Some (P)Arts of the Sonnet

Every generation seems to need a new rehearsal of the sonnet’s history, a new compendium of exemplars, a new set of two-page commentaries. Our age, it seems, demanded its version and so we have, courtesy of Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet.

Sigh.

I suppose it hurts no one to be reminded, again, of the sonnet’s origins in 13th-century Italy, of its importation into English verse by 16th-century diplomats and noblemen, of its enormous popularity among Elizabethan courtiers, its resurgence among the Romantics, and its position as a favorite occasion for experiment (or rabid resistance to experimentalism) among modern and contemporary poets. And yet another volume that takes us from “Whoso list to hount” through Sidney, Spenser, a couple of the best-known Shakespeares, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Millay, Frost, and Heaney is as good a way as any for the small and shrinking poetry-buying public to spend their few discretionary dollars (though I'd much rather they bought new volumes by living poets, like this one or this here other one). The mini-essays on the sonnets here are fine. Burt is a prolific and deft book-reviewer and his skill is evident (disclosure: we were colleagues a few years ago). But I’ve never been quite sure of the purpose served by commentaries in volumes like this. If the book is for students, the commentaries perform some of the work students ought to do themselves as they play with the poems. If it’s for scholars, the commentaries add little to ongoing critical conversations (we'll read Roland Greene on post-Petrarchanism, thanks). And if the book is, as I suspect it will be, picked up mostly by the sort of well-off professional who would like to add a little literary knowledge as a mark of Bourdieuian distinction (the audience for recorded lectures on, say, music appreciation or classics in translation), the commentaries will too often stand in for, rather than lead into, the poems themselves (it is, after all, much easier to derive cocktail party tidbits from prose about a poem than from the poem itself).

The contents attempt historical comprehensiveness (not just the big three Renaissance sonneteers, but also Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne, not just the major Romantics but also the eccentric American, Jones Very, etc). Likewise, the later periods (the book tilts toward the recent) show at least an awareness of the desirability of aesthetic diversity (a Ted Berrigan sonnet here, a Tony Lopez sonnet there). But it’s precisely here that I find the book most irritating. Take the 30 sonnets included here published after 1960 (please). Among them appear sonnets by May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, John Hollander, Rosanna Warren, Rita Dove, and Alison Brackenbury. Sure, these poets offer certain kinds of diversity. Harrison fills the form with political dissatisfaction, Dove with racial consciousness. Lowell is caught amidst his long experiment with the blank verse sonnet as a journalistic form and Bishop halves the lengths of the lines from their usual pentameter. But these, and most of the others here, exemplify one or another version of the familiar form doing familiar things with fairly familiar themes. (By the way, while two of the great recent experimenters with the sonnet – Geoffrey Hill and Paul Muldoon – are present and accounted for, I find myself wishing, in one of those inescapable critical cavils, that they were represented by some of their more searching experiments; “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” say, or “Quoof”).

Here’s the thing. There are more fun and interesting adventures in the sonnet since 1950 than are dreamt of in this book’s philosophy. The form was a favorite among writers on the political Left during the Fifties (not surprising, given the prominence of politics among the oft-treated themes in the form’s history). One might imagine, to give Harrison some company, an example from Walter Lowenfels’s Sonnets of Love and Liberty, or one of the tart, taut 14-line pokes at pop culture published by Eve Merriam. I’ve acknowledged the welcome presence of Berrigan and Lopez, but here, too, they might have been given a bit more sympathetic company in the form of a section from Lopez’s fellow Cambridge-schooler Drew Milne’s "Garden of Tears," say, or from Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets or Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane. Indeed, the really interesting riches among experimental sonneteers is something this volume would never lead you to suspect. Here’s half a dozen examples off the top of my head, in no particular order: Ken Edwards’s Eight + Six, Adrian Clarke’s 25 Sonnets, Sean Bonney’s Astrophil and Stella, Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets, Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private, and Geraldine Monk’s “Ghosts.” (You can find some of these, or parts thereof, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets.) And this is to say nothing of the great Oulipian games with the form; they’d have to be included in translation, but this didn’t stop Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo wandering leglessly in.

And this, I think, is what fuels my crankiness about another Wyatt-to-Walcott slog through the history of the sonnet. There are plenty of anthologies, with and without commentary, in which a student, a scholar, or a would-be sophisticate can find the familiar sonnets included here, from “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” to “Bluebeard,” and the exemplars better than those included here (Frost’s “Design,” for instance, instead of “Mowing”). Which leaves me, once more, wondering just what purpose is served by this partial (in both senses) survey.

Question Time

Tooling around on Ron Silliman’s blog a couple weeks ago, the Pill discovered a bunch of new poets to check out. Familiar with (indeed, a fan of) Graham Foust, and on nodding acquaintance with poems by a couple of the others Silliman mentioned as exemplars of the “New Precision” (or is it “New Precisionism”?), here was a half dozen or so poets utterly new to me: Joseph Massey, Michael Heller, Donna Stonecipher, and others). It’s a great thing to be introduced to new work (or work unknown to one). But in the last week or so, as part of my work on a writing project, I’ve been having to reread some poems I know pretty well, and there’s no denying the rich pleasure of rereading (hell, according to Roland Barthes, it’s the only real reading).

Most of what I’ve been rereading is distant not only from the Newly Precise, but also from the varieties of poetic experiment typically catalogued on Silliman’s blog. Today, for example, it’s been R. S. Thomas’s “Welsh Landscape,” Seamus Heaney’s “Bruagh,” and Ted Hughes’s Moortown, while yesterday was David Dabydeen’s Turner, and last week was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. More than that, even the twentieth-century poems I’ve been writing about I’ve been writing about in light of much older and still more familiar ones (the elegiac ones in light of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the others in light of Virgil, Marvell, and Jonson). But between my daily 300-500 words on the book-in-progress and the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands, I stole an hour to reread something Sillimanesque, since it’d been a while since I’d reread that kind of thing.

Indeed, I reread something so Sillimanesque it was Silliman; driven by questions, it seemed a good idea to return to a poem composed entirely of interrogatives, Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.” I remember reading it something like twenty years ago, back when the New Sentence was really new, and being guided through it by a group of like-minded grad school friends but also by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poem in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. A serious house on serious earth it was, at that time, a challenge to orthodoxies philosophical, poetic, and political, a darkly aggressive and demanding text the reading of which we would, as we did with various other 30-page chunks of difficulty (e.g. Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”) wear as a badge of avant-honor.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to reread the poem (it really is thirty pages, and it really is all questions) and discover how much fun it is. Here’s the beginning:

Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet?

See what I mean?

OK. On one hand, there really is something avant and aggressive in the insistent repetition of a specific syntactic form. As Silliman said about the poem in an interview, communication inherently involves power relationships (well, what he said was “To write is to fuck. To read is to be fucked.”), and the poem puts its reader in a position sort of like that of a hapless Prime Minister caught on the horns of a back-bench challenge before the House, or like one finds oneself in during a round of that old stand-by drinking game, Questions. Provoked by a wrong-footing question like “Which one are you,” it’s tough to resist answering (which forces you to drink) rather than replying with another question. Once you’re playing the game, you’ve got to submit to its rules.

Still, what really stands out for me in this poem now is its playfulness. Many of the moves among questions are non sequiturs, but often one question seems conditioned (or, better, our range of possible interpretive response seems conditioned) by the preceding one or by earlier ones. The first three quoted here establish a pattern that seems to refer to the physical, and the next three continue in that vein but with an added affective element. Taken together, that half-dozen questions invite erotic imaginings. Things might get sinister with “Is he there,” might go off in a different direction with “Is it near,” but when we get to “Is it hard,” or “Is this where we get off,” or “Have you come yet,” I think our reading is influenced by the opening questions. We can play with this in various ways – who is speaking these questions? What relationships can be imagined among the speakers? – but we’re going to be frustrated (not without pleasure, I think) if we try to impose a straightforward drama on the poem. Instead, it’s fun to follow the shift from a discourse of feeling to one we might characterize as topographical to the cliché of kids on a car trip to the intricate connection between perception and taxonomy, and so on, when all that these sentences really have in common (as if that weren’t either significant or enough) is that they’re all questions. Isn’t that cool? Cool enough for sweaters? Was Van Persie offside?

New Laureate

The best reading of poetry requires deep and sustained attention, it demands a retreat from the noises that surround us and a quieting of the voices within us, and it rewards our concentration with a more finely tuned awareness of truths, an awareness that is affirmative even when the news is bad. Few poetries at once demand and reward this kind of careful listening as richly as does W.S. Merwin’s finest work. For over fifty years now, since his first book (A Mask for Janus) was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Merwin has produced poetry that answers to and embodies the deepest difficulties inherent in language and life. He has also published volumes of translations (from, it seems, half the poets who have ever written in three-quarters of the world’s languages, including, most recently, Dante, the Gawain poet, and Follain), and four books of breathtaking prose. Now, this craftsman is the Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Much has been made of the stylistic shifts that have marked Merwin's career, that have, indeed, demarcated its eras. It is true that Merwin began by mastering the intricate and lapidary forms bequeathed him by the European lyric tradition and then, in the early and middle 1960s, published searing, stripped down, fragmentary poems that read like the eroded remains of lyric inscriptions. It is true that the early poems bear little resemblance to a poem like “Gift,” written twenty years later and including such lines as “I am nameless I am divided / I am invisible I am untouchable,” and that “Gift” is not much like the politically aggressive “Questions to Tourists Stopped By a Pineapple Field” published ten years later and that neither of these poems compares in philosophical density and wealth of historical detail to more recent poems like, say, “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” which is itself different from the thrilling autumnal auroras of The River Sound, which, if we really want to compare apples and oranges, cannot approach the epic sweep and episodic pathos of the brilliant book-length narrative poem on nineteenth-century Hawai’i, The Folding Cliffs.

At the same time, a rereading of this long and varied career yields surprising continuities. Merwin’s has always been a poetry crafted amidst and in the full awareness and acceptance of mortality. It is, as life is, a preparation for those last fires. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenarios of the early books continue in the later work, in, for example, the devastating representation of sandalwood logging and its associated natural and human destruction in The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s passionate care for the natural environment and his passionate critique of human rapacity have energized his poems throughout his career. So have his convictions about injustice and what he has called “the shamelessness of men,” from 1967’s “The Asians Dying” to 2001’s “The Fence,” dedicated to Matthew Shepard.

More central and enduring even than these specific political energies, though, has been Merwin’s understanding that language is at once what enables and enacts those extinctions and injustices and what might help us to find other, better ways of being in the world. Indeed, Merwin’s famous abandonment of punctuation (about halfway through 1963’s The Moving Target – I like to date it, conveniently, to “The Crossroads of the World, Etc.”) can be read as one of his most powerful strategies for loosening the determining and debilitating hold syntax so often has upon us. His unpunctuated lines, whether the short, almost groaned lines of The Lice or the long and limber lines of Travels, involve us in repeated dramas of resolution, revision, and renewed meaning.

Don't take my word for it. Here is "December Among the Vanished," one of my favorites from The Lice:

The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Birds with it

The beasts hide in the knitted walls
From the winter that lipless man
Hinges echo but nothing opens

A silence before this one
Has left its broken huts facing the pastures
Through their stone roofs the snow
And the darkness walk down

In one of them I sit with a dead shepherd
And watch his lambs

And here is "Cold Spring Morning," from Merwin's 2008 volume, The Shadow of Sirius:

At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled wlanut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go

To parse these poems is to engage the rules for sense-making, to admit our own wrong-footedness, to rethink relationships (grammatical and otherwise), and to engage a mind that will shrink neither from conviction nor from complexity. To read Merwin is to become a better reader, and to share his cautious hope that better readers might be better people. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest wisdom we might hope for from a careful communion with the mind embodied in Merwin’s poems: an intertwined distrust of language as that which categorizes and prioritizes and, too often, dehumanizes, and as at the same time, also, always, that with which we might come more tentatively, tenderly, but fully to be human together.