National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

Okay. Here's another sonnet, or perhaps "sonnet":

Sonnet
Terrance Hayes

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

Source: Hip Logic (2002)
​

Earlier I had posted Hayes's poem "The Golden Shovel," with which he created a new poetry form, one that has found significant acceptance by other writers. "Sonnet" is something quite different, being ostensibly a poem written in one of the older and more traditional forms. Does it fit the form? Well, it's 14 lines, rhymed (though in monorhyme), and in impeccable iambic pentameter. There is no volta or turn, at least not an obvious one, though the continual repetition of the line might be said to evoke a somewhat changing perspective of the poem, if only because of fatigue.

One could argue based on the stanza breaks that this is a Shakespearean sonnet (three quatrains follwed by a closing couplet), but why bother? What, in fact, is the point of this poem? Is it parody? Satire? Is it even a poem, let alone a sonnet?

Harvard professor and poet Stephanie Burt has said of this poem that "[o]ther Black poets still view the sonnet with suspicion, as a form made by privileged white folks, an ill-fitting mask." Is that what's going on here? That it's some kind of criticism of a form that came into prominence through the writing of old white guys?

I have no idea, but it makes me think of the kinds of things conceptual artists produce, where the object is to make the viewer/reader think.

 

[Tzara]

OK. There's this loosely defined term "American sonnet" that one runs across in various poets' work. It seems generally to mean something like a 14 (or thereabouts) line poem that probably isn't metrical, rarely rhymed, but which like traditional sonnets deals with personal subjects. It may or may not have some kind of volta, frequently has some kind of political bent or theme, often about American society or social issues.

Probably the best known American sonnets are those written by Terrance Hayes (yes, him again), from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. But Hayes's concept of the form was heavily influenced by the Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, who appears to have been the first to use the term and its characteristic qualities.

Here is one of her poems:

American Sonnet 35
Wanda Coleman

boooooooo. spooky ripplings of icy waves. this
umpteenth time she returns—this invisible woman
long on haunting short on ectoplasm

"you're a good man, sistuh," a lover sighed solongago.
"keep your oil slick and your motor running."
wretched stained mirrors within mirrors of
fractured webbings like nests of manic spiders
reflect her ruined mien (rue wiggles remorse
squiggles woe jiggles bestride her). oozy Manes spill
out yonder spooling in night's lofty hour exudes
her gloom and spew in rankling odor of heady dour

as she strives to retrieve flesh to cloak her bones
again to thrive to keep her poisoned id alive
usta be young usta be gifted—still black

Source: Bathwater Wine (1998)
​

Coleman's American sonnets are often called "jazz influenced". As Dan Chiasson says in a New Yorker article, "Coleman adapted the sonnet to the jazz methods of, as she put it, 'progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc.'" As a poet outside of the more typical university/MFA environment, Coleman's work is perhaps not as well known as it should be. Fittingly, her work was largely published by Black Sparrow Press, famous for its publishing another outsider poet, Charles Bukowski.

A somewhat different take on the term American sonnet is taken by Gerald Stern, whose examples of the form often skip even the 14 line requirement:

Still Burning
Gerald Stern

Me trying to understand say whence
say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking,
say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval
Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead,
William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke
and thinking for an hour, how did I get here?
Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar
or 68 or 67 Swissvale,
that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook
reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written,
whoever the author was, me on the floor of
the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged,
walking afterwards through the park or sometimes
running across the bridges and up the hills,
sitting down in our tiny diningroom,
burning in a certain way, still burning.

Source: American Sonnets (2002)
​

Stern's poem is 16 lines, but still personal in its focus. It is non-metrical, but hardly something I would call "jazz influenced."

Lastly, I want to mention Billy Collins' poem "American Sonnet" which doesn't seem to be a sonnet at all:

American Sonnet
Billy Collins

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,
adding to the view a caption as conventional
as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.

We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are,
walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
as you read and turn the thing message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
a piazza or curved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversible display:
a few square inches of where we have strayed
and a compression of what we feel.

Source: Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001)
​

Twenty-one lines is seven elegant tercets, this poem seems to be more about the poet musing on the tight little conventions of postcards, as if they were a kind of sonnet—a compact form with various conventions meant to convey personal emotions. As always with Collins, a lovely, graceful expression of the poet's feelings.

 

[Tzara]

As I suggest elsewhere on the poem-a-week challenge, I've been sick. Sick enough that I have retreated from reading, writing, or even thinking about poetry to pure comfort reading, which for me is mainly detective stories. Detective fiction has traditionally had a kind of second-rate reputation, particularly when compared to more artistic forms of writing (the literary novel, serious poetry, dramatic writing), but some of the most important literary figures have had a particular appreciation for it. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, loved pulp magazine fiction and noir films—and not particularly the highest quality of those (no Chandler or Hammett, for example).

Among poets, the great W. H. Auden was especially fond of detective stories of the English country house murder type and wrote a famous essay about the form, "The Guilty Vicarage." He also wrote a great poem using the idea of the detective story as an allegory for "the individual's loss of happiness." As always with Auden, the poem is beautifully eloquent and rhetorically graceful:

Detective Story
W. H. Auden

For who is ever quite without his landscape,
The straggling village street, the house in trees,
All near the church, or else the gloomy town house,
The one with the Corinthian pillars, or
The tiny workmanlike flat: in any case
A home, the centre where the three or four things
that happen to a man do happen? Yes,
Who cannot draw the map of his life, shade in
The little station where he meets his loves
And says good-bye continually, and mark the spot
Where the body of his happiness was first discovered?

An unknown tramp? A rich man? An enigma always
And with a buried past but when the truth,
The truth about our happiness comes out
How much it owed to blackmail and philandering.

The rest's traditional. All goes to plan:
The feud between the local common sense
And that exasperating brilliant intuition
That's always on the spot by chance before us;
All goes to plan, both lying and confession,
Down to the thrilling final chase, the kill.

Yet on the last page just a lingering doubt:
That verdict, was it just? The judge's nerves,
That clue, that protestation from the gallows,
And our own smile... why yes...

But time is always killed. Someone must pay for
Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself.

Source: Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (1967)
​

As I said, I've been sick, so I won't comment further other than to suggest you read both Auden's poem and his essay (originally published in Harper's Magazine), particularly if you have an interest in mystery and detective fiction.

 

[Tzara]

I saw there was a mention of the villanelle over on JNS's Tanka thread. I've spent some time posting about the sonnet here, so I thought I'd make at least a token post about the villanelle, which might be (after the sonnet) the most popular poetry form among professional poets. Certainly it is one of the more popular ones.

Here's an early poem in the form by Sylvia Plath:

Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Source: Mademoiselle (1953)
​

Plath wrote this when she was very young—just 21 and an undergraduate at Smith College. It was supposedly prompted by her being stood up for a date. Oddly, after its initial publication in Mademoiselle magazine, it was not published in any of her poetry collections while she lived, nor is it in her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes. This is especially odd as it was apparently a poem she rather liked, at least among her earlier poetry.

I think this poem is a good basic example of the form as it is very regular in composition—the lines are consistently in a straightforward iambic pentameter (there's maybe one acephalic line, but the rest are regular), the rhymes are mostly true, the lines are consistently end-stopped. The repetons are faithfully reproduced with no variations. The imagery is a bit, um, apocalyptic, but that's a strength, in my opinion.

Villanelles generally don't seem to have undergone the experimentation that the sonnet has (though that could just be my lack of reading). Marilyn Hacker has written several excellent villanelles that are longer than 19 lines, but which otherwise conform to the form. I've seen some that take liberties with the rhyme (to the point of not rhyming at all), which suggests that poets perceive the essence of the form to be the intertwined repetitions rather than the rhyme pattern.

The only really weird variant I've found is this poem by Charles Bernstein, which is incidentally based on the Plath poem:

Sad Boy's Sad Boy
Charles Bernstein

After "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath

I ruin my hats and all the mat slides glad
I hop my girls and all is skip again
I jump I run you up inside my truck

The car goes looping out in dark and light
And yellow hat slides in
I run my mats and all the girl slides glad

I hoped you skipped me into luck
And jump me black, ruin me glad
I jump I run you up inside my truck

I jump my slopes and all the dopes slide glad
I glide my luck and all is slip again
I jump my hopes and all the rope glides sad

I skip you jump the way you said
But I run old and sigh your name
I ruin my mats and all the girl slides glad

At least when luck hops it skips back again
A rune my mats and all the girls slide glad
I jump I run you up inside my truck

Source: Poetry (June 2007)
​

OK. Doesn't rhyme, isn't 19 lines, doesn't really repeat the repetons, etc. But it still kinda has the feel of a villanelle, despite all that.

Bernstein was (is) a member of the Language poet group (sometimes stylized L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E after a journal associated with the group) that was known for their experimentation and focus on, surprise, language itself.

I find this poem mildly interesting, but can't say much more than that about it. What is it about? Dunno. What is it trying to convey? Dunno. Maybe just sound, I guess.

 

[Angeline]

Thank you Tzara for another successful run of poems. I look forward to the revival of this thread each year and it never disappoints.