The American Sonnet: Commentary and Conversation
Building on The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press, 2023) and the Sonnets from the American Symposium (2020)
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Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers on this site refer to The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.
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by Joyelle McSweeney 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. by Zephaniah Oppen Among “some two dozen [recent] collections'' (p. 1) of American poetry centered on the sonnet is the late Jay Hopler’s hurtling and self-elegiac response to his terminal diagnosis as though an ugly and unyielding sentence were a thing that one might as well mock and be done. Still Life was published just a week before Hopler’s death in 2022. This year it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—ironic phrasing he might have joked about, given a poem like “Discarded Memoir Titles,” from this collection. Hopler’s poetry was unmistakably individual within free verse, alchemical and fastidious. Surprising as it may still be that Hopler did not even attempt English poetry’s favorite and longest-standing delineated game, the sonnet, until his 40s (late in this case, sadly), one expects him to establish some house rules.
The main and most distinctive one in Still Life is visual. A sonnet is usually recognizable simply by its appearance, its natural shape supporting a tradition of self-metaphorization as room or box, even a hostile one (Ramazani, p. 133); from within which Hopler’s opening sonnet, “Radiation Vault 4,” satirizes the hope of aesthetic transformation, of thus emerging alive. To its point, a reader’s eye is less likely to recognize this poem as a sonnet at first. The lines stagger toward the right margin of the page. Similar movement characterizes sonnets throughout Still Life. Line indentations often appear haphazard and inconsistent, often have a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion. While in “Radiation Vault 4” the effect is movement within constraint (the poet imagines merging with a butterfly inside his treatment room), more generally in the collection it is a feeling of force and lesser counterforce. In the context of aggressive cancer, this visual arrangement suggests the struggle against an impatient goad toward death. The collection’s inconsistent capitalization and abbreviations like “w/” and “b/c” also evoke the poet’s pitiful sense of drivenness and of being driven, and of poetry being all but potent in shifting from “perfection to existence” (see Kimberly Johnson’s conversation with him). Actually, the logic of Hopler’s visual arrangement is conventional: indent and justify lines that share an end rhyme. The simple difference is, he moves each rhyme progression further across the page. Obvious obscures itself. Varied rhyme schemes help, and lines that occasionally have no correlate, wonderfully creating a sense of chaos via a formality that is precisely controlled. It excuses Hopler to hitch together wonky rhymes, often slant or merely assonant, as in “Honky-Tonk Sonnet” where “country” is correlated to “squeak”; and stranger pairings like “lifespan” and “find,” a missing rhyme, or the semantic rhyme in “Radiation Vault 4” between “wing” and “span.” (Again, “perfection to existence.”) In the world of the poems—and only in that world, the poems themselves are aware—rhyme and, more basically, correspondence, as the living could only wish it to do, stays and staves off an inevitable ending. Tess Taylor states in her essay on Gwendolyn Brooks that a poet’s reinvention of a form must “charge it both forward and backward in time, electrifying it anew” (p. 327). Hopler certainly achieves that current in Still Life; he may or may not reinvent the sonnet. But the result is unique, the life of the sonnets felt. They deserve consideration in a larger discussion of the American sonnet. by Laura T. Smith “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. by Dora Malech"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. Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers on this site refer to The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.
by Laura T. SmithFelicia 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. Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers on this site refer to The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.
from Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, EditorsWelcome 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. Want to get involved? Use the Contact Form to reach out to us about contributing essays or reviews of 500 words or fewer to this blog. Are you looking for particular sonnet resources? Use the Contact Form to tell us what you are looking for. |