Submerged in the Sublime: The Expression of Self-Hood through the Modern Sonnet

The modern sonnet, a short, sweet, 14-ish lines of poetry, can be the perfect container for expression. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss writes, "The sonnet is an endlessly fluid, reimagined form. It has been hushed, lushed, fragmented, fogged, elated, flipped and freaked by everyone." While the traditional sonnet most of us learned in school is a rigid puzzle with many rules, the modern sonnet can be a brief adventure, an exploration with only a few rules--all which are made to be broken. In this generative workshop, we will dive into the beauty and intensity of the modern sonnet--looking at examples by Diane Seuss, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gerald Stern, and Lucille Clifton, to discover the ways breaking the bounds of the sonnet form can set us free.

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MEGHAN STERLING'S work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Rattle, and many…