Day Twenty-Seven

A very happy twenty-seventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo to you all.

Today, our featured daily participant is Peregrine Buffington, where you’ll not only find a lot of alliteration, consonance, and assonance in response to Day 26’s prompt, but you’ll find it in abecedarian form.

Our featured resource for the day is Poetry Pause, the “daily dispatch” of the League of Canadian Poets.

And now for our prompt – optional, as always!  Today we’d like to challenge you to write an “American sonnet.” What’s that? Well, it’s like a regular sonnet but . . . fewer rules? Like a traditional Spencerian or Shakespearean sonnet, an American sonnet is shortish (generally 14 lines, but not necessarily!), discursive, and tends to end with a bang, but there’s no need to have a rhyme scheme or even a specific meter. Here are a few examples:

• Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnet (10)
• Terence Hayes’s American Sonnet for the New Year
• Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet LXXXVIII

If you’d like more specific instructions for how to get started, Write 253 has a great “formula” prompt for an American sonnet, which you can find here.

Happy writing!