Thread by @dlseuss

1/ None of the sonnets in frank: sonnets feature regularized meter and rhyme. The book, my nature, is an experiment with form, with what has been called the American Sonnet since Wanda Coleman coined the phrase. Gerald Stern wrote a book of sonnets he called American Sonnets,

2/ many of which were over 14 lines. Of course, Terrance Hayes wrote American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, profoundly influenced by Coleman, and @Oliver_delaPaz wrote The Diaspora Sonnets, etc. etc. All of the experimenters, including me, have played with vestiges

3/of meter, poems which are more rhyme-heavy than others, poems that contain a volta, or turn. In my book Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, I did a sonnet sequence that made poems of 14 lines without rhyme, but with a syllabic pattern of 17 syllables per line,

4/ after Ginsberg's American Sentences. I am certain all of the writers I mention, and others who have experimented with the American Sonnet, know was composes a tradtional sonnet. I taught the form for 30 years, and students learned the Shakespearean and Italian sonnet, and

5/wrote them, before experimenting with more contemporary models. We also read earlier experimenters with the form, including Donne, Hopkins, Berryman, Bernadette Mayer, and countless others. Shakespeare himself reconfigured the Petrarchan sonnet.

6/ For myself, frank: sonnets experiments with the constituent parts of the traditional form. I was not interested in writing a memoir in Shakespearean sonnets, nor would contemporary readers have patience with that approach. For an incisive guide to the American Sonnet form,

7/ read @DoraMalech and @Laura_T_Smith's The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, from @UIowaPress.
I write this to encourage writers to read it all, and experiment from the axis of self-education, intuition, and self-knowledge.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/american…

8/Poetry evolves, as do poets. For those interested in my approach to the form, consider reading the whole collection of frank: sonnets, from @GraywolfPress. And please read other books of American Sonnets, those by Coleman, Hayes, and Stern, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks's

9/ experiments with the form, including her "Sonnet Ballad."

(BY nature)

(know WHAT composes)

10/ Let me add that even the vestiges of the form held me up as I wrote about my life. The foldout in the center of frank, about my son's addiction,

is a visual and even physical representation of what 14 lines can, and must, hold. I couldn't have written frank without the sonnet, whose origins and endless variations I respect and love beyond measure.