Paul Edmondson from Blogging Shakespeare alerts us to mark the date for October 20th, when Roehampton University will be hosting a symposium entitled Shakespeare and the Contemporary Sonnet:
Which Shakespeare sonnets do modern poets refer to again and again? What still attracts them to the sonnet as a form, and to Shakespeare’s poems in particular? Are there sonnets that resist adaptation in terms of theme, sexual politics, structure? Is the original 1609 sequence still important or do a small number of sonnets now stand alone? What are the challenges and possibilities afforded by adapting Shakespeare’s sonnets into modern idiom and modern culture?
Sounds like a neat topic. Naturally it’s more on the academic side, not the kind of thing that we casual hobbyists can just zip off to. Maybe they’ll do some live tweeting or blogging of what content comes of it?
[ If you want to see just how much depth can be found in even a single sonnet I point you to Paul’s previous article “Miracles in Miniature” where he talks about working through Sonnet 29 with a group of people and how you could talk about it for hours, down to the last syllable and punctuation mark. ]