Writing the American sonnet (1.9.21)

Dear Wednesdays@One colleagues,

Turn the page on the year!  
Poetry will save us!  Yeah, right.
Yeah, right, yeah, right.

No, we won't forget the old

For the old has put its brand on us

With an iron from the fires

Of disaster, burned our foreheads

And our souls and our lips.

But turn!

Veer into the new year.

Make a poem of what's to come,

For a song is coming again.

Raise your voices, song-singers.

Make that poem, save you.

Yes, let's keep talking about poetry and keep writing it, reading it, thinking about it.  Let's write better poems today than we did yesterday, better poems tomorrow than we do today.

Let's return to forms, namely, the sonnet (thanks to Margaret for suggesting it).  In a way, starting out this already dangerous, head-spinning new year with a form perhaps can lend a bit of stability, structure, regularity, predictability . . . at least to some small portion of our daily lives.  Poetry might not save us, but writing it, reading it, thinking about it and talking about it might keep us off the streets (and out of the Capitol Building).

For additional reading, visit the April 10, 2018 (4.10.18) post in this blog.  That's where we last focused on the sonnet form.  Recovering some of that ground might be helpful for this project, which is to write an American sonnet.

A what?

Can there be such a thing as a "national" form of a form?  Apparently, Terrence Hayes thought so when he wrote his book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.  Margaret kindly provided us some samples from the book.  Here's one from the book:

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

by Terrance Hayes

 

The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated.

The deep well of my nigga throat is assassinated.

The tender bells of my nigga testicles are gone.

You assassinate the sound of our bullshit & blissfulness.

The bones managing the body’s business are cloaked

Until you assassinate my nigga flesh. The skin is replaced

By a cloak of fire. Sometimes it is river or rainwater

That cloaks the bones. Sometimes we lie on the roadside

In bushels of knotted roots, flowers & thorns until our body

Is found. You assassinate the smell of my breath, which is like

Smoke, milk, twilight, itself. You assassinate my tongue

Which is like the head of a turtle wearing my skull for a shell.

You assassinate my lovely legs & the muscular hook of my cock.

Still, I speak for the dead. You cannot assassinate my ghosts.

There are 70 sonnets in Hayes's book, all bearing the same title.  So  I guess to call this one the "title" sonnet is a bit meaningless.  Or not.  Conventionally, the individual sonnets in sonnet sequences are without title, and so giving every poem the same title amounts to the same thing.  Or does it.  Reading the book means reading 70 takes on the idea expressed by that title; it invites you to link every sonnet to the one before and the one after.  Ingenious.

But what makes the sonnet above "American"?  Is it the subject matter, the voice and tone, the language, the drumbeat rhythm?  Is it the point of view (the present speaking to the past and the future)?  Is it the challenge to the assassin, the barely veiled threat/plea?  The accusatory stance?  The anger?  The violence?

And who, exactly is this assassin?  This past and future agent?  America?  The self?  Whatever it is, this isn't the opening salvo in Hayes's book.  The first poem is this one:

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

It has 14 lines.  Its lines are roughly five-beat, depending on how you voice the poem when you read it aloud.  As I read it, I sense volta or turning, though not just once but line after line, sometimes within a line.  I feel jumble and jangle and heartbeat.  I feel it sing.  

Hard to express any thoughts about Hayes's poems without doing so poetically.  Maybe that's all I've got.  When it comes to sonnets, I expect and in many ways crave setup and turn, rhetorical fulfillment; but (and this is what I find most AMERICAN about the poems in this sequence) what I get are "voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor."  I get jump-cuts and apparent non sequiturs.  

On the other hand, the positive!  Look at the lush language of the first Hayes poem above, the enumeration of the body's flesh: eyes, throat, testicles, skin, breath, tongue, legs, cock.  America's history is the history of the violence upon, the humiliation of the Black body.  Hayes's poem names the history (assassination) while reclaiming the Body for itself, or for himself, for his Black self, in one self-contradictory poetic gesture.  (This art may be as far as I am permitted to see into this poem.)  What could be more American than that, to "contradict myself," as Whitman celebrated.

Regarding the American-ness of an "American" sonnet, consider the opening images of the second of the two poems I just quoted: "I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. / I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat / Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone."  The sonnet form, handed to Hayes from the same Western European traditions that commoditized the slave trade in the Americas, confines yet protects, creates yet destroys.  If he is to write sonnets as a true artist, Hayes must learn to make use of all these competing applications; and that is the American thing about the American sonnet, how it contains multitudes of meaning, even of self-contradiction.

Well, these responses don't help much, do they, not if you're trying to figure out what could be "American" in an American sonnet and then write that sonnet.  So let's do the project this way . . .

• Write a poem that retains some but not all the formal features of a traditional sonnet.
• Choose a subject matter that strikes you as inherently American.
• Write from a point of view that an American might write from (you'll have to ponder what it means to look at the world through American eyes).
• Work in an American diction ("folksy" probably won't count, as one can write "folksy" Irish, English, Chinese, Brazilian, Tahitian poetry as well).  You might "listen to" Whitman or W. C. Williams or Adrienne Rich or Sylvia Plath.

Then let's share next Wednesday.  Good luck!