In August we had a sonnet workshop (on Zoom) led by Paul Francis. Paul is a prize-winning and prolific writer of sonnets who often finds inspiration in current affairs. During lockdown, he posted a sonnet a day on his website. All 98 of them can be found here: paulfranciswrites.co.uk. A collection of 50 of his best sonnets, called simply Sonnets, is also available and features brief notes under each poem, offering context and fascinating insights into the writing process, which make the book as engaging as a live poetry reading.
The workshop was suitable for everyone – from people who’d written sonnets before to those who didn't know much about sonnets at all. Paul started by reading us three of his sonnets written over a period of nearly two decades. They show the development in his own approach to writing sonnets, but also reflect the general trend in poetry over that time: away from regular rhyme schemes and end-stopping towards half-rhymes, or no rhymes at all, and more enjambement. The iambic metre appears to be more important than the rhyme.
Then it was our turn. We had just a few minutes to pick a subject and make some notes of the kinds of things we might include in our sonnet: like key factors, images, details, attitude, etc.
Next came my favourite bit: comparing five different drafts of a sonnet: 'Goya at 70', which is one of the poems in Paul's collection. To me this is like being invited inside a poet’s head, or sitting beside them as they think aloud. Paul had even italicised the changes between drafts to make it easier for us to follow his train of thought. We discussed these changes in pairs and my partner and I picked up on a change in the last line, which Paul had changed from ‘all cackling their insatiable demands’ to ‘and cackle their insatiable demands’. We thought ‘cackle’ was more direct, had a greater impact and chimed more with ‘agile’ in the previous line than the ‘-ing’ form did. As Paul says, it’s much easier to edit and discuss changes to someone else’s poem!
But now it was our turn again. We returned to our notes and started to turn them into a sonnet, using the elements we’d just discussed to see if we could make improvements. Finally in an impressively speedy read-around, we had a choice of reading out what we’d written with no explanation, or talking for up to a minute about what we'd been writing.
Keeping a dozen chatty writers in order for an intense 2-hour sonnet workshop is no easy task but Paul is an experienced teacher and, as a result, several Bilston Writers members have now tried their hand at sonnets for the first time or learned new ways of approaching them. Something that appealed to me, and which I tried for the first time in this workshop, was writing a 14-line poem in free verse and only then, in a second step, looking for rhymes or half-rhymes.
Ros Woolner
Comments