What, then, can poets writing today, in the vers libre form that has dominated the past sixty years of poetry, gain from studying English-language forms that moved in and out of fashion over the previous thousand years?

One answer is that the poet can gain a sense of connection to poetic lineage. Discovering that poets have been re-inventing our relationship to language for thousands of years can be deliciously humbling. Perhaps this is what Emerson meant when he said that poetry must be “as new as foam, and as old as the rock.” Even more than this important universal perspective, though, I feel that I have also gained personally as a poet through studying form.

One gain for me was the discovery, through practicing various forms, that constraint galvanizes creativity. In fact, I would say that I found a kind of freedom within constriction. By practicing various forms, I have learned that many types of constraints–such as meter, rhyme scheme, or even just a list of words to use when writing a poem–intensify my relationship to the “assignment” at hand. My creativity rises to the challenge, and I find myself writing more interesting lines than if simply given a blank page and a pat on the back. Exercises in form have helped me build creative muscle. It is a bit like running with weights. And as an added benefit, sometimes the formal poem succeeds as well.

Another wonderful aspect of studying form is being influenced by the musical heritage of poetry. I studied sonnets extensively as an undergraduate, writing essays on Dante, Petrarch, and Sydney, as well as the occasional sonnet to my girlfriend at the time. When I became more serious about writing poetry, I thought I had to somehow make a clean break from verse, and learn to write free verse as though I were starting from scratch. What I found, over time, and through working with astute mentors, is that the thousands of sonnets I had ingested in my teens became a tremendous asset. Musicality wins in poetry, above any other element (imagery, ideas, you-name-it). The music of natural English speech is closely allied to iambic and trochaic patterns. And so, once I embraced it, I found sonnet-like music suffusing my free-verse poems quite naturally and effectively.

Finally, there is a gain in studying form that brings together the aspects of lineage, creativity in constraint, and poetry’s musical heritage. By dancing between free-verse and formal poetry, I feel not only connected to poetry’s lineage in the abstract, but more able to synthesize old and new in my own work. This is the paradox of poetry–that it is a long-standing tradition of breaking with tradition. I have found that those poets who seem most unique, and whom history often celebrates as the vanguard of some new movement, were steeped in understanding of their fore-bearers–not as an abstract appreciation, but through the practical application of exercises, studies, and experiments with form.

Since free verse means the poet must invent and reinvent the form as she goes, understanding and practicing elements of form are, more than ever, a key part of a poet’s development. It is important, though, for writers to study form from a writers’ perspective–with an eye toward practical application. The intricacies of form can be seductive, since the analytical interrelations have themselves an aesthetic appeal. But it is important to ask: how is this making my poetry better? How is this increasing the musicality, and creative zeal, of the poems I write? This is a key to reaping what studies in form can offer: a greater sense of place in the timeless lineage, an explosion of creative freedom caused by seeming constriction, an attunement of the poet’s musical ear, an the ability to synthesize tradition and innovation in the centuries-old pursuit of using words to get beyond words.

I heard a poet say to me, ‘Oh, I hate sincerity.’ And I thought, oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I don’t get it.

I didn’t get it either. Perhaps partly because the title is so iconoclastic, Glück begins by defining terms, equating her use of the word sincerity with “telling the truth.”

Clearly, the truth is not always interesting. Nor can a poet force a reader to like a poem simply because “it really happened.” This seems to be the single greatest mistake of poets engaged with the personal lyric in our time.

Glück points out that a greater kind of “truth” can be had through a suspension of didactic conclusion, through exercising negative capability. She points out:

Keats’s theory of negative capability is an articulation of a habit of mind more commonly ascribed to the scientist, in whose thought the absence of bias is actively cultivated. It is the absence of bias that convinces, that encourages confidence, the premise being that certain materials arranged in certain ways will always yield the same result. Which is to say, something inherent in the combination has been perceived.

This is another angle on my own understanding that great poetry, in some sense, “executes” in the psyche much like software code runs in the context of computer hardware.

Interesting, also, is that Glück uses two sonnets to illustrate this capability, one from Milton, the other from Keats. This would seem to confirm Phillis Levin’s instinct in including one of Glück’s poems in her collection of Sonnets, and my own recognition of the sonnet’s influence on Glück’s ability to turn a line.

Above all, it was illuminating to read Glück espousing the greater “truth” that can be had through casting off any dogmatic adherence to fact or grasping after homily-like conclusion. What I sensed in a book like The Wild Iris was this kind of greater truth played out through the personae of plants. In a sense, Glück conceivably gives us, in some ways, a more accurate and intimate access to her inner life through this device. Though it is not in any way a factual autobiography, and though the speaker can never be said to necessarily equate to the author, this book of persona poems feels like a kind of “psychic autobiography.”

Glück confirms this as a possibility later in the collection when she writes about Eliot. Clearly, the character Prufrock is not the author Eliot–but Glück points out that Prufrock embodies many of Eliot’s concerns and that many of his later poems take the same kind of tone or voice as Prufrock. It is in this sense that exploring through negative capability helps a poet to arrive in truly unique and interesting territory–the questions that remain in the reader’s mind as perpetually more interesting than any statement of fact or any stroke, as it were, of “sincerity.”

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.

Both forms lend themselves naturally to turns of rhetoric and reflection upon a personal subject (be it love or the death of a loved one), and both forms, done badly, often seem to repay the author’s narcissism far more than the reader’s interest. The challenge with the personal lyric is to overcome the limitations of the deeply personal to reach some unique and universal truth. The challenge of the sonnet, especially in modern times, is to overcome the stringent limitations of the form to approach something transcendent. Far too often, it seems poets are content to write lyric poems that simply matter to themselves and their friends or, as with the sonnet, to simply plough through the form, capitalizing on all its traditional advantages and enduring its limitations.

I was therefore particularly interested in skipping ahead to poems from Elizabeth Bishop onward, to see how exemplary Modern and contemporary poets wrangle such a necessarily introspective form–how they might do more than simply settle for a decent sonnet, resting on the laurels of tradition. However here, too, I was struck by how many remarkable poets wrote mediocre sonnets. Many of the poems feel like early works, devoid of the unique flourishes that define the characteristic voices of Plath, Hall, Taylor, Stafford, or Dunn. Why is this sonnet business so hard for even great poets to pull off?

In a recent workshop, Marvin Bell pointed out that there is verse (meter/rhyme) and then there’s poetry, and that while he knows a lot about the former, he teaches and writes the latter. Furthermore, he pointed out how strongly contemporary poetry can often rest on interesting syntax. In a sense, syntax revives the unique literary interest of poetry in an analogous way to how verse charges language with meter and rhyme. The problem with the sonnet, of course, is that unusual syntax in service to landing on the appropriate meter or rhyme sounds deeply artificial to our modern ear.

Furthermore, because of the constraint on word choice, it seems to me that sonnets naturally tend toward more rhetorical speech (instead of concrete, imagistic plain speech)–because words are somehow more readily available in the realm of the abstract. Yet this can quickly add up to a lofty, philosophical tone, reminiscent of all the old devices of Renaissance sonneteers and their courtly ambitions. In short, it is awfully hard for a contemporary reader to trust the bombastic marching-band iambs and voltas of a contemporary sonnet, with its perilous temptations toward elevated diction, artificial syntax, and abstract, philosophical themes. It is the stuff of verse, not poetry.

Continue To Part Two: “Tactics For Contemporary Sonnets”

What is so great about this poem is that it makes excellent use of the momentum of the English sonnet form, culminating in a beautiful pair of lines that simultaneously do and do not make sense:

Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at haven’s gate;

Literally, it means something like, “When the lark wakes up at dawn it sings to heaven from the earth, and this is just like what happens when I am feeling very bad about myself and then I think of you.” How, exactly, does the poet turn from the previous lines of crying, cursing, and discontent into a lark? Or is it the turn of mind itself–the act of thinking on his beloved–that is lark-like? Is it the poet, his state, or his transformation that resemble a lark? And where did this bird come from in the first place?

Fortunately, we find ourselves not troubling a bit over these details, because by the time we arrive at the end of the third quatrain, we have been swept away by a poem that takes full advantage of the meter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet to propel us toward a spectacular end.

The tension that drives us here lies between fulfilling and confounding our expectations. Wonderful, ambiguous line endings like his “bootless cries”, (which resonates with being barefoot and poor) though desiring to be, “rich in hope” (can you deposit that in a bank?), “with friends possessed” (is that really a good thing?), desiring one man’s art and another’s “scope” (range? or what? and how?)–yet each of these line endings rings with a remarkable clarity and certainty, not because they are logical but because they rhyme with the ending two lines back.

And so, we are dazzled and carried along to this wonderful, unexpected ending involving a bird who rises up from the earth (apparently that’s where they nest) and sings to heaven. In this thought the poet realizes the memory of his love for his beloved is so rich as to make him better off than a king. Yet it is not actually the beloved, but the memory–the inner experience–that brings the poet richness. Just as it is not the literal meaning, but the wonderful tension between the sense of certainty and the literal ambiguity that brings to us the full richness of this poem.

What is so great about this poet is that he makes a form as intense, compact, and exacting as the English sonnet seem effortless. Furthermore, he brings all its devices to bear to intimate something that seems meaningful, beautiful, and important to us. There is no disputing Shakespeare’s importance to poetry. Stephen Booth once remarked to our class that, “saying Shakespeare was the best poet of his age is like saying King Kong was bigger than the other monkeys.” Despite changes in the English language and literary fashion, the bard remains an enduring example of elevating art to its highest potential.

On some side notes, my wife recently introduced me to a beautiful setting of this poem by Rufus Wainwright. He manages to avoid the pitfalls of trying to set iambic pentameter into its natural rhythm–which is utterly boring–and in fact produces a simple structure that is higly effective in evoking the spirit of the poem. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure where you can get ahold of a recording.

This sonnet also gives me some sense of link to my past. Years ago I was given a copy of Shakespeare’s works that used to belong to my great great grandfather. The volume is pristine, except for a pencil mark that circles this poem. Perhaps he too took comfort from the harsh midwest farming life of the early 20th century in thoughts of someone he loved or in the love of a poem. It is wonderful to think that a man I never met, and yet who influenced my life so greatly, may have similarly enjoyed and appreciated this poem.