David Cope

Sonnets 64 David Cope

This book contains sixty-four sonnets in the Shakespearian form. With few exceptions-albeit less than Shakespeare made with his-I have followed the ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG rhyming scheme, iambic pentameter meter, and three quatrains followed by a couplet. I have been less careful with the subtle shifts in tone around line nine but conformed to the less subtle surprise in the couplet. Writing a sonnet is like solving a complex crossword puzzle with the additional rules that it must make sense, follow proper syntax, abide by known semantics, still be a poem, and have an overall goal that's not always obvious. Like the haiku in my book called Comes the Fiery Night, some of the sonnets in this collection were created by a computer program I created. To give you a hint as to which might be which, I confess that I had to rake through hundreds of outputs to find the few I included here. To help those of you who may hate even the concept of computer-produced poems, I admit that the ones that I produced on my own here are far, far better than the others. Of course, the fact that I created the program that created the computer-produced poems, I suppose I need to take credit for the entire 64.