sheenaghpugh | More about verse breaks

Yes, I'm still wittering on -when someone asks a question about practice, you tend to start thinking about it more generally. It does seem logical that verse breaks follow the sense of what's being said. But one of the things conventions are for is to be subverted, and if people expect one thing to happen, you may be able to achieve interesting effects by doing what they don't expect (as applies to line breaks too; I really must get on and write that post).

The sonnet form has a very clear structure: 8 lines of explication (the octave), then a break or turn, called the volta, then 6 lines (the sestet) that home in on the theme. Within that, you often get a pattern of 4-4 in the octave and 3-3 or 4-2 in the sestet. (But even quite early on, Milton was subverting this by leaving out the volta and constructing 14 lines of unbroken thought.)

It struck me that it might be possible, by altering the rhyme scheme, to do something else. When you have a rhymed couplet poem, you expect the couplet to be one of sense as well, ie the rhymes mostly follow the sense. I wondered what would happen if you wrote in couplets, but made the rhyme cross them, so that the "sense" couplet that appears on the page is one thing, but the rhymes (or in my case half-rhymes) cross the white space and, hopefully, set up a whole other kind of tension. Like most things in writing, that is easier to demonstrate than explain, so here's one of four "Webcam Sonnets" I wrote on this principle:

Webcam Sonnets: 3

Contact

A man stands at a prearranged time
in a certain spot, smiling fixedly

towards a camera he can't see,
mobile ringing close to his ear.

A woman answers, takes her phone over
to a screen. I'm clicking in Favourites

but it's taking for ever to load the site,
stay where you are, don't move… Oh,

I can see you now. I can see you.
The small, fuzzy picture shows a place

halfway across the world, and there he is,
in his blue shirt, at this very moment,

not seeing her. She cannot speak, intent
on his blurred face, hardly hearing him.

Now to get this working perfectly there would need to be no run-ons between couplets. I have been writing these variant sonnets for a good while but haven't yet achieved that all through one. It's quite hard to tell yourself the rhyme has nowt to do with the unit of sense and is in fact working against it. It's fun though.