Open Poetry Ltd Launched the 2007 International Sonnet Competition

The Rules

The main rules are very simple:
1. The poem can be on any subject and must be your own original work.
2. It must be exactly 14 lines long (excluding title).
3. It must be written in English.
4. You must never have received any kind of payment, however small, for the poem.
5. There is no limit to the number of entries by any poet.
6. Entrants must be over 16 years of age on 10th January 2007.

The Judges 2007

Traditional Sonnets

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We'll build in Sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes...
(John Donne, 'The Canonization')

The sonnet is Donne's 'well wrought urne' - compact, shapely, highly finished, and able to contain, in concentrated form, almost all that is human.
Michael R.G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet (London & New York, 1992), page 1.

Or in modern times, perhaps we could think of the sonnet as a crafted piece of furniture, combining art, skill, beauty, function and that indefinable quality that speaks to us of more than the sum of the parts.

Writing a 'traditional' sonnet, though, has similarities with doing a crossword. It is a puzzle to make the pieces fit; there is some intellectual tease, and you can mull over individual lines, like crossword clues, as you continue daily life. There is also a knock-on effect. If you change a line, other lines then may need to change, just as changing the answer to 7 across in a crossword may mean you have to rethink 4 down. It is interesting as a form of poetry in which, at least in traditional form, structure and meaning are very intricately bound together and writing sees an ever shifting balance between the two as the poem works out what it is to be.

The sonnet is one of the longest lived of all poetic forms. It appears to originate in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Sicily itself and the southern half of Italy) under the rule from 1208 to 1250 of The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. 35 sonnets survive from this period of which 25 are usually attributed to the notary and legal deputy of the Emperor named Giacomo da Lentino. He may be regarded as the 'inventor' of the form, although many preceding influences could be discussed for which there is no space here.

The perfecter of the sonnet in Italian is agreed to be Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), otherwise known as Petrarch. The distinctive rhyming pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet is abba abba and then either cdcdcd or cdecde. With an alternative opening of abab abab, this pattern remained the template for the European sonnet until Sir Thomas Wyatt 'reinvented' the rhyming couplet as an ending (a minor Italian poet, Nicolo de'Rossi, c. 1285 - 1335, had done this before but it had not caught on with his contemporaries). After Wyatt's re-inroduction of the closing couplet, the form was adopted by most British sonneteers, so one typically finds abba abba cdcdee or abab abab cdcdee

Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599) introduced a more convoluted rhyming scheme of abab bcbc cdcdee, but there were few followers. Sir Philip Sidney ( 1554-1586) experimented in his Arcadia with some rather extraordinary rhyme schemes, such as a single rhyme for all fourteen lines and abab baba acaccc, but his great sequence Astrophel and Stella consistently uses an 'Italian' octet (abba abba) and an 'English' sestet (cdcdee or variants).

The form we now know as Shakespearean - abab cdcd efefgg - was actually established by the Earl Surrey (1517?-1547), but the quality and perhaps also quantity of Shakespeare's sonnets has resulted in his name bearing the laurels for this pattern. In English the Shakespearean form is the most widely imitated of traditional forms, possibly because it is less demanding on rhyme in a language that has nowhere near the number of rhyming words that, say, Italian has.

Italian sonnets tend to have 11syllables (excluding elisions) in each line, while English sonnets tend to have 10 syllables per line in an iambic pattern (unstressed syllable, stressed syllable), although most poets will play with metre at one time another. One of the points about repetitive metric patterns, just like beats in music, is the opportunity they create to suddenly change the pattern or beat for effect, whether that be emphasis, surprise, a sense of speeding up or slowing down, etc.

If you are really interested in the history of the sonnet, we recommend Michael Spiller's book cited at the top of this page (ISBN 0-415-07744-3 & 0-415-08741-4 pbk) from which much of the above has been gleaned. You may also wish to look at www.sonnets.org, and there are many other sites devoted to sonnets on the Internet.

A final word. The Open Poetry competition will treat traditional/formal sonnets and freeform/innovatory sonnets on an equal basis. Whatever the structural form, the quality of the sonnet as poetry is paramount and poetry is more than either form or content in themselves.

[If you are new to the use of letters to designate rhyming schemes, the first line rhyme is marked as a and any line that rhymes with that is also designated as a. The next new rhyme is b and any lines rhyming with that are also b, and so on to line 14, each new rhyme moving on a letter.]

Some Ideas

When people discuss sonnets, they usually argue for two forms: Petrarchan and Shakespearean, although we can also talk of Spenserian. If you are uncertain about these structures, which are largely to do with rhyme scheme and metre, and want to find out more, click here. They proved popular forms and have been much imitated, but they are not by any means the only forms for a sonnet. After all, like other poetry, a sonnet does not have to rhyme. And just as the Shakespearean sonnet form was an innovation on the Petrarchan, so your sonnets can be innovatory too. This is the 21st century. You can imitate a traditional style with modern content, or play with the style too and come up with your own format within the 14 line basic rule, which is the only structural rule we are operating.
 

Sonnets are actually incredibly flexible, despite the apparent constriction of the line number. If you do want to rhyme, what about breaking with tradition in any of the following ways?

Rhyming 7 lines apart (1 & 7, 2 & 8 etc).

Sonnet of the Week

For copyright reasons, we are unfortunately unable to publish (as yet) the work of most established modern poets, but each week we will place here an example of a good sonnet for which, to the best of our knowledge, copyright is not an issue.

On the Edition of Mr Pope's Works with a Commentary and Notes

In evil hour did Pope's declining age
Deceived and dazzled by the tinsel show
Of wordy science and the nauseous flow
Of mean officious flatteries, engage

Thy venal quill to deck his laboured page
With ribald nonsense, and permit to strew,
Amidst his flowers, the baleful weeds that grow
In th'unblessed soil of rude and rancourous rage.

Yet this the avenging Muse ordainèd so,
When by his counsel or weak sufferance,
To thee were trusted Shakespeare's fame and fate.
She doom'd him down the stream of time to tow
Thy foul, dirt-loaded hulk, or sink perchance,
Dragged to oblivion by the foundering weight.

Thomas Edwards

This is sonnet xxvi from The Canons of Criticism (1765) and addressed to William Warburton (whose maid incidentally is thought to have used some of the last surviving Shakespeare manuscripts, then in Warburton's library, to line pie dishes - a not uncommon use of old manuscripts). So the sonnet is usually about love? Not so with what might be called the Savage Sonnet, like this..

OPEN POETRY SONNET COMPETITION

We would very much like to run the Open Poetry International Sonnet Competion again, but times being what they are, we are unable to underwrite the costs without support as we did before. Sponsorship would be most welcome, but equally useful would be simple underwriting. The 2007 competition was in the end self-financing (see link to accounts below), but it was a big risk to take without any backing other than personal finances. One of the problems we have found in seeking backing, apart from there being considerably less arts funding around now, is that the competition is international. So much arts support is concerned with developing local audiences that as soon as one mentions 'worldwide' there is a shaking of heads and a closing of doors. Do contact us (link button on left) if you can help or have any ideas of where we might find an underwriter or two for an international sonnet competition.

Hand Luggage Only

The anthology of the 2007 Open Poetry International Sonnet Competition is now available for ordering online and by post. For online orders worldwide, click on the link below:

Hand Luggage Only Order

For orders by post (UK only), write to us at the address below, indicating how many copies you would like, clearly stating your name, delivery address and a contact telephone number, and enclosing a cheque payable to Open Poetry Ltd for the correct amount based on the prices shown below our address.

Open Poetry Ltd
50a Main Street
Peckleton
Leicestershire LE9 7RE

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2007 Competition Winners

1st Prize: Julie Kane – 'Used Book'

2nd Prize: Daniel Neumann – 'Two Moments'

3rd Prize: Alison Mace – 'Wartime Picnic '

Highly Commended:
John Haynes – 'First Thing'
Lydia Macpherson – 'Lessons'
William Orem – 'Crucifix, Church of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Washington, D.C.'

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You are welcome to add your name to our list of sonneteers by clicking on the 'Sonnet poets' link in the left hand row of buttons.

If you wish to create a link from your own website to ours, click here.

Thank you to all who entered the competition. If you wish to see how entry fees have been used, the competition accounts as of 30 August 2008 are to be found by clicking here.

2007 Sonnet Competition Accounts

For reasons of transparency and because it might help anyone else thinking of starting a poetry competition, we present here what no other poetry competition seems to do: an explanation of the competition accounts.

The figures below cover the period from first working on organising the competition in the summer of 2006 through to 30 August 2008 when, apart from any extra anthology sales to come, the costs are pretty much all known. Only matters like 2007-08 accountacy fees are as yet unknown (the competition ran across two financial years: 2006-07 and 2007-08).

One important thing to bear in mind when reading the accounts is that while the competition entry fee was £7 per sonnet, there was a consistent '3 entries for the price of 2' offer and that when entries were made online, Paypal would deduct a transaction fee, a percentage commission, and in the case of non-UK currency transactions a further currency conversion commission. This is standard practice for e-commerce, but it meant that a set of 3 sonnets from an overseas entrant could reduce the revenue per sonnet to £4.41. These commissions are the reason why the entry fee revenue is not a multiple of £7. Open Poetry Ltd is not VAT registered, as while that would have enabled us to offset VAT on expenditure, it would also have meant adding VAT to the entry fee.