My poem received the 2021 Musketman Shakespeare Award.

I learned in early December that my poem, "Shakespearean Sonnet 101," had been short-listed for the 2021 Musketman Shakespeare Poetry Award (MUSPA), and learned on Christmas that it had received first prize. Poem below.

The poem had to be 8 to 24 lines and mention #Shakespeare.
Mine was a Shakespearean sonnet about Shakespearean sonnets
(and how apparent limitations can enable freedom…).

Read it below or at the MUSPA link here:
https://musketmanshakespeare.blog/category/muspa-winners/

The face behind Musketman Shakespeare is Raphael Sóne, "a Cameroonian Canadian translator, Shakespeare lover and medievalist Africanist" as well as a novelist and Jesuit.

He posts a "He said/She said" Shakespeare quiz each week, with the answer to the previous week's quiz at the bottom of the new quiz:
https://musketmanshakespeare.blog/category/single-line-quizzes/

BTW, some of my favorite modern sonnets (two of them rhymed and Shakespearean) include these:

- Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All”
(amazing enjambment, and the third quatrain bleeds into the couplet)
https://poets.org/poem/love-not-all-sonnet-xxx
As sung by Rebecca Lucker, music by Jeff Blumenkrantz:
https://youtu.be/wxQTnJEOqMY

- e. e. cummings’ “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in

- William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark”
(unrhymed, with an extra quatrain at the volta)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark
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My poem:
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SHAKESPEARIAN SONNET 101

Iambic feet are weak at first, then strong—
a gentle peck, and then a deeper kiss.
Pentameter’s a line that’s five feet long,
so iambs in pentameter, like this,

can help to make a sonnet’s rhythm soar.
Now quatrains—those are four-line sets, you see,
and Shakespeare often rhymed lines two and four
in each quatrain—and also one and three.

In quatrain one, the poem begins its way.
In two, it still unwinds and roams about.
In three, a twist or turn comes into play,
and then the final couplet. Have no doubt:

The sonnet, like a ballroom floor, can be
a form where words go leaping, dancing free.


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Thanks for reading!
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My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.