When, in the early 1970s, I started writing seriously, very few poets wrote in traditional form, and form itself was considered in many ways to be “the enemy.” I dissuaded my first undergraduate students at Wisconsin from attempting rhyme and meter, and did everything I could to squelch their Wordsworthian tendencies. Although I had been informed by one of my college professsors in the 1960s that “real” poets had to pay their dues by writing a hundred sonnets before they could expect to write anything good, I had ignored him. I had, for some years, been experimenting with a variety of forms, including sestinas (I once planned to write 39 of them, all interlocked–I made it to 12), villanelles, pantoums, ballades, canzones, and sonnets, while continuing to think of myself, nevertheless, as essentially a free-verse poet. Some years ago it came to me that I should write a sonnet a day for a year. “He Is Mad Which Makes Two”: A Sonnet Project
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