[Continued from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin]
Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center released Anna Maria Hong’s debut poetry collection, Age of Glass, winner of its First Book Competition. Like Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, forthcoming in June, Hong’s book-length sonnet sequence, published in April, both engages with and subverts its tradition. Unlike Hayes’s “American Sonnets,” in which the visual density of a single fourteen-line stanza reinforces the lack of a set end-rhyme scheme and directs the reader instead toward the dense internal musicality of Hayes’s lines, Hong’s sonnets often take Shakespearean form with three quatrains and final couplet, cuing the reader to metrical choices, end-rhyme schemes, and stanzaic moves. This is not to say that Hong’s sonnets are any less internally dense or wild in their musicality than Hayes’s; to the contrary, both seem to use their versions of the sonnet form to provide the seams at which to burst with sheer imaginative and linguistic force.
With a dizzying range of diction and willingness to follow word play and pattern while bleeding between our own contemporary world and worlds of fairy tale and myth, Hong’s sonnets in Age of Glass seem to continue some of the conversations initiated by the poets of Stephanie Burt’s discussion of “Elliptical” and “Nearly Baroque” poets. The titular glass seems to speak to the collection’s forms and materials – Hong’s language as a substance of glitter and shine, shaped under high heat, the finely wrought artifice of which can then be shattered and wielded as a formidable weapon.
I find transition from one state to another and the taking of both social and personal power and agency to be compelling concerns at the core of the collection, often viewed through a gendered lens (“For the carried / margin. For the feminine conclusion” [64]), and enacted through both physical and narrative shattering, explosion, or rending:
“The world would crack extravagantly spent, / a shining exemplar or ornament” (3), “In the distance, always / the glass sea breaking. It was our time to savage” (5), “a way to blunt the need / for evidence of our humanity / and return the universe to light and speed” (7), “The angels turned me / like a face and gave me a new name, turned / my face like revolution” (9), “I’m the holy stuff, / the nod blown up inside your head” (11), “interest dipped, tinted, rinsed, and fenced, / looped and linked like a tarnished chain reaction” (22), “grip it, strip it, flip it hard– / ramp my shard” (27), “The world has burned her skin to make another” (48).
Here, Pandora ends her myth, “I flipped my lid and changed my name to Sally” (15), the old woman who lived in a shoe declares, “‘No music will uncap / the shoe. We must unhorn it with ourselves” (25), and the “newfound foundlings . . . give fate a firm shove” (26). In these reworkings, as elsewhere in the collection, the dynamics are sufficiently complicated, leaving the reader to think and rethink the implications, as in this new Aesopian dialogue:
“Goodbye, luck, you idiot,”
said the Fox to the Grapes.
“I love you,” replied the Grapes. (27)
Hong embeds poetic remixes within her castings of fairy tale and myth, with Eliot’s Prufrock respun in familiar idiom in “Persephone” (“The seed was my ticket to plummet. Each / to each, the fat lady sang to me” [16]), and Bishop’s “Casabianca” echoed in “Circe” (“The former us in me would like / to be jettisoned too or at least have / a deck to leap from” [14]). The poems reflect on themselves as poetry and literature, reflect on themselves as reflections:
“First, let’s find a future infant matron // and a falling apart version of the f***** up / fairy tale fiction of the fraternal Grimm” (26), “The King is bored by my antics, which are / after all, useless . . . I become the Minister of Implication, // my senses enriched as uranium / and no less stable” (28), “Give me liberty through diction and / fiction refined as sugar and oil– / product and process, again, again” (29), “Done with iambics, I wrote / the following instead” (30), “Come and tempt me, / mimetic” (35), “What this caper // slash tragedy needs is a new beginning, middle, / and ending” (36), “The morals vary, but not really” (44), “I’m writing this up for no one you know” (62), “I raise my voice / inside your throat; I hum a viral children’s / storyline” (65),
There are poems that willfully engage the absurd, particularly those that insist upon a particular repeated sound throughout. The reader who thinks sound’s an unsound engine, who can’t handle Hong at her “Bloom // a planetarium or a sherpa qua valium ferrying the blahs, / a chrome dome harem through the chutzpah of time” (49) and her “Rover / at the clavier, riven averrer and tourniquet // remover, glutting on slivers from the striver’s / market, surfing the quaver like a bouquet flower” (42), should perhaps seek more plainspoken poems elsewhere. But for the rest of us, here is language both ductile and brittle, both seductive and resistant. There are also moments of great clarity, as in the ending of “The Hologynic”:
I could go anywhere.
I had no fear. The gods I’d known were dead
inside me, where such things apparently
matter. I was ferociously happy.
But the clarity isn’t the “reward” for the twists and turns and puns and play – they’re inseparable facets of the same intense making. The release of Hong’s and Hayes’s sonnet collections in the same season only underscores the individuality (and glorious talents!) of both poets, revealing the alchemy that can result when an individual voice and vision engage with (both reveling in and interrogating) poetic constraint. “I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat / Grinder,” writes Hayes. “Box is Noah’s boat. Box is a bully / pulpit. Box is the antagonist in / a one-person show. Box is fully // present. Box is heart, blood, womb, and skin,” writes Hong (59).
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Anna Maria Hong’s Age of Glass was selected by Suzanne Buffam as the winner of the 2017 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition, and was published in April 2018.
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[Continued in “Crawlspace”]