The Equilexical Sonnet: Insights from Study and Poetic Practice

In Transformative Repetition in Experimental and Post-Digital Poetics, ed. Bruno Ministro

“My term ‘equilexical sonnet’ indicates a poem of fourteen lexically identical lines. I introduce and examine five diverse examples by Ron Padgett, Carl Andre, Christopher Knowles, Eugen Gomringer and Terrance Hayes. Then, I explain how equilexical sonnet writing can, in addition to resulting in new literary works, offer insight into this subcategory of poems and into poetry itself. In particular, I focus on how the difference between the imaginative world of many traditional poems and the operational nature of a computational poem is highlighted by my own extension of Padgett’s ‘Nothing in that Drawer’ into ‘File Not Found’.”