Invisible Frames: On & Beyond the Sonnet
Find form and freedom in the famous fourteen.
Modern English poetry is hard to imagine without the sonnet. This little net of fourteen lines has proven to be the most flexible and powerful form to fish for poetic insight for nearly five hundred years. Why is this the case and how can we use best use it today? Through this course we’ll learn how to use the form, drawing on the inherited tradition of its perpetual use and reinterpretations, while keeping it fresh and speaking to our own contemporary concerns. We’ll explore the historical and contemporary possibilities that the sonnet embodies and, through discussions and assignments, create new work in the medium, testing out various forms of the form.
Along the way, students will encounter poets as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Wanda Coleman, Anne Carson, Inger Christensen, Lyn Hejinian and James Schuyler, to name but a few. Our journey will imitate the sonnets own – from loose interpretation to strict measure, from fourteen lines through to its dispersed semblance in prose poems and ways of poetic thinking. We’ll see how a tradition built up around the sonnet (and explore various codified versions of the sonnet, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes and Adrienne Rich), and reflect on what this continual challenge and expansion makes possible today. We will learn how form is uniquely responsive to the complexities of writing from the personal perspective, how in its development we can trace the history of the ‘lyric I’ and how it offers a dialectic between poetic argument and lyric opportunity.
In the process of the course, each fortnight the students will receive a detailed outline of that session’s topic followed by an assignment where they will be encouraged to test out the approaches discussed. Through feedback, from the tutor and the other students, we’ll refine and develop what the limits of the form might be. By the end of the term, students will have gained significant insight into both the technical exactitudes of the sonnet and its deeper mechanisms of thinking and rethinking. Students will end the course with six new poems, a wealth of new understanding and confidence that they can utilise the form with greater freedom and technical grasp.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]; conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @jancanty
About Edward Doegar 
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Edward Doegar is a poet and editor based in London. He was the commissioning editor for the Poetry Translation Centre between 2019 and 2022 and is a consulting editor at The Rialto. His works include For Now (clinic; 22017), Adaptation (Kelder Press; 2022), a collaboration with the artist Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, and, most recently, sonnets (Broken Sleep Press; 2024).
"The Poetry School has helped me learn about editing my poetry, a really important skill in becoming a better poet. It has also helped me find a creative community, which living abroad now I really value."
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