LOCKDOWN JOURNAL: COVID-19.16 (Mark Staniforth)
ANTI-SONNETS is a series of fourteen books which re-imagine the sonnet as a purely contextual force.
In his The Development of the Sonnet (Routledge, 1992), Michael Spiller writes: “a poem which infringes [established rules] will not be recognisable as a sonnet at all, and we will regard it as something else unless there is contextual pressure - if, for example, we found it in the middle of a group of normal sonnets.”
Spiller provides no parameters: anything, he proposes, can be reflected as a sonnet, provided it exists within a sturdy-enough frame of reference.
The ANTI-SONNETS series employs a range of contextual tactics designed to stretch Spiller’s suggestion to its limits. For example inFood Sonnets, which re-renders the form as a Fluxus-style event score; in Newspaper Sonnets, which proposes that even the most impermanent of language may be re-presented as poetry; in 130X130 and Google-Translated Sonnets, which re-frame Shakespeare’sSonnet CXXX, regarded as the first ‘anti-sonnet’ for its manifestations of flawed beauty.
In Sonnets For Birds, each entry in the RSPB Book of British Birds is onomatopoetically rendered in sonnet form.
Mark Staniforth is a writer and journalist who is currently researching ‘Anti-Sonnets’ for a PhD at Leeds Beckett University. He is on Twitter and Instagram as @Fryup74. Free downloads of all fourteen of his Anti-Sonnets books are available via his website, antisonnets.wordpress.com .Physical copies of the books are available via Lulu https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Anti-sonnets&type=