klwilliams

A friend of mine a while back told me about a new poetic form she had encountered, the Jacobean Sonnet. Some of you may have heard of the Iron Poet competition, of which one form is to take a well-known sonnet or other poem, such as "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, snip off everything but the last word in each line, and have the competitors write a sonnet using the last words on a new topic.

A Jacobean Sonnet is to write an original sonnet, using any of the classic sonnet rhyme schemes, except each line is only one word long. The word can be any length, but if the word is more than one syllable long it should be iambic. The result should be a complete poem.

One of our mutual friends read me a Jacobean sonnet he had written, and I wish it was online so I could point people at it, as it is in a nutshell every single poem any bard has ever written in the SCA. If I get inspired soon I'll write one of my own.

Ah, you say, but there is already such a thing as a Jacobean sonnet. Where did this new one come from? It came from Jacob, the leader of the Surenos at my friend's high school, who was one of her students and who invented the form quite by accident.