What is the Modern Sonnet? Fourteen lines with a volta -- except when it isn't fourteen lines or when it has no volta.

Perhaps the Modern Sonnet is best described by comparing it to the Traditional Sonnet. So, what is the Traditional Sonnet? Well, it is divided into two parts by a "volta", a turn in the poem in which the second part responds to the first. Also, in English, it uses iambic pentameter. And it rhymes; it rhymes a lot, according to some tight strict scheme. In fact, sonnets are often classified according to the rhyme scheme they adopt: e.g., Petrarchan (abbaabba cdecde or abbaabba cdcdcd), Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg), Spenserian (abab bcbc cdcd ee), Envelope (abbacddc efgefg).

However, if this is the form of the Traditonal Sonnet, poets have been writing Modern Sonnets for centuries. Keats wrote a notable sonnet -- To the Evening Star-- two centuries ago that does not rhyme at all. Even Shakespeare wrote non-traditional (non-Shakespearean!) sonnets -- e.g., the fifteen line Sonnet 99 or the 12 line Sonnet 126 or the original Sonnet 25 that includes an unrhymed line. He also dumps iambic pentameter when necessary, like Sonnet 145 written in iambic tetrameter or Sonnet 29 which strays from iambs on some lines.

Lewis Turco maintains that any fourteen line poem that does not abide by the traditional rules is only masquerading as a sonnet and is actually just a quatorzain. (See The Book of Forms.) But what does he know? He is the same guy who said that there is no such thing as "free verse". (You'd think that a poet would have a better appreciation for how words get their meanings.)

A Modern Sonnet might break all the rules of the traditional sonnet. Yet in some way it is always a response to the tradition of sonnet writing. Some extreme examples of the Modern Sonnet are the Anti-Sonnets of Mark Staniforth. He makes sonnets out of pictures (Sonnet XXXIX: 14 Nuns), physical objects (Sonnet XXXI: A Waffle with Fourteen Holes), found text (Sonnet XLI: Upper Volta achieved independence on August 5, 1960.), numbered lists (Sonnet CCXXXIII: Fourteen Ways to Destroy a Sonnet), random typing (Sonnet LXIX: hhgjgh), and other creative, unexpected material. But a critical element of all of his non-sonnet-like works is that you are being asked to treat them as sonnets. (Google him.) In this issue of the Crocodile, the 'sonnet' that most exemplifies this priniciple is The Immigrant Sonnet. It diverges radically from the traditional sonnet; and yet, treating it as a sonnet is the pathway to its meaning.