Debra, Heather, and Molly Peacock at West Chester

There are many reasons I love Molly Peacock. One tiny one is this: she said I could use more exclamation points in my poetry! My whole life I have been waiting for that green light. I think I’ve never been happier as a poet—joy was loose and running about that room like hounds—as I was in Molly’s bright beautiful jewel-cut class.
 
I took her class at the West Chester Poetry Conference and I want to share with you her program (as I interpret it). My writing partner, Debra, and I are doing the program. A partner is highly recommended!
 
1.      Write a sonnet a week. Do this for years. After fifty of them, you’ll find a fluidity, not ease, but sometimes something akin to ease. It gets easier.
2.      Trade every sonnet you write with your writing partner.
3.      If you are new to sonnets, ramp up with triolets. “You can work a forty-hour week and write triolets,” says Peacock. “They are the perfect waiting room activity.”
4.      If you are new to sonnets, set the easier goals first: you’ll limit yourself to fourteen lines. You’ll limit yourself to ten-ish syllables. Iambic can come later. The rhyme schemes can be added on last, after you are good at ten syllable lines. Limits are necessary for art. Art exists in time. Limits create compression and pressure creates the turn. “Be approximate but not floppy.”
5.      Push yourself a little harder than you think you can. Don’t give up too soon. And, don’t get completely weird and rigid. But be weird and rigid for longer than you think you should. “Don’t give up to soon,” Molly says, “But live with the imperfection. Poetry is a hand-made object and valued for its flaws.”
6.      The sonnet and the triolet are like paintings. Focus, focus, focus on one subject. Composing in these forms is small and visual. Think small.
7.      Value your repetitions. Take the repetition demanded by the triolet up into the sonnet.
8.      “Hang on to your oddness.” Go for texture.
9.      No using rhyme dictionaries or making lists of rhyming words—let your unconscious come up with the words. Molly teaches: “You own your rhyme. You aren’t going after it. It isn’t out there somewhere. It’s in you. Don’t hunt outside for your rhymes. Go in.”
10.  Write a lot. Throw out a lot.
 
So, I wrote my first sonnet, using the program. (I did five triolets, and then an Italian sonnet.) It’s about man-woman heartbreak and bicycles and going slowly. The title is “Woman without a Man with a Bicycle without a Fish.” My partner, D wrote a beautiful love poem about her father. We met at our little café, over French martinis, and we believe the program is really, really working. We are very committed to it. A sonnet a week. It’s our church: prayerful and disciplined and joyous and private, public, beautiful, and nourishing. I can think of only two other human activities that fit that description.
 
Absolutely, Molly’s idea of learning the triolet as a pre-sonnet practice is essential. I will always teach it this way; I want to revise my textbook accordingly