How do you like your "American Sonnets"?
Many here write them. But the writer's views may prove controversial. I found this on the TLS so copied it out because it is paywalled.
I discovered a brilliant Gwendolyn Brooks' poem while reading it.
*****
THE AMERICAN SONNET
An anthology of poems and essays
382pp. University of Iowa Press. Paperback, $39.95.
Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, editors
Everyone knows if you have to explain it, a joke is no longer funny. Erotic dreams are never as provocative when you put them into words. Sonnets are designed to explain themselves, so they are usually humourless and very unsexy. The most pedantic of all the familiar poetic forms, they love to impart a lesson. This is why they feature so prominently on school exams.
This is not to say that sonnets are bad poems. Plenty of poets have found ways to turn the form loose, or else to inhabit its conventions with an authority that has its own severe thrill. But Ben Jonson, who “cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets”, was right to think the sonnet’s primary motive editorial, for the way it distils consciousness into a single unit of commendably clear thought. Meanwhile, in reading a sonnet, we are often forced into what the late Bernadette Mayer, an unmatched modern agonist of the form, calls “a heartless agreeing” with its claims, which tend to be the sort from which it would be pointless to dissent because they are so unremarkably true.
If the sonnet is, as Jonson said, a “tyrant’s bed”, it is also a lectern, and here is what it wants you to learn: small freedoms are possible within a situation of constraint, but they are probably trivial or doomed (death will be proud). Because it is relatively rule-bound (it should have about fourteen lines, a solid metre and reliable rhymes, a change of tone or heart just past its middle, and a kick of eloquence at the end), the sonnet offers itself as the ideal forum in which to explore those freedoms and materialize that constraint. It is a swiftly self-annotating exercise that presents itself as both instance and elucidation, a little song (from the Italian sonetto) that never fails to drive home what it means to sing.
It is customary to describe the sonnet as a European form, even though its origins may lie in the Arabic muwashshah, which emerged in Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries before making its way to Northern Africa and the Middle East. Kamal Abu-Deeb has suggested that Giacomo da Lentini, the Sicilian poet often credited with the sonnet’s invention, heard muwashshahāt at the polyglot court of Frederick II, in Palermo. If he did, he would have noticed, along with the form’s irregular prosody and flexible rhyming patterns, the kharja or envoi tacked onto its end. In Lentini’s sonnets, these parting shots become paradoxical expressions of ascetic desire, twisting each poem into emotional and sometimes metaphysical conundrums, as in the sonnet that begins
Many lovers carry their pain
Inside their hearts, where it can’t be seen
But I’m unable to hide my own,
So that it’s not exposed by my dejection
And ends
For I am no longer much my own,
No more than what my lady sees outwardly,
And the little breath left within. [My translation.]
Many muwashshahāt and sonnets are love lyrics, and fond of drawing an analogy between their own proscriptions and an image of desire as a prison, trap, or shackle; the word muwashshah, for what it’s worth, means “girdled”. In European and English-language traditions, this analogy has become an iron law of association, so that if you hear “sonnet” you are supposed to think “jail”.
In a fine essay in The American Sonnet, a new anthology of poems and short pieces of critical prose, Walt Hunter points out that “metaphors of imprisonment are not the only kind of metaphors scattered across the history of the sonnet”, for if Wordsworth “called the sonnet a cell … he also referred to it as a key and a trumpet and a glowworm”. Hunter’s suggestion is that a too-paranoid view of the sonnet, focusing on its restrictive or persecutory aspects, makes it hard to locate the more defiant uses to which it’s been put. His example of a “plastic and recombinative” sonnet poetics is drawn from the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay, whose “If We Must Die” appears in the anthology along with the firmly on-theme “America”.
Written during the Red Summer of 1919, when anti-Black violence broke out on a huge scale across the United States, “If We Must Die” stunningly transcends the tradition it invokes. The Actaeon topos passed down from Petrarch to Wyatt to Sidney – all of whom pose as men who have become deer shredded by hounds – flips into an image of white-supremacist brutality, as McKay enjoins his readers not to perish “hunted and penned in an inglorious spot … while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs”:
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but – fighting back!
Here the sonnet form, that open grave and unyielding wall, becomes an architecture of transfiguration against which Black Americans might brace themselves as they spring toward freedom. If poetry alone cannot change the world, at least it may ballast those who can.
Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, the editors of this useful volume, mostly consider the sonnet an incarcerating structure. Form binds the poet, whose achievements may then be measured by just how far she is able to subvert the status quo. The thirteen lines of Walt Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” are cast as a free-verse sonnet that bucks the regularities readers of Shakespeare might expect, while Wanda Coleman, by limiting her sonnets to no fewer than fourteen and no more than sixteen lines, gives herself leave to improvise (in her words) “a jazzified rhythm” that mixes high-cultural poetic protocol with vernacular sound. The uneven prosody of Sylvia Plath’s “Sonnet: To Eva” alternately heightens and undoes “our experience of constriction”, while Joan Larkin’s “‘Vagina’ Sonnet” mocks not just the sonnet but also some unnamed poet’s penis as “short … and dignified”.
Malech and Smith’s argument is that the American sonnet, unlike its British and Continental variants, has developed primarily through “the work of historically marginalized poets” whose relationship to tropes of bondage and captivity is sometimes quite literal. When the Cherokee writer Ruth Muskrat Bronson says she has “roamed a thousand worlds” seeking her lover’s face “while chains of ages pass [her], link by link”, her language is sharpened by the collective history of dispossession that frames the plight of the couple: the Cherokee were one of the five indigenous tribes forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States between 1830 and 1850 and resettled west of the Mississippi River in newly designated “Indian Territory”. Bronson’s images of illness, hunger, weeping and exile necessarily recall the horrors of that period, and of a state-sanctioned programme of so-called ethnic cleansing referred to metonymically as the Trail of Tears.
We can think of the American sonnet, then, as Terrance Hayes does: “part prison, / Part panic closet … part music box, part meat / Grinder”. And we can think of it in terms of space, of the tension between the sonnet’s trim, decorous form and what Charles Olson calls America’s “hell of wide land”, with its layered histories of genocide, slavery and environmental destruction. Malech and Smith make it clear that these are the stakes. Every sonnet, they write, is “an oblique interrogation of the purpose and possibilities of the sonnet itself”, but to this the American sonnet adds a politicized interrogation of the purpose and possibilities of the canon. It is “a shape through which to claim literary and social space and … [to] form a transhistorical discourse and transformative literary tradition”.
This seems right. Still, it is said so often here that the idea loses its expository force and – what’s more – flattens the real differences of style, voice, identity, aesthetic and ideological bearing that mark these poems and their authors. As the Kānaka Maoli poet Brandy Nālani McDougall piercingly observes, such a compression is already at work in the phrase “American sonnet”. In a short statement that accompanies her poem “‘elima”, McDougall writes: “I do not identify as an American. It’s true that I am a US citizen, but as an Indigenous person from an occupied place, I did not choose to be one and my ancestors were forced to be Americans”.
The anthology is a genre of compulsory consensus. There is never enough room for everyone, and even the most capacious logic of inclusion distorts those upon whom it is imposed. But if, to borrow a description from David Bromwich, the sonnet arranges “a compact and memorable record where the subject is found, held, and framed as if in a single pulse of thought and feeling”, the critic should help us grasp what is singular about each sonnet as well as what compels its affinity, if not its unanimity, with others of its temperament and type. The thirty-three essays in the volume’s second half – those by Hunter, Carl Phillips, Anna Maria Hong and Jahan Ramazani are standouts – do this beautifully, returning emphasis to what Phillips calls the “restless choiring of provocation, recognition, dissent, nostalgia, inquiry [and] argument” of history, people and poems.
As for the sonnets themselves, there are some great selections. Mayer’s “Sonnet (you jerk you didn’t call me up)” is vital and hilarious, a hearty rebuke of the “bourgeois boys” who squander their cultural capital, their Petrarchan inheritance, by “settl[ing] for a couch / By a soporific color cable t.v. set / Instead of any arc of love”. The avant-garde experiments of Charles Bernstein and Natalie Diaz degrade form into format to protest the winnowing of the soul by consumerism and stereotype. A century of professorial blather about form’s relation to content is disgraced when Dianne Seuss says that “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without. To have, as my mother says, a wish in one hand / And shit in the other”. Most happily, The American Sonnet features three sonnets by Gwendolyn Brooks, the only poet to have more than two entries in the volume.
The last of these, “A Lovely Love”, was first published in The Bean Eaters (1960). It anticipates the aubade that, nine years later, would close Brooks’s free-verse Riot. The latter poem ends with a moment of precarious quiet, as two lovers who, we assume, have been involved in the uprising of the title take their morning leave: “In a package of minutes there is this We”, but, “Because the world is at the window / we cannot wonder very long”. “A Lovely Love” likewise opposes intimacy to surveillance. “Let it be alleys”, Brooks begins, “Let it be a hall”
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lovely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise men, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.
For Brooks, the sonnet is neither jail nor escape hatch. It is merely a “splintery” – battered, uncomfortable – container in which the lovers throw each other around, and whose formal order sorts their joy into something recognizable even if it remains socially undefined. Sex is a secret brawl, and affection is tilted by embarrassment (“our lovely love”, Brooks writes, at once satirical and sincere). “Cannot we delude the eyes / Of a few poor household spies?” wondered Jonson. Not when race and poverty criminalize our very being. Whether the people who “must not catch us” are gossipy neighbours or state agents, they are a threat and a pressure love can defy but not, so far, elude. Brooks’s little song plays all these notes: furtive, indignant, rageful and yearning.
Anahid Nersessian is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Keats’s Odes: A lover’s discourse
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