The Importance of a Sonnet

For the first time in months I managed to jot down a poem. It's rough and somewhat rambling (as rambling as a sonnet can be, I suppose) and it probably won't make it past the page I wrote it on, but it's a step in the right direction. Why is it in form? Well, the shallow, thoughtless responder inside of me would say that it is because form has rules, and manipulating words to reach a predetermined syllable count is easy (in theory). The more analytical side of me would say this:

Having graduated college in December, I am in a state of flux. A sporadic surgical procedure, while non-life-threatening, unfortunately pushed the timing of my life off by a few months, which sounds minor, but it was just enough time to disqualify me from applying for spring internships. The whole point of a fall semester graduation was, of course, to beat the majority of applicants who would still enroll in the spring semester. And as a graduate from a relatively no-name state school, I needed any advantage I could get. As it is right now, I am waiting out the days until student loan payments start chasing me through the night, merciless with their sharpened, greedy teeth. It's intimidating and it's chaos-inducing. Perhaps "chaos" is too bold of a term right now, but the naivete enrapturing my life (wait, is that a contradiction?) will soon lead me into a chaotic state.

Form is grounded in rules. It is established for various reasons, one of which is to keep poetry clean, recognizable. A sonnet is a sonnet is a sonnet, sure, but to me it also represents something that I can control, something that I can still hold on to. And in unstable times like this it is important to embrace whatever is within my grasp, however miserably written it may be.