Finding Form

Shaping a Wasp Sonnet

When I first began this wasp project—before my illness, and so long ago now I forget how it started—I was writing with various self-imposed constraints: the mix & match of an exquisite corpse, the mix & match of a paper flexagons. I was exploring Q-codes and bell jars. I was thinking I was so incredibly innovative, only to find other people doing very similar kinds of work. It took me a while to celebrate that fact.

It’s a paradox of all art, and all artists after all, isn’t it?

I’m hoping to return to those things eventually, though it will be strange to walk back into that space—to see the studio I abandoned mid-thought.

Writing now, for a conventional page, I’m searching for new constraints that mirror the subject matter.

Of course sestinas are a natural choice, considering the hexagonal cells in the wasps’ nest. But only a minority of wasp species build those kinds of nests.

In looking for alternative constraints, I’ve taken my starting point from the Petrarchan sonnet. In this Italian form, an octave (8 lines) is followed by a sestet (6 lines).

Although wasps’ life cycles vary, in general, they can be broken down into the following stages:

5-8 days as an egg
15 days as a larvae, which goes through 5 moults
8-18 days as a pupa
21 days (worker), 15-25 days (drone), or 365 days (queen) as an adult

To create a wasp sonnet form, I’ve chosen to have each foot represent one day.

The octave begins with a couplet:

Line 1: 4 feet - the subject is embryonic in some way.
Line 2: 4 feet - “

Lines 3 through 6 will each have 4 feet, and end in a slant rhyme, assonance, or consonance, which will morph from the original pairing. For example: house/thrust/through/bough. The idea here is to mirror the larvae’s moults, echoing & shifting in shape, but not repeating.

As an aside, I’ll point out how fascinating I think it is, that so much of a wasp’s life is spent in this radical “becoming” phase. It is during this time the larvae provide food for the adult population. Wasp larvae have a purpose/responsibility before they become adults. I can’t think of any other animal that does this. Can you?

Line 7 and 8 are another couplet, using rhyme: Line 7 will end on a feminine foot - and line 8’s ending syllable (stressed) will rhyme with the stressed beat of the final foot of line 7.

Line 7 mirrors the first days of the pupa stage, and uses hexameter. Line 8 is also written in hexameter, but includes a volta, clearly marked with a caesura—signifying the shift to the wasps’ adult form.

The sestet’s rhyme scheme will vary according to the poem’s subject, as will the driving meter. The lines can be written in either trimeter or tetrameter. The rhyme scheme will vary among—ABABAB, ABCABC, and none at all.

The final poem in the collection will be a homage to the queens. This nonce Queen form will have a sum total of 364 feet to represent her year-long lifespan. The poem will be largely unrhymed, but include repeating couplets in the final 33 lines, mirroring the period when the queen is only laying eggs. It follows that these 33 lines are written in hexameter.

I don’t want to publish many poems from the collection before the book is available, but I do plan on presenting a draft of a wasp sonnet on a Thursday in the near future: just to demonstrate the form.

I would love to hear any ideas you might have about form and constraint poems.

Thank you so much for reading! Have a great week.

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For fun:

Warmly,

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