Winter Virtual Poetry Intensive: The Sonnet is Dead: Long Live the Sonnet: Virtual Workshop with The Poetry Society of New York

February 12 – March 19, 2025
Instructor: Chelsea Harlan
If you were asked to deliver a lecture on food (just… food), you couldn’t not spend a good amount of time talking about cheese, right? Sonnets are like the cheese of poetry. Sonnets are so important in the history and tradition of writing poetry, they’re a tradition unto themselves. Sonnets have style, sonnets have sass; they have rules, they have expectations — and yet, sonnets don’t care what you think about sonnets, nor do they always heed their own form, or honor the parameters of their ancestor sonnets. Sonnets are punk, sonnets are Virgos, sonnets are the color mahogany.

In this crash course, we’ll mosh our way through the sonnet tradition. We’ll look at the sonnet’s buttoned- up origins in Petrarch and Plutarch, as well as Shakespeare’s sonnet legacy, and of course the Romantic poets: Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. (The sonnet’s canonical history is typically and unfortunately homogenously represented.) But we’ll study the past in order to better study the present, examining all the exciting turns so many different poets have taken to get here. The sonnet as we know it these days is very different from its early beginnings, sometimes hardly recognizably a sonnet at all. What’sthepoint,we’llask,inwritinginformifformnolongermeansanything?

To answer this question and others, we’ll have to read and write our way through notions of the sonnet form itself. We’ll have to experiment.