[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)”]
In addition to the overlapping concerns of form and content I began to consider in the previous post, Stein’s Tender Buttons and Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin series also both accrue power through their repetitions. In Hayes’s poems, the repeated title (I’m not sure if he’ll repeat the title again and again in the collected book itself, but each poem as it appears in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and so forth, has carried the same title) seems to invite the reader to ask a linked set of questions: how is this poem American? How is it a sonnet? In what way is it “for” the speaker’s assassin, who (or what) is this assassin, what exactly does it mean to be the speaker’s assassin, how can an assassin be both past and future, and so on? Some poems clarify some of these questions but not others, the clarifications are not always the same, and the cumulative effect is a destabilizing one. A cumulative destabilizing effect: common ground between these two collections.
Stein’s signature style hinges on its repetitions, both a kind of anaphoric repetition that gives some shape to utterance where sentences and lines don’t always function as traditional units of meaning (as the phrase “Out of” does in “A Box” in the previous post) and repetitions that feel almost like a record skipping (if you want to connect her to technology of the day) or like Cubist painting (if you want to connect her to visual art) or like the mind at work (if you want to connect her to her early studies with William James), here from “A Plate”:
Cut cut in white, cut in white so lately. Cut more than any other and show it. Show it in the stem and in starting and in evening coming complication.
Hayes’s repeated title isn’t his only use of repetition in his American Sonnets. He too uses multiple kinds of repetition to shape individual poems, as in one of the most recently published of his American Sonnets, appearing in Boston Review on January 10. (Read the full poem here.) It begins:
I thought we might as well sing the fables of sea
To fill our mouths before sailing out to whale.
I thought we might sing as well of the feeling
Of sea moving about the whale like a coat.
Here, repetition-with-a-difference becomes a crucial move in the poem (as it does in other poems in the series). To me, it feels – like the sea itself with its tides and currents and waves and ripples and glints – both vast and subtle in its variant repetitions, from the large-scale anaphoric repetition (“I thought we might as well sing,” “I thought we might sing as well” “I thought we might drown,” “I thought we might sing”) to the repetition of individual sounds (the “ail” sound repeated in “sailing out to whale,” the shared framing consonants of “well” and “whale”), the echoed line endings of “toast . . . almost” and “kenning . . . sing . . . feeling,” and so on. These play off of the visual and physical repetitions referenced as well: reflections, swaying, winding. The poem only intensifies this sensation in the pressure of its ending: “I thought we might sing / Of the wire wound round the wound of feeling.” The heteronymous eye rhyme of “wound” and “wound” further heightens the lines’ musicality, the poem’s music belying the violence and illogic of this last image. We shake ourselves from a lyric trance to ask how and why a wire is wrapped around a wound? Is this some misguided tourniquet? Won’t this only make the wound worse?
I have been calling these moves of Hayes’s “repetition,” but here I return to the context of Stein to borrow her term instead, clarified (in her own way) in her lecture “Portraits and Repetition”: insistence.
[Continued in “American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)”]