Yes, I confess: I'm obsessed with sonnets. I love reading them, writing them, teaching them. What is it about this little form that's allowed it to stick around, despite its detractors, and falling in and out of fashion, for lo these many centuries? Not long ago a poet/professor friend of mine asked another good question: why do so many poets seem to go through "a sonnet stage" as they are working to find their voices? Hmm. I wrote back, thinking about how the sonnet epitomizes (and dare I say, in a formal way) most of the things that we look for in poetry: compression, flights of figurative language that take us along for the ride, careful attention to the actual craft of the writing, and the payoff at the end: the volta, that turn that steers us toward epiphany or surprise. And oh!, the shapely sonnet: it embodies these in a way that feels right, proportional, measured: it's like walking into a villa designed by Palladio and thinking, “Oh yeah. This is just right. I want to live here."
But then I started to wonder about my own little love affair with sonnets. When did it start? And a funny thing happened (coincidence? I think not). For another reason altogether, I decided to track down David Trinidad, a beloved former teacher who had, over the years in those workshops, given us several poems by Tim Dlugos. Weird enough, David had suddenly appeared in a dream one night (I've already told him about it; it was a nice dream, and not at all alarming!) just as I was trying unsuccessfully to find a poem by Tim that had, metaphorically anyway, saved my life back in those days. Bad bad break-up, you know how that goes, and I had actually taped this poem up on the wall so that I could read it every day before I left my teeny-weeny Upper West Side studio. I didn't remember the title, but I did remember that, just-post-break-up, the speaker "finds a shiny dime from Canada" and eats "the same beef stew he always eats" at a particular restaurant. I wrote to David, who, as it turns out, was two or three pages away from this poem in his typing-up of Tim's manuscript, which David is assembling for publication. He kindly sent it to me:
SONNET
The night he leaves, you find a shiny dime
from Canada. You eat the same beef stew
you always order, at Brigitte’s. Now you
can do what takes your fancy, anytime
you want. You live alone. You take a walk
down Bank Street to the pier. Hoboken glows
with a rich light, and one green tugboat slows
and banks downriver. There’s no need to talk
to anyone right now, as the dark blue
sky fills the water in between the streaks
of silver. In the breeze, the river reeks
a little less than usual. You’re through
and want to ease the pain. You think your art
might do that, but you don’t know where to start.
Tim Dlugos
28 July 77
NYC
A sonnet. And so much a sonnet that it's actually CALLED "Sonnet." I admire the way this poem treats some of the Big Poetry Subjects, using absolutely contemporary language, with vivid, immediate images, and great fluidity in working strictly within the form. I'm grateful to this poem for keeping me company and giving me comfort during some dark days, twenty years ago. But I'm also grateful for what it taught me--apparently deep down in my otherwise forgetful bones--about what a sonnet can be. (Thanks again, David. And Tim.)
