[Continued from “Crawlspace”]
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Thinking about contemporary sonnets, shadow sonnets, American Sonnets, and so on and so[nnet] on, I’m fascinated both by the poems themselves and by what the poems reveal about why people still turn to the form. To take on the very form that Shakespeare “mastered” can be a way of throwing your hat in the ring, asking for a seat at the table in the big conversation of Poetry with a capital “P.” It can also be a way of challenging the ring, the table, the seats, and the conversation. It can be a way of doing both simultaneously.
Fourteen lines is simply a satisfying chunk to inhabit, and some constraint (even if it’s just a line limit) can spur the imagination. It can pack the punch of brevity while still allowing for twists and turns, tone and image. It can also combine into a sequence in satisfying ways, giving the writer and reader the opportunities of the long poem or book-length work, without losing the intensity of each individual poem. For those working in rhyme and meter, there is a satisfaction in the sonnet’s gears and levers; though Williams wasn’t the sonnet’s number one fan, I can’t help but feel like his “machine made of words” description of the poem is a particularly good description of the sonnet. To build a machine and then feel it hum to life is a thrill. For those dismantling the formal conventions of the sonnet, they can find other ways of satisfying the reader’s expectations of the “little song” (“sonnetto”), knowing that a reader arriving with the expectation of musicality may be particularly attune to other subtle or innovative sound effects – or that that reader can be better startled or shocked by a particularly flat affect or conversational tone. Expectations of the form bring expectations of the content, and the poet can choose to lean into love, to question love, to complicate love.
There is also the sonnet’s connection with argument and motions of mind. The sonnet’s “turn” is a crucial component of the tradition, and it’s one that (like the sonnet’s traditions of form and content) sets up an expectation that often persists in even the most experimental sonnets. (One could argue that the most experimental sonnets are actually enacting their turn by turning away from the other conventions and expectations.) It interests me that some of the contemporary poets who feel pulled toward the sonnet aren’t poets with a particular affinity for other forms. In fact, a number of them actively resist traditional prosody, while either choosing the experimental sonnet as a place to engage in a conversation with tradition or making an exception for the pleasure and power of the sonnet form. It seems like the sonnet’s capacity and affinity for containing arguments and contradictions, its capacity for rhetoric, is part of this. The sonnet, which might seem like the most poem-y form around, seems to share meaningful DNA with prose and prose poetry in some poets’ minds and oeuvres.
Nikki Wallschlaeger’s book of subversive sonnets, Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), which I just discussed in my previous post, was preceded by her book of prose poems, Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015). The titles alone seem to ask readers to attend to the relationship between the two forms.
Harryette Mullen, in a 2008 conversation with Malin Pereira published in Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen: Conversations with Contemporary Black Poets (University of Georgia Press, 2010), notes, “Some of my prose poems are rewritten sonnets.” She goes on to say:
It might seem counterintuitive, given the prominence and prestige of sonnets in the lyric tradition, but the sonnet appeals to me in part because of my interest in prose poetry. It was very easy to move back and forth between the sonnet and the prose paragraph. I want my prose poems to be less prosaic and more poetic, so I like the energy of the sonnet. The structure of the sonnet is like a paragraph in verse, laying out a concise argument, but the sonnet also sings and swings.
Lucie Brock-Broido, in conversation with Carole Maso in 1995, the year The Master Letters was published, says:
I had always turned away from Dickinson’s poems, I thought she was precious; I didn’t get it. Then I began to read her letters. These, I fathomed . . . Though my letters originated in prose, eventually I found the present coupletted form . . . I decided that it was my dream to write short poems, so I began writing what I call American sonnets . . . [As] a long-term and unrecovering practitioner of the prose poem (which I disapprove of, and find indulgent, and feel helplessly drawn toward), the sonnet is the finest and most perfected little cage for a poem . . . Henri Cole used the term “violent concision” and the sonnet is that form of violence, and concisely, because there’s this metallic cage you can rattle the bars of, but you can’t get out of. Just as it should be: a place where you can’t go on and on. In prose you must go on and on, and, in a prose poem, you have to account for the leaps and white spaces and deletions in a different legislative world. Sometimes when a student can’t write, I suggest writing a blathering, indulgent, bubbling, frothing, mess of a prose poem. And then you put on the rubber gloves, put your hand down into it, and get out a sonnet.
In the book’s “A Preamble to The Master Letters,” Brock-Broido echoes this sentiment:
The following fifty-two poems, a series of latter-day Master Letters, echo formal and rhetorical devices from Dickinson’s work. The first three, originally conceived as prose, were intended as a specific and finite homage to Dickinson’s triptych – her brocade devastations. But my original impulse – the epistle procession (the impure, irresistible form of prose which lies on top of poetry) – gave way to an Other, coupled, more sinewy form. The third form fashioned was sterner still, the Old World sonnet – but American and cracked, the odd marriage between hysteria & haiku.
In a 2011 profile in The Harvard Gazette during her time as a Radcliffe fellow, Anna Maria Hong talks about writing the book that became the recently published Age of Glass (discussed in a previous post). While she doesn’t explicitly connect the sonnet with prose, she speaks of reworking prose narratives like the fairy tale into sonnets while striving to “bend it, and torque it, and incinerate it . . . pushing the limits of how this rigorous shape can still be recognized as a sonnet or not.” The profile ends by noting:
For the most part, Hong shuns other forms of poetry. She hates the villanelle, and she can “barely tolerate” the sestina. But the sonnet is different. “Its constraints and its rigor,” she said, “and its kind of speeding toward finality, I think, are what appeal to me.”
Of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Paul Peppis writes for The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry:
Described best, but inadequately, as prose poetry, it combines prose’s interest in description, narrative, and reportage with (modern) poetry’s interest in concision, repetition, and sound effects . . .
In contrast to the sonnet sequence, which also strings individual poems together, Tender Buttons lacks a conventional (male) lyric speaker whose obsession with a beloved makes the sequence cohere.
And Peppis’s take on Stein’s prose poem sequence as a subversion of the sonnet sequence is preceded by Rimbaud’s sonnet/prose investigation, as I discussed in an earlier post. Somehow, these persistent connections between the sonnet and prose, and the seemingly idiosyncratic pull toward the sonnet but not toward other forms (as in Hong’s case), seems to justify a sense that the sonnet as a form is more than the sum of rhyme and meter, though those endure as well.
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[Continued in “Scaffolding”]