Sophie Seita Writes Lovingly of the Sounds in Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets

The brilliant Sophie Seita reviews Bernadette Mayer's reprinted must-have Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press 2014), for Lemon Hound. She starts with sound, and song: "The first trill, or turn, rather, is sound; how Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets sound to me, their melodic or imagined graphic contours, their richness, their affective and harmonic range, intervals and ties." And do they need to be read as individual poems or as a cycle, she asks. Invoking Schumann, then:

Schumann’s Eichendorff cycle Liederkreis is composed of stand-­alone pieces but their underlying musical—rhythmic, melodic, harmonic—structure is only legible as a whole. True, the pieces are a ‘romantic whole’, which implies but does not satisfy closure, and Mayer’s sonnets, too, are no ‘cycle’ as such. The last sonnet does not pull towards the first, nor is it a triumphant end-­point prepared by gradual build-up, it is rather an accumulation that is united by textual (syntactic, semantic) and motivic characteristics (open beginnings or endings), or the re-appearance of characters (Grace).

These sonnets are songs that constitute themselves harmonically in a processual revelation, as an everyday epiphanic desiring structure or glimpse of the is and may be. Thoughts doodle and dander, in ritardandos and most of all grace notes—those little embellishments, in small type, clinging but frivolously free, uncounted in rhythm’s measure.

Dante is there in name, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘Most gracious singer of high poems!’) in spirit[1]. Sometimes there are word order inversions, in which the deliberately poetic is synthesised, placed on the dinner table, ‘I’m so mad at you I’m sure I’ll take it all back tomorrow / & say then they flee from me who sometimes did me seek’. The sonnet tradition is here present as citation; quoting Wyatt at the lover as a form of rebuff, and as consolation. Or even more explicitly, the sonnets sometimes foreground their sonnetness:

This is my new form of sonnet
This is the closing of it
Please don’t stop loving me right this moment

Later, beautifully: "A sonnet’s covenant is anticipation, longing, failure, anguish, disappointment, and pleasure, and these sonnets show themselves to be experts or connoisseurs, rather, in the poses and guises of love-­writing." Read it all at Lemon Hound.