[Alan Sullivan]

Sam, you posted a passel of sonnets on the adjoining thread, which makes me want to ask you for some thoughts on the state of the sonnet. Fourteen-line poems seem to be hugely popular with 'Sphereans, who turn them out like a bunch of junior Willis Barnstones, with ever-more-baroque rhyme and stanza schemes. To my mind, most of these works are not sonnets. Whaddya think?

Alan Sullivan

P.S. Loved the "Galatea" and agree with Peter that it's the strongest of your six.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Robert Lowell did the sonnet form irreparable harm with the History/Notebooks sequences of unrhymed, roughly blank verse sonnets. Without the structure imposed by the rhyme scheme, these just become arbitrary 140-syllable boxes to cram ideas and experiences into.

The sonnet form remains attractive because it has such a long and glorious history yet doesn't seem to be exhausted as a form yet. I am in favor of variant rhyme schemes but personally don't much care for slant rhyme and metrical laxness. Some of my favorite sonnets fit neither the Italian nor the English pattern.

[Alan Sullivan]

I am bothered by "sonnets" lacking any discursive structure. With all that glorious history in the background, it seems a shame to me that so many of our contemporaries are content with a fourteen-liner about, say, looking at a deer. If no comparison or conclusion is drawn, no wisdom or unwisdom gained, nothing said that a journalist would not say, why arrange words into the ghost of this form?

A.S.

[R. S. Gwynn]

The volta or turn was built into the Italian sonnet from the outset with the shift in rhyming sounds between octave and sestet. This led to an identification between the form and two-part logical structures--question/answer, problem/solution, cause/effect, etc. Even Shakespeare retains the 8 and 6 structure in about half of his sonnets, though his rhyme scheme doesn't enforce that structure. Sometimes he uses the 4, 4, 4, 2 structure--the difference, say, between #18 and #73. But a turn of some kind seems an essential element of the form. That said, I fear that Tim will post "Untitled," which strikes me as guilty of having violated that stricture. Your hypothetical case of a sonnet that describes a deer in the octave and simply continues to describe the deer in the sestet doesn't sound very promising. The argument has to move somewhere.

[Tim Murphy]

And here, as feared by my guest, is Untitled. This sonnet relies upon its litaneutic structure, the many repititions of the phrase, "In which." I think it's one of the best sonnets written by my generation, but what's extraordinary to me is that Gwynn was only twenty-five when he wrote it. It is an extraordinarily precocious and mature poem, which abjures the volta in favor of a layering in the intensity of a very young man's aspirations for his future.

Untitled

In the morning light a line
Stretches forever. There my unlived life
Rises and I resist . . .
Louis Simpson

In which I rise untroubled by my dreams.
In which my unsung theories are upheld
By massive votes. In which my students' themes
Move me. In which my name is not misspelled.

In which I enter strangers' rooms to find,
Matched in unbroken sets, immaculate,
My great unwritten books. In which I sign
My name for girls outside a convent gate.

In which I run for daylight and my knee
Does not fold up. In which the home teams win.
In which my unwed wife steeps fragrant tea
In clean white cups. In which my days begin
With scenes in which, across unblemished sands,
Unborn, my children come to touch my hands.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Tim has kindly pointed out to me that "find" and "sign" are not particularly spiffy rhymes. I plead the ignorance of youth here. It's a very old poem.

[Alan Sullivan]

Litaneutic! There's a fancy word for a farmer.

I think rather that the effect of this poem resides in the sense of many disappointments, of things which have not measured up to expectation.

A.S.

[R. S. Gwynn]

>>Litaneutic! There's a fancy word for a farmer.

Well, he did go to Yale.

When I was teaching at the Sonoma poetry conference last week one of my students said, "You know, both of my parents are from Texas. It sounds really strange to hear such big words in your accent."

I am still trying to sort out the full implications of that remark.

[Carol Taylor]

Well, there is Texan and then there is Texan. When I lived out of state I occasionally spoke Texan for the fun of it. I'll never forget the look on my boss's face when I asked him if I'd ripped my pants.

Carol

[R. S. Gwynn]

>>Well, there is Texan and then there is Texan. When I lived out of state I occasionally spoke Texan for the fun of it. I'll never forget the look on my boss's face when I asked him if I'd ripped my pants.
Carol


"Paints," you mean.