The Sonnet in South Wales

I was delighted to attend a very popular course this morning on the Sonnet. We considered Shakespearian sonnets, Petrarchan sonnets and modern day sonnets. We looked at sonnets that corresponded exactly to a prescribed form, and sonnets that had developed out of a traditional scheme of rhyme and metre.

I knew that sooner or later I would feel obliged to mention the current debate over the age-old question of what constitutes a poem, sparked most recently by The Queen's English Society. This seems as good a prompt as any! Poets the world over have read the article in The Observer (13 April 2008), and many of the editors of poetry magazines have made a response. I was particularly keen to read the editorial by Fiona Sampson in the current edition of Poetry Review (Volume 98, No 2, Summer 2008), the flagship journal of The Poetry Society.

I wonder where Haiku and other international forms of 'traditional poetry' fit in!