Edmund Prestwich was born in England but spent his first fifteen years in Pietermaritzburg, in Natal, where his father was a university lecturer. His mother was South African (half Afrikaans). He came to England for the last three years of his schooling at Leighton Park School in Reading. He studied English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Merton College, Oxford. His poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and he is events manager of the Manchester group Poets and Players, which organizes performances of poetry and music, and a Poetry School tutor.
Teaching the Sonnet for the Poetry School
Why the sonnet? On the one side there’s its expansiveness, its power to throw the doors open on wide imaginative vistas or violent internal struggles, to develop complex debates with other people or with God, to present whole narrative or dramatic scenarios within the space of just fourteen lines; on the other, there’s its concentrated drive, its ability to bring these divergent or conflicting forces to a single point of impact without suppressing their conflicts and divergences. Clearly the ability to combine such opposite effects isn’t unique to the sonnet. However, the fact that a form invented by a notary in thirteenth century Sicily still swings in and out of fashion seven and a half centuries later suggests both the power of the original invention and how richly it’s been developed since.A five week reading and writing course doesn’t give enormous scope. You have ten classroom hours, roughly half of which go on discussing poems that members of the class write in the weeks between sessions. However, the people you’re working with are intelligent lovers of poetry and writers in their own right. They all have their own priorities and ideas, they come from a range of generations and backgrounds, and they’ve all read different things. Between them, in a good group, they bring an incredible amount to the party. As tutor, you’re partly drawing together things they already know, partly reminding them of things they’ve forgotten, and partly creating a framework within which they learn from each other. How well you succeed depends on the balance you strike between having a clear idea of the main areas you want to cover, and flexibility in going with the flow of discussion.
I wanted to start with some of the older sonnet conventions. We began with the “English” sonnet, mainly focusing on several by Shakespeare and seeing how in them leading ideas are developed in clear stages, whether quatrain by quatrain or hinging on a shift between the first eight lines and the final six. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, for example, the speaker talks about how much older than his friend he is. Each quatrain develops a different analogy for his age – winter, twilight, a dying fire – and the couplet rounds it off by reflecting on what it means that the friend sees this and still loves him. It’s a brilliant example of the combination of imaginative expansion and concentrated impact. There’s a powerful centripetal drive as successive quatrains bring us closer to the speaker’s impending death, the metaphors contracting from time of year to time of day to dying fire, before things open out again in a final couplet that ripples with questions and suggestions about the relationship between speaker and beloved.
That’s only half the story, though. Moving between quatrains, we jump from one vividly imagined scene to another, each packed with detail, shifts of feeling and sudden detonations of metaphor within metaphor, like the famous description of winter trees as “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. Using rhyme scheme and syntactical period to give a clear frame to each metaphorical scene and stage of thought, Shakespeare encourages us to focus on the proliferation of subordinate or even contradictory ideas within the quatrains without risk of losing the bigger picture. Teasing such things out in writing may flatten the experience of simply reading the poem, but in live discussion they burst on you as intensifying, not diluting what you feel as you read.
Once we’d got a sense of these basic structures we looked at the dramatic effect gained by playing against formal expectations in Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”). Here, though the rhymes are patterned in the “English” way, the argument basically follows the Italian scheme of eight lines followed by six, with a turn or “volta” between them. Though broadly following this pattern, Shakespeare distorts it. The “yet” of line 9 appears about to introduce a turn, but then what follows defies expectation by continuing and intensifying the expression of restless, anguished self-pity and self-contempt built up in the first eight lines, as if the speaker’s feelings were too violent to be shaped and contained. When the real swerve does come in line ten, it’s the more arresting for having been delayed. Violation of an expected norm makes it seem as if sheer pressure of feeling were creating its own form. Of course everyone knows in a general way that the impact of breaking a convention comes from knowledge of the convention itself, but I think everyone found this a striking, illuminating example of how the principle could be applied to the writing of sonnets. Of the nine that people wrote over the following week all but two followed the Shakespearian structure.
In the second session we read sonnets on the Petrarchan pattern, letting the sonority of Wordsworth and Emma Lazarus play against the immediacy of Edwin Morgan in the Glasgow slums. Responses to Morgan were particularly keen, sensitive and intelligent. Allowance must be made for Morgan’s own sheer talent, of course - few can write as vividly and intelligently as he does, or handle complex forms with such ease – but these responses clearly suggested how contemporary subject matter can benefit by being defined and set forth within the structures of a sonnet if it’s done by someone with sufficient skill.
In the remaining sessions we looked at more formally experimental sonnets, mostly modern, but taking in Shelley, Hopkins and Frost. The sonnets members of the class wrote at this stage largely used irregular rhyme schemes. One special type we looked at was the fourteen line poem in couplets, starting with Herrick’s “A sweet disorder in the dress”, and glancing at John Clare, Robert Lowell and Alice Oswald. The general feeling was that however good or bad an individual poem of this type might be in itself, it didn’t really seem like a sonnet, unlike poems by Paul Muldoon and Jamie McKendrick in which unconventional but interwoven rhyme schemes combined the delight of surprise and an appearance of spontaneity with the pleasure of formal completion. I think what may have underlain this is a feeling I would share, that something I value about the sonnet is the sense of the poem as a whole looking back on itself, creating a single unified field of force, whatever smaller force fields may be contained within it. Jane Draycott’s remarkable “Pass” was a highly popular example of such a poem. Interwoven rhymes and half rhymes run all through it, some midline, some at line endings. This, together with the clear division between octave and sestet, balances the way the images spin apart from each other as the parents of a girl off on her first solo drive imagine her moving away from them. The emotional depth of the poem and its richness of resonance come from these syntheses of movement and stillness, of outward-moving imagination and unspoken private feeling, revolving around the paradox of holding onto and releasing in love.
I think everyone in the class learned more about the powers of the sonnet form even though some knew a great deal about them already. I think everyone there had come at least partly, and often mainly, because they were already committed to the idea that meeting technical challenges brings out the best in the writer, and I aimed to make these challenges more specific. Almost everyone brought a new sonnet for feedback every week, trying new things as they did so. I learned a great deal from them as the course went on, and I think they all learned from each other and from me.
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Edmund's website can be found here.