Photo credit: Kate Warren
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Annie
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Meter and Gender Politics
in the American Meta-Sonnet
in the American Meta-Sonnet
Sonnets that participate in the small but influential tradition of sonnets about the sonnet are by definition hyper-aware and are usually characterized by dramatic statement and pointed allegory. Like the sonnets that poets choose to place as the first sonnet in a sequence or a career, such meta-sonnets offer a valuable window into the strategies poets use to find, or earn, a foothold for themselves onto a form that can prove intimidating or impermeable.
Comparison of gendered language, imagery, and trope in opening sonnets by Gwendolyn Brooks and Terrance Hayes with meta-sonnets by William Wordsworth and Edna St. Vincent Millay suggests that the exploitative, confining gender dynamics that evolved along with the sonnet form in Europe contribute to the anxiety incited in many twentieth-century American poets by the sonnet form.
In the free verse sonnets by Brooks and Hayes, anxiety appears to be resolved by the manipulation of meter itself. Metrical code readings of these sonnets show that iambic pentameter is functioning here as a kind of code, a synecdoche, for the sonnet form. Both poets tweak the meter to make it metrically polyvalent while simultaneously tapping into traditions of gender-coded imagery—one poet drawing on gendered sonnet tradition, the other subverting it. Thus, they position themselves vis a vis the conventions and demands of the sonnet in a way that does not violate their sense of self.
Comparison of gendered language, imagery, and trope in opening sonnets by Gwendolyn Brooks and Terrance Hayes with meta-sonnets by William Wordsworth and Edna St. Vincent Millay suggests that the exploitative, confining gender dynamics that evolved along with the sonnet form in Europe contribute to the anxiety incited in many twentieth-century American poets by the sonnet form.
In the free verse sonnets by Brooks and Hayes, anxiety appears to be resolved by the manipulation of meter itself. Metrical code readings of these sonnets show that iambic pentameter is functioning here as a kind of code, a synecdoche, for the sonnet form. Both poets tweak the meter to make it metrically polyvalent while simultaneously tapping into traditions of gender-coded imagery—one poet drawing on gendered sonnet tradition, the other subverting it. Thus, they position themselves vis a vis the conventions and demands of the sonnet in a way that does not violate their sense of self.
Annie Finch’s most recent of seven poetry collections is Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). Other books include The Ghost of Meter, The Body of Poetry, An Exaltation of Forms, and A Poet's Ear, all from University of Michigan Press. She teaches poetry, meter, and scansion at poetsandseekers.org