
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?
from the archive; first posted August 15, 2012
This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM
I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM
One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM
Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM
I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM
Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM
Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM
Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM
Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM
Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM
I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM
When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM
The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM
Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM
alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM
I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM
Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM
Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM
My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.
Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.
Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.
Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.
Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM
The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM
I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.
The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM
Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:
Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.
Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve
Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.
Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM