badger11 Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 A question for those that know: can anyone recommend a poet who writes sonnets? One that is not dead! Thanks Phil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyv Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 Phil, please elaborate. Do you need someone to compose a sonnet for some special purpose? Any poet can do this ... Quote Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tinker Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 Badge, I think most modern published poets have abandoned the classic forms though they probably have one or two sonnets in their resume. Reading your post, Frost came to mind immediately and yet he died in 1963 which shocks me that it was that long ago. I remember seeing him on TV. I'm really getting old. The only living sonneteers one might find are probably on the internet, mostly amateur. You might try seeking out Sonnet Contests. Those still happen and all kinds of people participate. Tony has written some really nice Rainis Sonnets. And I think David Parsley wrote some nice sonnets a while back. Rafael Campo and Meg Day are living published poets who have sonnets featured on Poets.org, I don't know either's body of work so I don't know if they could be called sonneteers or not but they wrote at least one poem that the Academy of American Poets thought was good enough to be included with the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Wyatt, Frost, Cummings, Wordsworth and Wilde. Pretty good company. My granddaughter who is a freshman at Duquesne University facetimed just tonight and asked for help with an assignment to write a paper on the poetry of a modern American poet Sally Wen-Mao and in studying her work in her book Oculus, she appears to be writing free form but her poems take on stanzaic pattern but meter and rhyme are not employed and the patterns change with the poem, and sometimes in the poem. I have noticed that same thing in the collections of other modern poets. It seems they are letting the art evolve and may call a piece a "sonnet" but abandon the technical restrictions, maybe trying only to capture of the spirit of the original form. Good luck, Judi 1 Quote ~~ © ~~ Poems by Judi Van Gorder ~~ For permission to use this work you can write to Tinker1111@icloud.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
badger11 Posted February 14, 2022 Author Share Posted February 14, 2022 Thanks both. I was following a thread on another site and they quoted some sonnets from Bishop, Auden, Larkin. They are all dead. http://www.tangledbranch.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=516&t=2223 Phil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyv Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 Heaney wrote plenty of them, but he died, too, if only a few years ago. Quote Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyv Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 Douglas Dunn is still alive. His sonnet "Modern Love" is one of my favorites. Also alive, are Frank Bidart ("Self-Portrait, 1969") and possibly several more mentioned somewhere on this site but I can't find them at the moment. To what extent these poets wrote sonnets I don't know, but their poems are anthologized in one of my books of sonnets. 1 Quote Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
badger11 Posted February 15, 2022 Author Share Posted February 15, 2022 Thanks Tony. I have a Douglas Dunn book. Must revisit. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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