Sunday Picnic Under Peacock-Glorious Sugar Maples

[poetree_admin]

jjhunter

Sunday, every Sunday, let's have a community picnic. It's probably been a long week, and it's lovely to have a few minutes to sit back and relax and enjoy some good conversation in a less formal space. Feel free to bring something for the Picnic Basket - a poem you liked this week, a thought you had or something you experienced, or even something completely unrelated to poetry whatsoever that you just feel like sharing. Just take a moment to say hello, and maybe have a bite to eat; no one is going anywhere fast, and the shade promises some relief from the everyday heat. Let’s get to know each other a bit better, here under the branches of the poet’s tree.

Meta: for further reading (sonnet week)

[lnhammer]

The Making of a Sonnet, ed. Eavan Boland & Edward Hirsch. Large and diverse, and especially good on 20th century experiments.

The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller. This is smaller and was economically constrained to include fewer 20th century sonnets, but otherwise manages a greater variety. It's also only general anthology I've met that acknowledges the role of women poets of the late 18th century in the revival of the English sonnet, even if the selection of their poems is still thin.

Complete cycles: the best sonnet cycle in English is Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (original spelling). The next-best Elizabethan cycle would be Drayton's Idea; two good Victorian cycles are D.G. Rossetti's The House of Life and C. Rossetti's "Monna Innominata." For contemporary cycles, I'm especially partial to Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; if the form used in Hollander's Powers of Thirteen counts as a sonnet (and this is highly debatable, though it's certainly a sonnet-analog of roughly the same size), I like that as well.

And fwiw, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles "Sonnet" and "Volta" were especially useful to me this week.

---L.

Community Calendar: Post of POETREE Past

[poetree_admin]

This is a one stop post for tracking previous weeks at poetree and catching up on any weeks you may have missed. It follows the idea of the weekly and monthly round-ups. Once a month has passed it will be moved from the current Community Calendar to this post. Please see the community Archive for weeks Hosted prior to Sept. '12; you can also browse the themed week master post and the community tags to review previous weeks by theme and posts in general by author, type of content, and so forth.

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Last edited 3/27/14 by jjhunter