Predictable Forms

Recently I was thinking about romance novels (which I am an avid consumer of) and fanfiction (which I both read and write) in connection to a topic that is also applicable to poetry, particularly the sonnet: the joys of predictability.

In romance novels, there are known beats in the story that the audience can predict. In fanfiction, the characters and often the events as well are drawn exactly from an existing canon that the audience is explicitly familiar with. In each case, the pleasure and joy of the consumption comes not from surprise and unpredictability but from finding out exactly how known factors will develop and reveal themselves. The journey, not the destination, is the point. 

The same, it seems to me, is true of the sonnet. Fourteen lines; a rhyme scheme and meter that reveal themselves early; predictable points for a turn or two. None of them are the point; they are the medium for the point. The predictable elements allow the rest of the expression to be the focus. 

A lot of modern poetry relies on invented, even nonce forms, unpredictable or at least unconstrained. There is obviously space for this just as there is space for original (not fan) works, and for literary (non-genre, non-romance) novels. But there is also ample space for sonnets and other formal, predictable forms, just as there is for fanfiction and romance. And this is true even though there have been millions of sonnets written and similar quantities of fanfic and romance. Precisely because the journey is the point, we can travel the same paths endlessly, within the same constraints. And it will be different every time.

Religious Extremes

This is not a Christian nation, not

A country born from your theology;

The key idea I see you have forgot

Is that in this land all of us are free:

Free not to worship as you choose, but to

Consider what we do ourselves think right;

To pray to your God or if we want, not, too,

Without your interfering oversight.

And if we have (have always) fallen short

Of that ideal, and lessened freedom's range,

That does not mean that you get to abort

The thought itself, or make the ideal change:

It means we have some work to do. Our nation

Is larger than your cramped imagination.