a number of formal poets.

I hold formal poets in high esteem actually–like they’ve attained a level of poetry that is unreachable to me. A club where I’m not admitted. I’m fairly certain I have never written a good formal poem. I’ve managed to wrangle some poems into form, but sort of like a cake made from a box kit type of poem. Annoyingly enough, my husband, a math teacher, can scan poetry like a pro.

I’m curious too about what is going on with form poetry nowadays–sometimes I see sonnets that don’t hold to all the formal rules. Is that allowed? How much can I break the rules and still call a poem a sonnet? What is the essential HEART of a poem that makes it a sonnet? The meter, the 14 lines, the rhyme scheme, the logical argument?

(an aside: these are the kinds of questions that sometimes make me wish I wasn’t writing so much in the isolation of a suburban stay at home mom–I have no literary group to bounce these questions off of)

Well. I could go on feeling sorry for myself that not everything in poetry comes so naturally, or I could try to learn it.