Sherry Chandler

The Sonnet as Scaffolding

The Molly Peacock Master Class, The Sonnet as Scaffolding, might also have been called something like strategies in the English sonnet. It was taken as a given that participants were familiar with sonnet forms. The notion in the class was to break out of the form as a restricting set of rules, to loosen up within the form, to use the sonnet form as a scaffold.

There are, said Molly Peacock, two kinds of scaffolding: one kind is internal and integral, it becomes part of the structure; the other kind is external and can be kicked away to leave a free-standing structure. We were working toward a sonnet of the latter kind.

The scaffold of the sonnet, is of course, 8/6, “the magic proportion” or variations thereof. If I remember correctly, Timothy Steele, in All the Fun’s in How You Say A Thing, has a fine chapter on the way in which the proportion resembles the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0 1 1 3 5 8 etc) on which the sunflower whorls its seeds, the nautilus secretes it shell, and the Old Masters built their sense of perspective.

We were to think of it more simply as “not something that divides itself in half” because you “must cross the middle line before you can see that something has to end.” Not necessarily 14 lines, though “there is something about that 14.”

Hence, the much-whined-about sonnet a day. We were asked to write a sonnet in the last 40 minutes or so of class time (on the first day, we had 25 minutes). The limit put the pressure on. No time to fret the details, like rhyme and meter, and what was worse, for me, no time to fret over subject matter. We had to grab an idea and start writing.

It was like the time-honored free-write, only it had to be done in some approximation of sonnet form.

I failed every time to write a sonnet in 40 minutes.

But I did get a sonnet out of the scribblings and scratchings of class by class-time the next day. One was Italian, one was sort of Kay-Ryan-dessicated with odd and playful rhymes, and one was “fat” and in blank verse. For me this was very quick work, though it violated one dictum of Peacock: “A lyric poem should be written in one sitting.”

Says Molly, “I want you to have a sense of the sonnet as a tradition of hundreds of years that is appropriated by each person who writes it.”

[All these quotes are from scribbled class notes and I can't vouch that I got them word-for-word.]

One small side note: Molly Peacock has a lovely triangular face, laughing eyes, and sometimes a mischievous triangular smile that makes her look exactly like a kitten that has just performed some miraculous feat of acrobatics and is very proud of herself. I hesitate to write this, because kittenish has become a sort of pejorative adjective. Molly is more like the Cheshire Cat. The Tenniel version, mind you, not that awful Disney thing.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“– so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Possibly related posts:

Sonnet LXXIII

A curtal sonnet

The Ekphrastic Sonnet

An Ekphrastic Petrachan Sonnet

A tetrameter sonnet

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.