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NateMickelsonClinical Associate Professor
Expository Writing Program New York University |
Sonnets and/as Boxes:
Considering the Structural Possibilities
of Ken Taylor’s Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell
Considering the Structural Possibilities
of Ken Taylor’s Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell constructed his puzzling, remarkable boxes from a trove of materials he collected and stored in a Queens, NY workshop throughout his life: discarded wood, wire, and string; plastic and glass objects and figurines; cuttings from newspapers and magazines; and fabric remnants, among others. As capacious as they are constrained, Cornell’s boxes evoke nostalgia, astonishment, obsession, and eerie curiosity. North Carolina poet Ken Taylor adapts the artist’s techniques to sonnet form in the 2016 collection Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell, from Brooklyn's Pressed Wafer press. Taylor arranges cultural references, found language, and personal reflections in poems that follow a strict Italian structure--an octave followed by a sestet, with a double line-break in between--that resembles a box with two compartments. The poems are labelled as figures 1-70 and organized in three sections whose titles reference specific works by Cornell: "thimble forest," "objects (roses de vents)," and "habitat for a shooting gallery." Each sonnet appears on the right-hand side of a two-page spread and is further identified by a caption listing underlying materials, references, dates of construction/composition, and dimensions (“8 x 6,” in several instances). Constructed and displayed as boxes in these ways, Taylor’s sonnets assemble a range of styles and influences, including the impressionistic phenomenology of the New York School, swerving syntax characteristic of the Language movement, and mystical cadences that bring H.D. and Robert Duncan to mind. Like Cornell’s boxes, Taylor’s sonnets exceed their dimensions by transforming discrete materials into open-ended poetic composites. This essay and talk will describe how Taylor’s sonnets unfold new possibilities for the form, including how sonnets might function as typographical objects, poetics workshops, semi-public archives, and idiosyncratic treasure troves.
Nate Mickelson grew up in Wyoming and teaches expository writing at New York University. He is the author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis (Bloomsbury) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time that Isn’t (Vernon Press).