Hi there. I'm Brian Calvert.
I'm a journalist and a poet.
I live in Almont, Co which is near
Crested Butte in western Colorado.
And today I'm going to walk everyone through
three simple steps to writing a sonnet.
The first thing to remember in writing a
sonnet is that the sonnet is a form of art.
That and a form of poetry that is meant
to be contemplative or introspective.
So the 1st 8 lines of a sonnet sort of set
up a situation and the last 6 lines of.
Sonnet turned back and contemplate
the situation that you've just set up.
And so I think it's a perfect poetic form for
anyone who wants to experiment with poetry,
a because it sounds fancy and B because
it's actually very simple to write.
So it's 14 lines and what
you really want to try for.
We're going to talk about a
Shakespearean sonnet today.
So there's a specific meter or
accounting that goes into a sonnet
and there's a certain rhyme scheme.
Goes into a sonnet.
You're going to rhyme across 14.
Lines of poetry,
and it's going to be very easy to do.
The first thing to understand is the
meter of a Shakespearean sonnet,
which is iambic pentameter.
What you want to understand about iambic
pentameter is that it's a soft, hard beat.
Is 1 foot, and there are five of those feet,
so it's soft, hard, soft hard,
soft hard, soft hard, soft hard.
And you can vary that a little bit,
but if you really just make 10 syllables
across one line, that's a good start.
And you don't even have to do that
if you don't want to,
because it's creative expression
and who cares?
So you can just write us on it.
So your lines are going to rhyme.
A/B A/B.
That's your first four lines,
which is known as a quatrain.
Then you're going to ryme CDCD,
which is your second quatrain.
Those two quatrains together give you
an octave or your first eight lines.
After which you turn the poem
towards its final sestet,
which is
EFEFGG. So the last two lines of
the sonnet will rhyme and that kind
of gives it a sense of finality.
And you've kind of come to a point
when you're writing your own poems,
what you want to do is you just want
to start working 4 lines by 4 lines.
The 1st 4 lines you write,
they rhyme ABA. Three, which means.
If the first line ends in being,
then the third line needs to rhyme
with that which is seeing. If
the second line ends in cold,
then the fourth line
needs to rhyme with that,
like behold or something like that.
You can cheat as much as you want.
There's rhyming dictionaries online.
There's lots of ways to figure
out what words rhyme with words.
If they don't quite rhyme,
that's totally fine.
That's sometimes called slant rhyme,
sometimes it's called assonance.
It's just the word sounds very
similar even if they don't rhyme.
So you just kind of set up.
4 lines of a of a situation.
So you're standing in the
mountains or you're on the street,
or you're cooking dinner,
chopping vegetables, whatever it is.
You would write about that.
And then you would take that
a little bit further.
And four more lines,
just getting some texture in there
about the vegetables or the mountains
or the bedroom or the street corner.
And that would create your first eight lines.
And then you would really kind
of turn back and think about
what it means to be chopping.
Vegetables.
And you might sort of describe
your inner thoughts a little bit
more about that process and then.
And then you want to just sort of like
land the poem somewhere on a final thought,
which is in your last two lines,
which is the ending couplet.
And once you've done that,
then make sure to share your
poem with whoever you want,
because art is all about sharing.
And if you don't like the poem
that you wrote, write another one.
This is glanmore sonnets 1 by Seamus Heaney.
Written in 1979, it says here, revised
in 1998. So remember,
a poem is never finished,
it's merely abandoned.
Vowels plowed into other opened ground.
The mildest February for 20 years is missed.
Bands over furrows a deep no sound
vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
I wrote is steaming that turned up acres.
Breathe. Now the good life could be to
cross the field and art a paradigm of
Earth's new from the lathe of plows.
Miley is deeply tilled.
Old plow socks gorged the
subsoil of each scents,
and I am quickened with a redolence of
farmland as a dark unblown rose. Wait.
Then, breasting the mist and Soares aprons,
my ghosts come striding
into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like
freakish Easter snows.