[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IX: Concept and Impact)”]
I’ve been pulled in two directions in my reading and thinking in the past few weeks. I’ve been writing posts inspired by Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin series here at The Kenyon Review blog while thinking about American-ness and sonnet-ness, but I’ve also been rereading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons to prepare for teaching a graduate workshop focused on Modernist long poems and poem sequences. I’ve been resisting bringing them together here, telling myself that it’s really just happenstance that they’re both on my mind at the same time, but sometimes chance and proximity insist upon pursuing those kinds of connections.
Most obviously and simply, Tender Buttons (first published in 1914) and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (forthcoming in 2018) are connected in that they are both book-length poetic investigations comprised of individual smaller units linked through form and “topic.” In Stein’s case, the smaller formal unit is the prose poem; in Hayes’s case, the smaller formal unit is the fourteen line poem. Both Stein’s prose poem and Hayes’s American Sonnet embody contradictions in their nature. How can a piece of writing be both prose and a poem, especially when the sentences themselves, like Stein’s, resist and undermine normative syntax, description, and narrative? How can a European form (the sonnet) be an American form, especially when Hayes’s take on the form eschews its characteristic rhyme-and-meter prosody?
Both are building their innovations on formal innovations of a previous (but recent) generation: while the prose poem would have been less familiar to American English-speaking readers in 1914, Stein had moved to Paris in 1903, and one might see Stein’s prose poems in the context of the prose poems of nineteenth century French writers like Baudelaire. Hayes builds on the American Sonnets of Wanda Coleman, though he’s much more willing to give credit where credit is due in terms of formal influence than Stein might be; Hayes is dedicating his forthcoming book of American Sonnets to Coleman, whereas Stein famously declared herself practically peerless, asking who could be seen “besides Shakespeare and me?” (Of course, for a woman writing experimental literature at the turn of the last century, to make such a declaration was a particular kind of willful provocation.)
Both works ask the reader to question their assumptions about subject as well as form. The straightforward titles of Stein’s three sections, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” belie the complexity of their contents; for example, within “Objects,” even a poem/paragraph/chapter/section/stanza (what shall we call it?) titled “A Box” may be opened to reveal:
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So, then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.
One would forgive the reader, even in 2018, who asks, “Where’s the box?” Similarly, the subtitles of “Objects” and “Food” themselves often undermine the sections, as when the “Food” section contains not only “Asparagus,” “Sausages,” and “Butter,” but also “End of Summer,” not only “Orange” (twice) and “Oranges,” but “Orange In.”
Reading Stein’s “A Box” above, I think of an interview Hayes gave with Rachel Carstens for the Interview Series of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. Carstens notes Hayes’s formal innovations, then notes how his poems’ content also “pushes against” those forms. Hayes responds:
You’re right when you say the content seems to push against the rules of the form even when it’s a form of my own invention. The title of my third book, Wind in a Box, maybe best reflects my (compulsive) interest in form – in borders I can straddle, the rules I can bend. Wind needs the box to be framed, contextualized. Without it, wind is, like language, too pervasive to be grasped and shaped. What happens inside the box is always a gratifying surprise.
[Continued in “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”]