[Orwn Acra]

What she said was stupid but I don't see her comments as gaining much traction. Wasn't Lentini Arab-Italian, anyway? And also: wait til she learns who invented vers libre!

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

What she said was stupid but I don't see her comments as gaining much traction. Wasn't Lentini Arab-Italian, anyway? And also: wait til she learns who invented vers libre!

Her comments are already a certain brand of contemporary poetry: she's not the agent of anything, but instead the fulfillment.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

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?

...............................
Yes. In that logic, at least.

[Julie Steiner]

Well, it's better than my own first sonnet.

About which I, too, felt cockily self-congratulatory for having completely revolutionized such a celebrated form by not writing about love. (Having read about three sonnets at that point, I considered myself quite the authority.)

I'll also confess to having had--when certainly old enough to have known better--the arrogance to enter a humorous poetry comp or two under the rubric "Compose a rap about..." Again, armed with passing acquaintance with a few examples from the genre and a fistful of stereotypes, I rose to the challenge. As I'm sure many others here have also done.

[Mark McDonnell]

Well, it's better than my own first sonnet.

And If she were a teenager scribbling in her bedroom, Julie, I'd feel inclined to tell everyone to stop being so mean. But she really isn't.

https://ashleymichellejones.wordpress.com

Walter – Fascist sympathiser Pound, yes? (Just checking I'm clever enough to get the joke. It's a good one, and a good point)

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Mark,

As the phrasing implies, it comes out of the French tradition, free verse merely being a calque of the French term invented in the late 19th century.

By white men, though Pound specifically would have been more, uh, poetic.

[R. S. Gwynn]

There's a flawed syllogism here:

Western culture oppresses POC.
The sonnet is a product of western culture.
The sonnet oppresses POC.

Both the major and minor premises sound true enough if you let them be, but the major has to be "Some aspects of western culture oppress POC." Leave it alone ("All aspects of . . .), and you can put "pasteurized milk" or "the Salk vaccine" or "steel" in the middle term and get a valid conclusion.

I didn't see Hair until 30 years after its Broadway debut, but everybody seemed to have the cast album back in the day. "Colored Spade" was probably a little shocking in 1967, but the whole show was a little shocking, and a huge hit. I doubt that the poet is aware of the song or the 60s culture that spawned it. The "Broadway-style review" was the form that was then being appropriated by a new generation.

As for the sonnet, I'd just say that the diversity of subject matter displayed in the contests and forums here is pretty good proof that the form is adaptable.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Sam,

Is steel or the Salk vaccine a cultural product or a scientific development? Though each arose in the West, there is nothing that says it had to have. Many other major inventions came elsewhere. We don't consider the Printing Press part of Eastern culture, right?

In that sense I don't think the syllogism would necessarily break down. It would be the cultural artifacts unique to the West.

Again, I don't think the sonnet is necessarily oppressive, nor any meter. Meter, in particular, strikes me as agriculture, developing everywhere in different forms. It's merely a way of organizing words and sounds, and literally every culture has done it in ways unique to the language being used.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Well, there goes pasteurized milk. Sorry. https://www.economist.com/finance-an...jRyks55ic2eMdU

It's generally believed that the Chinese invented the printing press.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

And If she were a teenager scribbling in her bedroom, Julie, I'd feel inclined to tell everyone to stop being so mean. But she really isn't.

https://ashleymichellejones.wordpress.com

Okay, that's a fair point, Mark. Ashley M. Jones was born in 1990, so she's thirty-ish.

Which raises an interesting (to me) near-parallel between her age and Claude McKay's, who was born in 1889, and published 18 sonnets from 1917-1925--many of them written in the summer and fall of 1919, when 76 African American men were lynched, and when the Chicago Race Riot occurred. There were a lot of tensions when Black soldiers returned from "fighting for democracy" in World War I, only to find their former status as second-class citizens awaiting them in their own country.

But there's at least one glaringly obvious difference between Jones and McKay.

McKay was seeking to communicate with a mostly-white audience, in a form that would lend both legitimacy and approachability to his message.

In contrast, the opinions of sonnet connoisseurs are utterly irrelevant to Ashley M. Jones's poetic career. Why should she care if a bunch of curmudgeons--from a class that used to be, but no longer are, cultural gatekeepers--think her views of the sonnet form are inaccurate? She can do quite well without our approval. In fact, she may feel that our disapproval makes her case that the sonnet form is oppressively restrictive, because people like me feel comfortable saying that the form can only be used in a particular way. (Even if I define that "particular way" in differently than she does.)

I noticed another poem that Jones calls a sonnet on her website, which is actually a fourteen-line free verse poem. This is further evidence that using the term "sonnet" in a way that will piss off purists apparently means something different to her, and apparently resonates with her target audience in a different way, than it does to a bunch of sonnet nerds in this not-very-popular corner of the Internet.

Jones might (or might not) be interested to read what McKay did with the sonnet form, one hundred years ago, to discuss race in America. In "America," he even transposed the sonnet's traditional use of the lady-love trope (with which she specifically took issue in her comments) to his relationship with the country that so despised Black men like himself, while still expecting his adulation.

Two other relevant sonnets by McKay:
"If We Must Die" (written in direct response to the Chicago Race Riots)
"The Lynching"

I agree that it is presumptuous, and appears ignorant of the true depth and breadth of the sonnet tradition, for a young Black poet to dismiss the form by calling it a restrictive instrument of the oppressor, limited to non-political topics.

But it also seems presumptuous for a White poet like me to set about "schooling" a Black poet (whose literary career is far more successful than mine will ever be) on the appropriate use of the sonnet to write about her experience as a Black person in America--however valid my criticisms may be, from a technical standpoint.