Douglas Basford

Cheating, Not Cheating: A Review-Preface on Sonnets, More or Less

Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets (reissued by Penguin, 2000)       The Making of a Sonnet, eds. Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch (Norton, 2008)       The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, ed. Jeff Hilson (Reality Street Editions, 2008)       H. L. Hix, Shadows of Houses (Etruscan Press, 2005)       Seymour Mayne, Ricochet (Mosaic Press, 2004)       Foreplay: An Anthology of Word Sonnets, ed. Seymour Mayne and Christal Steck             (Friday Circle, 2004)       Sidney Wade, Stroke (Persea, 2008)   Four Saturdays ago, we stood on a tennis court under a darkening, churning sky that threatened to end our game. As though to emphasize the precariousness of our being there, as yet unrained-upon, almost too often rain came between us in the form of words: All the way through fog and drizzle The roof— rain— pills— found among the moss but hurting under the fire brilliant rain to meet us. We walked around the hand observe the smashing of the rain into the door the night can’t keep inside RAIN And if we’d stayed there longer, had more stamina, put up with the drizzle, what have you, these too would have come between us: There was rain and dew Rain blossomed in the highlands They must hold against The fire rain We were—ten of us out on the damp, slick, moldy, mossy remnants of a tennis court behind the house that our ever-gracious hosts Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack are renting—reading John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, each person voicing a stanza or so before passing it over the net, or laterally to someone whom one might have called a "teammate." It was, in fact, the inaugural reading of what may well be an annual affair, and all of us present signed the Wesleyan reprint (what does it say that all but one signature—and it wasn't mine by a long shot!—were well-nigh illegibile!). And thus was my introduction to and induction into the Poetics crowd at SUNY-Buffalo.         Perchance I made an ass of myself a couple of times early into the match, blurting out this or that tennis- or sports-oriented interjection. After someone else read the first (and title) poem of the book, I just had to inquire, "Shall we applaud after each point?" I got a laugh for that and for my follow-up volley "15-Love, then!" I had, I think, the good sense not to kill that joke by continuing to call out the "score." Then, observing that only the men in the group were reading (Karen and a grad student had pulled up chairs where the net judge would be seated), I slid over to Karen, reached across the net, declaring, "We ought to make this a spectator sport!" I swear, though, I was not losing focus on the text, despite my low-friction antics.         My wife and I have arrived in Buffalo, our new home, and have been settling in as quickly as possible into our apartment and our respective jobs. Alas, that meant a hefty delay in getting all of the pieces of this issue of Unsplendid together. With our move, that now makes all three of us editors who have moved since we started the journal a year ago and a bit. Hard to imagine how we would be able to maintain production if it weren't a web zine, and if we couldn’t use various web-based means of communication and file exchange. All of which is to say, we apologize for the longer wait on issue 2.1, and, because we are now effectively only three editors, Unsplendid will only put out three issues a year—yes, we're going triquarterly, with slightly more poems per issue to make up for the now-absent fourth edition. We hope, with that additional time afforded us, to make more ventures into other dimensions of the journal—broadsides, more real-time news and postings (perhaps a blog?), soliciting more translations, interviews, reviews, and essays, etc.

The Making (and Breaking) of a Sonnet         For what was essentially my last huzzah in Baltimore, Smartish Pace editor Stephen Reichert pressed hard to get a smattering of poems from the just-released issue 15 reprinted in The Baltimore Sun in advance of the launch reading to be held early in the summer. His success is testament to his persistence and persuasiveness, no doubt, but tempered by how the newspaper went about it. Mine—and I can't speak about the others at the moment, as I don't have them before me—appeared on the third page of the "Ideas" section, a misnomer if ever there was one, for at least 90% of the page was plastered with discount clothing store ads, leaving my poem to float towards the top, directly and incongruously adjacent to a graph about gay marriage. Me, I'm proud to have appeared in The Sun, and unfailingly grateful to Stephen. My poem, however, got a less-than-royal treatment, crammed into two standard newspaper columns pretty much like this: VERY MEMORY Phone card cuts us off, second in a row. To know I’m a neurotic and not to be able to hold onto the burble of Rome behind you, to know I’ll incessantly fret about your walk along an unlit street of shuttered and graffitied negozi, palazzo-flats above, at best 500 square feet, whose occupants won’t give a thought to a stray cat’s wharl below, like a sharp fear I can’t say much beyond “to know… and not to be able”— to know is to abruptly cut to the chase: afraid of anger, silence, a fist on the table, I recall when a call ended meant the end, no word for weeks, a feeling we’d never mend. I was loath to reprint my own work, as Unsplendid has always been about promoting others' work, but otherwise it would be difficult to see how hard it is to recognize it as a sonnet at all. I won't be too hard on the typesetters here, who may never have given much thought to how poems might need a little breathing room, how white or negative space plays into the encounter with the poem, and how when lines are broken there is usually a slight indent granted to the remnant so as to signal how it is a remainder of the line above rather than a free-standing line. To be fair, a cursory glance at poems published decades ago in newspapers and even some small journals will reveal similar constriction of the column width. Is it possible to become accustomed to reading poetry arrayed in such a fashion?         By contrast, I could cite what happens when you have a major critic mulling over the new work by a poet she considers to be beyond reproach: Helen Vendler appraising Jorie Graham's Sea Change in The New York Review of Books, June 18, 2008. Vendler, ever the close reader of form, does her usual work-up of the pattern of Graham's line arrangements, which veer from quite long to quite short. In fact, as a means of illustrating how the shape points towards a rhetoric, Vendler provides the following mock-up of the repeated unit: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx     xxxxxxxxxxxxxx     xxxxxxx     xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx     xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx     xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx     xxxxxx It turns out that in order to give readers a valid impression of this arrangement on the page, the editors of NYRB granted Vendler an exemption from the typical inch-and-some column width and doubled the size. Well, boo-hoo, Jorie Graham gets two columns' worth so her poems don't make one go cross-eyed, and I don't. That's totally beside the point. My thinking instead runs along the readerly line: just how disruptive, exactly, is that breakage of a line caused by a margin? I always tell my students to think about the appearance of a poem on the page—not the 8.5"x11" sheet they are accustomed to, but the more-or-less standard relation of one poem to a page in a poetry collection. Some of their wilder typographical inventions would self-destruct in that relatively constricted space...         The above typesetting issues immediately came to mind when I finally got my paws on Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch's Norton anthology The Making of a Sonnet. Usually I don't cave to such complaints, and so I'll pay greater tribute to the kinds of things I saw there before flashing before you the root of the problem. It is, by whatever account you choose, a broader selection of poems and poets than most Nortons, for one reason that I've always felt has plagued them: the question of including translations of poems from other languages than English. Boland and Hirsch set, however, their section entitled "The Sonnet Around the World"—with terrific contributions by at the very end, or at least before the beginning of the postfatory material.         In this way, the great Italians—Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and the usual suspects—come decidedly after, some three hundred pages after, the first salvo. This be no fusty complaint, as I have been wrestling—and I do mean wrestling—with how to present the sonnet to a new generation of readers and writers in creative writing workshops. Begin with Guido Guinizelli, showing the migration of the form from place to place, tonality to tonality? Or loosen up their gullets with a brash number by Bernadette Meyer or the sonnet silhouette of Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Bean Eaters"? I'll be the first to admit that I oscillate between the two, though I cut many of my teaching teeth at Johns Hopkins, where Jean McGarry's introductory courses essentially took a ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny tack, introducing students to form and meter before turning them loose into free verse and prose poems. I almost always, however, in my Intro to Poetry courses, had a week of "traditional sonnets" followed by one on "non-traditional sonnets," the aim of which was to acclimate the students to the rules they could subsequently break. On these grounds alone I was happy to see Boland and Hirsch's "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," a section collecting oddities and experiments, of which more later. Much like its much-ballyhooed predecessor, The Making of a Poem, which Boland edited with Mark Strand, the anthology leaves discussion of the "making" pretty much out, and most explanatory prose in the book leaves one wishing something else had been penned. On a similar line of complaint, I get the feeling that the 80 pages or so of poets' biographies could have been dispensed with, or heavily edited, given that almost none do anything to contribute to any so-called "psychobiographical" readings of the poems. Lest I seem un-awed by the book, I should say that I have gotten many hours of pleasure re-encountering the old chestnuts and a healthy dose of new tastes, that I found their section of poems illustrating the sonnet in/as the mirror a delight, and that I am grateful for Boland's careful close reading of Kavanaugh's "Epic" in her introductory remarks—it made me return to the poem anew.         But I must return to the issue of typesetting... and here we have the consequence of The Making of a Sonnet's slightly narrower page, the roughing up of Sir Philip Sidney's famous first sonnet from Astrophil and Stella: 1 Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That the dear She might take some pleasure of my     pain, Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make     her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,     I sought fit words to pain the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain, Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned     brain.     But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's         stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's     blows, And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.                         [page break] Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my     throes,     Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,     "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and         write." In short, I think the typography of the above is atrocious. Half of the poem's lines have had to be broken, leaving an odd miscellany of words to get the hard return: pain, her know, brain, stay, blows, throes, write. With seven additional lines added, the poem veers over the page break, a tumbling catastrophe that could have been avoided. That technical requirements have an effect on the appearance of the printed text, and thereby reading experience, and thereby yet further cultural dynamics, is hardly a new idea. Coleman Hutchison, for example, in his PMLA article "Breaking the Book Known as Q," makes some remarkable, if controversial, claims about the Quarto folio of Shakespeare's sonnets, dismissing Auden's belief that the text had been printed unauthorized ("Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published.") as "projected horror" and "deeply indeterminate." In the Quarto, sonnets are scrunched into the page, with only the space provided by each sonnet's number keeping the texts from dissolving into one long 2150-line poem. while monumentality, visual unity, borders, and the like were all conventional choices available to Shake-speares Sonnets, [the editor known as] Q seems to have seems to have deferred such a choice, chosing instead to "not choose" by presenting some but not all poems as visually unified (see [Sharon] Cameron [Choosing, Not Choosing]). I don't know that anyone 400 years from now will be justifying the typesetting of The Making of a Sonnet, but we certainly can say that Sidney's sonnet 1 as it appears there affirms more of Hutchison's questioning: Page breaks [and here, line breaks as well] are not the only abnormal material aspects of Q, but a primary emphasis on page breaks [and line breaks] here allows us to focus our attention on an aspect of materiality that has the broadest implications for the ways that readers conceptualize literary form, encounter the page as a unit of meaning, and experience—or do not experience—what Barbara Herrnstein Smith dubs "poetic closure." Apropos some less vigorous examination of such effects elsewhere, we might find Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595, printed by P. Short (a telling name), as his pages came up a bit short of Spenser's demands, leaving Amoretti sonnet 45's last line to dangle its remnant: But if your ſelfe in me ye playne will ſee,     remoue the cauſe by which your fayre beames                                                           darkned be. This is interesting, for it causes "beames" to sit in the emphatic terminal position, even if metrically it has been diminished by falling where an unstressed syllable is expected, a point less subtly made by "darkned be." Thinking more along the lines of the materiality of the text, "darkned be" now sits in the place of what rests there on every other page of the sequence: the catchword, the first word (or portion of the first word) of the next sonnet. Does inserting a catchword imply that we are supposed to be reading these sonnets at a clip akin to that of page-turning prose? If so, does this swap of remainder for catchword bring us to a screeching halt in the plot of the sequence?         And then you can watch the traffic pile-up in sonnet 77, caused by Short both using the catchword and having to break Spenser's last line prematurely: Her breſt that table was ſo richly ſpredd,        (fedd. My thoughts the gueſts, which would thereon haue                                                              Lacking To be fair to Short, the last line of sonnet 45 is hexameter, the longest hexameter line in the whole book (the others, like the refrain of Epithalamion, "Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr Eccho ring" and its variants, being far shorter), and the long line of sonnet 77 is the only other line in the book that exceeds the length dictated by what were undoubtedly financial and/or mechanical constraints.         Beyond that I have issues with the editing of the Sidney poem before the typographers got their paws on this: for one, I have a fetish, I suppose, for the old spellings. In The Making of the Sonnet, Sidney's poems are modernized, as are Shakespeare's, but only Spenser gets to hold onto his, presumably on the grounds that he was intentionally channeling an already-archaic sound. Phillis Levin does better in her The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, at least letting Sidney's lines speak for themselves, acknowledging that there is some scholarly consensus that "the dear She" should really read: Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That she (deare she) might take some pleasure of my paine; In sooth, I end up preferring this—some of this might stem from my love of the material object of the book itself, exacerbated by the whirlwind three-day training in typesetting I had at the Center for Book Arts in New York.         Acknowledging full well that the sonnet came to England in part through France, where sonneteers were working in alexandrines, and that in England the idea of the sonnet was being still being worked out by such poets as Sidney, we accept his hexameter—indeed it seldom seems anything other than indispensible when it appears. Contrast this with how Spenser was denigrated for having been swayed by the irascible yet unintentionally comical figure of Gabriel Harvey, who wished to be remembered on his epitaph as the inventor of English hexameter.         I have a burr under my skin: what if the hexameter isn't really indispensable? What if we reduce it to a pentameter poem? Judiciously excising approximately a foot from each line, what happens? Loving in truth, and fain my love to show, That she might take some pleasure of my pain, Pleasure cause her read, reading make her know, Knowledge pity win, pity grace obtain, I sought to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, to entertain, Oft turning leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain. But words came forth, wanting Invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled Study's blows, And others' feet seemed strangers in my way. Thus great with child, and helpless in my throes, Biting my pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart." What horrors! you cry. A hatchet job, yes. I should count my lucky stars that the one that Thomas Nashe avered was coming is not any longer able to come for me: "Put out your rush candles, you Poets and Rimers,and bequeath your crazed quaterzayns to the Chaundlers,for loe,here he cometh that hath broek your legs." I should note, however, that I'm not the only one who has visibly conducted such a macheteing of a poem: Raymond Queneau did something similar with two sonnets by Mallarmé, the results of which I'll discuss further below, but from the conclusions of which I'll nevertheless quote here: What is the point of this? Primo, I obtain a new poem which, upon my word, is not bad, and one should never complain if one finds beautiful poems. Secundo, one has the impression that there is almost as much in the restriction as in the whole poem; that is why I spoke of redundancy. Tertio: without going to the far limits of sacrilege, one can at least say that this restriction sheds light on the original poem; it is not wholly without exegetical value and may contribute to interpretation. ("Potential Literature") This exercise on Sidney is one that led me to exactly what I could leave out: any mention of writing. Sure, a few indirect hints here or there (e.g., “read” and “reading” of line 3), but ultimately in this "new" poem we might see a paradox emerging: writing is extraneous to writing. Other variants of this might include that writing is the grace note that writing itself tries to dissipate. Or writing is, if Allen Grossman is right about the lyric, a last resort, and it chronicles its own attempt to erase its last-resortness. Or is it the other way around? Does poetry, by outwardly emphasizing its last-resortness, attempt to elide from its own being its superfluous nature—or at least try to get us to look past how it does not have to be? Can it be that both questions can be answered in the affirmative? These sorts of questions unsettle me.         A more recent adoption of the hexameter sonnet in any fair numbers is to be found in H.L. Hix’s Shadows of Houses, and in it he exhibits concern with similar “problems” that sonneteers might face in going full hex. In “The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle,” a sequence of 56 sonnets, divided up into four sections—each one to a season—containing 13 week-poems and a prefatory title poem interlocked with repeating lines in a descending order, Hix makes a case for the untapped potential of hexameter. The first of the sequence hints at its modus operandi and its achievement. There is something deeply ancient about this poem, a sense that change is itself impermanent, that old patterns echo forth (the sybaritic leaves; the sons recognizable not only by their features but also by their movements, like Telemachus was spotted by Helen), and even that movement is in itself representation. Note the first line, how the single foot of "seedburst" dangles there—a mimetic gesture if ever there was one—the locus versus. The perfect pentameter of the dependent clause which precedes it is like the marvel of the spiderweb, perfect and self-sufficient. But it must await a "catch," which is in this case the inadvertent one, the winged seed. So here we have both contingency and necessity, both potential and gratuity. If a sonnet, be it pentameter or hexameter, have not these contrasting elements at their base, there is likely not an occasion for the poem. It is interesting to note, however, that this poem is one of two in the sequence--thanks to the pattern of interwoven repetition of lines--that begin and end with the same lines. The other, concluding the Summer sequence, was originally published in 2002 in The Drunken Boat, though with a title, "I Believe in the Recurrence," which seems to be a corruption of "I believe in the Resurrection," and which is actually a line in a poem by Agnes Martin, "The Untroubled Mind." This poem, despite its appeal to the recurrent (not merely cyclical) and to the undistressed, has a kind of frenetic almost stochastic energy about it, a tinnier sound, and the illusion that because we are closer to fall that promise is starting to fade past fruition. The first sonnet, by contrast, seems unhurried.         In introducing a selection of poems from "The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle" at the faculty reading this year at the West Chester University Poetry Conference, Hix rather modestly, almost embarrassedly, offered a disclaimer that his hexameter variation on the standard sonnet was "cheating." Alicia Stallings, sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered: That's not cheating! She's right, of course, and in fact her own course on the sonnet was predicated on the idea that the history of the sonnet is one of innovation, competition, and evolution.

When it comes to thinking about the sonnet as the locus of experimentation, it's surprising and not surprising to find Oulipians like Raymond Queneau and Jacques Roubaud at the head of the line, loudly proclaiming the primacy of the sonnet in the history of literature, claiming it to have been an invented form, generating potential for future writers to adapt and channel, being a true Oulipian text, in fact, "plagiarism in anticipation" of the convening of Oulipo in the 1960s and after. I'll have still more to say about Queneau shortly, who, as you may know, lamented the disappearance of fixed-form poems like the rondel and the madrigal, but I do want to turn towards a limited number of possibilities that the invention of the sonnet opened up, namely iterations of itself but with shorter meters. I have already touched ever so briefly on hexameter sonnets. For the next few paragraphs, I'll be examining not a scramble to break the pentameter by bursting the length of the sonnet's lines (I could give a series of lectures on G. M. Hopkins alone), but instead the race down to the immaterial, poets removing feet, down from pentameter to tetrameter to trimeter, dimeter, and at last monometer and what have been variously called "word sonnets" or "monosonnets." In creating this albeit limited taxonomic annotated catalogue, I feel a tad like I'm tracing the trajectory of Lewis Carroll's narrowing mouse's tail.         Perusing anthologies of sonnets at the Library of Congress, I came across several that illustrate the truism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of which one was Sonnets of this Century: Ed. and Arranged with a Critical Introduction on the Sonnet by William Sharp. Sharp is pretty dismissive of variants of sonnets on the whole, picking in particular on one country's worth of scribblers: French writers (who, speaking generally, are seen less to advantage in the sonnet than in any other poetic vehicle) have delighted in much experimentalising: their only genuine deviation is a frequent commencement of the sestet with a rhymed couplet (a mould into which Mr. Swinburne is fond of casting his impulsive speech)—but their octosyllabic and dialogue sonnets, and other divergencies, are nothing more than more or less interesting and able experiments. William Sharp goes on from his harsh judgment above to hold up one ostensibly ludicrous example which I'll get to under the aegis of the monosyllabic sonnet below. I have to question the judgment of some of these early anthologists, though, as it is often the case that they try to temper their own radical claims by holding up for ridicule the claims of myopic predecessors. Samuel Waddington, for example, in his English Sonnets by Poets of the Past (1888), points out how the 18th-century editor of Shakespeare's collected works, George Steevens, once claimed that the now-forgotten Thomas Watson was "a more elegant sonneteer than Shakespeare." That Steevens must have been in keeping with his time's preference for a more decorous, classical allusion-laden verse like Watson's 18-liners in Hekatompathia over Shakespeare's more audacious, self-substantial fuel is easy enough to discern. Where better, then, to turn than Shakespeare's most-maligned sonnet, least likely to hold a candle up to Watson or other sonneteers of that day, for the initial descent into sonnets-with-less? Tetrameter       It is an unhappy coincidence, or perhaps no coincidence, that Shakespeare's sonnet 145 is broadly regarded as sub-par and is his only tetrameter sonnet: T Hoſe lips that Loues owne hand did make, Breath'd forth the ſound that ſaid I hate, To me that languiſht for her ſake: But when ſhe ſaw my wofull ſtate, Straight in her heart did mercie come, Chiding that tongue that euer ſweet, Was vſde in giuing gentle dome: And tought it thus a new to greete: I hate ſhe alterd with an end, That follow'd it as gentle day, Doth follow night who like a fiend From heauen to hell is flowne away.     I hate,from hate away ſhe threw,     And ſau'd my life ſaying not you. In a two-page near-dismissal in her The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Vendler finds this poem to have a "disproportion" of 14 subjects and verbs in its 14 lines "so grotesque as to render the sentence entirely unidiomatic." The poem, in her estimation, engages in "preposterous" activities, the rhymes particularly so: Sweet and greet are too close to hate, state, and straight (especially considering the possible Renaissance pronunciation of swāte and grāte, and indeed the rhyme-vowel a is preserved in one set of the rhymes of Q3—day and away—with the continued internal rhythms of hate and (in the couplet) hate, hate, away, saved, saying. The effect is one of cacophony, not euphony, since rhymes recur faster in tetrameters than in pentameters. (NB: there is no closing parenthesis for the first of these two sentences.) This, I would venture, is what Vendler is good at (as well as identifying typological and tropological themes of interest). She has an ear and does give us a sense of what a given poem reads like in the history of the language and literature in English. If what she says is true of tetrameter and rhyme, then the trajectory I wish to follow is one increasingly one of cacophony, not euphony. At least until the poets dispense with the rhyme, as they do, as we shall see.         Vendler is hardly the only one to cast aspersions on #145. John Berryman thought it wasn't even penned by the Bard, and in his recent biography Park Honan termed the poem "amateurish" and "not beyond the skill of a bright grammar school boy." There are, moreover, those who have argued that this is likely the first sonnet that Shakey wrote, and that his grasp of the expectations of the form was, well, shaky at best. However, I cannot agree with their devaluation of this sonnet entirely. Ever the one to fight for an underdog, I'll rise to the occasion, but be brief.         I'll begin with a complaint about a claim made by a critic that shall remain unnamed that this sonnet must be addressed to Anne Hathaway—not so much because of "hate away" as a pun having its roots in the Warwickshire accent in which both "hate away" and "Hathaway" sound like "het away" (this has been pointed out in several places), but because Shakespeare uses "you" to address his beloved for the only time in the sonnets. A misreading if ever there was one: Shakespeare does not use "you" to refer to the beloved but instead says, with apparent great relief, that the beloved had not used "you" in the sentence "I hate you" to refer to him. In other words, the beloved has not only not said "I hate you," but by implication she has called, or will call, him by the intimate "thou" instead. There's encouragement in this, for both the speaker and for us: for him, the promise of intimacy, for us, the promise that shorter lines might be accompanied by certain adaptations or compensations that admit of companionship or exchange rather than solipsistic pining.       Generally speaking we know the progress of the sonnet in English from the late 16th century to the present: a solidification of iambic pentameter as the standard meter. It was not so in France, as we shall see below with Rimbaud, but there are numerous examples of sonnets by Mallarmé and Valéry that might well fit what William Sharp was complaining about above—would that I had time to talk about those poems at length here. In English, however, it is not for hundreds of years that we start to see poets revisiting the horizontal standard in any significant numbers. Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, wrote a trio of tetrameter sonnets, of which I will only discuss one. The second does have a neat turn at line 9, a clear-cut sestet emerging, though with the first three lines sounding a summary of the octave, In that the foul supplants the fair, The coarse defeats the twice-refined, Is food for thought, but not despair: and echoing very strongly Shakespeare's oddball list-sonnet, number 66 ("Tir'd of all these for restful death I cry"). Shakespeare leaves his lover only just barely opting for life, for encouragement only insofar as "to die, I leave my love alone."—which can be read pretty convincingly as deluded quasi-heroic altruism masking the speaker's unremitting desire for the beloved. But then Millay adds her own twist in the final tercet (the sestet, of course, is rhymed efefgg, the tension between the rhymes' 4:2 proportion and the 3:3 of the syntax being quite powerful): All will be easier when the mind To meet the brutal age has grown An iron cortex of its own. The linebreak at "grown" demonstrates so clearly what Mary Kinzie means by "half-meaning": we imagine that as the mind matures, comes to accept the grief that the world bears us along in, we will experience not mere desire to see ourselves survive for the sake of seeing others (and ourselves) comforted, but more importantly the widening, wakening of the mind. The last line, however, turns hard, more in keeping with the coldness, the callousness, the utter dispassion Millay exhibits in "Sonnets upon an Ungrafted Tree." My curiosity is piqued, though, by "of its own"—a phrase that seems to indicate that the world's brutal core replicates itself in the mind, as though we are susceptible until we become like our environment.       James Merrill, too, has a nice one (at the end of William Meredith's appreciation), an aunt's advice for visiting an elder relative, which concludes with a line that I'm starting to feel, having been at this preface for some time now, ought to have been my motto: "Go now. But do not stay too long."       The tetrameter sonnets of Vikram Seth's monumental The Golden Gate explode Pushkin's Onegin stanzas (ababccddeffegg) into a narrative of certain implexure, infolding plots and subplots that the almost unitary Romance of the Russian lad didn't allow. Not that I'm usually one to buy from Amazon, I did want to see what they had excerpted in their "Look Inside!" tool, and found something rather more interesting than that peculiar kind of editorial choosing: a Toronto-area reader who found the following tetrameter sonnet written by hand in as a preface to the book, easing the worries of anyone who might in that public library lay hands on the book and be immediately turned off by a novel-in-sonnets: Dear friend, don't be intimidated By this, a novel penned in verse: Perhaps you have anticipated That it will be obscure or worse— Solemn, pretentious, and "poetic". Relax! You'll need no anaesthetic. Our author tells his tale with style And wit and charm. Before long, I'll Bet, you'll find yourself engrossed in Each stanza of this narrative Of love and lust, of take and give, Of modern times. Let's drink a toast in Honour of the nerve it took To publish this amazing book. I had been due to go to Toronto this past weekend, but plans fell through, so I can't yet locate said copy to see if it's actually true that someone "defaced" the book as such! Instead, I can at least point us to the great ars poetica sonnet 5.4 in The Golden Gate, one that touches on the matter at hand, and does so with brilliant flourish, at least through the first eight lines: Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter? Because it once was noble, yet Capers before the proud pentameter, Tyrant of English. I regret To see this marvelous swift meter Demean its heritage, and peter Into mere Hudibrastic tricks, Unapostolic knacks and knicks. The sestet, pushing back in a sort of muted carpe diem manner, plays off of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and concludes that brevity is a mortal necessity, sounding vaguely like Frost's late half-tongue-in-cheek epigrams: The time is not remote when I Will not be here to wait. That's why. Trimeter and Dimeter         We can now head into the conjoined realms of trimeter and dimeter, conjoined because the examples of which hold Of Bishop's eponymous sonnet, much has already been written. James Olney, for example, makes a pretty convincing case that this poem, short and compact as it is, is Bishop's most distilled effort of enclosing life and the memory of it with a few lines. I'm not as prepared to accept his math in saying that it alludes to over half of Bishop's own poems, but I do think that he has the idea of constraint-followed-by-release correct. In his presentation of the poem and the audio recordings of Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, and Gail Mazur reading the poem at The Atlantic's website, Lloyd Schwartz has some interesting background material to contribute, including the variant line in the original version published in The New Yorker: instead of "a creature divided" we find "contrarily guided," an initial phrasing I think we can all agree was best left behind. The inverted sestet-octave proportion, compounded by an erratic—which is not to say carefully planned—rhyme scheme, the glancing rhymes, syntax akimbo, and the volatile imagination like quicksilver all point to how Bishop did not so much put the sonnet "under pressure" (as Jeff Hilson labels the innovative impulse, as though the sonnet is an oppressive system) as pull at the weave until she can reweave it in her own pattern. Is this what will increasingly occur as we get closer and closer to nil for each line, an increasing "disregard" for the conventions of sonnets?         Mona Van Duyn, on the other hand, opts for the straight Shakespearean rhyme scheme in her many poems she that termed "sonnets for minimalists." The titles of the most anthologized (i.e. "A Double Sonnet for Minimalists" and "Sonnet for Minimalists") have much the same effect as that of Mary Jo Salter's "Half a Double Sonnet": they posit a light, almost jaunty stance towards the seriousness that the sonnet form implies, and the effect is to begin to read with less gravity than the poems' sense of wonder ultimately demands. That initial "cognitive dissonance," if we may so term it, strikes me as deliberate and effective. Van Duyn's minimalist sonnets, which are to be found in their greatest numbers in the 1990 collection Near Changes and the Pulitzer Prize winning Firefall published two years later, do not merely adhere to dimeter, though many of the most memorable lines are so: "The world's perverse / But it could be worse." And speaking of a snail, as though channeling "The Spiral," a delightful story in Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in which the protean ancient narrator Qfwfq fabricates a spiral shell for love, Van Duyn eases into: "its thought will find / Fibonacci's mind." Monometer, Monosyllables, "Word Sonnets," and Monosonnets         I will begin with a foray north of the border, to Seymour Mayne's cultivation of the "word sonnet" in Ricochet and an edited online collection, Foreplay: An Anthology of Word Sonnets. Desperate to save money (the god-awful photocopying prices at the Library of Congress will set you way back), I copied into a notebook in the requisite pencil all of Mayne's poems from Ricochet, fourteen to a page. The immediate effect was to see that almost all of them are comprised of one grammatically sound and often uninterrupted sentence. Is this the natural effect of stripping away feet to the bare minimum? Some have suggested that he and his friends achieve a kind of haiku-like effect with these word sonnets, perhaps reflecting the stillness of the Canadian landscape.         "Why has Ottawa offered so fertile a ground for the word sonnet?" he asks, and his answer moves off in a way we might not expect: "Is the writing a subtle revolt against the garrulity and bureaucratic discourse that flourish like dandelions in the national capital? A need for succinct utterance in a time of public and electronic surfeit of words?" As much as I identify with the need to create a counter-discourse to the language of bureaucracy, the discourse of dehumanization, prejudice, callousness, and exploitation, I also sense that such a stance can produce reductive responses. Word sonnets risk a great deal in their brevity, and I have found that most of Mayne's poems, and those of his associates, don't rise to the standard he sets for them in his note at the front of Ricochet: "Each of the word sonnets attempts to be a pithy and suggestive poem in its own right. Many [...] also aim for a compact resonance that may attract the reader to return to them again and again." This sort of preface to one's own work, I think, is asking for trouble.         One suggestive poem is one that draws on Mayne's other main line of work—as a translator from Yiddish ("Yiddish" is about 2/3 of the way down that page). As much as I am a stranger to Yiddish and as much as what I don't know is a constant, even obsessive draw for me, this poem gives me far less of a sense of the spiritual continuity of the language from the body of ancestors than does the work of Yiddish writers in translation (H. Levick, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and Yehoash, to name but three). That would seem to me to be a measure of success or failure of a poem of this sort. After reading it, I actually feel compelled to return to absorb the ambiance of ancestral weight in Delmore Schwartz (say, "Jacob" or "The Children of the Czar") or Bernard Malamud (The Fixer) or Kafka than I am to these fourteen words. But maybe that's not a point of detraction, ultimately, if it makes me want to read.         None of the Canadian-manufactured word sonnets rhyme. Which makes it odd for Mayne to call up what he proclaims to be the inspiration for his invention: the earliest example of a monosyllabic sonnet, Brad Leithauser's famous "Post-Coitum Tristesse," from 1985. It is a perfectly rhymed Petrarchan sonnet, monosyllables straight through, a voice interrogating the inarticulate male, we might assume, about his unstoppable drive towards "some / hum- / drum / come"... is the persona female? objective? Does it matter? Edward Hirsch notes in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry that the poem concludes—"Hm..."—on a sigh, but I beg to differ. The poem seems to claim that there can be no other than a bodily response to an inquiry about the body's will: the largely uncommunicative "Hm..." cannot merely be a male's desire to avoid pillow talk at all costs, but it has close ties to the low gutteral hum of a bodily machine in perfect working order, having no need for self-reflection. In fact, self-reflection of the wrong sort might lead to embarrassed self-consciousness and, in turn, self-consciousness to, well, trouble keeping it up. Leithauser's is, to be sure, a snappy number, and quite sly, but it is hardly the first monosyllabic sonnet.         Arthur Rimbaud, for one, wrote at least one and published it in the offbeat Album Zatique, Conneries 2e serie 1. Cocher ivre Pouacre Boit: Nacre Voit: Âcre Loi, Fiacre Choit! Femme Tombe: Lombe Saigne: —Clame! Geigne. English version by Martin Sorrell     Boland and Hirsch do well to single this oddity out for their section "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," but only in the English, which, as I think you can see, loses a great deal, through no fault of Mason. What's more, if you read the French aloud, it doesn't so easily remain unqualified monosyllables: at least to an American or English ear, and in contrast to Leithauser's simple monosyllables (again no point of detraction), these have a far richer sound, their diphthongs lengthening and almost splitting in two, and half-syllables seeming to protrude at the ends of the words. Rimbaud's sonnet seems to sit between monosyllable and monometer. In fact, the first "Conneries" sequence also had a purer monometer (or bisyllabic) sonnet: Conneries 1ère serie 1. Jeune goinfre Casquette De moire Quéquette D'ivoire Toilette Très noire, Paul gette L'armoire, Projette Languette Sur poire, S'apprête Baguette, Et foire. English version by Martin Sorrell         I suspect that these two poems demonstrate the limits in attaining straightforward English syntax while drawing the rhyme scheme out from our minimal quiver of exact rhymes. Watching Wyatt Mason, Martin Sorrell, and other translators make their stabs is like watching a number of poets and assorted others having their way with Clémont Marot's "A une Damoyselle malade" (also known by its first line, "Ma mignonne") in Douglas Hofstadter's massive tome, Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, about translating (and failing to translate) that narrow piece. The same might be said of efforts to Anglicize this poem, by Paul, Comte de Resseguier (1789-1862): Epitaph d'une jeune fille Fort Belle, Elle Dort! Sort Frêle Quelle Mort! Rose Close— La Brise L'a Prise. Epitaph for a young girl Very Fair, She Sleeps. Frail Sort, What Death! Rose Close— The Breeze Seized Her. This sonnet is the one that William Sharp holds up for ridicule: "The paring-down system has reached its extreme level in [this] clever piece of trifling"...         Now another word about Queneau and his "haikuization" of Mallarme, "haikuization" because his cutting up of two sonnets into ribbons that only contain 1-2 words from the end of each line strikes him, somewhat inexplicably, as making "Asiatic" verse that reads down. I leave it to you to examine the results in his essay "Potential Literature."         The vast majority of Mayne's word sonnets, and those by his Ottawa friends in Foreplay, rarely escape quotidian language, apparently hewing to the idea that haiku-like utterances cannot risk being problematic. Perhaps I betray a certain predeliction for tangled syntax (I prefer to follow Yeats's lead and call it "passionate syntax") and a wider vocabulary, but I kept looking for surprising word clusters and signs of a tension-filled relation between syntax and form (usually between syntax and line, but such a space as the "word sonnet" almost precludes talking about those two terms). I was rarely piqued by much in Foreplay and Ricochet.         Sidney Wade, on the other hand, has penned a remarkable, though short, sequence of what she calls "monosonnets," which recently appeared in her new book, Stroke. She has met my criteria for excellence in these word-a-line sonnets: a wry but not self-satisfied wit, syntax that tumbles and twists or comes to an abrupt halt, and multifarious impulses. In my favorite of the five monosonnets, wordplay dominates, but not in a predictable way: Adam and the Snake Prepare to Recite Some Verse Snake says Let's go mezmerize some pomes Adam says I prefer to mammarize them First, a formal matter: the balance of a 7:7 proportion (or more accurately 2:5::2:5, if you prefer). Wade does not fear that even divide, as the first poem of the book, "No Comfort to Be Had," whose title reveals a great deal, and the penultimate poem, "The Weight of Light," are 7:7 "sonnets" of a rhyme scheme that spans the two stanzas (abcdefg abcdefg). Where there is "balance," though, there is no comfort. And even if Adam and the Snake speak to each other as equals in the Garden, we know quite well at bare minimum the disparity in the power between the two. This is a comic poem, but not doggerel in the common sense of the word, I want to argue. Doggerel is daffy and light and almost predictable, insofar as we might even catch where the punchline is headed because the rhyme tells us so. Here we have the Snake's apparent malapropism ("mesmerize" for "memorize"), which could be (1) a verbal slip like the one that Stephen Jay Gould describes in a footnote in the introduction to the 1996 reissue of The Mismeasure of Man, wherein a veritable plague of "mishmeasure" confronted him at every turn, a shift of a sound later in the word to the beginning of the word; (2) a snake's sibilant speech pathology, hissing as he speaks, his tongue sticking out like the obsequious serpent-courtier in the animated Robin Hood, (3) a sly misstatement meant to trip Adam up in some way; or something else still. By mesmerize, do we mean that this is a hint at what Satan will eventually do to Eve, disarming her, hypnotizing her with his explanation of the proper interpretation of the forbidden fruit? Standing alone, the pun is complex enough, but then we toss in the snake's additional (un)intentional pun, "pomes" for "poems." Of course "pomes" is a supposedly non-elite even anti-poetry way of speaking of poems (cf. Jack Kerouac's "Rose Pome" and "Various Little Pomes"), and what could we say but that Satan has degraded himself to be so engaged with Adam. But even more than that, "pomes" is a stone's throw from "pommes," the French word for apples, and is in fact the botanist's term, anyway.         Before we can fully internalize what exactly it might mean to mesmerize some apples, Adam leaps into the fray with his dogged assertion that he'd prefer to do otherwise. His contribution is even more problematic: Is he correcting the snake, asserting his Adamic prerogative to naming, not only the flora and fauna but also actions in the Garden? Has Adam unintentionally slipped as well? In the last case, then we have to wonder what "mammarize" means, exactly. Is it some so-called Freudian slip predicated on repressed sexual urges? Let's recall that Adam has to ask God for a companion! What's more, given that this is a sonnet, we are bound to run up against its traditions and conventions, in this case the Petrarchan commonplace of speaking of breasts as apples. JoAnn DellaNeva recently published an article in Renaissance Studies about one possible origin of the metaphor, and it is not to be found in the relatively prudish Rime sparse of Petrarch but in Pierre de Ronsard's adaptation from Ariosto and Bembo. First, the Ariosto, which previous scholars had noted: The passage in question is the celebrated portrait of Alcina found in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso 7:14, one of the texts that constitute a virtual canon of female beauty for subsequent Renaissance poets. There, Ariosto describes the colour, shape, and movement of Alcina's bosom using the images of snow, milk, apples, ivory, and waves: Bianca nieve è il bel collo, e 'l petto latte; il collo è tondo, il petto colmo e largo: due pome acerbe, e pur d'avorio fatte, vengono e van come onda al primo margo, quando piacevole aura il mar combatte. The mention of fruit – specifically apples – is intended to suggest the roundness of the lady's breasts, while references to snow, milk, and ivory emphasize their whiteness. By adding the adjective 'acerbe'– literally meaning 'unripe' or 'bitter'– to the apple image, Ariosto is, above all, introducing the notion of Alcina's apparent youth (though it is later revealed that she is, in actuality, an old hag who merely projects the image of youthful beauty for the benefit of her hapless victims whom she instantly seduces through her physical charms). Furthermore, as [Michael] Riffaterre reminds us, the apple image is related to the traditional vision of the body-as-garden, a topos that can be traced back through medieval poetry (and, one might add, beyond, to the Song of Songs). The deceptive Alcina as Eve seems an obvious, perhaps too obvious, conflation. And then, the Pietro Bembo sonnet, which was widely circulated and which is responsible for helping to solidify the Petrarchan catalogue of the lady's physical virtues. DellaNeva wonders whether or not Ronsard understood Bembo's "senno maturo a la più verde etate" such that "senno" (wisdom) is distinct from "seno" (breast), and she concludes that Ronsard's "sein verdelet" ("greenish bosom") when allied with what he also says of Cassandre, that she has a "coeur meur" ("mature heart"), means that he was likely cleverly playing with the phonic similarities as many Renaissance humanists loved to do. What does Ronsard's mature-greenish Cassandre have to do with the monosonnet in question? Maybe not that much, though I think it bears greater consideration: Is Eve green or ripe? Mature beyond her years? Is Adam truly ready for her company? Or can he only conceive of her in erotic or corporeal terms? Will they be able to converse as equals, as Milton thought necessary in a successful marriage?         What I do greatly enjoy about Wade's Adam is that he is reversing the tide of metaphoricity (did I just use that word?), rather than fructifying the breasts, he is "mammariz[ing]" the apple, an immensely more problematic move, more problematic because (1) it doesn't have an easily identified context like that of the Renaissance blason, and (2) we know that equivalencies between vehicle and tenor typically have something of a unidirectional quality, hence the trajectory implied in the word "metaphor" itself, and so what does it mean to do a figurative u-ey of this sort?         Is it that Adam realizes that he too has made a mistake? And moreover, are we hearing this conversation as pre- or post-lapsarian? The Snake and Adam speak as though they are equals. If pre-lapsarian, it recalls how in Paradise Lost Adam speaks on par with the archangel Raphael. If post-lapsarian, Adam and the Snake have been punished, partners in crime, by being cast out of the Garden. Is the recitation of poems supposed to serve an elegiac function, help the two exiles console each other? And who, then, wrote the poems in the first place? And how does all of this converge with the pre- and post-Babel divide? Are they speaking in Adamic language, or is the "preference" of each for his own variation on "memorize" a reflection of the fragmentation into many languages? Can they understand each other?         Regardless of these fascinating questions, this negotiation-as-banter sounds to my ear more like a Vaudeville act than anything else. I can almost hear Adam's pitch begin to rise as he's about to deliver the killer word in the punchline, though because there is no meter to clue us in, we have no way to predict what it will be. We also expect a punchline to be snappier and shorter than the set-up, which in a sense makes the parity of 7:7 feel more like 8:6. Depending on my mood I could hear the ever-prudish Jerry Lewis, Benny Hill, Rodney Dangerfield, or Stephen Wright cast as Adam. Better still, it's like Mel Brooks is rewriting Paradise Lost. Seriously, though, folks, Adam's repartee makes us laugh almost exclusively because of the pace of the delivery—we hear the similarities in sound and giggle by reflex rather that reason. This surely is a new version of Eliot's "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." But it's better understood, I think, under the aegis of Octavio Paz's great line that "Laughter renders everything ambiguous."         I had thought I would treat another of Wade's monosonnets, but I think one will suffice to show how rewarding such short pieces can be, and how Wade tends to move in her poetry: every gesture is just beyond the range of anyone's crystal ball. There are others who have taken on poems of such minimal length: Piers Hugill, Harry Gilonis, and above all—and perhaps now most notoriously—Tim Atkins, for his sonnet 20, comprised of fewer than 14 words, and with placeholders to indicate where a line could have been. Ron Silliman reprints the whole sonnet in his review of the sonnet anthology in which it appears, and scroll down for some lively debate about Atkins's contribution to the history of that received form.         We now have reached the point of nullity. No syllables per line. Fourteen soft breaths in hyperventilation, or what have you. What have we seen in all of this? That with experimentation there seems to be compensation for alleged offenses. The shorter sonents seem, among other things, to (1) become more jovial and ironic, (2) exhibit a defensiveness against being labeled a trifle or a novelty, (3) admit multiple levels of interpretation, and (4) generate an ever-propagating list of intriguing oppositions: perfection-imperfection, autonomy-dependency, constriction-release, loss-gain, private-public. The end of this tale/tail points me to that recent anthology in which the Hugill, Gilonis, and Atkins sonnets appear, and which may point to ways of toying with the sonnet form that escape this duality of obedience-reward / disobedience-guilt, or vice versa...

The Reality Street Book of Sonnets I hope that I have not bored with these horizontal variations on the standard sonnet. I have been teaching my students for years to write "non-traditional" sonnets in my introductory poetry workshop (and will do the same in next semester's course at Buffalo). The poets in the final book in my review-preface would likely view these interests in meter and word-count as myopic, parochial, etc., were it not perhaps for the ways in which they demonstrate an interest in the sonnet as a form of arbitrary procedural constraint as any other. The Reality Street Book of Sonnets arrived just in time for me to complete this tract, and I am grateful to Ken Edwards for the review copy and for publishing it.         To a T, every one of these poems might seem heretical by New Formalist standards (and here I'll repeat Alicia Stallings' question, "What is a New Formalist?"). Ultimately, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets is a testament to the understated and often unacknowledged resonance of received forms among the avant-garde (again, "What is the avant-garde?"); for more on this look to, for example, Joseph Conte's commentary on Ashbery and Zukofsky's sestinas in his Unending Design. The poems in this collection, by and large, might be said to be paragrams, in Steve McCaffery's definition. Here's Marjorie Perloff on the matter in an essay on his work, "'Inner Tension / In Attention': Steve McCaffery's Book Art": [P]aragram, which McCaffery defines, following Julia Kristeva and Leon S. Roudiez, as a text whose "organization of words (and their denotations), grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinite possibilities provided by letters or phonemes combining to form networks of signification not accessible through conventional reading habits." The paragram "is that aspect of language which escapes all discourse" This tickles my fancy, in fact. . . . we have to ask what "conventional reading habits" are now, however, a century after, say, Apollinaire gave us his calligrams, which was the springboard for N. Katherine Hayles's keynote lecture (available here in video soon, I hear) on certain cognitive dynamics of reading, in particular the spatialization of time, at Buffalo's Digital Humanities symposium a couple weeks back. She was right to point out the disruption that Apollinaire's "Il Pleut" represents in conventional reading patterns, and then to walk us through similarly innovative work by her favorite poet Stephanie Strickland and others. Hayles never said it, but I was thinking it: I want every poem to invent its own kind of reading. The best sonnets and the best sonnet sequences do—and always have done—exactly that, I firmly believe. The greatest value, I believe, of The Reality Street Book of Sonnets is that it is a treasure trove of poems intent on inventing, or intent on allowing the reader to invent (as Bruce Andrews has essentially put it), new kinds of reading.         That said, I suppose it's a reviewer's prerogative, even duty, to point out omissions. Having written an extended explication of Karen Volkman's sonnets last summer, I have to make a pitch for her work in Nomina (BOA Editions). She has been publishing these poems pretty widely for the last few years, and they have more to teach about the practice of poetry now, and lyric poetry in particular, than Ron Padgett’s tribute to Andy Warhol which is comprised of "Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" repeated 14 times. Snarky, yes, and maybe we could talk a while about the complications of stance in that utterance, but let's just admit that once we've glanced at the first two lines, we don't need to read the rest. I'm more satisfied with Sean Bonney's visual "writing through" of Astrophil and Stella (erratic sketched star-like patterns suggest a problematic relationship between stella/star and stela/pen) in RSBS, and curious to spend more time with his Baudelaire translations.         And then there’s the question of origins of the “linguistically innovative” sonnet. Hilson pegs Denby as the first, taking Williams at his word that nothing of interest could come of a sonnet to indicate that there had been long arid spell for the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps Frost is the progenitor of the "School of Quietude" (and I do acknowledge that a lot of drivel has been written in imitation), but anyone who takes "Design" as humdrum linguistically needs to reexamine his priorities. Here is Carol Frost (no relation, I believe) in an essay "Frost's Way of Speaking" from the Winter 2002 issue of The New England Review: "Frost seems temperamentally opposed to creating a neat pattern of thought. He seems more intent on getting several disjunctive ideas and tones roiling through the lines to get readers questioning." I would only substitute, in both of her sentences, the tentative "seems" with an unabashed "is." For all the folksiness attributed to him, and which he embraced in public, Frost had more iconoclasm and subversiveness in his proverbial right pinky. "Design" more conspicuously demonstrates the slipperiness of the signifier, the difficulty of talking about authorial intention/presence, and the "bitter logic" of representation than a vast majority of works whose purpose is to foreground only those things. I was greatly disappointed to see Hilson fall into facile anti-meter stance, saying that iambic pentameter tends to make him "seasick," and I wonder if that revulsion makes anything that can be stuck with the the straw-man "strenuous-aesthetic" label simply unstomachable. What an irony, then, that anything in the least bit characterized by what I will now label not reading ease but readingese should be illegible.         I'd also point out another figure of great importance to innovative sonneteering around the time Denby was starting out in the 1940s: Gwendolyn Brooks. Her "Gay Chaps at the Bar" sequence did more than pick up the tradition of African American poets—McKay and Cullen, in particular—writing sonnets. For those writing in the Harlem Renaissance, there may have been the trace of beating-you-at-your-own-game behind the sonnets, but with Brooks, she has started to unhinge her syntax, not just to match patterns in speech she heard around her on the south side of Chicago. Ron Silliman has already rightly noted that Louis Zukofsky's "A"-7 was a precursor, if not progenitor, to these sonnets (it is, in fact, a crown of seven sonnets, although with only phrases stitching the sonnets together, rather than whole lines). I very much like what Bob Perelman has to say about this (among other things), beginning with proposition 74—"Purportedly perfected forms, when divided or multipled by Zukofsky, produce irrational numbers."—and following, including a full sonnet (albeit in ugly web-default double-spacing) from the sequence.         All of that said, I do genuinely think that the RSBS has a tremendous amount to teach the world about the development of the sonnet in the last 60+ years. Time was when I bristled at any appelation granted a poem that was clearly not a sonnet. With time, it's easier to see the appeal, and this anthology has responded to poets who have been busily creating and occupying a niche in a liminal space I find valuable to journey in.         Again, that rhyme is eschewed by the vast majority of the writers here is not surprising. Break the pentameter, break the rhyme, those being the first two rules of the new sonnet. I have high hopes that Jonathan Culler's interest in foregrounding rhyme, and the turn towards "new lyric studies" (a term that amuses me as much as it irks me, since it's the result of a fad-stampede away from poetry and then back again), will make rhyme more palatable, regardless of the issue of "linguistic innovation." Most rhyme here is ironic and often determinedly flat-line exact, as in Lisa Jarnot's "Stein Meat Work": And in the inside there is sleeping sleep and in the outside there is reddening red and in the morning there is meeting meat and in the evening there is feeling fed and "Vulpes Zerda Sonnet": O fine fennec fenéstrated and full fennec, I've never seen one in the cold fennec, a moor, with long ears, sharpened toes, near fennel I would place you in font bold, whose sound qualities remind me of a far more abusive effusive alliteration at the beginning of Lello Voce's "Rap di fine secolo": fine finalmente finita fine fissato flusso di flutti feroci a finis-mondo a finis-terra a finis-tempo fibula finta e fine fetta-fibroma frutta friabile e frugale filo e fiore fretta fugace fine fra fini fine fra feste fine fra folti boschi d’inganni e utopie e terrori che vagano tra il ponte e il fondo della stiva del mondo col fumaiolo in stelle e feste e fuochi e fumi verso il cielo Or in Julianna Spahr's found poems, rhymes emerging from quotations found in newspaper and magazine articles by turns shows their insipidness or their prescience, as in this sample: No matter who you are as a teen, you're in the same kind of limbo— old enough to do stuff on your own but young enough that people say "you're just a teen." Some dudes are into girls who are all boobed up and made up, but I'm just not with that. I'd rather hang out with a girl who's supercool to talk to, someone I can joke around with. Philip Nikolayev's "embedded" or "immured" sonnets also rhyme, and Hilson has given us a nice representative sample, though he leaves out the most ars poeticky of the lot, "Insects in Amber," which can be found in Ben Mazur's review of Monkey Time (there are others in Letters from Aldenderry, apparently, recently out from Salt). As with Greg Williamson's "Double Exposures," the parallel texts could have been clumsily handled, but we feel in confident hands in each case. Some of my former students are keen on saying how much pleasure and encouragement they got from my declaring of Williamson, "Well, someone had to do it!" implying that he opened up possibility, much like the Oulipians would have appreciated.         And coming to the end of the very brief list of those employing rhyme in their sonnets, Jen Bervin's Nets each playfully gray out portions of Shakespeare's sonnets (hence sonNets) and yield "hidden" narratives and/or lyric moments. Of the ones included in RSBS, I'm most drawn to sonnet 2 ("When forty winters shall beseige your brow"), which becomes reduced to "a tattered weed of small worth asked to be new made". In Bervin's deletions, the ghost of the meter and the ghost of the rhyme are plainly visible, whereas in Steve McCaffery's own variations on the Bard's sonnets retain only the ghost of the rhymes, with those words incorporated into prose text and italicized lest they be lost. Those prose pieces are a part of a nearly completed book, Dark Ladies. A Masque and User's Guide to the Tragi-comic, and they weave together monologues delivered by characters from Shakespeare's plays, as though they have become stock characters in some latter-day commedia dell'arte. He begins with Act 1, Scene 1. Enter Polonius. I may be Denmark's politician of the decade but I'm so cognitively constipated these days that a thought from me instantly becomes an endangered species; it makes you wonder how I've made it so far in politics and why I've never approached life with that eschatological indifference so popular during the dissolution of the monasteries. ... and continues with Banquo, Macbeth, Falstaff, Pistoll, Robin, and others. The rhyme words of the sonnets—here in Act 1, Scene 1 we begin with Sonnet 1, though the next monologue by Banquo incorporates the end-words of Sonnet 47—appear such that "thee" is replaced with "you" (lest the language need to take on a Renaissance character) and the prose moves from the 14th end-word to the 1st and then back again. It is a fascinating undertide welling up and then receding again as the monologue yawls and pitches. Like Taj Mahal, there is an inbuilt imperfection right in plain view: Polonius leaves out an italicized "be" between the appearance of "you" and "niggarding," but slyly works it in: But to turn to the temporal matter at hand, once upon a time seems reasonable, in fact I love the idea of being upon time as I'm rarely in it— here the gerund "being" and the first-person singular in contraction "I'm" don't receive the italics, and in fact if we imagine the poem aloud, it could be written as follows for the emphases: But to turn to the temporal matter at hand, once upon a time seems reasonable, in fact I love the idea of being upon time as I'm rarely in it— since the position of being relation to time is the crucial distinction. This entices me to consider not just the ontology of being in fiction ("once upon a time" signifies fiction, except perhaps if you are Raymond Federman)—as opposed to Being in fiction—but also the problematic being of the young lad implored by the speaker of the sonnets to not refuse the perpetuation/multiplication of his beauty. That young lad, whom we now might somehow conflate with Laertes receiving his father's advice, must now live a less-than-charmed life, as '"starting to decease" means "not to die"' and we're seeing as mere flashes of memory "that meta-linguistic striving to increase the possible ways for us to die in language."         The best of the sonnets in RSBS do similar work, forcing us into new relations with language, and also with the form. Robert Adamson's thought-experiment sequence, Sonnets to be Written from Prison, provides perhaps the clearest articulation of the dilemmas and desires of the poets here, how to escape the inertia of the sonnet's history, what it dictates to us, and how to conceive of what is keeping this world from splintering off into a million different factions now that the center will not hold: Here's the world — maybe what's left of it — held together by an almost experimental sonnet. Surely there must be some way out of poetry other than Mallarmé's: still-life with bars and shitcan. That's only one way of looking at constraint, of course...         Alice Notely, in her introduction to Ted Berrigan's Sonnets notes that even though the book had been out of print for decades it had been a windfall for the turn towards the sonnet among the avant-garde. It was a nice convergence to be revisiting these sonnets when the aforementioned Ashbery reading took place, for Notley explains that Berrigan had read, re-read, and memorized The Tennis Court Oath (which, we should note, is pretty much what Ashbery said about his encounter with Bishop's North & South), and took from it a sense of how to maintain consistent style, even while embracing disjunctive poetics. His most-obvious shout-out to Ashbery comes in the anthologized Sonnet II, abbreviated "How Much Longer Shall I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine"—leaving off "Sepulcher". In rather conventional anthologist's form, Hilson reprints this one, as well as Berrigan's famous cut-up sonnet (XV) and its counterpart "original" (LIX). Boland and Hirsch, on the other hand, take what might be a more risky selection of edgier-sounding sonnets, at least from their first lines: L ("I like to beat people up") and LXXII. A Sonnet for Dick Gallup ("The logic of grammar is not genuine it shines forth"). Although I very much dislike how sonnets XV and LIX are presented on that website I have linked to, with the line numbers squished up against the lines, it will have to suffice for what follows. The simple algorithm of this poem's self-collage has a spiraling symmetry found in sestinas, but here it is without the serialization that could yield fourteen different permutations before the fifteenth would be the original order—like a cardsharp's deck perfectly shuffled time and time and time again eventually returns the cards to their original order. Why didn't Berrigan generate that whole sequence of Brainard-Monroe sonnets? Even he, with all his interest in Whitehead's notions of time and repetition, might have gotten bored with it. But the more compelling explanation comes, I think, in the fact that this poem, being a disassembled sequence of complete sentences in enjambed lines, does not merely read straight through with all of the disjunctiveness creating interesting juxtapositions and random syntactic bursts and blurts—it also invites the eye to move about in a nonlinear manner, absorbing the disparate strands and reassembling them based on what "sticks"—say, "white-" adheres to "washed" and so on. If we reassemble the pieces, first as groups and then as the whole, there is, I think, great pleasure to be derived from (1) feeling the pathos of the poem's memorial to Marilyn Monroe and to Joe Brainard's sentiment both emerging into coherence, like watching Frank O'Hara breezy stroll interrupted by the news Billie Holiday's death, and (2) seeing how the apparent chaos of the collage is actually governed by a beautiful simplicity, perhaps akin to the beauty of what chaos theorists called strange attractors.         I think that it would be a relatively simple matter to demonstrate that the effects of Berrigan's self-substantial collage are highly dependent on the syntactical patterns in relationship to the line breaks. One way would be to draw on heavily end-stopped lines such as can be found in Renaissance sonnets. I hate to make Sidney my whipping-boy in this preface, but I'll do it again, regardless, with sonnet 104 from Astrophil and Stella, a sonnet that my generous, imperturbable colleague Stacy Hubbard reminded me of in the process of her own research, writing a paper about Edna St. Vincent Millay's largely neglected sonnet sequence that she also reminded me of: "Sonnets upon an Ungrafted Tree." Here is the Sidney original: Enuious wits what hath been mine offence, That with such poysonous care my looks you mark That to each word, nay sigh of mine you harke, As grudging me my sorrowes eloquence? Ah, is it not ynough, that I am thence, Thence, so farre thence, that scarcely any sparke Of comfort dare come to this dungeon darke, Where rigours exile lockes vp all my sense? But if I by a happy window passe, If I but starres vpon mine armour beare, Sicke, thirsty, glad (though but of emptie glasse:) Your morall notes straight my hid meaning teare, From out my ribs, and puffing proues that I Do Stella loue, fooles who doth it deny? This is that beautiful sonnet in which Astrophil declares his joy at writing Stella's name in the condensation of his own breath upon every window he passes—I'm almost loath to do what I'm about to do, but it's all in the name of art. And so here is the recast version, as per Berrigan's method: Enuious wits what hath been mine offence, That to each word, nay sigh of mine you harke, Ah, is it not ynough, that I am thence, Of comfort dare come to this dungeon darke, But if I by a happy window passe, Sicke, thirsty, glad (though but of emptie glasse:) From out my ribs, and puffing proues that I Do Stella loue, fooles who doth it deny? Your morall notes straight my hid meaning teare, If I but starres vpon mine armour beare, Where rigours exile lockes vp all my sense? Thence, so farre thence, that scarcely any sparke As grudging me my sorrowes eloquence? That with such poysonous care my looks you mark A few quick observations, some obvious: (1) the unstitched rhyme scheme now yields two abab quatrains at either end of the poem, with three rhymed couplets in between like soprasetta, capicola, and bologna on a cold-cut hoagie; (2) if you hadn't noted it in the Berrigan, one of the consequences of turning the sonnet inside out using this pattern is that smack-dab in the middle of it lies lines 13 and 14 in the order in which they had originally appeared. That latter point, even if the clarity of the argument leading up to them has been scrambled a bit, suggests something paradoxical: the core of the poem's resolution remains intact, and yet, the former 14th line has now become the 8th line, as though concluding the first movement, the octave, which subsequently becomes (a) reversed as lines that once set up the problem now cascade in reverse, (b) challenged in a statement-counterstatement dynamic, or (c) re-resolved in such a manner as an unexpected source of complication has arisen. In short, the 8:6 imbalance is preserved by the mathematical pattern of line shuffling, but the original's emergent equilibrium has now become the grist for the mill of yet newer equilibrium. That has gotten me now to think about shifting a last line of a sonnet I have written forward to the eighth; what new direction might I take if "no word for weeks, a feeling we'd never mend" sat just before the turn? We could ask the same of any number of last lines. What new life would get breathed into them if finality isn't finality?         I really ought to linger on the rhetorical effects of the new rhyme scheme, but that has little relevance to Berrigan's sonnet, so I'll now my transmogrifying raygun on another mid-century unrhymed sonnet to see what happens when heavier enjambment is already present: Robert Lowell's famous "Dolphin," a blank-verse sonnet with a devastating last line that rings the world round. Here, then, is the reworked version: Dolphin My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, drawn through his maze of iron composition When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . words of the collaborating muse, not avoiding injury to others, to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting not avoiding injury to myself— and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, I have sat and listened to too many caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. a captive as Racine, the man of craft, So much for the first 14 lines, run through that collage-wringer, almost seeming to reverse the benevolence of the dolphin ("you made for my body / the glassy bowing and scraping of my will") and explode the speaker's sense that he is trapped ("I have sat and listened to too many / caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,"). And then, of course, we get what had originally been a devastating coup de grâce, now rendered a loopy kind of comment on the collagist's role: my eyes have seen what my hand did.             I now, and much belatedly, introduce this new issue of Unsplendid, with a generous helping of new talent pushing the art of poetry in received and nonce forms in engaging ways. I'll leave you to explore the issue on your own, but I will mention two interesting facets of the issue that may or may not be obvious to the reader. Francis Raven, who by chance is publishing here the only sonnets in the issue, has invented a new form, the haifun, with which he has now completed a full collection, 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible, issued just last month by Blue Lion Books (available in electronic text for free and in print). That book is a computer-generated text, as he says, "The base text of this poem (approximately 37%) was created by reading George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous to my computer and letting its imperfect speech recognition software make mistakes." Lynn Aarti Chandhok's sequence from her book/sequence-in-progress, Traveler: In this Light, plays right into the graphics for the issue, provided by the German photographer Fabian Birgfeld, whose Interior Landscapes series depicts airports worldwide during very late or very early hours (only the rare figure appears). There are so many things to say about all of the poems here, and alas there is not world enough and time. Our eyes see what these writers' hands have done. Enjoy! Oct. 18, 2008 Buffalo, NY

2.1 home - next