some sonnets

Sonnets are all the go, as they have been since the Italian sonnet (sonetto - ‘little song’) was introduced to English poets in the early sixteenth century and was to become gradually ‘anglicised' and altered and eventually known as ‘Shakespearean’. As poetry-reading visitors to the deletions already know (and so may wish now to skip straight to the poems and books I'm going to mention), sonnets used to be a neat lyrical form that used various rhyme schemes. (Italian sonnets had some repeated rhymes and used iambic pentameter). The final couplet usually functioned as an epigram, summarising the moral drift or giving some kind of twist to the poem. Rhyming has been ditched by many contemporary sonneteers, as has the epigram, and formal traditional rhythm. Now, with the sonnet form in mind, you can write a poem that turns out to be fourteen lines or two stanzas of seven lines and you can fracture and indent eccentrically and it can be a ‘sonnet’.

Two sonnets by Canadian poet Anne Carson in a recent edition of the London Review of Books stretches the form beyond the form. They seem clever but perhaps they’re over-clever, intense examples of dry dedicated experimentation? Then I guess if mainstream international journals like the LRB publish sonnets like this, then poetry readers might have caught up with poetry writers …

       Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein



         Here is a pronoun to

              address

             Gertrude

               Stein

               with

                 :

                 a

               dog



             you’ve

              never

               had

              before

               has

              died.



                (click on 'Drop't Sonnet' to enlarge for clearer reading)                                                                           

                    cover art by Tallulah Knox



Some Sonnets was edited and published by Tim Wright in Melbourne 

in Winter 2010 in an offset(?) or photocopied, hand-collated, 

limited edition of 100.



It’s an unpaginated assortment of thirty six sonnets by a variety of

innovative Australian poets. The poems are ‘ordered by shuffling’ and

there are no author designations accompanying them. If you like, you

can figure out who wrote what by referring back to the contents page

and that’s random too, not following the order the poems appear in the

book. It’s interesting to read poetry without knowing or thinking

about the ‘poet’. Whether the sonnets work or not relies on your

particular tastes or poetic interests.



Not many of these  twenty-first century sonneteers attempt high form -

embellished, lyrical sonnets - in earnest. Mostly, they fulfil Louis

Zukofsky’s desire, eighty years ago now, for innovation. In 1930 he

wrote “It is time someone resurrected the sonnet from a form that has

become an exercise.” Though some, like Claire Gaskin’s ‘looking into

the eye of my addiction’, Jill Jones’ ‘What Is Due’ and Ryan Scott’s

“The Suddenness of Spring” do look like traditional sonnets and are

lyrical. Cory Wakeling’s ‘Barrett’s Song For Hattie’s Detour’ also

looks conventional but it’s his sonnet’s curious ‘Australianness’ that

gives it a comic spark - 



I look left, you look right, I look Nullarbor

you rush Bendigo. Decide: …



Duncan Hose contributes two complex (yet clearly written), kind of

metaphysical love sonnets - one in German,’O ein Liebes-Sonett’, that

introduces the wonderful word ‘Tweetyvögel’, and the other in English,

‘o a love sonnet’, that translates the earlier German poem where we

found the ‘tweety-birds’.



Some Sonnets also includes sonnets from Kate Fagan, Marc Jones,

Patrick Jones, Sam Langer, Caroline Williamson, Nick Whittock, Joel

Scott, the wildly varying innovator Peter Minter, Michael Farrell’s

ineluctably cryptic minimalisms include a nine line sonnet, Derek

Motion, the collection's editor Tim Wright, Jal Nicholl, Ella O’Keefe,

Tom Lee, the linguistically playful Chris Edwards presenting his own

renditions of Rilke, Brett Dionysius, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Peter

O’Mara (more conceptual minimalism), Stu Hatton, Astrid Lorange,

Stuart Cooke and Ted Nielsen.



Ted Nielsen has been writing a sonnet every week for a few years. He

publishes them on his blog magic dog vs tokyo as ‘Friday sonnet’. 

Ted’s poems carry a tone and lightness of touch engaging with the everyday 

that remind me of John Forbes and the 1960s sonnets of Ted Berrigan. 



friday sonnet (#124: tedpapa pig)



old man getting older & weary today it’s

already tomorrow you’re still tired the

bags under your eyes have bags under

them & she says that’s a pig because you

like pigs & he says dad, you’re an idiot &

this is all in japanese & one dad is dead &

another dead drunk & if you were any

more sentimental it’d be an epidemic like

travel sickness so we joke around in the

bath singing some kind of monkey song &

stay up for hours past bedtime it’s all

good then for the next few days there are

pigs drawn on everything, that is, pigs,

hearts, tulips, occasionally a spiral pattern



Richard Lopez reviews 'Some Sonnets' in Galatea Resurrects here





Pete Spence's Sonnets, co-published by Karl-Friedrich Hacker's

Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia

in a limited edition of 50, in 2009, is a hand-made book of ten

sonnets, with an afterword, also a sonnet.



These light-hearted sonnets are like a mix of Shakespearean sonnets,

French modernist/cubist poetry and 60s New York School dailiness. Pete

Spence has Cendrarsian 'squares of green light' being thrown about,

Frank O’Hara's room for roaming variously, the Forbesian ‘stunned

mullet’ and other modern classic influences.



Sonnet 8



in the millenium of the pushbike

everyone must know of the worsening

weather? my shadow stretched forever

no Badoit? no money! it’s a day

of Perrier fever! this is all we need

another set of sonnets? deciduous

as a plum    you eat it & it leaves

is there more roughage in eating books?

the wind jogs through the rainforest

squares of green light are thrown about

is there more air in daylight? I’m

a couple of steps from everywhere

somewhere in the shadows evening waits

is yesterday the subject of these poems?



Sonnet 9



walking Planck's constant in a red shift!

great day! upwind the day winds down

squares of light are thrown about

should i feel ok now that yesterday

is the subject of these poems? better

to be quick about it like a shadow

taking shade from today's sun! when

will i have room where there's room

where i can roam variously & hang

my tantrums & other guests?

the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!

its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!

a mullet sidles through the air

& i'm stunned by its flight!

hearts, tulips, occasionally a spiral pattern



                    (click to enlarge)



Jeff Hilson edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets in 2008. This anthology 

contains my own failure at writing sonnets which would only ever get 

themselves to twelve rather than fourteen lines, called Eyes on potatoes.







This year Jeff Hilson has published an attractively designed square

book In the Assarts that, on first look, seems to be a book of

sonnets, but doesn’t always adhere to form. Yet, there are

sixty-eight, fourteen line poems. Apparently Jeff was given the notion

of sampling Sir Thomas Wyatt (who introduced the sonnet form to

England) from the Reality Street publisher Ken Edwards.

These sonnets are often very funny, riffing from the probably

to-be-expected Ted Berrigan, and from Petrarch (‘No one listens to

Petrarch’), Sonny & Cher, Donovan, Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees,

Tubular Bells (Mike Oldfield!),Thomas Wyatt (of course), Veronica

Forrest-Thomson, Oliver Cromwell and others. It’s great fun and

technically smart to boot. It looks great too - the square format is

pleasing, the cover drawing, clever and the typeface apt. In the

Assarts publisher, Veer Books, definitely looks like an

adventurous UK independent small press. 



                    (click to enlarge)