The Unlikely Sonneteer: Thoughts from Kate Sherrod

Podcaster and poet Kate Sherrod, author of such projects as Suppertime Sonnets, Kate of Mind, and Life in a Northern Town, shares some of her experiences writing one sonnet per day, while becoming a part of the online poetry community.

Without the internet, they could not be,
These sonnets that I publish every day.
While, when first I did start, I thought I'd see
Some real-life inspiration in the play
Of people and events, quite soon I found
A richer vein on Twitter for ideas:
Those links and news which daily there abound
Are now essential; then, too, there's the squeeze
I sometimes put to friends there: sonnet dares.
Then, too, there is the question of research!
I am no chemist, for example. There's
No telling in what deeply horrid lurch
I'd be without those Wikis and RhymeZone.
I don't think I could write these all alone.

That was my Suppertime Sonnet for Monday, September 28. I write at least one of these every day for that blog; it was my New Year’s resolution to do so, even though before December 31, 2008 I had never written a sonnet before, ever. Not for class, not for fun, not to woo a fellow literature major: Never.



I look back on the night this mad idea seized me and shake my head. I no longer know the woman who cooked this up, mostly as an act of desperation: anything just to restore some discipline to my writing, some structure to my days that had become free-form and crazed. I was inspired by a group of photographers interviewed on NPR, who had spent 2008 taking a photograph every night at the exact same time, wherever they were and whatever they happened to be doing. They weren’t satisfied with mere blogging. They had been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt, worn it to Starbucks and spilled espresso all over it. No, they wanted something more: more elegant, more challenging, less sprawling. So did I.

Sonnets. OK. Nervously I looked around the depressing apartment where I lived (this was in the last months before I up and bought the house my readers now know well as The Kate Station), my sad little hermitage, and wondered if really I would find enough going on in my life to put into a sonnet every day, especially since I have a day job about which I am not really free to write.

But there was Twitter. At first I just used it to share links to my daily output with the friends I had already found there. Then gradually, something else happened.

I was swept into the social media whirlpool as I had never been before; spending more time and having richer and more varied conversations about things that really interested me. And those conversations, those topics, crept into the sonnets. How could they not, when I was talking to people around the world who shared so many of my interests, my passions? Entomologists, astronomers, geographers, bibliofetishists, historians, nerds of all kinds…

Then one day, feeling truly stuck for what to write about and unwilling to punt in that way we writers have (You know the punt: the post or story or poem that is all about not having anything to write about. We’ve all done it.) – I threw it out to my “tweeps”: give me a dare, any dare, and I’ll write a sonnet about it. I would write a sonnet about ANYTHING, I promised, even if it was something I knew NOTHING about.

And oh, did they come through, my tweeps.

So this year I have gone from writing a (very poor) first sonnet about how my cooking on New Year’s Eve was in no way an acceptable part of a Wyoming locovore’s diet to writing book reviews in 14 lines, to one about orangutan biology, a ghost slug that slurps earthworms “like spaghetti”, drinking wine to aid and abet the launching of a pair of lunar probes, weird beer murals, and incredibly specific and brain-hurting topics in organic chemistry.

This, of course, is where the research comes in. For oh, yes, does my poetry require research, even when it is not about something I flunked out of in graduate school. It can be as simple as needing to look up a word to make sure I’m not going too Humpty-Dumpty with its secondary or tertiary meanings, or really needing just one more unusual fact with which to lard a line about lunar geography (And yes, I know the term for that is “selenography” but using that would lose me some lovely alliteration!). I need to be able to have multiple browser windows open while I compose these fourteen lines – which I do, about 95% of the time.

And sometimes research of a wholly different kind must be done, for another sub-genre of sonnet that I practice and wonder sometimes if I mayn’t have invented: the sonnet interview. For while my first such was with a writer whose work I already knew fairly well (My first victim, who helped me come up with the idea and to prove it was do-able, was bizarro fictioneer Jeremy C. Shipp.), I scored some subsequent interviews before I was really in a position to ask intelligent questions (just ask Mur Lafferty!). Now I Google, Facebook, and all but cyberstalk my victims before I even approach them (unless, like Scott Sigler, they strut into my parlor almost without warning).

And yes, like Travis King before me, I must heap praise after praise upon the maintainers and creators of www.rhymezone.com, which I also often open in multiple browser windows – especially now that in addition to my daily sonnets I am also working on a space opera farce in ottava rima (There just aren’t enough of those out there, don’t you agree?). For it I must come up with TWO rhymes for a word before I’m done with it.

As a parting word, though, I must add that I do still sometimes write poetry the old fashioned way, on my thigh with a pen I keep in the glove compartment of Jack the Booktastic Buick for just that purpose. It doesn’t do to become too dependent on ANY crutches, however useful and fun they may be.

If you don't already, be sure to follow Kate on Twitter.