[W T Clark]

I'm not a big fan of Duffy myself. I mean, I think every good writer has something interesting, and idiosyncratic, and strange to say about the world around them. But Duffy trots out what you would just expect, over and over again. Her sonnet about Shakespeare's wife says nothing very interesting or new about Shakespeare, it just says the normal banal things that people say every day about him in slightly heightened language. Why, when there was Hill, Oswald, even Armitage (though his particular talent is much overshadowed by the two previous names), did they pick her as laureate? Her opinions on Hera Lindsay Bird, or that texting is poetry should have made her a laughing stock.

Cummings is also not my favourite. What did he do but play with grammar? I think he was a painter who mistook himself as a poet.

But Bishop is a glorious writer!

In my mind, a sonnet should have a turn somewhere within it at least.

Regards,
Cameron

[Allen Tice]

Where is Shakespeare’s volta in Sonnet 66? Just before the final couplet. I’m not even sure a proper sonnet has to have a volta. Voltas provide a swirl of energy, ‘tis true, but maybe a good sonnet could be entirely gold or blue.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hey Aaron,

I've no doubt I'm very frustrating to argue with, my apologies again. To be fair, our ratio of misunderstandings is going to be higher than most people's given how we go at it haha. OK, I'll say one last thing. Your example of Eliot's Chaucer allusion is a great one, and I'm glad you brought it up because I've thought about the same thing from a different point of view. The Waste Land, of course, is famously chock-full of allusions. I fell in love with it in my late teens, like many I'm sure, knowing very little of its countless reference points and knowing nothing about Eliot, beyond Macavity the Mystery Cat. I loved its strange music and mystery and epic scope. I loved those opening lines, the boldness of the seemingly contradictory idea of this most life-giving month being the cruelest. When I read Chaucer for the first time a few years later and made (or read about) the connection I found it interesting. But in a weird way it slightly diminished rather than enhanced the line for me. Same when I eventually learned who Tiresius was and all the other references. The poem, brilliant as it is and I still love it, never quite recaptured the magic for me of my initial readings when I had no idea what was going on but was utterly captivated. My reading of it deepened maybe, but some kind of magic was lost. Weird. I'm not sure what point I'm making. A person's relationship to poetry and what they want from it is very personal., I suppose.

Cameron - I think maybe the laureateship spoiled Duffy, or she just went off the boil a little. She write some fantastic poetry in the 8os and 90s. I think the Anne Hathaway poem does say something we haven't heard about Shakey before! It suggests he was great in bed!

[W T Clark]

Hi Allen Tice,
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the Volta is surely in line 14, in that for 13 lines Shakespeare says he's going to die because of the bad things that have happened to him etc. etc., but then the "save" introduces a turn, he would die apart from he loves someone still and would live for them. There's a turn, not 360 maybe, but 180 degrees for sure.
I stand by my other argument, a sonnet is not rhyme scheme, isn't even metre, these are the sonnet's armour but not its heart. The beating heart of the sonnet is an argument, set up normally through 12 or 8 lines, then changed, destroyed, or augmented somehow (it doesn't have to be a major augmentation) in the final 6 or 2 lines. If a poem hasn't an argument with a turn, then it's still a fine 14 line poem, but it's not a sonnet!

Hi Mark
Yeah, she was definitely better before the laureateship. Still, compared to other British poets (oswald, Hill) I don't think she stacks up that well.
Don't get me wrong the poem is a fine poem. But even the idea that Shakespeare would be good in bed is predictable. It would be a more interesting/challenging poem if you wrote that he was terrible in bed. Shakespeare, as most modern critics seem to agree, was probably a completely boring person in actual life, although its all speculation.
Maybe, I'm out of order. Maybe I shouldn't look for a great writer in a good one.

Regards,
Cameron

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

The poem, brilliant as it is and I still love it, never quite recaptured the magic for me of my initial readings when I had no idea what was going on but was utterly captivated. My reading of it deepened maybe, but some kind of magic was lost. Weird.

A young Eliot (allegedly) used to read Dante aloud without any actual ability to read Italian. He loved the sound. Loving the story of what you can't quite piece together is both somehow old and postmodern.

All the fun's in how you say a thing--on the level of signifier, syntax, and form. No language exists in a vacuum: it comes from our own experiences and a variety of "traditions" (high, low, literature, film, tv, etc), and those traditions shape us consciously and unconsciously, in addition to shaping our life experiences in ways we can never fully grasp. In that sense, everything engages with something else, and recognizing the ways it does that enriches the piece.

All that's to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Novick here, and not just because he said he wanted to grab a beer with me and praised me in a public interview. Though that probably helped. Static definitions of sonnets aren't particularly valuable. Things that cannot adapt die--I don't mean that as a pseudo-biological evolution statement about life, but I mean it very specifically about language and forms. When languages stop adapting, they die. When forms cannot be used in new and novel ways (and I mean that pretty broadly), they stop being fresh.

I do particularly like his breakdown of the four things he thinks are valuable in assessing a poem. He's starting from a place like Pope and adding the "but does the world need another one of these poems?" or "but does it advance a fascist worldview?" layer.

In every work regard the writer's end,
Since none can compass more than they intend.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Andrew

Static definitions of sonnets aren't particularly valuable. Things that cannot adapt die... When forms cannot be used in new and novel ways (and I mean that pretty broadly), they stop being fresh.

Yeah, there's nothing there I disagree with, as I made clear in my first couple of posts on this thread. That's not what we've been arguing about. To be honest, I'm not sure what we have been arguing about. It's a blur haha.

I love that story about Eliot.

[Allen Tice]

Oh, Cameron, nolo contendere. I see your point. Maybe the minor volta begins line 13, and the volta majore begins line 14. It's a bit smeared out and rises in intensity. Or so I could argue and agree at the same time. My point was that I personally feel that the "volta" is the least interesting thing about a sonnet. Some good sonnets don't even have one or much of one, as with Ann Drysdale's here (post 36).

[Andrew Szilvasy]

I wasn't arguing with you Mark. I just quoted you because that particular quote made me think of the Eliot anecdote. The rest was just my (not particularly nuanced) addition to a conversation I had been following.

[W T Clark]

Hello Allen,
Ah, and here's where gut feeling conquers intellect. Anne Drysdale's very fine sonnet does not have an opposition, a change of argument, but it does have a turn. The turn from the explanation to the epigrammatic. It would not be a sonnet without that last couplet, that compression of everything. The argument isn't changed Shakespeare-style, but it is reformed. Without that turn from style to style, for me it would fail to be a sonnet.
Yeah it's a stretch, but I'm enjoying trying to pull everything into my argument.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by W T Clark

Cummings is also not my favourite. What did he do but play with grammar? I think he was a painter who mistook himself as a poet.

Cameron, I admire a great deal of what you say, but I think there's a lot more than just gimmicky games going on in Cummings' sonnets. Check out this one:

["kitty". sixteen,5'1",white,prostitute]

Look at that trivial, nonthreatening, uncapitalized "cute" at the end of L4, which to me implies that her cuteness is just as studied and "skilled" and "Unspontaneous" as her other Death-defying survival skills. And that heartbreaking "twice eight"!