​For a long time, I was possessed by a question: what is the lyric?
 
What accounts for its intensity, its irresistibility, its brevity? In our age of toxins-- environmental, political, pharmaceutical, psychological, social-- could we also think of lyric as a toxin--seductive, mind-altering, fatal?  
 
I thought of Plato's model of writing as pharmakon, a volatile and dubious mix of medicine and poison. I learned that word toxin derives from the Greek word for arrow-- more specifically, a poison arrow.
 
Well, if Plato could have his pharmakon, I thought, I would have my Toxicon-- a collection of poems like a quiver of poison arrows.
 
As I grew more and more absorbed in constructing my Toxicon, I asked myself further: which form of Western lyric poetry is the most toxic, the most intense, the most sweet, the most fateful? The answer seemed to be: the sonnet.
 
When I drew back my poisoned arrow, I saw that it was pointing at Keats.
 
It could be said that John Keats is himself a sonnet-- emblem of the sonnet's sweetness, intensity, pugnacity, brevity, and fatality. My sonnets grew out of an obsession with Keats, but also with the tuberculosis bacillus that delivered him out of this bad world and into the immortality he so desired, that looked a lot like mortality itself.
 
As I wove my toxic crown, I felt like the bacillus: dubious, lethal, I ate John Keats alive. The sonnets themselves began to feel like lungs where all the toxins and contaminants of our toxic planet would run, chemical and lit up, a toxic stew that sent up prophetic, glowing fumes.
 
And these toxic sonnets turned out to be, quite literally, prophetic. The poems I had written in and around 2017 carried the wingsweep of a catastrophe that would shortly touch every precinct of the planet. My sequence alludes to Apollo, god of poetry and plague. I drew in the swine flus and bird flus that were winging around the planet, thanks to global distribution chains and market demands, but also other kinds of specifically American violences, from military occupations to drone pilots trained on video games to celebrity dog fights. With the arrival of COVID in 2020, as well as each year's brutal compounding of the climate catastrophe, techno-fascism and cruelty, the true prophetic force of these sonnets has come into focus.
 
Truth be told, I didn't used to think of the sonnet as a prophetic form. But maybe it's like any boundary augurs, oracles, prophets and scientists draw around the world in order study it-- bird flight, sheep's organs, two neutrinos on their gold track, the hasp of DNA. Draw the circle of study tight enough and the truth comes into view.
 
Re-encountering these sonnets now, in six-years' retrospect, I recall the particular truism of prophecy as it was practiced in the classical world: all prophecy is retrospective. As I wrote in a sister-essay to this working note, "How I Became a Prophetess":
 
When books of prophecy are opened, we discover what we knew all along.

​
Joyelle McSweeney is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry and the co-founder of the international press Action Books. Her tenth book, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024.

“The Fifteen-Year-Old Considers His Closet” is one of three sonnets by Tariq Dobbs in the January issue of Poetry.  All three take different forms, this one, a couplet sonnet. 

The couplet sonnet is something of a hybrid form, balancing the forward march of the heroic couplet with the centripedal, circling qualities of the sonnet. Dobbs’ sonnet amplifies this both/and quality, punctuating heavily enjambed lines with feminine rhymes (“prettied”/”taxied”), wending one long and jostling sentence over thirteen lines.   

While the couplet sonnet is perhaps less common than other variations, the couplet itself is central to the fundamental construction and musicality of the sonnet in general, not just in the closing couplet of the English form, but in the musicality of the Italian’s abbaabba rhyme, which is composed mostly of couplets, though we don’t experience them as rhymed pairs, lending a stairstep, one-note-off quality not unlike the couplets of Jericho Brown’s sonnet form, the duplex. Michael Dumanis describes Brown’s duplex as “nonlinear, fragmentary, disjunctive, destabilizing, protean,” where “each step forward is partially undone, until we end up where we began, a circular journey” (p. 239).  Dobbs’ poem makes its own circular journey: “these images dreamed in my mirrored/gaze of a high school men’s restroom.” 

Couplet sonnets show up throughout the Sonnets from the American anthology: Phillis Wheatley’s “To The King’s Most Excellent Majesty” (p. 10), Alexander Posey’s “On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake, January, 1900” (p. 23), Lola Ridge’s “Electrocution” (p. 24), Lousie Bogan’s “Roman Fountain” (p. 41), Langston Hughes’ “Bed Time” (p. 43), Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” (p. 112), and sections of Tarfia Faizullah’s “Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum” (pp. 117-121). Unrhymed couplet sonnets by Philip Metres and torrin greathouse also appear; Charles Bernstein’s “Questionnaire” might be read as an unrhymed couplet sonnet.  

In his essay in the collection, Stephen Regan characterizes the couplets of Lowell’s couplet sonnet “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” as “relentless” (p. 315). Jonathan Post hears in the couplets of Frost’s early sonnet “Into My Own” “will” and “youthful chutzpuh” (p. 260). 

In “Notes on the Couplet in the Sonnet,” Stephen Guy-Bray notes that while couplets usually “indicate finality” or foreclosure, in Shakespeare’s sonnet 126, a twelve-line sonnet made entirely of couplets, they instead "give way to another couplet that also doesn’t provide an ending, a pattern that is repeated five times.” Sonnet 126 is also the last of the young man sonnets, and the sonnet in which the speaker gives up on all his solutions to the problem of mortality. Here, the couplet sonnet might signal a difficulty or refusal to conclude. 

Dobbs’ sonnet turns toward its own meditation on immorality in the final lines as “crushed soda cans turned/ urinal cakes would outlive all the friends who snorted/ our shared Ritalin collection, and/certainly, outlive me, and thank God.”   

If couplet and closet represent kinds of closure/enclosure, the unpaired final line, its own complete sentence, offers as closure an opening: “My love will outlive me.”  

 Notes: Stephen Guy-Bray. “Notes on the Couplet in the Sonnet,” Shakespeare 18:3 (2022): 322-331.

"Freedom in Form, Or Tricking Ourselves Into Delight and Play” by Rebecca Foust, appears in the Fall 2022 issue of DMQ Review. In this essay, Rebecca Foust writes about her own relationship to poetic form, with a particular focus on the sonnet. Describing the experience of writing her book-length sonnet sequence Paradise Drive (Press 53, 2015), Foust writes, "Over time, I found that writing sonnets was like learning a language. I became more fluent, sometimes dreaming in the form, or composing grocery lists in 14 lines."
Foust's connection between sonnet-writing and language-learning brings Brandy Nālani McDougall's poem "''elima'" (p. 114)—the fifth in her sonnet sequence "Ka ‘Ōlelo" ("'elima" means "five" in Hawaiian)—to mind, as well as Jahan Ramazani's essay "Self-Metaphorizing 'American' Sonnets" (p. 133). 
For a close reading of Paradise Drive, read Lee Rossi’s 2020 review in Smartish Pace, which connects this 21st century book's form and materials with Vikram Seth's 20th century novel in verse (i.e., book-length narrative sonnet sequence) The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986), itself influenced by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin. (Foust herself mentions both Seth and Pushkin's works in an interview with Fourteen Hills.)
Both Foust's 21st-century and Seth's 20th-century sonnet sequences are (from their very titles) California-rooted, but they converse across languages and continents with Pushkin's classic 19th century work. Ramazani's essay is one of several in The American Sonnet to note the "irrepressible globality and translocality of the sonnet" (p. 143). Transhistorical as well. 
For readers and writers of contemporary sonnets, a sonnet can articulate our moment, but that "moment's monument" (to quote Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from The House of Life, a—you guessed it—sonnet sequence) converses with other moments across time and place. ​

Felicia Zamora’s “A Quadriptich: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility,” was published in the Winter 2022 issue of The Georgia Review. It’s a sequence of expansive, connected sonnets that explores the animal-human binary and its role in producing dehumanizing rhetorics of antiblackness. The four sonnets fuse family stories with whale anatomy and critical theory in lines that range well beyond twenty syllables.

The sequence won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Dawn Lundy Martin who calls the poem an “un-crown, crown attack, crownology.”

The sonnet series opens with anatomical details—“the humpback whale’s mouth expands up to 10 feet, yet the throat widens only 15 inches in diameter”—and stays close to the body (“my whale heart, my whale brain”) while it tells a family story: “Grandma sent me to deliver / leftover church lilies. Would you teach me to play? I asked Evelyn Green. Oh, / dear don’t touch. Children like you become ditch diggers.”

As the poem navigates its multiple worlds—land and water, human and animal, story and theory, family and history—the speaker observes that “A body living half in air and half in water will always be misinterpreted, misrepresented.”

The poem details the whale’s ears, “the only mammalian ears to adapt fully underwater” and concludes “To examine a whale out of water means to ignore plurality in the mechanisms of anatomy.”

Moving deftly across and within the human-animal binary, the poem begins to excavate how the very “concepts of human & animality” that lie at the foundation of humanism rest on racist structures.

Drawing from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s On Becoming Human, the poem reaches past the terms of western thinking for its own terms: “Imagine us, inscribing new / divinations of being.” 

Invoking the imaginary number in mathematics, Zamora writes, “I make my I an i… I make my i an eye..” The poem’s closing blazon brings us back to anatomical catalog as “i a force of matter, extends a reckoning.” The poem ends in a furious remaking that, as Martin describes, un-crowns the crown while building from it.
 
The expansive reach of Zamora’s sonnets feels reminiscent of sonnets by Lo Kwa Mei-en (p. 126), Lyn Hejinian (p. 74), and Diane Seuss (p. 94) that stretch across wide historical distances and amass archives in their long lines.    

Zamora has published two additional “Sonnets to Break to Crown of Invisibility” in The Missouri Review.

Welcome to the website of The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.

If you’ve found us as a result of reading or teaching from The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, we hope you’ll find the added resources here helpful.

If you are new to the American sonnet, we hope you’ll enjoy the poems and commentary gathered here and join the conversation.

In this space, we look forward to expanding on and complementing the poets and poems featured in the Anthology, continuing the critical discussion about the American sonnet, and fostering a gathering space for emerging sonnet news and conversation.

Over time, in addition to essays, reviews, and news, the website will include a searchable collection of selected "Sonnets from the American" and links to other American sonnet resources available on the web.

The original title of this project, Sonnets from the American, drew upon Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1850 Sonnets from the Portuguese, which invoked the popular literary traditions of circulation and translation in order to disguise her intimate, original sonnets. The Sonnets from the American project (first implemented as a virtual symposium, archived here) similarly originated from interest in the circulation of American sonnets, the communities in which they travel and that form around them, their international and global networks, and the ways sonnets build upon and construct tradition, but also in the ways American sonnets disguise themselves—as prose poems, blues, ghazals, fragments, narratives, and visual poems.   

While the Anthology traces a continuous American sonnet tradition from the 1760s to the present, the history of the American sonnet is growing rapidly as new sonnets, sonnet collections, and criticism appear. We hope this website will prove a useful tool for researchers, teachers, students, poets, and all those interested in the past and future of the sonnet from the American.
 
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