This video is sponsored by Skillshare. So, this is “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare.
We know it’s a Shakespearean sonnet because it has 14 lines, an ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme,
and uses iambic pentameter in each line. That is five sets of unstressed
and stressed syllables. It reads: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; /
Coral is far more red than her lips' red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; /
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. / I have seen roses
damasked, red and white, /
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; / And in some perfumes is there more delight /
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. / I love to hear her speak, yet well I know /
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; / I grant I never saw a goddess go; /
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. /
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare /
As any she belied with false compare. I know Shakespeare’s language can sort of
be a lot to keep up with but you
may have noticed this sonnet is rather different from the
typical love sonnet. The subject of the sonnet is described either literally or disparagingly.
This woman sounds average at best and repulsive at worst. See, Shakespeare was pulling
a fast one with this sonnet. The joke, however, is not on this plain
woman who may or may not exist. The joke is on Shakespeare’s contemporaries
– other sonnet writers who exaggerate the beauty of their subjects. Reread the last
two lines of the poem: “
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied
with false compare.” Despite the lack of beauty in the subject, the speaker loves
them just the same as the sonnet writers who use ‘false compares,’ or exaggerated
metaphors, to describe their beloveds. Isn’t it interesting how the last two lines of
the sonnet completely changed the meaning of the work? Rather than being an attack on
this woman, it’s a jab at other writers. Let’s take a look at another sonnet,
this time a Petr
archan sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet uses an ABBAABBA
rhyme scheme in its first eight lines, then a CDCDCD or CDECDE scheme in the
last six, dividing the work into an octave and a sestet. This example, “The
New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, reads: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, /
With conquering limbs astride from land to land; / Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand /
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name /
Mother of Exiles. Fr
om her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command /
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. / “Keep, ancient lands, your
storied pomp!” cries she / With silent lips. “Give me
your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, /
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, /
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” So, if it wasn’t clear, this poem is
about the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus’ sonnet doesn’t
have the same rug pull
that Shakespeare’s does, but there is still a noticeable turn in the work. After the
octave, the Statue begins speaking for herself, and that shift is evident, even if
it’s just on a subconscious level. Let’s take a look at one more sonnet. This one’s
not quite Shakespearean in its rhyme scheme, but it’s not quite Petrarchan either. This
is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley: I met a traveller from an antique land, /
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone /
Stand in the desert. . . .
Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, /
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read /
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, /
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; /
And on the pedestal, these words appear: /
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! /
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck
, boundless and bare /
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” This work also has a noticeable turn, going from
the description and words of the ancient Pharaoh Ozymandias to the vast sands that surround the
remaining head and feet of his statue. Note, that shift occurs on line 12,
and to emphasize the shift, Shelley changes the rhythm slightly. Up
until that point, every line began with a proper iamb – an unstressed syllable followed
by a stressed one. For example, “I met,” “Who said,”
“Stand in,” “Half sunk,” etc. But by the
ninth line, the word “Nothing,” has exactly the opposite stress pattern. It’s called a
trochee rather than an iamb. But I digress. So, what did these three sonnets have in common?
Each one had a noticeable shift, either in form, delivery, or meaning. In poetry, this is called
a “volta,” which is the Italian word for turn. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the volta is on
line 13 at the start of the ending couplet. In a Petrarchan sonnet, the volta comes on
line 9,
the transition between the octave and the sestet. In Shelley’s poem, since he’s playing a little
fast and loose with typical sonnet structure, the volta comes on line 12 rather than 13 or
9. By the way, that shakeup in the structure adds to the overall meaning of the work and
I’ll let you contemplate that for yourself. But this is what I want to talk about today – the
volta – because it’s not exclusive to sonnets, nor is it exclusive to poetry. And my
hope is that through understa
nding the volta a little bit better, we might all
write better poetry and short stories. By using the volta as a tool, we can turn
a simple haiku into a killer short story. First, let’s just make sure we understand
a volta completely. Most resources, including StudySmarter and The Poetry Foundation,
would describe a volta as “the turn of thought or argument” in a poem. Literarydevices.net
uses this description too, but also adds, “It is a rhetorical shift. In some ways, it is a
dramatic ch
ange in emotions or thoughts.” I like these additional descriptors because they make
it clear that a volta isn’t just the same as a twist. Like, in Lazarus’ poem, even though
there was a rhetorical shift with the volta, the poem’s sentiment and meaning
remained the same all throughout. Similarly, Gregory Pardlo said, “the volta is
special in that it marks the moment when the poem breaks its deepest and most characteristic
habit. There is rarely a single turn that everyone can agree on, and
who cares if everyone
agrees. Reading is a solitary exercise, a union of one. The detective work of looking
for the volta is what gets us into the poem, makes us rewrite the poem in our
own voice and consciousness.” Sonnets aren’t the only poems that have voltas,
however. Haikus can also contain a volta. Haikus are Japanese poems known for their three-line
structure, five syllables on the first line, seven on the second, and then back to five.
Most traditional haikus are comprised of a sin
gle piece of juxtaposition –
two contrasting visuals or ideas. A literal English translation of Matsuo
Bashō’s poem, “The Old Pond,” reads: The old pond- /
a frog jumps in, /
sound of water. In English, the syllables don’t scan over,
but that’s beside the point. One can argue that the volta here is on line two when the
frog jumps or line three when the silence breaks. In either case, the quiet, tranquil scene
introduced on line one is replaced with a moving, noisy setting. This is how a lot
of
haikus operate – an establishment on line one broken by the lines that follow. One
might interpret ancient haikus as a status quo on line one, a disruption on line two, and
a realization or conclusion on line three. In Japanese, the volta in a haiku
is referred to as “kireji,” which literally translates to “cutting letters.”
A blog post from James Karkoski explains: Japanese verbs are always conjugated at the
end, just like we conjugate the past tense of such verbs like “walk,” where t
he past tense is
“walked”. Of course, we also put auxiliary verbs in front the the verb to say “want to walk,”
“can walk,” etc… However, the Japanese always conjugate at the end of the verb by changing the
end, “aruku” is “walk”, “aruita” is “walked”, “arukitai” is “want to walk”, “arukeru”
is “can walk”‘ etc… for every verb tense. This is how the “cutting letters” that are
auxiliary verbs work, they are end verb conjugations that not only cut breath pauses into
phrases, they also indicate
different verb tenses. So, in a traditional haiku, the
volta isn’t just a shift in idea, but a shift in verb tense as well. Remember,
the goal of this video is to take a haiku and eventually produce a short story.
What’s the advantage of doing so? Well, writing an idea as a simple haiku forces you
to understand what information is the most important in your idea. You really distill the
meat of your story in both events and sentiment. In fact, a lot of authors don’t even write haikus in the
traditional five-seven-five
pattern. For author Joyce Clement, “the key elements of any haiku are a fragment
and a phrase spoken in a single breath.” When writing flash fiction, author
Kathy Fish recommends taking a small, poignant moment from one’s life, writing it
down, and developing it into a flash fiction story. I would suggest taking that premise
even further. Take the moment from your life, distill it into a haiku, then
write the haiku as a short story. Another form that uses the v
olta is “sijo”
a Korean poetic form comprised of 44-46 syllables. Sijos have three lines which vary
from 14-16 syllables each. The Sejong Cultural Society explains that the third line has two
halves. The first half is the “counter-theme” and the second half is the “conclusion.” We
would consider this counter-theme a volta. The example given by The Sejong Cultural Society
is “Song of my five friends” which reads: You ask how many friends I have?
Water and stone, bamboo and pine. / The moon
rising over the eastern
hill is a joyful comrade. / Besides these five companions,
what other pleasure should I ask? Listed beside each line is how the syllabic
grouping patterns line up. As you can see, sijo is a rather technical form, perhaps even more so than
haiku. But one thing to keep in mind is this quote from Korean literature professor Mark Peterson:
“The structure is important, but I always allow for poetic license, meaning that sometimes the
message is more important than the st
ructure.” Taking a haiku and turning it into a sijo
allows us to emphasize the points of imagery, word choice, and emotion that
we think would be essential in turning a small moment into
a longer piece of fiction. And that moves us into flash fiction,
which is a short story usually crafted in fifteen hundred words or less. Later in
this video, I’m going to show you a flash fiction story that I wrote. But first, I
want to touch on a resource that helped immensely in both writing my story an
d writing
this video. Allow me to explain in haikus. A published author Taught me how to write fiction
In the shortest terms Class: “Fast Flash Fiction: Writing Tiny, Beautiful
Stories” Kathy Fish An emphasis on
Sense, compelling openings, Overcoming fear In a Skillshare class
My writing went from simple To pure explosive A community, The largest online space for
Learning creatives Thousands of classes
Led by the professionals Of their industries Film, illustration,
Design, painting, crafting,
plus
Music and beyond This new year, invest
In yourself and your goals through
A learning journey Use Skillshare to take Creative projects – passions –
To the next level Use their learning paths, Hand-picked classes in order
That build on the last Reinforced learning
Ranging, depending on your Experience level Tools and software Like Procreate and Blender
To enhance yourself Productivity, Creative freelance, design,
Marketing, and more The first 500 To use my link will get 1
Month of free Skills
hare All right, that’s enough haikus. As I said, I
took the learning path on writing powerful short fiction and I found it to be so helpful, even with
all the writing I’ve done and classes I’ve already taken. Kathy Fish and Yiyun Li’s classes on short
stories were excellent, and Alison Malee’s class on Instapoetry honestly had me considering the
medium in a way I’d never thought about before. As previously mentioned, the first 500 people
to use the link in my description will get one month
free of Skillshare, which is a deal I
highly recommend as someone who used Skillshare even before they approached me for this sponsored
segment. Huge thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring today and be sure to take advantage of this
offer to take your writing to the next level. Before we get into the writing exercise, I
want to show two examples of flash fiction stories that I feel exemplify a good use of
the volta. However, I will not point out the volta for you. I’d like to hear where you th
ink
it is, keeping in mind that there’s no one right answer. These stories came recommended
by Kathy Fish via her Skillshare class. This story is called “Thirty-Nine Years
of Carrie Wallace” by Jeff Landon: At recess, in Roanoke, Virginia, we play freeze
tag, only the rule is you don’t tag the person, you kiss the person, and once you’re kissed
you’re frozen forever until somebody tags you. I’m a fast runner, but I always
let Carrie Wallace catch me. She has bangs and white plastic boots.
She kisses
me and goes, “You’re frozen,” and I go, “So what?”
*** Carrie’s basement and we’re fifteen years
old. Her parents have gone to Aruba for a rebirthing workshop, and her big sister is
upstairs, shaping her eyebrows. We are high on green pot and the jug of Mogen David wine
I lifted from Garland’s Drugstore. It’s summer and I can taste the heat in Carrie’s skin.
Huddled together we smell like fruity wine, spearmint gum, Lark cigarettes, pot, and Herbal
Essence shampoo. It’s not as
awful as it sounds. “Make it last,” Carrie whispers
in the dark. But I don’t. *** Downtown Boston, in my dorm room, and we’re
listening to a Poco record. Carrie’s down for the weekend; she goes to school
in Vermont. Tonight, she’s wearing a yellow T-shirt and my flannel pajama pants.
A pot of coffee is brewing on my hot plate, but right now we’re eating cookies and
drinking beer. We pretend that we’ll be grown-up and stop drinking beer any
minute now, but it won’t happen that way. It’s sn
owing outside. It snows all the time
up here. My dorm room is on the tenth floor of a converted hotel. In the hallway, this
insane guy from Texas dribbles a basketball and sings a song about cheese. In my room,
Carrie and I sit on the edge of my bed and look out the window. She loops her arm
around my shoulder. People are skating on the Charles River, under artificial
light, and the snow swirls everywhere. Carrie is in love, she tells me,
with someone she met in school. I look at the windo
w. I want to
jump, but I don’t want to die. I just want to float. *** When I see Carrie again, it’s by accident. She’s
in town for the weekend; she’s helping her mother move into a new place on the river. We meet
in a bar, back in Roanoke. I moved back here, after my divorce. I live in an apartment complex
popular with young singles. They smile at me. The women ask about my daughter, and the
men go, “Hey, big guy, how’s it hangin’?” When the bar closes down, I offer to drive Carrie
home, b
ut she wants to go for a walk. It’s April, but it feels like summer tonight, so
we walk. She talks about her kids, her mother’s ancient Cadillac, and her adult ballet
class. She doesn’t talk much about her husband. “He’s OK,” she says. “He’s a wonderful father.” I nod. It’s getting late and Carrie
needs to get back to her mother’s house. *** It’s hard to explain the luster of certain
ordinary nights when everything works together. When you’re walking in your old hometown with
Carrie Wallace
and her new, complicated haircut; when the moon ducks under the mountains, when the
song you hear on someone’s passing radio is one of your favorites, when Carrie walks beside
you in her blue sneakers and a yellow dress, and neon crosses flare over empty churches
and it’s the exact middle of the night and for a little pocket of time your life seems
perfect and without memories, and so quiet. This next flash fiction story is even shorter. It’s called “The Wolf Wears
Jeggings” by Georgia Bel
las: The wolf wears bubble gum pink rainboots. The
wolf drinks medicinal whiskey. Every night. The wolf roars like a bear and sprinkles glitter in
her fur. The wolf rides the train back and forth with no destination, sometimes while wearing a
tiara. The wolf has no friends. The wolf reads about alien abductions in the tabloids,
reads about missing kids on milk cartons, eats hot muesli for breakfast. The wolf strums
her autoharp and sings in a quiet growl of a voice. The wolf staples posters
to telephone
poles seeking bandmates but no one calls. The wolf trembles with lust for
the forest and one gingko tree in particular. The wolf wants to rescue
someone, be a hero. The wolf carries her neighbor’s trash can back to the curb each
time the wind knocks it into the street. The wolf believes in self-care and
applies a deep pore exfoliating mud mask every Saturday morning. The wolf
donates to GoFundMe campaigns for birds rebuilding their nests after natural
disasters, such as a gu
tter cleaning. The wolf writes terrible poetry. The wolf
writes Nancy Drew fan fiction but tears the words up before they reach the page. The
wolf makes a bonfire of her poems once a month. The wolf believes hibernation
should be a choice for all creatures. The wolf is not a mother. The wolf wants to share her heart-music with the
world even when no one listens. The wolf knows you can die of a broken heart. The wolf plays
hopscotch but only when no one is watching. The wolf gets drunk on lo
neliness. The wolf’s disappearance is
a small mention in the back of the community newspaper. There
is no photograph to accompany it. Once again, I ask you to discuss where you think
the volta is in these short stories. But with that, let’s get into the exercise. I’ll show you a
haiku, sijo, and flash fiction story that I wrote. Remember, Kathy Fish recommended taking
a small, poignant moment and developing it. I took one moment and wrote it as a
haiku to start. Here’s the first draft: A p
atron walked in /
Noting my Gengar sticker; /
The second that day. See, I work a service job during
the day and I usually keep my phone out on the desk beside me. I have a
Gengar sticker on the back. One day, I had two patrons notice the sticker
and call the Pokémon by its name, which is highly atypical. After looking at the haiku
for a minute, I eventually changed it to read: A patron walked in /
Noting my Gengar sticker /
At once I was seen Taking this haiku, I developed the memory, settin
g, and idea further. Here’s
the sijo based on the same moment: The rec center smells of sewage
today, oppressing the lonely / Who have nowhere to go. My
Gengar sticker accompanies me. / But not until a patron points
it out, do I know myself. Here are the syllabic groupings as I felt them
when writing. It’s not expertly crafted by any means, but it absolutely helped me understand
what I wanted my short story to look like. One thing I noticed in a lot of the flash fiction
I read was the cho
ice to use present-tense narration rather than past-tense. Perhaps
since these stories were fresh in my mind, I unconsciously wrote in present tense
as well. Here’s the story. Once again, tell me where you think the volta is. With Gengar at my right, the smell of sewage
becomes harder and harder to squint away. A vile affront to the nose leaks its way from the
women’s locker room and into the racquetball hallway. I rest my hand atop my phone for
a moment, my index finger playing with the pe
eling protective plastic of the Gengar sticker
that decorates my dirtied white phone case. Turning my head, the glass doors reveal
the blue skies where, on my way to work, rain clouds were overtaking the after-school
traffic. The rain melted a good chunk of the snow so that it might perhaps be
March, just as the calendar claims. A patron comes in with coconut wafting off
them. They explain to me that they were just at a tanning salon but this explanation leaves me
without clarification. It
doesn’t matter because, for a moment, I’m not near the locker
room or the tanning salon. Instead, I’m in the drive-through of the soda parlor,
where she would always buy me whichever concoction contained coconut. The scented chemicals
in the air neutralize each other for now. Of course, then the patron walks away, and I’m
back amid the sewer scent. I walk to the front to get the aerosol from the employee bathroom,
then back to the desk to spray the aerosol, then back to the front to put th
e aerosol
back, then back to the desk to suffer. I’m not even supposed to be working in this hallway.
Hours earlier, I traded my coworker the 4:30 to 8:30 in the main office for the 3 to 9 at the
east desk, a request which she did not explain. I recenter my empathy and remind
myself that she has her reasons. I don’t know her life and she doesn’t know mine. Looking down at Gengar, I remember when David
traded me one to my copy of Pokémon Ruby at just 10 years old. Then there was catching the
shiny
variant at the Old Chateau in Pokémon Platinum, a 1 in 8,192 chance. And, of course,
the package of stickers she got me, 151 for a handful of coins. I remember
searching specifically for Gengar, saving him for the arrival of my new phone case.
Nobody recognizes Gengar anymore. Not since her. My stupor of remembrance is interrupted by a
patron who wants to use the ice balcony and the sauna. I stand up and prepare the
register. “Seven dollars,” I tell him. “Hey, Gengar,” he says. “Is
that your favorite Pokémon?” Surprised, I respond, “I would say so.” He takes his wristband and heads to the ice
balcony, and I hope he’ll be back. But for a moment, in a smelly, rainy world,
it was me, Gengar, and company again. Admittedly, this story isn’t entirely
true to life. I wasn’t actually mad at my coworker for having to
switch shifts – if anything, I was glad to have the extra hours. The
bad smell was, however, an unfortunate side effect. And I wasn’t feeling lonely during
the
experience either. But I thought the haiku, sijo, and the short story were engaging ways to
give meaning to otherwise benign circumstances. But there we have it. By going from haiku to
sijo to short story, with emphasis on the volta, I ended up writing something that
I actually liked pretty well. Now, I want you to try this exercise. At
the very least, I would love to see everyone write a haiku and drop it in the
comments below. If you feel so inclined, turn that haiku into a sijo, and if y
ou’re really
feeling it, turn that sijo into a short story. But if you don’t feel so inclined, then let me
ask, what did you think of this video essay? What are your thoughts on the volta, and the
poetic forms discussed in this video? Please, tell me everything. If you like what I do here,
consider supporting me on Patreon for special benefits, like priority review on the second
channel. Be sure to subscribe over there too for more writing tips. It was actually one
of my patrons, Aya, who
suggested this video topic. I also had another patron, Madison Rye
Progress, offer up some helpful resources, so, huge thanks to both of them. Also, consider
following me on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with what I’m reading and watching. And,
ultimately, keep in mind, this is a rough draft.
Comments