a skeleton, not a cage

Pearl London: I've been reading your work sheets you sent us and was so delighted about "The Hunt," that beautiful sonnet, and as I was thinking of Seamus Heaney's "Glanmore Sonnets," and then the China sonnets that Auden wrote, I asked myself, "Why the sonnet today? What does the sonnet offer you?" When Bob Hass was here last time he said to us that the patterned form implies a patterned society. No matter how Elizabeth Bishop deviated from the thing - nonetheless, inherent in the sonnet is a kind of pattern. But we certainly don't live in a patterned society. Every day becomes less patterned.

Molly Peacock: Patterned form comes from the premise that the form is the outside of the experience. My premise is that form is the inside of the experience, as a skeleton, not a cage...

You might think of the sonnet as a wave. In the traditional Shakespeare sonnet, there's a part of the wave that goes out, then it crests and comes in. I don't think of the pattern as societal; I think of it as deeply internal both psychologically and physically. I have a physical sense of this form that is quite different from saying, "Oh, this form is not useful for us now because we do not live the way people lived in the fourteenth century." Indeed that's true, but we have the same physiology, and if not the exact psychology, we are certainly as human.

 - Molly Peacock, in conversation with Pearl London in 1992, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).