The Guardian's March Workshop with Anne Stevenson

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms. Originality and inspiration can take you anywhere.
Or can they?

Since this is an exercise, I'd like you write at least one sonnet in which, using contemporary language to express some aspect of life today, you conform to the rules set long ago either by Shakespeare or Petrarch. Then, if you wish, you can experiment with a second poem of 14 lines in which you freely bend the rules.

Email your submissions to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Sunday March 13. Anne's responses will appear on the site in the following week