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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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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.
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