What is an American Sonnet? "The Man Without a Friendly Wife"

The American sonnet has recently emerged with a slightly less restricted format than the traditional sonnet form derived from renaissance Italy (Petrarch) and Elizabethan England (Spenser, Shakespeare) that continues still today to challenge, and intimidate, the serious writers and readers of poetry all over the world.

Every dynamic culture with a living language, however, in literature if not in every other artistic category, continually accommodates itself to the respected traditions it inherits by tailoring them to its own unique, intrinsic norms and customs.

The Renaissance Italian and Elizabethan English writers experienced dramatic new creative freedom working inside the newly developed rigid sonnet rhyming schemes and mandatory rhythmic boundaries to every line.

But Americans today increasingly break free from those kinds of traditional restrictions, and more naturally use heroic couplets for exalted statements, with each of the two lines ending in words of the same rhyme, and flexibility in the length of lines. They only rarely use the more complex four-line rhyming pattern of the traditional sonnet, each line restricted to only five iambic feet. Americans have much less patience with complex organizational schemes, and much, much more to say within each line.

The sonnet's subject matter, also, continues to change in each new culture it encounters. The 14th century Petrarch was a brilliant, multi-talented scholar, but he wrote his influential 317 sonnets to a beloved, idealized, and inaccessible Laura in Tuscany, where women were dramatically less visible to men than they are today in America which has developed the most remarkably open society in human history for both men and women.

Every conceivable aspect of human life has today become accessible, available, and even plainly visible on any computer with an internet connection to anyone with the curiosity and a third-grade education. We scarcely any longer understand the late medieval and early modern styles that effectively used obscure images of unfulfilled and unfulfillable romantic love,

We still experience, however, the desperate need, perhaps more pressingly now than ever before, to find, nurture, understand, and even promote every positive aspect of human interaction and connection. Poetry, perhaps, can help in this important task, and perhaps a newly liberated American sonnet style can teach, enrich, and guide us in another age of great cultural transition.

My modest exploratory didactic sonnet, "The Man Without a Friendly Wife," presented here with some postmodern undertones, aims at one, but only one, perspective in the overall picture of human interactions, how a man may hurt himself by not attending properly to the needs of a friendly wife. It provides no definitive statement to cover every relationship in our complex culture. So please relax, you who are not represented! Your day will come. Indeed, it can come right now if you write a sonnet from your own point of view. Petrarch's Canzoniere contained 317 sonnets, and we have 154 sonnets of William Shakespeare, but all 471 of them together did not exhaust every possible aspect of human life and interaction.

Writers Workshop. Experienced sonneteers don't need my advice, but to aspiring new sonneteers, I suggest you familiarize yourself with a college Guide to Literature (with major section on poetry), keep handy an anthology of major English and/or American writers, refer regularly to a comprehensive English dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus, and keep an informal journal of your ideas as they come to you, so you have it as resource whenever you actually write. HubPages provides a virtual Writer's Workshop for showing your new sonnets to others for responsible feedback, and of course, to read their work as well.

The Man Without a Friendly Wife

The man without a friendly wife he loves, respects,
and honors all the way has several defects:
he only dimly sees the sun rise up each day
because his troubles rise instead and block his way.

He rarely hears the sacred music floating by,
because his brain's preoccupied with asking, "Why?!"
The leaves fall to the ground and quickly disappear,
but he must fall aground himself to feel them near.

So you must straighten up yourself when she comes in the room
and step aside respectfully when she picks up her broom,
engage in two-way conversation with her when it's time,
and send some flowers every year, and poetry with rhyme.

Yes, you there! You're the man that I am talking to,
or you know someone else who needs a talking to!

______________________________________________
Copyright (c) 2011 by Max J. Havlick, Writers Workshop, The Max Havlick School of Personal Creation and World Citizenship, a project of New World Community Enterprises, Inc., 16 W. Vermont St., Villa Park, IL 60181-1938, all rights reserved (30 min. from O'Hare Airport). Permission here granted to make and publish exact copies that contain the complete essay, the sonnet, and this copyright notice.