[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)”]
I’m going by memory and intuition here in tracing some kind of history of the formally subversive American sonnet – I hope readers let me know of those non-sonnets and anti-sonnets I have missed along the way, particularly any before Gertrude Stein’s satirical “A SONNET” in “Patriarchal Poetry” in 1927 and between that and the blossoming of blank verse sonnets, free verse sonnets, or otherwise irregular sonnets a few decades later. I jump to 1956, when John Ashbery’s “Sonnet” appears in his debut Yale collection Some Trees:
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
After many years he has been brought nothing.
The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.
The servant goes to bed.
The patience rambles on
Musing on the library’s lofty holes.
His pain is the servant’s alive.
It pushes to the top stain of the wall
Its tree-top’s head of excitement:
Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.
The light walls collapse next day.
Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.
Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;
Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.
In Peter Sacks’s essay “The Face of the Sonnet: Wyatt and Some Early Features of the Tradition,” he begins with a quotation from Ashbery’s 1974 “Grand Galop” – the same moment of that long poem I returned to a few months back in a brief elegiac post here at The Kenyon Review after Ashbery’s death. Sacks begins:
In John Ashbery’s “Grand Galop” the speaker listens back across more than four hundred years to what he goes on to call “that still-moist garden where the tooting originates.”
It drifts away in fragments.
And one is left sitting in the yard
To try to write poetry
Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around,
Took up and put down again
Like so much gorgeous raw material.
Sacks goes on to draw the reader’s attention to Ashbery’s impersonal pronoun and to his focus on “poets (two rather than one) whose signature originations (the first English sonnets . . . ) arose as translations of prior Italian sonnets.” He writes:
Ashbery helps us recognize that one of the salient features of the English sonnet may be the form’s way of confronting head-on, so to speak – while also developing thematic entailments and analogues for – a more general lyric venture: the impersonating of an individuality whose very means of expression impugn any claim for unique self-possession. Indeed, Ashbery’s earlier “Sonnet” . . . has no first-person singular at all.
And later in Some Trees, we reach another “sonnet” titled “Sonnet”:
The barber at his chair
Clips me. He does as he goes.
He clips the hairs outside the nose.
Too many preparations, nose!
I see the raincoat this Saturday.
A building is against the sky –
The result is more sky.
Something gathers in painfully.
To be the razor – how would you like to be
The razor, blue with ire,
That presses me? This is the wrong way.
The canoe speeds toward a waterfall.
Something, prince, in our backward manners –
You guessed the reason for the storm.
In The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Susan M. Schultz considers the subversive sonnets of Some Trees as follows:
These poems are wrought of fourteen lines, as they should be . . . but they otherwise disobey rules kept even by Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, Hart Crane, and other twentieth-century poets . . . Not only does Ashbery’s form diverge from that of the traditional sonnet, but the content of his poem surely astonishes an American reader accustomed to the American line of democratic poets from Whitman through Frost . . . [One] has the feeling of plenty amid the playful diminishment of this traditional form, a plenty that is more postmodern than modern, unanchored as it is from the very traditions it mocks.
[Continued in “American Sonnets (Part XVI: ‘What’s up ahead / which is resistance’)”]