The Resistant Strain: Notes on the Nonnet
William Carlos Williams walked back his famous assertion on the sonnet, finding it more fascinating than necessarily fascist:
The sonnet, I see now, is not and has never been a form at all of any fixed sense other than that incident upon a certain turn of mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded: a statement, then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a direct reply, perhaps a variant of the original–but a comeback of one sort or another–which Dante and his contemporaries had formalized in their day and language.
That dialogic unit is a form of resistance, signaled in a sonnet’s turn. We could think of this habit as a deep structure: The world says A—I say B.
North America has been a highly active site in the proliferation of this resistant strain of sonnet, which I am calling the “nonnet.” Class it with the sonnet in its focus on the rejection of discursive norm, but differentiate it in some conscious rejection of conventional form: unlegislated line counts, unregulated meter, unnecessary end rhymes.
Contact tracing to include: Emily Dickinson, Kay Ryan, Heather McHugh, George Starbuck, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, John Berryman, Tyehimba Jess, Robert Lowell, Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Paul Muldoon, and David Wojahn. Resistance is febrile.
The sonnet, I see now, is not and has never been a form at all of any fixed sense other than that incident upon a certain turn of mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded: a statement, then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a direct reply, perhaps a variant of the original–but a comeback of one sort or another–which Dante and his contemporaries had formalized in their day and language.
That dialogic unit is a form of resistance, signaled in a sonnet’s turn. We could think of this habit as a deep structure: The world says A—I say B.
North America has been a highly active site in the proliferation of this resistant strain of sonnet, which I am calling the “nonnet.” Class it with the sonnet in its focus on the rejection of discursive norm, but differentiate it in some conscious rejection of conventional form: unlegislated line counts, unregulated meter, unnecessary end rhymes.
Contact tracing to include: Emily Dickinson, Kay Ryan, Heather McHugh, George Starbuck, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, John Berryman, Tyehimba Jess, Robert Lowell, Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Paul Muldoon, and David Wojahn. Resistance is febrile.
Kevin McFadden is author of the poetry collection Hardscrabble and a chapbook collaboration with illustrator Jeff Pike, City of Dante. His poems, reviews, and essays appear in American Letters & Commentary, Fence, Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and in other publications. He is chief operating officer of Virginia Humanities.