The Sonnet

I have two sonnets in need of revision, of re-envisioning; thus, one thing I'm contemplating lately is the form of the sonnet. What constitutes a sonnet, or "little song?" How can I develop my sonnets into fully realized poems while maintaining their sonnet qualities?

Tony Barnstone writes in A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics (featured in The Cortland Review, December 2006):

Poets set sail like Columbus, unsure whether they would sail forever, sail off the waterfalling edge of a flat world, or encounter India or other new worlds. There is something comforting about knowing the destination of your journey. Sonnet-mariners know they will arrive at a port after a voyage of fourteen lines. With free verse, one travels into the fog, and must map the world again with every poem. With free verse one has to ask each time, "What makes this a poem?" Why should I break my line here and not there? What sort of stanza shape and length should I have? What voice shall I speak in, with what attitude, with what rhetoric, with what image structure? We have to come up with organic ways of making it poetry, because the mechanic form has been dispensed with.

Working in form (sonnets or otherwise) gives me a compass and the comfort that there is a destination ahead. I'm envious of the free-verse poets who can write beautifully and clearly without maps. Recently even my poems that end up in free verse tend to start in form. Without some breathable shape, my writing borders on prosaic thoughts broken into lines. Furthermore, form helps write the poem. Rhyme, in particular, leads me to what the poem is trying to say. I might arrive at the same place in free verse, but form tends to get me there in a more direct, unexpected, and interesting way. (Bardstone's essay addresses rhyme and rhyme devices in detail...worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

Barnstone proposes a number of ways of approaching the sonnet, one of the most interesting being to "transform sonnets in English into sonnets in English":

I found that approaching the sonnet as a translation game was a very generative creative mode. The translator wears the skin of the author. It is a kind of spirit possession. In my own work, I have learned much about traditional form by wearing the skin of the Chinese sonneteer Feng Zhi, of Petrarch, and of Borges. In addition to learning their techniques in the process of translating their poems into sonnets in English, I have developed a technique of transformation that I have attempted to apply intralingually as well as interlingually. I might, for example, work from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, using some of his rhymes and filling in my own lines, or write poems in direct conversation with the imagery of a source poem.

I think I may be too far along with my two sonnets in question to start from the translation/transformation approach, but I think it is an interesting approach to play with to generate new poems.

What I need to do is study my sonnets--map out the routes they took, look at the destinations they arrived at--then see if I can improve upon the routes and destinations.