More on the Sonnet

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Marilyn Hacker notes about the Italian sonnet "that all these versions of the sonnet almost predicate a poem whose "argument" divides into two parts, a premise set out in the octave (first eight lines), with the sestet contradicting it, modifying it, or giving a concrete proof."

The volta, or turn, seems to be the essential element that makes a sonnet a sonnet. Meter might vary, a couple lines might be added or subtracted, rhyming might be slant or varied or even non-existent, but most poet-critics suggest the turn is a requirement.

Hacker also says (specifically about sequences of sonnets):

Its Italian form is very like a mixture of the two most flexible and utilitarian "blocks" of verse narrative: the quatrain and terza rima.

And she summarizes the sonnet as (in regards to its origins and contemporary applications):

a poem in "popular" language that could be read or written by anyone (not only clerics and scholars) and that incited its writers to fresh examination of their evolving languages' interactions with the human world.

The Sonnet

I have two sonnets in need of revision, of re-envisioning; thus, one thing I'm contemplating lately is the form of the sonnet. What constitutes a sonnet, or "little song?" How can I develop my sonnets into fully realized poems while maintaining their sonnet qualities?

Tony Barnstone writes in A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics (featured in The Cortland Review, December 2006):

Poets set sail like Columbus, unsure whether they would sail forever, sail off the waterfalling edge of a flat world, or encounter India or other new worlds. There is something comforting about knowing the destination of your journey. Sonnet-mariners know they will arrive at a port after a voyage of fourteen lines. With free verse, one travels into the fog, and must map the world again with every poem. With free verse one has to ask each time, "What makes this a poem?" Why should I break my line here and not there? What sort of stanza shape and length should I have? What voice shall I speak in, with what attitude, with what rhetoric, with what image structure? We have to come up with organic ways of making it poetry, because the mechanic form has been dispensed with.

Working in form (sonnets or otherwise) gives me a compass and the comfort that there is a destination ahead. I'm envious of the free-verse poets who can write beautifully and clearly without maps. Recently even my poems that end up in free verse tend to start in form. Without some breathable shape, my writing borders on prosaic thoughts broken into lines. Furthermore, form helps write the poem. Rhyme, in particular, leads me to what the poem is trying to say. I might arrive at the same place in free verse, but form tends to get me there in a more direct, unexpected, and interesting way. (Bardstone's essay addresses rhyme and rhyme devices in detail...worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

Barnstone proposes a number of ways of approaching the sonnet, one of the most interesting being to "transform sonnets in English into sonnets in English":

I found that approaching the sonnet as a translation game was a very generative creative mode. The translator wears the skin of the author. It is a kind of spirit possession. In my own work, I have learned much about traditional form by wearing the skin of the Chinese sonneteer Feng Zhi, of Petrarch, and of Borges. In addition to learning their techniques in the process of translating their poems into sonnets in English, I have developed a technique of transformation that I have attempted to apply intralingually as well as interlingually. I might, for example, work from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, using some of his rhymes and filling in my own lines, or write poems in direct conversation with the imagery of a source poem.

I think I may be too far along with my two sonnets in question to start from the translation/transformation approach, but I think it is an interesting approach to play with to generate new poems.

What I need to do is study my sonnets--map out the routes they took, look at the destinations they arrived at--then see if I can improve upon the routes and destinations.

Ghost Forms

If you have about an hour and are interested in how traditional form influences free verse, listen to Katie Ford's talk "Ghost Forms: Using Traditional Form in Free Verse." You might have heard similar points made before (such as how the turn is essential to sonnets and nonce sonnets), but the contemporary examples Ford cites make the presentation original (at least for me). The title of her talk is borrowed from what Roethke had to say on the subject, which I think bears repeating:

Behind every free verse poem there is the ghost of a form.

Meditation on a Meditative Form--The Villanelle

I met with a couple of the lovely and talented writers of KaPow! yesterday to discuss two villanelles I had written recently. (Poets.org gives this explanation of the form.) As we were talking about the form, I was trying to articulate why the form sometimes works so well. Because eight of the 19 lines are repeated lines and the entire poem hinges on two rhymes, it seems to me that when a villanelle works:

• The repeated lines change or deepen in meaning as the poem progresses.
  
• The variable lines support and push on the repeated lines.
• Much energy comes from the union of the repeated and variable lines.
  
• Its subject matter is usually not narrative in nature but meditative.

For me, this last point is important. In much of my poetry, particularly free-verse, I am trying to get from point A to point B in a clear and linear manner (blame my training as a technical writer). However, this is probably impossible to do with the villanelle. Its nature is to double-back and wind around an idea. So the villanelle seems an especially apt form to work in when I have a subject that I need to meditate on, a subject that feels more like prayer or song than story.

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Artists Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (The University of Michigan Press), Maxine Kumin concludes about the contemporary villanelle:

It's my thesis that we don't need to ossify these ancient French forms by slavish imitation. We can enliven and enhance them with our own approximations. By resorting to the ingenuities of our own time and place, American poets in the last fifty years have turned a stultifying and restrictive form into an elastic, even gymnastic one. Perhaps in the twenty-first century others will remake the villanelle in ways as yet unthought of.

An excellent point of which I need to remind myself from time to time. When I work in form, my goal is to let the form be flexible, elastic, let the form serve the poem and not the other way around, but sometimes, particularly during the revision process, I lose this flexibility and find my allegiance has shifted from the poem to the form. I think there is a way (there must be!) to honor the spirit of the form while maintaining the integrity of the poem. Such is my quest.

Here are some of my favorite villanelles:

• One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
• Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
• Little Miracle by Molly Peacock
• Villanelle for D.G.B. by Marilyn Hacker (scroll to end)