[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)”]
Terrance Hayes connects with Harryette Mullen connects with Gertrude Stein connects with Terrance Hayes. The links (hyper- and literary) above aren’t just from this particular “American Sonnet” investigation; when I felt like I might be pushing tenuous and personally circumstantial connections in discussing Hayes and Stein together in my most recent posts, I remembered that I had already connected them here, through Mullen, back in 2016—the through-line of serious play supersedes the sonnet, American or otherwise.
Stein settled in Paris in 1903, and we call her an expat, but 2018 is no time to be mindless about migrations—Stein was a kind of double-immigrant. Before she was the American in Paris, she was the the child of German Jews who settled in America. In spite of—or more likely because of—her insider-outsider perspectives, Stein seemed obsessed with what it meant to be (or be made, or become) American—her over 900 page magnum opus was called The Making of Americans, after all. And she placed herself in a (white, male) American canon (here, from “Lecture I” from Narration):
In the American writing the words . . . began to have within themselves the consciousness of completely moving, they began to detach themselves from the solidity of anything, they began to excitedly feel about themselves as if they were anywhere or anything, think about American writing from Emerson, Hawthorne Walt Whitman Mark Twain Henry James myself Sherwood Anderson Thornton Wilder and Dashiell Hammett and you will see what I mean, as well as in advertising and in road signs, you will see what I mean, words left alone more and more feel that they are moving and all of it is detached and is detaching anything from anything and in this detaching and in this moving it is being in its way creating its existing.
That American dismantling – I think of Whitman’s imperatives:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
But what does any of this have to do with sonnets?
Along with the formal elements of 14-line rhyme schemes and iambic pentameter, one feels sonnets in their movement—in their turns. The traditional major turn (called a volta) between a Petrarchan octave and sestet or before a final Shakespearean couplet often keeps company with other turns—usually conjunctions (but sometimes adverbs or interjections or admissions or interrogatives or tonal shifts or shifts in scene). When I ask students studying sonnets to look for these motions of mind (but . . . or . . . if . . .), I call them hinges.
Hinge: “a jointed or flexible device on which a door, lid, or other swinging part turns.”
(“Unscrew the doors!”)
Though Whitman’s sprawling, anaphoric free verse lines and expansive vision unscrewed certain locks and doors, I see Stein as taking up his project of American dismantling of convention, but on the level of syntax.
In “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein writes:
Verbs and adverbs and articles and conjunctions and prepositions are lively because they all do something and as long as anything does something it keeps alive.
And earlier, in 1890, Stein’s undergraduate professor William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology:
There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relations which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought . . . We ought to say a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of substantive parts along, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.
Here, implicit challenges from Whitman and from James, taken on by Stein, who gives us back our hinges, but deconstructed and repurposed. She’s not quite writing the opposite of a sonnet—the opposite of a sonnet might be a poem with no argument at all, no movements of mind. This is more like a sonnet slurry, or collage, or explosion, where grammar and logic still make up the crucial form, but function like nothing before.
[Continued in “American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)”]