I am still a bit skeptical about sonnets... however I must admit that our discussion on Monday forced me to look at this topic in a bit more depth. Finding a confined space as liberating is something I have thought about much.
I have a friend who currently is doing time in MSP, and after the crazy, miserable never-relaxed life he has had, this friend has been able to have a sort of awakening now that he has been forced to take a step out of the "real-world" monotony of distractions and pointless endeavors. He is learning to focus on the beauty of simplicity and living beyond all of the meaningless crap that most of us fill our lives up with.
I tell this story not to go into detail about this friend of mine, but to hopefully illustrate a bit clearer the lens through which I am now attempting to view the sonnet. By nature, I enjoy free writing, free-verse poetry, songs with no chorus, etc. This anti-structuralism, the condition I have diagnosed myself with, is a problem that I am fairly aware of, but I never considered that it could relate to the attempt to cancel out all of the "strutting and fretting" and distractions that can sometimes cloud free-verse writing.
Having fourteen lines in which to convey an entire message, especially a message of something as complicated and multidimensional as love, is complected to say the least. I don't think that writing a semi-respectable sonnet is okay. After much contemplation and sonnet-reading though, I believe that writing in this way can sometimes require even more talent than free verse. If one can do this well, not alright, but truly well, the results can be very rewarding.
My sonnet currently has an outline, which I will not reveal just yet, but even though I still do not particularly enjoy sonnets, I am working on that. I do have a better understanding now, though, of how a "confined space", even in literature, has the potential to be freeing.
-AS
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