[Steve Bradbury]

Is anyone up for discussing the merits of Don Patterson's theory of the appeal of the sonnet, which he presented in the introduction to 101 Sonnets?

I'm usually turned off by comprehensive theories of literary genres, but Patterson has some very intriguing hypotheses about the perennial appeal of the sonnet and of poetry in general. e.g.,

1) that "the poem is a machine for remembering itself" (xvi)

2) that the preference for a pentametric line has a neurological basis in "the length of time we can hold in our brains as 'an instant'" (xxv)

3) that the predominance of a volta on or slightly after the 8th line can be attributed to our biological addiction [my word] to the golden mean/fibbonaci sequence (xvii-xxii)

3) that the predominance of love sonnets can be traced back to Petrarch's conflation of the poet's effort's to win his patron's "love with seducing the muse through his poetic prowess" (xiii)

If you haven't seen this anthology and are interested in the sonnet, you definitely should, as it has some terrific sonnets in addition to Patterson's provocative introduction. Among the lesser known jewels are

Hartley Coleridge's "Long Time a Child"
Wendy Cope's "from Strugnell's Sonnets" [a parody of Shakespeare 55]
Carol Anne Duffy's "Prayer"
Anthony Hecht's "An Old Malediction"
Patrick Kavanaghs's "Inniskeen Road: July Evening"
Weldon Kees "For My Daughter"
Jamie McKendrick, "Ye Who Enter Here"
Tom Paulin's "In the Lost Province"
Craige Raine's "Arsehole"
Jo Shapcott's "Muse"

[Maryann Corbett]

I hope such a discussion gets going, though my contribution to it is not very significant.

The notion of the sonnet line as being "the length of time we can hold in our brains as an instant" corresponds somewhat to a commonplace among readability mavens, that the number of words we can reliably hold in short-term memory as we read is about seven. I've been sitting here counting on my fingers the words-per-line in the various Shakesperian sonnets I've got in the memory banks, and it's a little higher than seven, but not much.

I do want to thank you for the summary and the list of sonnets. I knew Carol Ann Duffy's "Prayer" (thank you, David Anthony) but not the others, and a few of them are findable online. The others may yet prod me to buy Patterson's book.

Maryann

[Steve Bradbury]

No wonder I have so much trouble remembering cell phone numbers.

But you should get the Patterson volume anyway, Maryann. It's cheap and chock-a-block with great work, much of which I had never seen before, from lovely listpoems like Barnabe Rudge's "A blast of wind,a momentary breath," to terrific sendups like Robert Southey's "To a Goose" and John Wilmot's "Regime de Vivre" (yes, THE John Wilmot of Johnny Depp fame), and some very interesting formally innovative work, such as Edwin Morgan's "Opening the Cage" and Paul Muldoon's "The Princess and the Pea".

btw, Patterson is pretty good sonneteer himself. See, for example, "Exeunt" and "Poetry" in his collection The White Lie (Graywolf Press, 2001).

[Maryann Corbett]

The sonnet that enlisted me as a Paterson fan was "Waking with Russell." I am admittedly a total sucker for parent/child poems, but this one is admirable for succeeding with just two (slant) rhymes, and for their very slantness, the way they sneak up on the reader.

For anybody who doesn't already know it, take a look here.

[Janice D. Soderling]

No, but I ordered the book yesterday, though. Do I get any points for that?

Come back in a few years when my education is complete!

thx for the tip.

[Maryann Corbett]

I've ordered it too. But so that I don't have to be in suspense until it arrives, could we perhaps hear more of what Paterson says about the placement of the turn?

The reason I ask is that it seems to me that turns can come quite a bit later, even at the couplet, even at the last line. If they come much earlier than line 8 or 9, we might not recognize them as turns, but later--well, they often do.

And are we really oriented toward the golden mean in some biological way? And how does the Fibonacci sequence fit in here?

[Steve Bradbury]

I don't have the book in front of me, but basically Patterson argues that the reason why most sonneteers put the volta at the end of the 8th line is that the ratio of the length of the sonnet to the octave approximates the ratio of the octave to the sestet, which is roughly the same ratio as in the Golden Mean and Fibonacci sequence (it would have been clearer if Patterson had used the more precise terms Golden Ratio or Golden section, which is expressed in mathematical terms as a+b is to a as a is to b.)

Patterson admits that the Octave/sestet ratio is not exactly 1.618 . . ., but he thinks this may account for the large number of sonnets in which the volta occurs a little before or after the end of the eighth line (which is actually the ninth line in many sonnets with run-on titles.

He doesn't say that this preference for the Golden Ratio has a biological basis, but then I doubt it really matters, as this particular ratio is as common in culture as it is in nature. The Renaissance artists and architects were obsessed with it, so I suspect the early sonneteers were too.

I'm sort of curious if our preference for the Golden Ratio might be underlying other poetic genres conventions, such as the caesura or closing couplet, but also the ratio of phrases to a sentence.

[John Whitworth]

The reasom most poets place the volta at the end of the eighth line is because that's one of the rules of a sonnet. The 8:6 ratio is a bit like the golden section and a bit like the Fibonacci series, but only a bit. Hell, have I mis-spelled Fibonacci? The reason why Paterson has elaborate theories about the sonnet is because he's a Scot and Scots have elaborate theories about everything. From one who knows. Good stuff though, I do agree.