Writing sonnets

After reading Mary Oliver's book on poetic structure, Invitation to the Dance, I started writing sonnets. I picked a rhyming pattern from one by Shakespeare, noting that his patterns vary. (In one, almost all the lines rhyme.) To my surprise, the process of rhyming came easily to me, and the sonnet form seemed to sharpen rather than hinder my thoughts. It reminded me of giving talks in Japan in which I was asked to pause after three or four sentences for the translation. I once gave one more or less extemporaneously, using each pause to come up with the next brief increment. Some modern sonnets don't rhyme. (Frederick Seidel has an example in My Tokyo, for instance.) Rhyming, to me, is the point - or one point - of writing sonnets.