On Beyond Petrarch
American sonnets deliver more
Bang for the buck!
Clever Americans
Dig that old
English
Form fresh up.
Good morning and good luck!
However delightfully
Italians
Juggle their rhymes, they also
Know that
Love (when the
Moon's in the sky like a big pizza pie) may
Never again be enough.
—Peggy Landsman, Pompano Beach, FL
Peggy Landsman's work has been published in many online and print literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, To-wit To-woo, is available from FootHills Publishing. Her out-of-print romance novel, Passion's Professor, which she wrote under the pen name Samantha Rhodes, is now available on her web site. She lives in South Florida where she swims in the warm Atlantic Ocean every chance she gets. Visit http://peggylandsman.com.
I enjoy the challenges of writing a poem according to formal rules—playing the poetry game, formal version. It's usually after I've read several poems in a particular form, in a short period of time, that my thoughts start coming in that form and I find myself obsessed by it. I've been acquainted with most formal forms for decades. When I was younger, I wrote many parodies of my favorite formal poems, but it's only been the past twenty years or so that my relationship has become more intimate, that I've worked on writing my own original poems in form. I cannot always account for the "formal" phases I go through.
I spent one summer writing sonnets. By chance, the first day of my vacation, I found an old copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. I read the first three or four sonnets and found myself inspired. I started copying her form, the Petrarchan, then switched to the Shakespearean. Before I knew it, I was playing around very liberally with the form, making my own private jokes. In "On Beyond Petrarch," I combined the alphabet-poem form with the fourteen-line sonnet convention to demonstrate the freedom and playfulness of poetic license.
I write mostly in free verse, but from time to time, especially when I'm feeling blue, dueling with the Muse of a particular form is the cure that puts me back in the pink.