About Thousand Sonnets

Backstory

Back in 2006, I was figuring out what to do with my life a year out of college. I knew I wanted to move to the Bay Area to get into the startup scene, but had no idea how. No friends, no family, no connections in the area, and all my friends were Econ, Finance, or Liberal Arts majors, so no real guidance on what careers to pursue.

So I did what every sane person would do: I taught myself how to code. Proper code, not the janky copy and paste stuff I did prior. And I made sure to learn by building something I wanted to build. That ended up being Thousand Sonnets.

After 2.5 years of pain as an Econ major, I switched to English Lit and fell into a mostly monogamous relationship with the sonnet form. Coupled with my inability to focus on longer forms of creative writing and general affinity towards rhythmic anythings, I began to teach myself how to write 14 lines of iambic pentameter sometime in the middle of college (I wanna say... 2003?). Repeated periods of infatuation with assorted girls alongside classes on Shakespeare and Petrarch (and ancillary support via Eliot and Pound) gave me enough ammo to write decent sonnets at first. And it felt good.

Then I had the idea.

The. One. Thousand. Sonnet. Sequence.

Shakespeare wrote 154.

Petrarch wrote 366.

I'm going to write 1000. And 8 years into it, I'm only at ~#33. Probably will never be as good as the masters, but striving to surpass regardless. Still with a focus on quality, not quantity. So it'll be a rough rest of my life.

Initially, this Thousand Sonnets idea also involved crowdsourcing topics and poetry fodder from the internet, which at the time felt very awkward and new. I don't think that'll be part of this second revision, mostly because I never got around to it initially, and moreso because as I got through the first batch of sonnets, writing became incredibly personal. Therefore it'd probably be difficult for me to assume someone else's feelings and write something meaningful.

Now

Revamping the site was the first step towards getting me back on track; I've been largely inactive cause of various stints in startup turmoil and undulating stress, never having the creative zest to finish and feel satisfied with any piece. And the first site was a terribly designed and terribly coded Textpattern PHP site; this static site fits my current design and coding mood much more.

So, hopefully I'll start writing more, and thus posting more. Enjoy!

Cheers, Huy

Soon

  1. Readings of each sonnet, and maybe brief voice commentary, maybe in a podcast format
  2. More sonnets
  3. Wider breadth of topics

Huy

— on