[Aaron Novick]

Alright, then, I'm not with Mark. But I maintain that seeing traditional form as oppressive is a cliché idea, and that defending it is boring and unimaginative.

[Mark McDonnell]

I did know what you meant, Aaron, and we were basically circling the same idea. Not for the first time, I was being a pedantic arse. Sorry.

[Roger Slater]

Langston Hughes wrote only three sonnets, I believe. But then again, I don't think Richard Wilbur wrote many more. Here's one by Hughes that I like a lot:

The Pennsylvania Station in New York
Is like some vast basilica of old
That towers above the terror of the dark
As bulwark and protection to the soul.
Now people who are hurrying alone
And those who come in crowds from far away
Pass through this great concourse of steel and stone
To trains, or else from trains out into day.
And as in great basilicas of old
The search was ever for a dream of God,
So here the search is still within each soul
Some seed to find to root in earthly sod,
Some seed to find that sprouts a holy tree
To glorify the earth — and you — and me.

[Catherine Chandler]

Maybe I should write a sonnet using these terms, eh? And that's not even including the Urban Dictionary.

[Daniel Recktenwald]

Thanks for posting, Sam.

Regarding the "sonnet" and its author, all I got is, "Whatever."

Oh, and this: among many, many others African-American poets, Robert Hayden (a personal favorite) never needed the sparks off a grinding axe to light his poetic fire. Middle Passage, "Night-Blooming Cereus", etc, just speak for themselves.

Daniel

[Mark McDonnell]

And there's this from Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers in 1978. 'White Noise'.

https://youtu.be/9MuzUfjrcKU

Lyrics

https://songmeanings.com/m/songs/vie...2107858623906/

I suppose you could say her poem is working in a grand tradition.

[E. Shaun Russell]

If the sonnet form had been frequently used as a way to degrade non-white races (implicitly or otherwise), then I could perhaps see some merit in this poem as a biting retaliation. But as we all know, and as many here have said, the sonnet simply hasn't been used that way very often. It's just not the point of the form. In other words, this author is displaying her ignorance for the sake of shock value, which is about as unpoetic as it gets...

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

If the sonnet form had been frequently used as a way to degrade non-white races (implicitly or otherwise), then I could perhaps see some merit in this poem as a biting retaliation. But as we all know, and as many here have said, the sonnet simply hasn't been used that way very often. It's just not the point of the form. In other words, this author is displaying her ignorance for the sake of shock value, which is about as unpoetic as it gets...

The argument is less about the sonnet but about the sonnet--and meter, rhyme, etc.--being representative of a hegemonic Western culture which has dominated and colonized the rest of the world. In that sense, what the sonnet specifically has been used for is irrelevant: it propagates a problematic system.

I'm not saying I agree with that argument, mind you, but I think you're strawmanning it a bit.

EDIT: For instance, teaching Renaissance sonnets proves a problematic task, especially teaching at an all-girls school. You have to do a lot of work situating the language and explaining how it is stylized for it's day--there are genre expectations going back to the Roman Elegy-- but there's no question that it now sounds like it's written by Incels and MRAers and that for all the (absolutely) gorgeous and clever language, the genre dehumanizes women.

[Aaron Novick]

Yes, it's much easier to see how one might appropriate the sonnet in this way for feminist ends. Harder (for me, at least) to see the connection between the sonnet and the black American experience. Is there a deeper connection than that westerners both colonized and brutalized the rest of the world and also wrote sonnets? The one potential connection I saw in the article was the implication that sonnets are traditionally "apolitical" and thus a reflection of privilege, which may have some truth to it, but hardly enough to make this slurret interesting on the grounds of how it uses the sonnet form.

Though the real issue here may simply be the felt need these days to provide explanations that suffocate the art itself, that explain how it's subverting this or that or challenging our entrenched view of X or Y or what have you, which is inevitably boring and distracts attention from the art itself (which, if it's successful, will do that without the need for a lecture).

[Roger Slater]

"The argument is less about the sonnet but about the sonnet--and meter, rhyme, etc.--being representative of a hegemonic Western culture which has dominated and colonized the rest of the world. In that sense, what the sonnet specifically has been used for is irrelevant: it propagates a problematic system"

The problem with that argument is that it proves too much. There's nothing about the sonnet that is uniquely emblematic of Western culture, so presumably the argument would apply to, among many other things, all Western musical scales and all music employing them. So Beethoven and Mozart are also presumably now symbols of colonialism because they are guilty of having appealed to people throughout the world?

I think Jones exhibits her ignorance as she seems to think her sonnet is unique because "it's not talking about the fair maiden, or a rose, or any of the other non-political white subjects that sonnets were written about in the past." Has she actually read more than a dozen sonnets, and have any of them been written in the last 100 years? She has a stereotypical impression of what sonnets are and have been. I can't think of that many sonnets about fair maidens, can you? Yet Jones seems to think that fair maidens make up the bulk of the history of sonnets and that she is being innovative by avoiding that trope.