JUMP TO THE AMERICAN SONNET EXAMPLES
A decade ago, I spent one December writing only sonnets. One each day. The experience solidified the sonnet (and, in particular, the American sonnet) as one of my favorite poetic forms to read and write.
I agree 100% with Kim Addonizio when she says this about the sonnet’s appeal:
“I continue to be drawn back to the spirit of the sonnet, especially its fourteen-line limit, which encourages the writer to get something meaningful said before the poem is over. Also, it can fit on a cocktail napkin, should the writer find herself with inspiration but no paper.”
The sonnet is compact. Its appearance is often tidy. And, having forced the poet to find freedom in constraint, the sonnet unlocks a kind of magic.
My American sonnet poem-a-day (during a 2015 “residency” with the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project) helped me learn how I wanted to use the form. While I do not stick to any syllable count or meter, I almost always utilize a rhyme scheme and rely on a volta.
I’m excited to share more about these traditional elements below, including how other modern poets are making their own decisions about the form.
JUMP TO THE AMERICAN SONNET EXAMPLES
What Is an American Sonnet?
At its simplest, an American sonnet is a 14-line poem that includes a volta — a turning point in the poem that shifts the poem’s energy, intelligence, or meaning. American sonnets may, or may not, use rhyme in homage to their much older cousins: the Petrarchan Sonnet and the Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet. (You can learn more about each of these, including how they rhyme and where they place the volta, here.)
But here’s something fun about the American sonnet… nearly all the rules are squishy, including that “it *has* to be 14 lines.” It’s probably more accurate to say that American sonnets are 14-ISH lines. And the volta? That’s optional, too, though I highly recommend it.
Straightforward definitions are rarely sufficient to capture the spirit of the sonnet. I prefer affectionate descriptions (like what Addonizio says above) or explanations about what the form can do (and why the sonnet should be in your poetry-writing toolbox):
- “If a poem, as William Carlos Williams claimed, is a machine made out of words, the sonnet can be viewed as a particularly compressed, dynamic, and efficient little gizmo, one that poets have been tinkering with since the 12th century. …The sonnet affords the poet unique opportunities to embody or even resolve certain essential contradictions… ” (SOURCE: Brian Brodeur, “The Technology of the American Sonnet,” New Ohio Review)
- “I decided that … the jazz sonnet would be as open as possible, adhering only to the loosely followed dictate of number of lines. I decided on 14 to 16 and to not exceed that, but to go absolutely bonkers within that constraint. … I decided to have fun, to blow my soul.” (SOURCE: Wanda Coleman in an interview with Paul Nelson, cited in American Sonnets: PolyVocality and Code Switching With Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes,” Pleiades)
- “The compact machinery of this form — which for hundreds of years explored themes of love and longing — has been reinvigorated in recent decades to delve into cultural resistance and political outrage, or the deep introspection of Self.” (SOURCE: AE Hines, “The Surprising American Sonnet,” Charlotte Lit)
- “An American sonnet is a sonnet that has stopped asking permission. It keeps the essentials, fourteen lines, compression, a turning argument, and discards the rest: no required rhyme scheme, no iambic pentameter, no octave and sestet etiquette.” (SOURCE: Writory)
JUMP TO THE AMERICAN SONNET EXAMPLES
Who Is Most Known for the American Sonnet?
While I won’t attempt a comprehensive history of the American sonnet, the modern story of the form must include Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, and Diane Seuss. Here’s a little bit about how each has expanded our understanding (and use) of the form:
WANDA COLEMAN
Coleman’s contribution to the history of the American sonnet, which she famously wrote throughout the 1990s, is undeniable. The Poetry Foundation says, “Coleman’s magnum opus might be her 100 American sonnets, a sequence written over many years and scattered across several books. Originally intended to ‘earn [her] way into the canon,’ her ‘jazzified’ takes on the venerable form are high-octane, unpredictable, and utterly original.”
And I love how this commentary by Jefferson Navicky in “A Review of Wanda Coleman’s Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets” (The Adroit Journal) characterizes Coleman’s work with the sonnet: “The showdown is set: one of the most formally rigorous and constricting poetic forms vs. the devout rule breaker and master poet Wanda Coleman. …It feels like Coleman is trying to hack her way out of the box of form. It’s a thrilling escape attempt, and her pushing at the bounds often yields brilliant feats of lineation or punctuation.”
TERRANCE HAYES
In 2018, Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, significantly raised visibility for the American sonnet and renewed excitement around its possibilities. Hayes, who often credits Coleman’s American sonnets as the shoulders his poems stand on, started his collection of 70 American sonnets early in the first Trump administration.
Hayes uses the form to expose systemic racism and white supremacy and ask critical questions about American democracy, including, “What kind of life does each of us get to have? How does the assassin’s violence get passed on? And, if this pervasive violence is corrosive both to Black lives and to all our lives, how do we address it?” (SOURCE: Tess Taylor, National Book Critics Circle).
DIANE SEUSS
frank: sonnets (2021) by Diane Seuss is comprised of 127 long-lined sonnets, dubbed “Seussian sonnets” by Terrance Hayes, according to the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). The Pulitzer Prize-winning collection represents another big moment for the modern sonnet. As “one of the most talked-about collections of the year,” NBCC says, “[the book] proves that the continually-reinvented American sonnet can still surprise us.”
In a Brooklyn Rail interview, Seuss offers this incredible description of her reliance on the sonnet in frank: “It occurred to me that I could write a memoir in a string of sonnets. Each event, relationship, speech act, song that a particular sonnet might carry would hold the same amount of space — those reliable 14 lines — no matter the degree of gravity or levity. I found as the writing proceeded that the form could hold so much. Nearly everything. I could leap through time and space and enter an incident the size of the eye of a needle. Or hurricane. I could sustain dialogue. Write flash-memoir. Play with meter and rhyme, whether internal or a nice little rhyming couplet. All within the boundaries of those 14 lines. A life is a long and convoluted thing. (Mine is. And getting longer.) It also contains buckets of pain. I couldn’t have written my life without the sonnet. I could not have flown on that trapeze without the safety net of the form.”
40+ American Sonnet Examples
I’d like to frame this list of American sonnets as a collection of “subversions and appropriations.” The description comes from Terrance Hayes, as quoted here in The Kenyon Review: “It’s the form I return to most often. It’s a centuries old box always waiting to be reshaped, adapted, filled with new words. I love to see what new things poets do with the form . . . Subversions and appropriations of form are always of interest to me.” Amen!
- Here by Kim Addonizio
- Blessing the Baby by Diannely Antigua
- Sad Girl Sonnet #2 by Diannely Antigua
- My Hair Remembers Everything by Ruth Awad
- American Sonnet by Corey Baron
- Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
- for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
- Triple Sonnet for Infinite Eight: An Editor’s Note by Dorothy Chan
- Triple Sonnet for Tripling Your Chances by Dorothy Chan
- Sonnet and a Half for a Beginning by Jillian Clasky
- American Sonnet (10) by Wanda Coleman
- American Sonnet 51 by Wanda Coleman
- American Sonnet: 91 by Wanda Coleman
- American Sonnet (95) by Wanda Coleman
- Lines Written During My Second Pandemic by Eduardo C. Corral
- Holocene Sonnet by Lisa Fay Coutley
- March by Chelsea B. DesAutels (second poem on the page)
- Backward Sonnet for a Forward Thinker by Caitlin Doyle
- Sinkhole Sonnet by Kelle Groom
- Wetland by francine j. harris
- American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye Lavette,] by Terrance Hayes
- American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Inside me is a black-eyed animal”] by Terrance Hayes
- American Sonnet for Wanda C. by Terrance Hayes
- Suitcase: Departure (and Suitcase: Return) by Susanna Lang
- I’m Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest by Paige Lewis
- Corinthians 13:11 by Jennifer Martelli
- Sonnet for a Body Under Pressure by Patrick Mullen-Coyoy
- Hydrogen Peroxide Sonnet by Sharon Olds
- Woman Swallowed by a Python in Her Cornfield by January Gill O’Neil
- Feeling Sonnet 22 by Eugene Ostashevsky
- On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced. by Julia Rapp
- [Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me] by Diane Seuss
- Six sonnets by Diane Seuss
- Six unrhymed sonnets by Diane Seuss
- Wisco Sonnet by Lora Supandi
- Sonnet for Her by Kara van de Graaf
- Fifty-Nine and Feeling… by Donna Vorreyer
- What a Girl Wants by Donna Vorreyer
- Sonnet for the Second Coming by Ashley Wang
- OCD SONNET #3 by Zachariah Claypole White
- Her Obsessions by Wendy Wisner
I’d love to expand this collection of American sonnet examples. Got a fave that I’ve missed? Let me know, and I’ll take a look. Also, be sure to check out some of the other lists published at this blog:
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