Comments on: Sonnetude

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:52:01 +0000

Thanks, Simon, for your continued interest and Devil’s advocacy! I guess I am just not one of those people who think that rhymes, like obedient Victorian children, should be seen but not heard. I don’t consider that “jangling”, especially when it is skillfully done as here. Nor can I hear anything wrong with rhyming “edible” and “fool”–even in “pure” rhyme rhyming with a schwa like that is perfectly traditional or acceptible or whatever you want to call it (not that rhymes need be any of these things!)–take Yeats rhyming “school” with “beautiful” in “Adam’s Curse.”
The difficulty of the Volkman sonnet does not strike me as glib–as “computer generated” might suggest. Sure, it is easy to shrug and walk away and say “I don’t understand it, so it doesn’t mean anything.” But the poem does reward re-reading, at least to me (whereas glib difficulty does not); and while I do not think the poet wants us to take this as a riddle–ah! the moon! A flower! Mortality! There is the feeling that something “real”, about which the poet has thougths, feelings, meditations–is at the heart of this web of language, that this is not a hollow exercise. Maybe that is a trick of the syntax and the similes, I don’t know, but I do not feel this poem is a mockery of sonnets, rather a deeply engaged one.
As for Zukofsky–hmmm. I don’t buy that sonnets need to be wedded to music. Sure, sonnets are not just 14-lined, rhymed-a-certain-way, iambic pentameter poems. That’s one aspect of the sonnet, but I think there is a deeper form behind that superficial form. I would consider 16-lined Meredithian sonnets in the tradition. Some of the earliest sonnets in English were unrhymed. Some sonnets repeat words rather than rhyme them (also an ancient tradition). Nonce rhyme schemes are common. And even Shakespeare has a sonnet in another meter (tetrameter). I think sonnetude is more about proportion and rhetorical structure, about certain kinds of arguments. And about thinking of itself as a sonnet.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:16:42 +0000

How 'bout the seven rhymed sonnets in Zukofsky's "A"? As LZ wrote in A Test of Poetry, “The Sonnet Form is not a matter of 14 lines, set rhyme scheme, 10 syllables to a line, alternating ascending accents, as the rhetoric books have it. Sonnet literally implies the form of the short tune, to which certain Italian poets – Dante, Cavalcanti, and others – wrote words; the form involved the statement of a subject, its development, and resolution. Dissociated from music, the sonnet became merely the poor versification of amateurs, without emotion or sense of the relation of the parts of a composition to the whole.”

By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:14:42 +0000

Perhaps that’s the point at which the formalists and the Oulipons meet?
Simon, yes, except that as a formalist-most-of the-time-lately, it seems to me that the best formalist work (e.g. Donne) provides both experiences at once–fregrounding structures and syntax AND lsimultaneously making a speakable moment. That’s what I try to do in my poems, anyway. The trick is to strike just the right balance, for one’s own time, between the strangeness of the foregrounded syntax, a strangeness which keeps the reader’s heart open, and the speakable moment which can then speak to that heart.
This is not an avant-garde prescription, but, oddly enough, it seems to me necessary to absorb some avant-garde influence in order to achieve the necessary strangeness for it to work.
Totally off thread, and going to check out Bill Knott’s blog,
Annie

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:59:05 +0000

I feel sort of challenged — given my dismissal of ABBA in a previous post to A.E. — to read this work and “report back.” I’ll just deal with Karen’s work (I couldn’t get past the “edible / trying-to-fool” rhyme in Craig’s work, but I may just be in a crappy mood, it could be good.)
Karen’s work reads like a computer-generated Donne. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, just that any kind of sense slides right off the edges like raw egg on teflon. There is no argument as there is in the real John, just the apparatus, like bits and pieces of construction material without a building behind it. The diction — feels like one is reading in the nouns and verbs from a jumbled concordance of the metaphysicals.
I think there are some infelicities (that end-stop at the start of the second quatrain sounds a little hard — and stumbly), but at the same time I would call it a “successful” work in the sense that I don’t feel cheated of my life-force after reading it. apsis-axis sounds quite wonderful.
The rapid jangling of end-rhymes — especially at the beginning, the enjambments are rough going, full of pauses — reminds me of these little toy train-trucks I had as a child, with magnets on each end that allowed you to snap them together. Snap! Snap! Go the lines. Which is very different from how the sonnet goes when it’s written “at the time” — when it is not a recovery project.
In a sense, then, I’d call it an experimental work, avanty gardy, in as much as it is concerned with foregrounding structures and syntax and less about the “meaning-generating” instant or the desire to make a speakable moment. Perhaps that’s the point at which the formalists and the Oulipons meet?

By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:06:50 +0000

Steve and Alicia read me correctly when they chimed in to defend me in Bok’s comment thread. There’s a difference between pointing out (as I do) that historically critics have tended to characterize some modes as more-or-less “masculine” or “feminine” and asserting (which I don’t) that individuals can’t partake of both modes, regardless of gender.
I do have a couple of caveats, though. One is that, a posteriori, women aren’t pioneering mechanical modes of poetry production a la Bok, and (so far) seem less interested in removing the content of their experience from their writing. Decades after the first wave of feminist writing about motherhood, for instance, my generation acts as though it is still groundbreaking to “talk about” it. It’s one thing to theorize about what women and men can or can’t write; it’s another to actually look at what they do and don’t write.
The other is that the most rewarded women in the avant-garde have indeed been the ones that “restored” the lyricism that Langpo excised: Barbara Guest and her Kelsey St. Press epigones; Ann Lauterbach; Susan Howe; Fanny Howe; even Rae Armantrout. The exception that proves the rule is Hejinian.
Gender aside, the lyric is still seen as the “real” poetry. I wish I had a penny for every time I heard: “Yeah, everybody’s talking about [fill in blank with Langpo] but [fill in blank with Palmer, Mackey, Howe...] is the real poet.” It still goes on: “Yeah, flarf is funny, but X is a real poet.” “Real” poetry equated with lyric; “ephemeral experimentation” equated with theory buffs and mild autism. And yet, the avant-garde is continually configured as that which strains against this move back toward lyricism; you know that joke about Dada and MoMA.
By the way, I don’t think of New Formalists as male: Mary Jo Salter, anyone? I do however think of them as domestic(ized), creating family photographs in verse, whereas I follow along the lines of O’Hara’s “I first recognized art/as wildness, and it seemed right,/I mean rite, to me” …. That is, finally, a matter of sensibility; it’s not a contest.

By: Annie FInch

Annie FInch — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:03:55 +0000

Thanks for a good post, Alicia, with some nice examples.
I think you make an interesting point about the sonnet being devalued when it began to be seen as a female form Millay was called the greatest sonneteer since Shakespeare by Edmund Wilson, just before the form went under and began to become the accepted signifier for everything trivial and outdated about poetry.
In response to Christian Bok’s comment that men played the key part in developing the Romantic lyric, of course that doesn’t mean anything about the later history of the form as regards women. Like the profession of secretary and the color pink, things that were originally associated with males have had, in the past at least, a tradition of tosing cultural value when they became associated with females.
I assume Ange was not claiming the lyric or anything else as an “innately” female form; it seems commonly accepted now, as it should be with so many centuries of experience in poetry to learn from, that even the associations between particular forms or meters and particular moods–let alone between particular forms or meters and particular kinds of people–are cultural and shifting.
Annie

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:54:25 +0000

“I have sometimes wondered whether dismissiveness towards the sonnet hasn’t had something—vague, slight?–to do with the sonnet’s being a form in which women have traditionally and conspicuously excelled.”
This got me thinking about the invention of the Shakespearean sonnet – how Philip Sidney and his highly inventive sister, Mary Sidney, worked together. Then I started thinking maybe there’s something inherently female about the sonnet form itself – womb-like. It was the sonnet that drew me into formalism. It was an English woman poet who doesn’t write sonnets, who mysteriously inspired me to start writing sonnets. I’ve even been called a sonneteer – but it didn’t feel anything like an insult, just sort of playful. It’s hard for me to imagine the sonnet as oppressive, when it’s been so inspiring to me. Anyhow, thanks for posting these three delicious poems (and the olives look delicious, too!).

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:16:16 +0000

Here is a link to Bill Knott's blog. Is Knott the first poet with a series of much-admired books from "proper" publishers to go this far into the open-access, Web-based self-publishing route? Charlotte Smith is historically very important, but my nominee for neglected pre-modernist, post-Jacobean writer of lots of very good sonnets is still Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. I'll have more to say about sonnets next week, I suspect, but for now it's worth a pointer to the very fannish, non-academic, neat-to-know-about, and perhaps rather New Formalist sonnets-dot-org.

By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:29:59 +0000

. . .
Poetry – MSN Encarta
… E. E. Cummings, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Marilyn Hacker, and Bill Knott have experimented with the possibilities of the sonnet, …
encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761568296_3/Poetry.html – 57
…
if anybody is interested in how I “have experimented with the possibilities of the sonnet,”
to quote the MSN Encarta Encyclopedia (is it a reliable source?),
please see the four voumes of quatorzains posted
on my blog . . .

By: bill knott

bill knott — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:19:40 +0000

. . .
may i dare mention the four volumes
of quatorzains
(many of which are rhymed)
posted on my blog?