The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

For each poet, I have been jotting marginalia on my tube journey to work. I include these notes here, in a similar fashion to the notes I took on Modern American poets during my MFA degree. Unlike those notes, however, these are taken on a short sampling of work, as opposed to a whole book. I therefore intend them as starting points, not summaries.

In my notes I have also included broad designations of geographic origin, since to my outside ear a poet from Leeds and a poet from Northumberland have an auditory relationship to language more in common with each other than they do to a poet from Oxford (hence my coarse-grained designation “Northern England.”) I realize I may be missing out on subtle distinctions in language and even politics. But for now, I am concerned with puzzling out in general how these poems would sound read aloud by the authors themselves, and taking a first pass this broadly has been helpful.

Compiling in this way, I am particularly struck by the complete absence of Welsh and significant lack of Scottish poets from this volume, and the controversial inclusion of so many poets from Northern Ireland. I would be interested to hear who else you think should have made it into this book.

Here are my notes:

Seamus Heaney, from Northern Ireland, blends image and music deftly, treating The Troubles in Northern Ireland with universal, humanistic insight and a rich, gravelly consonance that is his signature sound. Favorite poems from this set include “Churning Day,” “Punishment,” “Casualty,” and “The Otter.” It should be noted that Heaney’s inclusion in this volume prompted his lyrical objection, in an open letter, to being called “British.”

Tony Harrison, from Northern England, examines human cruelty and disdain. His work blends rhyme and violence, affection and disillusionment, treating subjects both historical and familiar. One fine example of each is “The Nuptial Torches” and “Long Distance.”

Douglas Dunn, from Scotland, treats class war and imperialism, mostly in long, continuous stanzas. He examines the working class both through persona and direct address. I particularly liked “Men of Terry Street” and “Gardeners.”

Hugo Williams, from London, elevates the mundane through the music of plain speech in terse, observational poetry. I especially enjoyed “The Butcher” and “Confessions of a Drifter.”

Derek Mahon, from Northern Ireland, living in London, blends quietness and careful progression with a fanciful turn of mind, celebrating the music of plain speech, and the dizzying power of whimsy. Favorite poems include “Afterlives,” “The Apotheosis of Tins,” “The Snow Party,” and “Lives,” the last poem taking a dig at Seamus Heaney for extensively applying the metaphor of anthropology to his examination of contemporary political events.

Michael Longley, from Northern Ireland, mixes the profane and human sacred fiercely, taking a direct look at quotidian violence through strong narratives with explosive endings. Great examples of this are “Wounds,” “Swans Mating,” and “Mayo Monologues.”

Fleur Adcock, born New Zealand, living in England, merges the real and surreal in shocking, cryptic, devil-may-care examinations of the inner and outer worlds. I was amazed by the long poem “The Soho Hospital for Women.”

Anne Stevenson, born on the east coast of America, now living on the border of Wales, treats romanticized and historical American settings through miniatures and epistles. That said, I liked the simple and more universal poem “The Marriage” best of all.

James Fenton, from Oxford, writes long, dark, strange poems that could be the love child of Wallace Stevens and Edgar Allen Poe. See, for example, “A Staffordshire Murder.”

Tom Paulin, born England, raised Northern Ireland, now living in England, treats politically-charged topics with a mildness and quiet attention to music. Favorite poems include “Settlers” and “In a Northern Landscape.”

Jeffrey Wainwright, from Northern England, takes on the topic of revolutionary class war through commitment to personae. I particularly liked the long poem “1815.”

Andrew Motion, from London, writes quiet, observational poems that are highly controlled but not contrived. There is a sense of persona always, even in the “I” voice. Consider “In The Attic” and “Anne Frank Huis.”

Paul Muldoon, from Northern Ireland, writes persona poems that are irreverent in the extreme, shifting like quicksilver from line to line. Favorite poems include “The Big House,” “Cuba,” and “Quoof.”

Peter Scupham, from Northern England, now living in the South, writes in same-length stanzas that are often imagistic, even haiku-like. I especially liked “Early Summer.”

Carol Rumens, from London, writes mostly in long single stanzas, giving close examination to objects as they represent human concerns, much like Dutch miniatures–where the physical stands in for the metaphysical. Good examples of this are “A Marriage” and “A Poem for Chessmen.”

Penelope Shuttle, from Greater London, now in Cornwall, brings the dream world into this one, exploring the intersection of imagination and terra firma. Favorite poems include “Three Lunulae, Truro Museum,” and “Travelling.”

Craig Raine, from Northern England, now in Oxford, demonstrates a keen eye for observation of the absurd in the mundane, to a sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply-felt effect. For a delicious taste of each, consider “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” and “A Cemetery in Co. Durham.”

Christopher Reid, born in Hong Kong, living in London, writes light, glancing verse that relies on indelible images. “A Disaffected Old Man” is a favorite poem from this set.

David Sweetman, from Northern England, now in London, brings an intellectual regard to charged emotional matters, exploring the contrast between surface and depth. One fine example is the aptly titled “Looking Into The Deep End.”

Medbh McGuckian, from Northern Ireland, brings a focused, persona-like observation to self-contained settings, objects, and events. “Slips” is a favorite from this set.

“In art, you’re free.”

One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to be countless poets, poetry awards, and poets with awards. How, then, do we define great poets or poetry? He gave me permission to answer publicly, on this site.

In doing so, I first have to admit that I do not feel qualified in any way to define great poets or poetry. I can really only comment on the poets and poems that are great within me. I have been giving this some thought, and have identified a few common characteristics.

Voltaire is reputed to have said, “Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.” That’s a bit harsh. But I am inclined to agree that poetry does involve its own kind of “truth.” It is not a factual truth, but more what Seamus Heaney called “a ring of truth within the medium itself,” since, according to Emily Dickinson, a poet “tells all the truth but tells it slant.” I also think poetic truth needs to be both new and moving in order to reach toward greatness.

Some would argue that newness, especially innovation in language, is all that matters. I think, instead, that innovation is actually a by-product of great poets seeking after new truths (which are often, in fact, old truths newly arranged). The quality of moving the reader in some way is, to me, essential. This does not need to involve an intense emotional outpouring. But if the reader is the same before and after reading the poem, then the reader has not been moved, and the poem can hardly be said to have fulfilled its potential for greatness.

Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz are two poets I think are great. Among other things, Heaney mostly wrote about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Milosz mostly wrote about occupied Poland during World War II. The combination of their position in history, and the profound ways in which they related to such difficult subject matter, make it clear why they were both awarded the Nobel Prize.

I believe there is an energy and intensity that comes with discovering poetry as a means to reconcile life’s difficulties, and then discovering how much one needs such reconciliation, or, at least, creative freedom. However, the drive to write does not necessarily require such epic circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote poems of remarkable ingenuity and skill in the midst of a repressive life as a Victorian spinster. In fact, I think that anyone sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of the world in which we live has all the encouragement necessary to seek the solace poetry can provide.

The most common characteristic I can identify among those poets I consider great is their absolute hunger for the freedom in art. It is this quality that galvanizes talent, effort, patience, endurance, and everything else I find inherent within those poets I most admire. It is true, as Marvin Bell points out, that in life we are not free, and even the most privileged life can be a burden. But in art, we are free, and this freedom, and the poetic truth that issues from this free space, can touch to others in ways that are great inside of them as well.

In his poem, “Prelude”, Kavanagh condemns “Card-sharpers of the art committee / Working all the provincial cities, / they cry ‘Eccentric’ if they hear / A voice that seems at all sincere.” (Collected Poems, 132) “Eccentric” was no doubt an epithet with which the iconoclast Kavanagh was familiar. Yet Heaney’s Kavanagh-esque figure, in arguing against orthodoxy, is not necessarily arguing against sincerity. He is arguing, instead, against earnestness. The difference is more than just an exercise in semantics.

Earnestness is a kind of sincerity, or endeavor toward sincerity, marked by gravitas. It is a determined manner, one that weighs consequences soberly. In this sense, earnestness finds itself at odds with mischief and irreverence. It is different, I think, than sincerity, which can include mischief, irreverence, and other forms of impolite honesty–modes Kavanagh embraced in his work. In differentiating, I would say earnestness involves a serious attempt, whereas sincerity involves a state of unvarnished being, and a willingness to look unflinchingly at what is.

Consider, for example one of Heaney’s most controversial poems, “Punishment”:

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
and your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

The Art of Seamus Heaney (Curtis, 1982) is one of the earliest collections of critical essays on Seamus Heaney’s poetry. As such, it offers insight into some of the early critical responses to Heaney’s work, and summarizes many of the pressures under which Heaney labored as an artist. In “North: ‘Inner Emigré’ or ‘Artful Voyeur’?”, Edna Longley sums up much of the controversy about “Punishment” by pointing out that “the moral and political ground beyond the self-contained emblem is boggy indeed.” (81) Curtis, too, opines that in this poem, Heaney is “sitting on the fence.” (100) I disagree. I would say, rather, that Heaney is painting the fence, and everything around it, in a manner of realism that is, ironically, more inclusive and compelling than supposedly more “realistic” forms such as journalism or political rhetoric.

Curtis later frames Heaney’s approach with a quote from his 1979 interview with James Randall in Ploughshares, in which Heaney says, “I think that what he [Yeats] learned there [in his poetry] was that you deal with public crisis not by accepting the terms of the public’s crisis, but by making your own imagery and your own terrain take the colour of it, take the impressions of it.” (125) Here the imagery and terrain of Heaney’s imagination is undeniably colored by contemporary sectarian violence. Yet it is a remarkable work of imagination as well, employing characteristic music and imagery which Heaney deploys with equal flourish in poems about landscape and childhood. Earnestness snuffs out such fertile imagination.

Were Heaney to attempt to write such a poem with more trying and less observing, with more earnestness and less sincerity, this poem might have been reduced to an essentially political message, sacrificing its larger, human message. It would not achieve the “total adequacy” which Heaney ascribes to The Divine Comedy in the title piece to his collection of lectures given while professor at Oxford, entitled The Redress Of Poetry:

Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated. The Divine Comedy is a great example of this kind of total adequacy… (7-8)

It is in this essay that Seamus Heaney describes poetry as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” (1) He goes on to describe these pressures in detail, pressures clearly analogous to his own situation during most of his writing career:

… if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification. (3)

Simplification is a function of earnestness; inclusiveness is a function of imagination. It is in encouraging the imagination that the old ghost tells the poet to “let go, let fly …” and “strike your note.” (245) In this way, the antic Heaney, like the Fool in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, is able to speak a more complete truth by eschewing earnestness and sobriety–in favor of art.

Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
already. Raindrops blew in my face (Opened Ground, 244-245)

The terza rima structure immediately calls to mind Dante, and in his essay “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Heaney acknowledges this influence directly.

In the first part of this essay, he points out how other poets have written their own poetic projects into their translations of Dante. In the second part, he notes Dante’s influence on Eliot’s “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets, wherein “the poet exchanges intense but oddly neutral words with ‘a familiar compound ghost’” (242) and Heaney concludes “as a matter of literary fact, that the lines are more haunted by the squadrons of Dante’s terza rima than by the squadrons of Hitler’s Luftwaffe” (243) Heaney further points out that a major part of the poetic influence was that “Dante was actually giving Eliot the freedom to surrender to the promptings of his own unconscious.” (249) The parallels here, between Dante’s influence on Eliot, and both Dante and Eliot’s influence (as well as Dante’s influence through Eliot) on Heaney himself, could not be made more clear.

In the third part of this essay, Heaney traces Dante’s musical influence on Mandelstam, and the “steadfastness of speech articulation” (255) in Mandelstam which Heaney admires, concluding that for Mandelstam and others, “Dante is not perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy but rather as the apotheos of free, natural, biological process … non-utilitarian elements in the creative life.” (255) Finally, Heaney brings this all together in treating an earlier version of the above quoted poem, saying:

What I first loved in the Commedia was the local intensity, the vehemence and fondness attaching to individual shades, the way personalities and values were emotionally soldered together … The way in which Dante could place himself in an historical world yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history, the way he could accommodate the political and the transcendent, this too encouraged my attempt at a sequence of poems which would explore the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country [Northern Ireland]. … I hoped that I could dramatize these strains by meeting shades from my own dream-life who had also been inhabitants of the actual Irish world. They could perhaps voice the claims of orthodoxy and the necessity to refuse these claims. They could probe the validity of one’s commitment. (256-257)

Heaney does just that–probing not only his own commitment, but, in the process, representing a kind of universal probing, a timeless tradition of antagonism; the poet arguing with aspects of himself. So again he represents a kind of bridge between worlds in this passage, an articulate bridge capable of identifying the struts which support it, calling this “an encounter reminiscent of ‘Little Gidding’ but with advice that Mandelstam might have given; yet the obvious shaping influence is the Commedia.” While it may be true, as a New York Times Book Update sidebar which I clipped and taped to the inside of The Poet’s Dante proclaims, that “Dante was his own best hero,” we might also say that Seamus Heaney is, in fact, his own best critic.

Yet equally as important to me as how Heaney approaches this passage as an amalgam of influences and a culmination of his own hard work and talent, is how this passage inspires me in relation to my own art. Whenever I read this passage, it also leaves me “alone with nothing that I had not known / already,” and yet the admonition “don’t be so earnest” continues to ring in my ears. Even as Dante might have given Eliot permission to probe the unconscious, here I can not shake the feeling of Heaney’s conjured ghost admonishing me against earnestness.

In the next installment, I will explore what earnestness means in this context, and how this relates to “sincerety” and “politeness” in poetry.

Imagine the look on my guidance counselor’s face when I told her that I wanted to transfer into the English department. My grades were good; what was wrong? I told her that I simply wanted to pursue something more–how could I say it?–human. She suggested that I consider a career in the exciting new field of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

After signing a legal contract wherein I promised that I would not, under any circumstance, try to beg my way back into the Engineering department, I found myself sitting auditorium-style with three hundred other students, eagerly attending a lecture by Robert Hass. Within minutes, I felt all three hundred students disappear, and I seemed to be sitting fireside with my favorite poetry-loving uncle. Professor Hass mentioned that Seamus Heaney was returning to Berkeley to discuss his new translation of Beowulf, and to read some poems. He encouraged us all to attend.

After graduation, I followed a high-tech career up to the executive level, reading and writing poetry less and less with each promotion. I started my own company, got married, and moved out to the country to be closer to my parents, who were soon to be grandparents. After the death of our infant son, all my worldly ambition evaporated. In poetry, I found solace, and a means to engage the complexity of human experience on its own terms–not as a reductive conclusion or homily, but an expansive and containing act of art. Still, I felt divided–between the new self that embraced the wildness of a contemporary American voice, and the keen, impressionable undergraduate quoting Keats late into the night.

Seamus Heaney appeared before me, blinking under the spotlight. He read poems and told stories, explained the music of Anglo Saxon, quipped about his traditional education that, “those of us who chose Latin were bound for the seminary; those who studied French were bound for something known as ‘the world.’” Here was a man who navigated many worlds: Protestant and Catholic, farmer and academician, poet and critic. In his poetry, he seemed to take on the best of the British lyric tradition, the contemporary voice, the Irish tradition of music and story, Classics, folklore, the Bible, free verse, form–and tackle subjects as close to the bone as the death of friends and family during the atrocities of twentieth-century Northern Ireland. Yet the man was also a celebrant of simplicity, humanity, and hope.

This is why I chose, after recommitting to my writing by undertaking an MFA, to examine the work of Seamus Heaney closely. In the coming weeks and months, I will continue to post some of my research and revelations to this website, and welcome your thoughts.

Funnily enough, although we only live a few pretty blocks apart in the sleepy idyll that is Ojai, she found out about my rekindled interest in Heaney from this website. Who says blogging doesn’t have its rewards? In the end I have only to say: thank you, Kelly. I will use it well.

Narration	Lyricism
Free verse	Meter & rhyme
Meaning	“Precious Nonsense“
Stichic	Stanzaic
Plain Speech	Elevated diction

In addition, I will continue to read widely from a variety of sources. Here is what I am thinking about adding to my reading list:

On Poetry

• Fredrick Smock, Poetry And Compassion (thank you, Mr. Carter)
• Dorianne Laux and Kim Adonizzo, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
• Stephen Berg (ed.), Singular Voices: American Poetry Today

Poetry

• Umberto Saba, Songbook: Selected Poems from the Canzoniere of Umberto Saba (trans. Stephen Sartarelli)
• Marvin Bell, The Book Of The Dead Man and Mars Being Red
• Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
• Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World
• Ron Silliman (ed.), In The American Tree
• Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
• Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
• Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
• Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
• Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems: 1978-1994
• David St. John, Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems
• Tony Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney
• Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition

Ideas For Poetry Book Structure

• Issa, The Year Of My Life (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa)
• Basho, Back Roads To Far Towns (trans. Kamaike Susumu and Cid Corman)
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies
• Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)

This is only a cursory sketch for now. Any suggestions?

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

Although not a single stanza, many of the structural elements of this poem resemble the stichic form. The language begins in a very plain register, and builds gradually but somehow unpretentiously toward internal rhymes and rhythms that manage to mask the structure. That is, this poem tricks the ear into forgetting that this is a four-stanza poem of four lines each with an a-b-a-b ending rhyme scheme.

Gerard Manley Hopkins often tricked the ear out of hearing his sonnets as sounding characteristically like sonnets–but he did this by compounding and compressing the internal music in such a way as to drown out the sonnet’s cadence. Heaney also manages to mask the structure of this poem, but instead he puts in just enough music to do so without disassembling, as Hopkins does, into non-narrative exultations.

The rhyme scheme itself also begins with fairly oblique rhymes (such as “house” and “notice”), and ends on more straightforward rhymes (“yard” and “disregard”), continuing this trajectory from a starting point closer to free verse to an end point more akin to rhymed iambic pentameter. Thus the cadence, tone, texture and rhymes all build toward a progressively more lyrical experience while, at the same time, still following the traditional narrative trajectory of the stichic poem–building toward a remarkable conclusion.

The poem also makes a sonnet-like volta, turning on the line “My last things will be first things slipping from me”–a play on the biblical phrase “the last shall be first.” (Matthew 20:16, KJV) Biblical phrases represent a kind of culturally accepted form of elevated diction–that is, a form so common and so ubiquitous within Christian-influenced cultures as to in some ways act like plain speech. Heaney softens the diction further by using “will be” instead of “shall”–but at the same time achieves the effect of a more grand, lyrical, philosophical statement without coming off as pretentious. He carries off the impact of biblical phrasing under the guise of plain speech.

From this point, he has launched into the proclamatory language of biblical text, and can say “let all things go free that have survived” without sounding out of tune. But instead of carrying on with this proclamatory voice, he makes a wild associative leap, comparing mint to “inmates liberated in that yard.” Even as strange associations and memories are triggered by certain smells, here Heaney associates mint with “the disregarded ones we turned against / Because we’d failed them by our disregard.” The poem ends on a kind of poignant and unexpected moment of admitting complicity in the complex circumstances of prisoners–presumably those prisoners connected with the struggles of Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century.

Having navigated the complex interrelationship between plain speech and lyrical thought, between crafting narrative and exploring association, we arrive finally at a conclusion that is both unexpected and, thanks partly to the heightened rhyme, somehow fittingly related. In this way Heaney manages to bring elements of Romantic and lyrical poetry to the modern ear, giving us both what we want as modern readers expecting innovations on common language, and what we have always wanted throughout time–the music of poetry.

… there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the ‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation’, from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.

It would seem Heaney is advocating, to alter Dickinson’s famous quote, that poets can only “tell all the truth by telling it slant.” Or, as Ella Fitzgerald has been wailing at me through speakers of the coffee shop in which I find myself typing this now, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Yet some have done it surprisingly well. Of the poems I liked best toward the latter half of this anthology, there seemed to be three general types of poems that employed either dense music to drown out the form; an “absurd” subject matter juxtaposed against the intricate, labyrinthine turns of the form; or a very faint adherence to the form, giving a vague echo or nod to the tradition while also breaking free.

An excellent and very early example of “dense music” can be heard in the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I mention him in the context of contemporary poets (though he falls chronologically in the middle of the book) because his associative leaps are as bold as any Wallace Stevens poem and his strange sprung rhythms are characteristically his own. The musicality in such classic poems as “God’s Grandeur” or “The Windhover” completely subsumes the sonnet form, making each poem uniquely Hopkins.

Another, more modern example of dense music drowning out the all-too-familiar cadences of the sonnet are poems by Seamus Heaney. His lugubrious, rich, full relationship to language, darkly overshadowed by his Irish accent, drown out the ending rhymes such that we focus more on the dense internal rhymes and lush linguistic rhythms. To a lesser, and different extent, Paul Muldoon’s sonnets are likewise dense with internal music, although they are not as tightly controlled or as obsessed with the sounds and rhythms of words. Muldoon peppers his sonnets with idea-surprises (consider “October 1950″) that go equally as far as music in distracting us from, and transcending, the form.

Besides drowning out the form, another option is to succumb to it–but with a subject so iconoclastic to the witty volta that it adds energy through tension. An excellent example of this approach are the poems from Marilyn Hacker’s Cancer Winter that are included in this anthology. The intense experience of a full single mastectomy and resulting physical and psychological recovery are pitted against the quip-like chiming of a the classic Italian sonnet form. The Italian form reveals its “device” even more than the English form, since the kissing rhyme places rhymed lines right next to each other–something that sounds more contrived in English than it does in Italian, where rhyme-able word combinations abound. The intense disparity between form and subject reflect the speaker’s dissociative experience of loss.

Equally awkward and compelling are J.D. McClatchy’s series of poems about his male mammogram, discovery of excess estrogen in his body, and resulting musing about his androgyny. Again, by pitting an embarrassingly personal and awkward, intimate situation with the rigid sonnet form, he draws out the difference between the glib, hyper-professional medical staff and the uncomfortably intimate subjects they probe and examine. But “absurd” subjects need not be deeply personal–our world is rife with examples of the ironic and surreal.

In Charles Martin’s “Easter Sunday, 1985″ the absurdity of Guatemala’s president confronting the notion that desaparecidos (political dissidents who disappeared under his totalitarian regime) could resurrect is carefully explored in the first two stanzas. Then, in the volta of the last two stanzas, he compares this kind of resurrection to the resurrection of Christ, ending on the compelling image of Jesus “Broken and killed, flung into some ravine / With his arms safely wired up behind him.” Martin resists abstraction and rhetoric and, by taking the absurd seriously and pouring it into a modified Italian sonnet form, he renders a compelling disparity between totalitarian rhetoric and its underlying brutality.

A third option for contemporary sonneteer-ing I have identified through this text is to exhibit only a faint adherence to the form. I was surprised to see a poem by Louise Glück in the collection, adhering to her characteristic form and clearly “breaking” the rules of classic sonnets. On further examination, the turns involved in this (and many) of her poems exhibit a kind of faint adherence to the spirit of the sonnet’s volta. Another example of muting some of the more intractable difficulties of the sonnet form by only vaguely adhering to the tradition is Dana Gioia’s “Sunday Night In Santa Rosa.” Gioia uses subtle, slant rhyme and refuses to rhyme the ending couplet–instead relying on a compelling image of a clown peeling away his face as a kind of comparable “ta-da” to the traditional couplet.

Another example of faint adherence to sonnet form is Henri Cole’s series “Chiffon Morning.” Here Cole pursues the somewhat awkward and personal subject of his mother’s final days but, rather than creating dissonance by employing a strict Italian form, Cole employs the English form and mutes the flourishes of this form using slant rhyme and strange, disorienting associations within the lines. This represents a kind of amalgam of the above techniques of taking liberties, exploring a compelling theme, and drowning the form out with other interesting intellectual and musical goings-on within the middles of lines.

These three tactics of dense music, absurd subject and faint adherence represent my own taxonomy derived from reading selections of the Penguin anthology. Obviously, there are other techniques I have not spotted, and clearly the three I have outlined interweave and interplay with each other as contemporary poets continue to attempted to mitigate the difficulties and capitalize on the assets of this timeless form.