How to: Write a Sonnet

In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s James Davies on how to write a sonnet.

To write a sonnet, start with a clear theme or emotion—common subjects include love, beauty, time, or mortality. A sonnet is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter, where each line typically contains ten syllables in an unstressed-stressed rhythmic pattern. Choose a rhyme scheme depending on the type: a Shakespearean sonnet follows ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with three quatrains and a final couplet; a Petrarchan sonnet uses ABBA ABBA CDECDE, dividing the poem into an octave and a sestet. Include a volta, or turn in thought, which usually occurs before the final couplet in Shakespearean form or between the octave and sestet in the Petrarchan. The ending should provide a resolution, shift, or new perspective on the theme.

Here is James Davies discussing sonnets, how to write them and what to read. If you’re interested in learning how to write sonnets, James is teaching Fourteen Lines, Myriad Methods: Experimental Sonnet Studio with us this Summer, starting 19 June.

Let’s start with Desert Island Sonnets. What 7 sonnets do you treasure the most?

So let’s start by cheating and having the whole of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I enjoy the cycle and the epic that the sonnet can offer, and having all of them by the palm tree will if nothing else help with counting ‘the clock that tells the time’ (‘Sonnet 12’). Then we’ll need some animals in the pot, so I’ll be taking John Clare’s double sonnet, the sonic gem ‘The Marten’. I’ll want to continue by thinking about the sonnet as a visual form; existing anywhere and everywhere, so next is Mary Ellen Solt’s ‘Moonshot Sonnet’. Perhaps, after, something a little political with a capital P: I’m fifty-fifty between Wordsworth’s ‘On The Projected Kendal And Windermere Railway’ and Sassoon’s ‘Attack’. Umm? Last on the list are Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets (a collage sequence), the humour of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘You jerk you didn’t call me up’ and reduction and palimpsest in my own one-line Sonnet from Plants which goes: ‘Thirteen lines dumped. Fourteenth July Owe Six.’

What draws you to the sonnet form? 

I’m drawn to all poetry machines and containers. Poetry machines are made up of rules, which is to say both constraints and freedoms that make writing hard and easy at the same time. The sonnet is a particularly complex machine, yet due to its length and structure is very malleable. Sonnets are incredibly satisfying to write – they make you work hard and rigorously, guiding you serendipitously to solutions and truths. Reading the best sonnets is a game-changing experience in endless surprise.

Sonnets have strict rules—rhyme schemes, meter, length. Do you find that structure freeing or restrictive? Can a poem that breaks all the rules still be a sonnet?  

Well sonnets do and don’t have strict rules, as the history of the sonnet attests. There’s always been evolution, think Petrarchan and Shakespearian verse. In the last two centuries there have been a whole swathe of developments. The great Jeff Hilson edited anthologyThe Reality Street Book of Sonnets demonstrates the range. In that book there are several sonnets that have fun by really tugging at the edges of what a sonnet can be, yet there’s always a connection to the sonnet somewhere. The seemingly infinite variations to the form suggest that we are far from running out of gas. First came the croissant, then the cronut, what next?

Some of the most famous sonnets are about love. Do you think the form lends itself to certain themes, or can it work for anything? 

A sonnet’s traditional structure lends itself to exploring and making arguments. So any theme will work really. Think how well the volta worked for the War Poets. However, nowadays the sonnet’s purpose is manifold. I’m immediately thinking of Paul Dutton’s so’nets that strip away thematic concerns and are just about the sonic, visual and playful qualities of the form.

What advice would you give to a poet writing their first sonnet?

Get the fourteen lines down. If you have something to write about, fine. But if not just write automatically. Don’t worry about meter, rhyme or the visual to begin with. Write on paper first, in a small empty notebook called SONNETS. Now, tease away at editing your first poem. Rewrite. Reread. Rewrite. Reread. Keep all versions. Enjoy the duality of exasperation and pleasure as one word choice forces another away. Break the rules if you need to. For sure! Be gone with you fourteenth line! Vanquished art thou rhyme! Think big, this could be a sequence!

If you’re interested in learning how to write sonnets, James is teaching Fourteen Lines, Myriad Methods: Experimental Sonnet Studio with us this Summer, starting 19 June.

James Davies’s writing includes many books of poetry, including stack from Carcanet, an exploration of minimalism and alternative walking practices, and it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall from Pamenar, in which pairs of lines push and pull between bliss and bathos creating a magical fuzziness. He is also the author of prose texts including the Oulipian psychedelic romantic comedy When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank’s Transporter (Crater Press), written in collaboration with Philip Terry, and The Wood Pigeons (Dostoevsky Wannabe), a slenderising of a quiet night in for two. He is editor of if p then q and co-ran the legendary The Other Room poetry night. More at www.jamesdaviespoetry.com 

James is teaching Fourteen Lines, Myriad Methods: Experimental Sonnet Studio with us this Summer, starting 19 June.