Hampden-Sydney Having Fun with Sonnets

Editor Nathaniel Perry [pictured] of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review considers in the Winter 2016 Editor’s Note “that poetry is both a serious lifeblood and something seriously fun.” And further questions, “. . .how many poets are still willing to admint that it’s the fun of poetry that maybe primarily attracts us to the art? . . . why must we always take ourselves so seriously? What’s wrong with an occaion for poetry?” And so, Perry set out to creat both the occasion and the invitation to have fun. “I thought if an issue of the magazine could empahsize the fun of the moment, the pleasure in working out draft – it might be a tonic kind of enterprise and, who knows, soemtimes something bigger happens anyhow. In that spirit, this year’s issue was commissioned specifically for the magazine. Writers, both solicited and unsolicited, were told they could write on one of five themes – A Walk, Silence, Water, Frames and Containers. Each poet only had an hour to compose a poem . . . and ‘sonnet,’ formally, could be in interpreted in whatever way was useful to the writer.”

The contributions fill this annual issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, including A.E. Stallings. Stephen Dunn, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Mira Rosenthal, Bob Perelman, Katrina Vandenberg, Jon Pineda, Laynie Browne, Rob Shapiro, Eamon Grennan, and many more.