What Makes a Sonnet Sound?
Sonnet controversies; a miraculous poem by Diane Seuss; kisses from Catullus
There was a little kerfuffle the other week on poetry Twitter, which is just the usual state of affairs, there’s always a kerfuffle in poetry land, and usually they’re easy to ignore. But I noticed this time because it involved one of my favorite living English-language writers, the American poet Diane Seuss. I was late to Seuss’s work, I’m not sure why (she published her first book in 1998, just as I was starting to write poems); I’m never sure how to explain the weird chemical reaction that happens between poems and readers, or why it only happens when conditions are right, or what makes the conditions right, or even what the conditions are. Almost all of the modern poets I love most—Stevens, Glück, Bidart, Phillips, Bishop, Pound, Moore—failed to light me up on first acquaintance, though now that seems inexplicable, impossible. A Frank Bidart poem is lightning in a bottle, how could I ever not have felt it?
I had read several Seuss poems with pleasure but—due to no fault of their own, I’ve found it in them since—not quite revelation. Then I got an early copy of the manuscript of her fifth book of poems, frank: sonnets, which was electrifying from the first line. The book is a sequence of 127 wildly varying poems, all of them, despite their variedness or because of it, sonnets. It’s a kind of atomized autobiography, offering scenes (“a sonnet is one frame in a long strip / of celluloid,” one poem declares) from the poet’s rural childhood; from her days as a young bohemian in New York in the early AIDS crisis (several of the book’s most moving poems memorialize her friend Mikel Lindzy, who died of AIDS and whose photo graces the cover); from her relationship with her son. I find it entirely overwhelming, a firehose of emotion and bravura technique. If you haven’t read Seuss yet, I think it’s the place to start (then get her new book, Modern Poetry, just released, which is wonderful and which I would love to write about); it has also become my go-to suggestion whenever I meet anybody who thinks they don’t like poetry, or don’t know how to read a poem. Seuss’s poems are as sophisticated as poetry gets, but they don’t require any special equipment. Just open the book up and go.
It was frank that came under fire on Twitter, when some rando (I say this lovingly, we’re all randos on Twitter) claimed the poems weren’t sonnets at all, weren’t even poems, but prose. This person’s view was that there’s something one can identify as a “classic, traditional” sonnet, and Seuss’s poems didn’t make the grade; presumably by “classic, traditional” they meant a certain number of lines with a certain number of syllables ending in certain rhymes arranged in a certain pattern. What ensued on Twitter in response was, as I say, a kerfuffle, with the original poster dunked on by all and sundry, sometimes in a tone that really isn’t called for in disagreements about poetry. (Diane Seuss’s own response was an ideal of generosity and grace, followed by a thread on the American sonnet tradition that almost, in its richness and pedagogical amplitude, changed my mind about the irredeemability of social media.) Basically, my view is that anybody who cares about sonnets is almost certainly more friend than foe, even if they’re trying to police a form that has never, in the 800 years of its existence, held a stable shape.
My go-to attitude tends to be that people get to identify how they want to identify, and they can identify their poems how they’d like to, too. I don’t get to tell anybody what a sonnet is or isn’t; I’m certainly not going to argue with them about it publicly. That’s what group chats are for. (For the record: I am in no group chats, though there’s a good chance I get screenshots from yours.) But it does seem to me that calling your poem a sonnet can be a more or less aesthetically successful maneuver—that is, more or less charged with emotion and meaning; and the emotion and meaning it carries are probably going to have something to do with how thoughtfully, how intensely, how innovatively it engages with the history of the form.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to To a Green Thought to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.