Shouldn't The Sonnet? [by Sandra Simonds]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

                    Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

 

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

 

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 

You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

 

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

 

 

V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

 

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

 

 

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

 

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

 

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

 

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

 

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

 

Comments

[Derace Kingsley]

The farthest-right poets I can think of were the most high-profile inventors of "avant-garde" free verse, and I'm not sure what it would mean to consider nearly all English-language poets who wrote before them Fascists. Voluntary rules in an art do not in any way equal Fascism, and if a person really believes they do, he or she can only be a silly academic with no life experience or imagination.

[Sandra Simonds]

I know but don't you think it's catchy phrase--"a fascist form"? I want to say it over and over!

[Judi]

So anything with rules is fascist, even if you are allowed to break them?

I recommend Don Paterson's book "101 Sonnets" which is an anthology of sonnets regular and highly irregular.

What I hate is if I write something with, say, 16 lines and somebody says, "hey, just take this out and that out and you could make it into a sonnet".

[Sandra Simonds]

I guess it would be worse if you had a 500 line poem and someone said that you should turn it into a sonnet.

[Ian Pindar]

WCW was down on the sonnet generally. See his Intro to The Wedge.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237888

I'd love to know where WCW says the sonnet is a "fascist form" though. I feel I've read it somewhere, but I can't find it. Please, somebody help!

As for experimental poets being right wing. Pound, of course, was a fascist. But Pound's fascism enraged & exasperated WCW (see WCW's Selected Letters). So WCW is a nice antidote to Pound: an anti-fascist experimental poet.

Also, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (ed. Phillis Levin) is a broad-minded colection (including Ted Berrigan, for instance).

[Sandra Simonds]

Yeah some has got to know where the fascist thing came from. Help us.

I love Berrigan's sonnets but left him out because he gets sooooo much time and space whenever the sonnet comes up. Also interesting is how Dickinson and Whitman basically had no use for the sonnet while their contemporaries wrote so many of them (a lot of horrible ones, I should add). Check out "The Baby Sorceress" for example! http://www.sonnets.org/higginson.htm

[Ian Pindar]

Also, just came across this at the very end of WCW's important essay "The Poem as a Field of Action":

"Do you not see now why I have been inveighing against the sonnet all these years? And why it has been so violently defended? Because it is a form which does not admit of the slightest structural change in its composition."

[daniel bailey]

you could turn a 500 line poem into 35.714 sonnets, which is pretty baller, if you ask me.

[Sandra Simonds]

Yes, but why stop there? A 500,000 line poem could be turned into 35,784.83345 SONNETS. Why not turn all LONG poems into manageable 14 line nuggets of JOY?

[Soulclaphands]

Really enjoying your posts.

A possible lead to the sonnet/fascist question -
The following appeared in Google Reader:
"These charges have continued from Pound and W.C.Williams to Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski (who once equated sonnets with fascist politics!) and are doubtless reiterated in brand-new manifestos."

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of this book on hand to see much of the previous text but it is p. 298 of
An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, edited by Annie Ridley Crane Finch, Kathrine Lorne Varnes. http://bit.ly/NDdnPN

[Jilly Dybka (@jilly)]

Marilyn Hacker, in an An Exaltation of Forms (ed. by Annie Finch), says Diane Wakoski is the one that said sonnets are fascist.

There are no footnotes so maybe ask her?

[The Best American Poetry]

Fascinating column. The idea that the sonnet is "a Fascist form" is a variant on the equally ludicrous equally academic notion that "meaning is Fascist." "Meaning," meaning the idea that a statement could be effectively construed, was considered Fascist on an April day in 1981 at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities where lunch was served and an art historian described her recent voyage to an underground grotto in the Caspian Sea. In defense of the sonnet and liberty see Wordsworth and Keats. -- DL

[Sandra Simonds]

but! I am sympathetic to Williams's statement (if he did in fact say it cause no one seems to know)since one of the ways to be new or "modern" is to break free from old forms, right? Pound would have never said this about the sonnet. Some of my twitter friends did dig up an interesting endorsement of the sonnet from Williams in regard to the poetry of Merrill Moore (who the hell is that?)...apparently a psychiatrist who wrote like 30 million sonnets.

[Sandra Simonds]

hmmmm....maybe Diane is our key! Thank you.

[Sandra Simonds]

Thanks, Jilly.

[Sandra Simonds]

Want to make it clear that *I* don't think the sonnet is a fascist form. Rather, I think the idea of calling any form fascist is an interesting one and I hope that WCW did in fact say it, just because it's an interesting argument.

[Sandra Simonds]

Interesting!I think that all of my examples argue that the sonnet does allow for a lot of variation. BUT then some people would argue that those sonnets are not sonnets--of course I think that those people tend to be reactionary conservatives so....

[Jake Adam York]

I don't know where/if WCW said that, but if he did you'd find the source in Stephen Cushman's FICTIONS OF FORM IN AMERICAN POETRY where, if memory serves, there's a chapter whose title quotes WCW: "The world is not iambic"

[Jake Adam York]

Charles O Hartman's FREE VERSE also rounds up some commentary on iambic pentameter being anti-democratic...

[Sandra Simonds]

How can iambic pentameter be anti democratic? super curiouso

[Jilly Dybka (@jilly)]

Merrill Moore poem :/ (from the book A Moment's Monument the Development of the Sonnet by White & Rosen)

How She Resolved to Act

"I shall be careful to say nothing at all
About myself or what I know of him
Or the vaguest thought I have - no matter how dim, Tonight if it so happen that he call."

And not ten minutes later the door-bell rang, And into the hall he stepped as he always did,
With a face and a bearing that quite poorly hid
His brain that burned and his heart that fairly sang, And his tongue that wanted to be rid of the truth.

As well as she could, for she was very loath
To signify how she felt, she kept very still,
But soon her heart cracked loud as a coffee mill,
And her brain swung like a comet in the dark,
And her tongue raced like a squirrel in the park.

[Soulclaphands]

In "The Art of the Sonnet" by Stephen Burt, David Mikics, WCW is said to have "singled out the sonnet as a 'fascistic form.'" Maybe he is best known by the paraphrase of his original comment(?)

[Jenny Factor]

HI Sandra. I truly enjoyed your BAP week!

And thanks for tuning me into kasey mohammed. fun stuff indeed! Do you know Aaron Sorkin's retooling of the shakespearean sonnets, playing but-rimes on largely queered and culturally murked up themes? They are also quirky, experimental and fun.

[Ken Edwards]

You should check out the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which includes Mayer, Berrigan, Padgett and much, much more - http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/jeff-hilson.php

[Mike Theune]

Williams is well-known to have challenged the relevancy of the sonnet form to modern poetry. For example, in his introduction to The Wedge he states, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance” (Collected 54). But when called upon to champion sonnets, as he was in his foreword to Merrill Moore’s Sonnets from New Directions, he does so. What's interesting to me is how he does so: Williams focuses on the volta, on the sonnet's turn. He states:

"Never in this world did I expect to praise a living writer because of his sonnets but these have been a revelation to me. For years I have been stating that the sonnet form is impossible to us, but Moore, by destroying the rigidities of the old form and rescuing the form itself intact–an achievement of far-reaching implications–has succeeded in completely altering my opinion. The sonnet, I see now, is not and has never been a form at all of any fixed sense other than that incident upon a certain turn of mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded: a statement, then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a direct reply, perhaps a variant of the original–but a comeback of one sort or another–which Dante and his contemporaries had formalized in their day and language."