Kasey Mohammad has posted his thoughtful and provocative full response to a question raised in comments to my previous post: Just what allows us to reasonably call some particular English-language poem a sonnet? Kasey says the answer depends on "things like intention, context, and self-consciousness," and I agree, and I think Kasey misinterprets my position as entailing "closed, static mode of taxonomy, as of birds or fisherman's knots" as opposed to his own "open, dynamic mode of functional ontology." We clearly do differ on just how open that functional ontology ought to be, and on how to weight the various factors, including "intention, context, and self-consciousness," which make something a sonnet or not (though I don't think that it's a simple binary).
Kasey starts:
Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets are sonnets because the title tells us they are, because they were composed with the idea of the form in mind, etc., regardless of whether they have fourteen lines, or more, or fewer. If I just happen to write a fourteen-line poem without realizing that I have done so (though that's highly unlikely in my case and in the case of most poets who are familiar with the form--let's say instead that it's written by a middle-school student or someone from a different culture or anyone else with no knowledge of sonnets per se), it's more problematic to make the identification. And yet even in this case, if the poem is placed on a page with other poems that clearly are "meant" to be sonnets, I would want to argue that it takes on an undeniable sonneticity. [emphasis in original, and I'll keep using 'sonneticity' below]
My first inclination was to agree entirely with the above paragraph. Intention does matter, and in the case of Berrigan's poems it's clear that "the sonnet" is something like a Platonic Idea informing those poems. I would argue further that when someone puts words in order and says (and means) about that ordering "this is a poem," it by god is a poem, just as, when someone puts paint on a surface with the intention of making a painting, the result is a painting, without any implication concerning the goodness or badness of the work in question.
Two things kept me from that agreement. The first, and perhaps less important, is the way Kasey treats context in his penultimate sentence. It's certainly true that we have learned that context allows us to appreciate as art objects things which were made for purely utilitarian purposes, and we didn't need Andy Warhol to teach us that: there are lots of wine jars in museums of art. (He may have been needed to teach us that art is what collectors will buy, but I'm not sure that's a good lesson. In any case, it's not one poets have learned.) But there limits to the power of context: if I, as an editor, put a sonnet in a page of poems clearly meant to be double dactyls, does that sonnet take on "double dactylity?" Why should the obverse be true?
The second reason is that three are also limits to the power of intention and self-consciousness. The difference between a sonnet and some other kind of poem is more like the difference between a still life and a landscape than like the difference between some group or words being or not being a poem. I can call my painting of daisies in a vase on a table "Landscape With Cows" and it doesn't make it a landscape, not even a bad landscape. At a coarser scale, I can call that painting a poem, even reproduce it in a book of poems, and it won't be a poem; nor would calling a poem a painting make it a painting. And I already know that I've just banished a fair amount of "visual poetry" from the slopes of Parnassus. I'm comfortable with that.
Kasey goes on to formal principles, giving a number of examples of poems arranged in decreasing resemblance to the usual sonnet forms, and I think his analysis of their sonneticity is spot on. For example, I can only think of handful of formalists who might object on formal principles to including Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation II" in an anthology of 20th century sonnets (though I don't think many more that would think it's very good or interesting).
It's only at the very end of his remarks that Kasey and I truly part company, when he claims "it is next to impossible for any poetry-literate reader to see a fourteen-line poem and not think 'sonnet.'" I think he's very wrong, and the question is decidable, though I doubt anyone is going to fund the study.
Considering any number of sonnet-features — number of lines, presence and (if present) location of the turn, myriad matters of meter and rhyme — it would be possible to survey suitably selected literate English-speakers to determine whether and to what degree particular poems are recognizably sonnets. The results of such surveys could be graphed as probability distributions* of how likely it is that each of those features confer sonneticity.
My guess is that, in the case of Ron Padgett's "Nothing in that drawer" and Kasey's own "Fourteen" (a for-the-occasion-knockoff he almost certainly doesn't mean to be taken seriously as a poem), those who are even remotely reminded of sonnets, or, for that matter, of poetry, would be represented by a very short, vanishingly thin tail — unless "poetry-literate reader" is defined to mean "reader educated in a late-20th century university literature or writing program dominated or strongly influenced by post-modern literary theory."
*Every literate person should be at least as familiar with probability distribution curves as our putative respondents should be with the canonical forms of the sonnet in English. That is, they may be able neither to write a sonnet nor to perform statistical analysis, but they should be able to recognize deviations from a normal distribution (often called a "bell curve") as well as they can recognize, say, the difference between Italian and English sonnets.
3:42:35 PM 
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