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slowdown show.org. I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I hope you don't mind if today I geek out on a particular poetic form.

The Sonnet.

From the Italian sonneto, or little song,

the sonnet is one of the most recognized forms in English.

There are two different kinds of traditional sonnet,

Shakespearean and Petrarchan,

and although their rhyme schemes are different,

they have a lot in common,

both 14 lines long,

usually written in iambic pentameter, the meter that sounds like,

ba-dam, badum, badum, bad-um, bad-um, bad-dum, and they both contain a sonnet's signature turn,

the Volta. Volta is a musical term for a turn.

It's a point of transition, either grammatically or conceptually.

The Volta is the, but wait, think again, not so fast, moment in the poem.

It is a poetic plot twist, a complicating of the poem.

We think of a sonnet as expressing an initial idea, but then there is a turn to something

else. A sonnet presents a problem and then an answer, but often not the expected one.

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