Cedric Tillman's Blog - Posts Tagged "petrarch"
July 8 Sonnet Workshop, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Arts & Science Counsel/Public Library
Thanks to Charlotte Poet Laureate Jay Ward, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Arts & Science Council, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library at University City for the invite to participate in the Laureate Workshop Series, a series of poetry workshops conducted by local poets.
My workshop was originally called "The New Sonnets: Innovation or Adulteration?", but ended up being a deep dive into the history of sonnets and how they changed and developed over time. I used a few faves to illustrate how sonnets evolved and pointed out some of the ways poets have bent the "rules" over the years to meet syllable count restrictions or just ignored the rules altogether other than sticking to the typical 14-line limit. I referenced work from Petrarch, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Hyatt, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Wendy Walters, Terrance Hayes, and Natasha Trethewey. We concluded with an exercise in which we made up end rhymes for our choice of Petrarchan, Spenserian, or Shakespearean sonnets and shared them with each other to hear the differences.
I'm grateful for the positive feedback I received for something I was so apprehensive about doing (well). Hopefully the workshop makes for a few more sonneteers in the world (including me-I've never tried my hand at them, beyond some terrible attempts in graduate school).
My workshop was originally called "The New Sonnets: Innovation or Adulteration?", but ended up being a deep dive into the history of sonnets and how they changed and developed over time. I used a few faves to illustrate how sonnets evolved and pointed out some of the ways poets have bent the "rules" over the years to meet syllable count restrictions or just ignored the rules altogether other than sticking to the typical 14-line limit. I referenced work from Petrarch, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Hyatt, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Wendy Walters, Terrance Hayes, and Natasha Trethewey. We concluded with an exercise in which we made up end rhymes for our choice of Petrarchan, Spenserian, or Shakespearean sonnets and shared them with each other to hear the differences.
I'm grateful for the positive feedback I received for something I was so apprehensive about doing (well). Hopefully the workshop makes for a few more sonneteers in the world (including me-I've never tried my hand at them, beyond some terrible attempts in graduate school).
