{"id":56,"date":"2013-09-24T19:57:31","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T19:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=56"},"modified":"2017-11-14T19:54:47","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T19:54:47","slug":"mad","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=56","title":{"rendered":"He Is Mad Which Makes Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sonnets<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“He Is Mad Which Makes Two”: A Sonnet Project<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some years ago it came to me that I should write a sonnet a day for a year.\u00a0 Why I had\u00a0 this revelation I’m not sure.\u00a0 I had, for some years, been experimenting with a variety of forms, including sestinas (I once planned to write 39 of them, all interlocked–I made it to 12),\u00a0 villanelles, pantoums, ballades, canzones, and sonnets, while continuing to think of myself,\u00a0 nevertheless, as essentially a free-verse poet. Although I had been informed by one of my college professsors in the 1960s that “real” poets had to pay their dues by writing a hundred sonnets\u00a0 before they could expect to write anything good, I had ignored him.<\/p>\n

When, in the early 1970s, I started writing seriously, very few poets wrote in traditional form, and form itself was considered in many ways to be “the enemy.”\u00a0 I dissuaded my first\u00a0 undergraduate students at Wisconsin from attempting rhyme and meter, and did everything I could\u00a0 to squelch their Wordsworthian tendencies.\u00a0 A bad free verse poem, I thought, was always preferable to a bad formal poem, and much more difficult to dismiss as bad.\u00a0 Having myself abandoned the\u00a0 rhyme and meter I favored in childhood and adolescence (the music of echo and repetition and\u00a0 harmony that originally drew me to poetry via nursery rhyme, nonsense verse, popular music,\u00a0 religious responses, and product jingles), I would have been incredulous had someone told me that thirty years later I would be enamoured of forms in general and sonnets in particular.\u00a0 All that was old-fashioned, tired, fustian, and boring.<\/p>\n

However, had I looked more closely and objectively at my own “free verse” and that of many other young (and old) poets I admired, I might\u00a0 have noticed how close to formal verse it really was.\u00a0 Most free verse poets of the 60s and 70s were not writing the kind of raggedy poetry that\u00a0 characterized a Williams or a Creeley.\u00a0 Most free verse at the time was blocky on the page, with\u00a0 lines and stanzas of approximately equal length, a considerable amount of internal rhyme, and a\u00a0 fairly regular trimeter or tetrameter cadence.\u00a0 In fact, many of my own “free verse” poems, as\u00a0 well as those of the established poets I was reading, looked and sounded a lot like sonnets–approximately 12-20 lines, with regular line lengths; a heavy use of assonance and consonance; a thematic\u00a0 tension created by opposites and contrasts that appeared approximately two-thirds of the way\u00a0 through, or near the end of, the poem.<\/p>\n

So, in retrospect, it should not have seemed odd to me to think that I might one day be\u00a0 writing in forms, or even writing a sonnet a day for a year.\u00a0 And when the idea did come to me,\u00a0 it came with the force of an epiphany–I had been moving toward this project all of my life.\u00a0\u00a0 With melodramatic fervor, I knew I had to do it, and I knew I would do it, no matter the consequences.<\/p>\n

My first thought was that I would write the sonnets merely as exercises, little sketches\u00a0 with which to begin the day.\u00a0 They would in no way conflict with whatever more serious writing I\u00a0 might be doing.\u00a0 I resolved to get up an hour or two earlier each morning and write the sonnet in a period when I would otherwise just have been sleeping.\u00a0 The sonnet would be out of the way\u00a0 before my “real” work day began.\u00a0 I wouldn’t worry about writing “good” sonnets; quantity would\u00a0 be more important than quality, and I would try, as much as possible, to let the sonnets write\u00a0 themselves–I wouldn’t exert too much effort to make them conform to my usual standards.<\/p>\n

A quip from William Stafford proved useful in this respect.\u00a0 When asked how he managed to\u00a0 be so prolific, Stafford replied, “Every day I get up and look out the window, and something\u00a0 occurs to me, something always occurs to me.\u00a0 And if it doesn’t, I just lower my standards.”\u00a0 I\u00a0 figured that even if I had to lower my standards 90% of the time, even if just ten percent of the sonnets were “good,” at the end of the year I’d have close to a book’s worth.\u00a0 And, of course, I’d also have the other “real” poems I’d be writing during the rest of the day.<\/p>\n

I quickly learned, however, that the plan wouldn’t work quite as I’d imagined it.\u00a0 Once I’d written my day’s sonnet, whether it was good or bad, I found that I had satisfied my urge to\u00a0 write.\u00a0 I had, after all, done some work that day, and I consequently felt none of the guilt that usually accompanied dry periods.\u00a0 I felt no psychological need to write more than the sonnet.<\/p>\n

I also discovered that it wasn’t as easy coming up with a new topic each day as Stafford’s\u00a0 quip suggested. I found myself spending every free moment looking for subjects.\u00a0 On the one hand\u00a0 this was frustrating and exhausting.\u00a0 I became so obsessed with finding an idea for a new sonnet\u00a0 that I could think about nothing else–certainly not other poems.\u00a0 I was, in effect, “working”\u00a0 from 5:30 or so in the morning (when I’d get up to write the sonnet) until 10:30 or 11:00 in the\u00a0 evening when I’d go to bed, and then sometimes I’d dream about subjects, or lie, half-asleep,\u00a0 searching my unconscious for inspiration.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it was exhilarating; I had never felt so much like a writer.\u00a0 Students often ask me how they will know if they are “real” writers.\u00a0 A writer, I tell them, is someone\u00a0 who writes.\u00a0 Despite my glib response, I know it’s not so simple.\u00a0 Even though I have published\u00a0 over 500 poems in magazines, five books and four chapbooks of poetry, two dozen short stories,\u00a0 three critical books, and a couple of dozen articles and reviews, I don’t feel like a writer\u00a0 unless I am at that moment writing, and writing well.\u00a0 Whenever someone asks me if “I’m writing,” unless I have written something that day I equivocate, or I look ashamed and admit that no, I’m\u00a0 sort of blocked.\u00a0 Whenever I finish something, and have no idea of what I might turn to next, I\u00a0 fear that I’ll never write again.\u00a0 Mark Strand has written that “most poets dry up by fifty,” and I am already fifty-one.\u00a0 I try to assure myself that I always have written, and will probably\u00a0 write again, and that other writers report the same difficulties, but that doesn’t prevent me\u00a0 from worrying.\u00a0 Still, the standard reply–a writer is one who writes–is not a bad one.\u00a0 Donald\u00a0 Hall defines “contentment” as “work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working,” and when I’m working as a writer I’m content.<\/p>\n

Writing a sonnet a day, even a bad sonnet, was engrossing work.\u00a0 It is one thing to\u00a0 “write” every day (which many writers do); it is another thing actually to finish a complete\u00a0 draft of a work every day and immediately go on to another the next.\u00a0 I found myself doing what\u00a0 I had always assumed other writers did, and always instructed my student writers to do, but had\u00a0 never consciously done myself in any systematic way, which was to pay a special attention to the\u00a0 world, to be, as Henry James insisted, “one on whom nothing is lost.”<\/p>\n

I was intensely attentive all day, listening to people talk, seeing things in new ways,\u00a0 meditating on anything that caught my fancy.\u00a0 Everything became interesting again; I sought out\u00a0 experiences, even painful ones, because they might provide material. I put myself in uncomfortable situations, struck up conversations with strangers, took risks that I would have assiduously\u00a0 avoided before.<\/p>\n

Several months into the project I began to feel like I was running a marathon.\u00a0 As a\u00a0 runner I always found the first few miles exhilarating–the feeling of power and energy and\u00a0 health–and then the side stitch would hit, or the legs would get wobbly, and I’d want to quit,\u00a0 but I’d keep running, and eventually get that second wind, or the third, running through pain and discomfort.\u00a0 The sonnets were like mile markers ticking off:\u00a0 Could I keep up my energy?\u00a0 Would I run out of breath?\u00a0 Would my feet fail me?<\/p>\n

But running wasn’t just a metaphor for my project; literal running was one of my major\u00a0 sources of inspiration.\u00a0 Early in the year, when I was most concerned about how I would find 365\u00a0 new subjects, I discovered that the hypnotic trance I’d get into during my daily run was very\u00a0 productive of ideas.\u00a0 Along about mile two, when the breathing had become deep and regular, and\u00a0 the rhythm of feet on pave established its own insistent metric, and Lake Mendota stretched out\u00a0 wide and open on either side of the narrow isthmus of Picnic Point as the state capitol building\u00a0 rose in the distance, lines would come to me.\u00a0 I could hold on to four or five, or maybe six or\u00a0 seven, before I was in danger of losing them, and I’d keep repeating them and refining them until I got home and could scrawl them on my yellow legal pad where they blurred with my sweat as I\u00a0 bent over the page which curled and puckered under my damp hand.<\/p>\n

Later, in the shower, I’d find that the flow of water would stimulate additional material.\u00a0 So I often had at least some lines to start the next morning’s work with.\u00a0 Later in the year,\u00a0 when I was less worried about finding subjects and more content just to let ideas come as they\u00a0 would each morning, I found that my early morning shower generated lines as well.\u00a0 Donald Hall\u00a0 once said that when he wanted to write a poem he would go to sleep.\u00a0 The realm between sleep and\u00a0 waking was a fertile one for tapping into the unconscious.\u00a0 Thus, showering before I was fully\u00a0 awake, allowing whatever thoughts arose to flow, I found that new and unexpected ideas would\u00a0 almost effortlessly overtake me.<\/p>\n

Some days I’d get several ideas and write two or three or even four sonnets, but I held\u00a0 to my rule that I couldn’t “bank” them up.\u00a0 If I wrote four sonnets one day, I still had to write one the next, and the next.\u00a0 I looked to the seasons for help–the tall prairie grasses of fall, the snows and below zeroes of winter, the wet promise of spring–sometimes anticipating changes\u00a0 weeks before they occurred, sometimes recalling past seasons, sometimes startled anew.\u00a0 If cliches came my way, I welcomed them–what the hell, it was just one poem out of 365.<\/p>\n

I watched the news in a new way, hungering after events and stories, attuning myself to\u00a0 the human rhythms of birth, death, marriage, sex, love, loss, divorce, disaster.\u00a0 When I traveled to Florida or the Virgin Islands, I wrote about travelling.\u00a0 When I was sick with the flu, I\u00a0 wrote about the flu.\u00a0 When a friend experienced something interesting, I wrote about the friend.\u00a0 Occasionally I felt almost ghoulish in my pursuit of material, recalling a possibly apocryphal\u00a0 story about Henry James.\u00a0 Once when a friend saw him lurking on the periphery of a funeral and\u00a0 remarked, “Henry, I didn’t know that you were acquainted with the deceased,” James is supposed\u00a0 to have replied, “I’m not; but where emotion goes, there go I.”<\/p>\n

It wasn’t just subject matter, however, that presented difficulties; I had to teach myself to write in iambic pentameter.\u00a0 From the outset I had decided that my sonnets would be fairly\u00a0 conventional.\u00a0 I would not write the “minimalist sonnets” that Mona Van Duyn practiced (although I have great admiration for them); I would not use the basically trimeter or tetrameter line of\u00a0 much of my early poetry and much of what has been called “the workshop poem,” (although I think\u00a0 that tetrameter may be a more “natural” cadence for American speech).\u00a0 I wanted a sonnet that was recognizably a sonnet, in the great historical tradition of the sonnet.<\/p>\n

For the first few months, the iambic pentameter was a strain; counted out on my fingers, it seemed stiff and forced.\u00a0 But gradually it began to feel completely natural.\u00a0 I had heard\u00a0 Marilyn Hacker at the AWP convention in Tempe say that she told her students that if they\u00a0 listened to their own speech they’d be amazed at how much of it was in iambic pentameter.\u00a0 Her\u00a0 examples were:\u00a0 “My sister doesn’t like to clean her room; a double burger and a side of fries;\u00a0 I think, my friend, that you are full of shit.”\u00a0 Phil Dacey, in his wonderful anthology Strong\u00a0 Measures<\/i> extends the range of iambic pentameter beyond speech to biology, recalling that the\u00a0 heart beats in iambs and approximately five times for every breath one takes.\u00a0 Three months into\u00a0 my project I was hearing iambic pentameter everywhere.<\/p>\n

I had pretty much settled on the formal requirements of my sonnets.\u00a0 The meter would be\u00a0 fairly precise–fourteen more or less decasyllabic lines with liberal substitutions to capture\u00a0 speech rhythms; a volta, or turn, for thematic tension; a rhyme scheme that varied from poem to\u00a0 poem, and rhyme words that relied heavily on near rhyme or eye rhyme or slant rhyme.\u00a0 As I look\u00a0 back at some of the sonnets now, I wonder how I thought certain lines were in iambic pentameter,\u00a0 or certain words rhymed (twelve\/hell; horrors\/stories; gibbets\/infants; kowabonga\/longer), but at the time I was convinced they were and did.<\/p>\n

For some weeks I experimented with a rhyme scheme that I fantasized might be added to the\u00a0 Shakespearian, the Petrarchan, the Spenserian– would we call it a Wallacean?–a kind of envelope structure: AABCBCAA DEFEFD.\u00a0 But after several weeks the advantages of the Shakespearian and\u00a0 Petrarchan forms became clear to me.\u00a0 My new rhyme scheme was nicely symmetrical, but the rhyme\u00a0 words, particularly in the sestet, were too far apart to provide a satisfying sense of closure;\u00a0 that all-important echo of sound at the end was missing.<\/p>\n

I gravitated to a hybrid, drawing on the English or Italian form or some variant depending on the particular poem.\u00a0 I decided to set the poem visually as an octave and a sestet, even when\u00a0 the “sense” didn’t necessarily decree it, even when the turn was elsewhere, in order to provide a shadow of the tradition.\u00a0 When the sense of the poem might have suggested a division after the\u00a0 seventh or ninth line, for example, the physical appearance on the page would push it toward the\u00a0 conventional division and the disparity would create an additional tension in the poem, the shape on the page holding its ground while the language and subject struggled against it, stretching\u00a0 it this way and that.\u00a0 I found this freedom within the form, the variety within the fixity, to be aesthetically appealing although I realized that I would offend some purist critics.<\/p>\n

In fact, I constantly found myself mentally debating with critics.\u00a0 I knew that my sonnets were too “free” to please the more rigorous of the New Formalists who insisted on the necessity\u00a0 of rigidity; but I also knew that my sonnets were too formal to please strong proponents of free verse who would find the rhyme and meter restrictive.\u00a0 It could very well be, I thought, that\u00a0 these sonnets would have no audience anywhere.\u00a0 But it didn’t matter; I was committed, and\u00a0 increasingly excited about the project, because, as it turned out, more of the sonnets were better than I could have hoped.<\/p>\n

Originally, I planned to write for a year, without revising or even rereading any of the\u00a0 poems.\u00a0 At the end of the year I would spend another year sifting and winnowing, selecting the\u00a0 few that were worth seriously working on.\u00a0 But because I was writing nothing else, and because\u00a0 the sonnets had so taken over my life, I soon altered my plan.\u00a0 I established a rhythm whereby\u00a0 I would write for a week, reserving every Thursday for revision of the past week’s poems that\u00a0 seemed worth saving.\u00a0 Every Thursday (after writing my daily sonnet), I would revisit the week’s\u00a0 production and salvage what could be salvaged.\u00a0 Most days during the week, I finished my sonnet\u00a0 and slipped it into my folder with the thought that it was junk.\u00a0 I’d then go on about my day\u00a0 looking for something better for the next one.<\/p>\n

But each Thursday, reading back over the week’s work, I was surprised at how many of the\u00a0 sonnets seemed worth working on.\u00a0 It was as if the sonnet form itself was smarter than I was;\u00a0 that it, in fact, helped me to write better than I could have written alone.\u00a0 All forms, perhaps, do this–push you in directions you might not otherwise take. John Ashbery once said that he\u00a0 liked the sestina because, like an old-fashioned bicycle whose pedals keep pushing your feet,\u00a0 the form pushed him in directions he wouldn’t have taken himself.\u00a0 So the sonnets pushed me into\u00a0 new territories.\u00a0 Technique was, as is often said, discovery.<\/p>\n

Which may suggest why the sonnet has been such an enduring and resilient form over the\u00a0 past 600 years.\u00a0 It’s the one poetic form that even people who “hate” poetry, or are indifferent\u00a0 to it, can recognize. And most literate readers probably know at least something of its history:\u00a0 how it was invented by Giacomo da Lentino or Guittone di Arezzo or Pier delle Vigne (there is\u00a0 disagreement on this issue) in the first half of the thirteenth century in Italy, and became\u00a0 popular in the court of the Emperor Frederick II of Sicily; how the possible origin of the name\u00a0 itself, from the Italian suono (sound) or sonnetto (a little sound), is a bit misleading since\u00a0 the first true sonnets (at least those of Giacomo da Lentino, the most likely inventer) were not\u00a0 intended for music or oral performance, but for silent reading, and were finally more dramatic\u00a0 than lyric; how the form was given theological depth, and established as a serious literary\u00a0 endeavor, by Dante in his Vita Nuova<\/i>; how it was popularized by Petrarch who fixed its connection with the sentiments of courtly love in his famous sequence to Laura; how it spread to England\u00a0 with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey by way of Tottel’s Miscellany<\/i> (1557) which helped establish the English form of three quatrains and a concluding couplet (ostensibly to\u00a0 make the form more amenable to the fewer exact rhymes possible in English) and how it was\u00a0 reintroduced 25 years later via France through Ronsard and Descartes; how English translations of Petrarch, and Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella<\/i> (1591), were widely imitated; how the\u00a0 English form was so perfected by Shakespeare that it took his name; how Donne and Herbert\u00a0 embraced its fixity for their religious convictions, and its tensions for their accompanying\u00a0 doubts; how Milton and the great Romantic poets exploited it for their own purposes, enlarging\u00a0 the traditional themes and content; how Victorian and modern practioners like Hopkins and\u00a0 Meredith and Frost and Cummings exploded some of its strictures; how even T.S. Eliot embedded it\u00a0 in lines 235-48 of “The Wasteland,” and Berryman and Lowell turned to it almost exclusively late\u00a0 in their careers; and how it has enjoyed a resurgence among contemporary poets who have, by\u00a0 loosening the demands of rhyme and meter and diction and length, stretched the form, in some\u00a0 cases, almost beyond recognition in poems that retain only a shadow, an echo, of the original.<\/p>\n

For all its popularity and resilience, the sonnet has not been without its detractors,\u00a0 even among its best practitioners.\u00a0 John Donne insisted, “He is a fool which cannot make one\u00a0 sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.”\u00a0 Samuel Johnson, in his 1775 A Dictionary of the English\u00a0 Language<\/i>, impugned, “It is not very suitable to the English language, and has not been used by\u00a0 any man of eminence since Milton.”\u00a0 Wordsworth, in a letter to Walter Savage Landor in April 1802 , confesses, “I used to think [the sonnet] egregiously absurd.”\u00a0 Ezra Pound complained in his Literary Essays<\/i> about the “monotony of the fourteen even lines.”\u00a0 And William Carlos Williams\u00a0 quipped in The Wedge<\/i>, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.”<\/p>\n

Of course, Donne, Pound, and Wordsworth all wrote their own sonnets, and even Williams\u00a0 eventually retracted his position.\u00a0 In an “Afterword” to the selected sonnets of Merrill Moore\u00a0 (probably the most prolific sonnetteer of all time, having written upwards of 50,000 sonnets;\u00a0 Marvin Bell has said that Moore could write a sonnet in the time that a traffic light turned\u00a0 from red to green) Williams admitted:\u00a0 “For years I have been stating that the sonnet form is\u00a0 impossible to us, but Moore, by destroying the rigidities of the old form and rescuing the form\u00a0 itself intact . . . has succeeded in completely altering my opinion.”<\/p>\n

Although the sonnet is under fire from various critics–some New Formalist poets feel\u00a0 that with the infiltration of slant rhyme and speech rhythms and the general hybridization of the form (what Phil Dacey has called the “grafting of free verse onto forms”) the form has been\u00a0 devalued and trivialized in “pseudo-formalism” (although it was Milton, and not Van Duyn or Rita\u00a0 Dove or Ted Kooser who rhymed “tetrachordon” with “what-a-word-on”); and some free verse poets\u00a0 continue to see a return to formal verse as “a dangerous nostalgia,” suggesting that the very use of a traditional form is somehow elitist or politically reactionary (the magazine Sparrow<\/i>,\u00a0 edited by Felix Stefanile and featuring only sonnets, boasts of itself as “a politically\u00a0 incorrect verse magazine”)–many of our best contemporary poets continue to write sonnets.<\/p>\n

In addition to Van Duyn and Dove and Kooser one immediately thinks of Marilyn Hacker and\u00a0 Marilyn Nelson Waniek (whose poems with lesbian and African-American themes certainly cannot be\u00a0 considered reactionary); but a multitude of others, including David Wojahn, Michael Heffernan,\u00a0 Brad Leithauser, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kelly Cherry, and Phil Levine come to mind.\u00a0 It has been\u00a0 calculated that some 200,000 sonnets were written between 1530 and 1650 by 3,000 sonnetteers in\u00a0 Italy, France, Germany, and Britain.\u00a0 Although I have not done a count, I suspect that a\u00a0 comparable number have been written over the past fifty years in America alone, where nearly\u00a0 every serious poet has at least flirted with the sonnet.<\/p>\n

But what, exactly, qualifies as a sonnet?\u00a0 Given the liberties contemporary poets have\u00a0 taken with the form, there is less agreement today than there has been in the past.\u00a0 Leigh Hunt,\u00a0 in his 1867 “An Essay on the Cultivation, History, and Varieties of the Species of Poem Called\u00a0 the Sonnet” which provides thirteen “rules” (including one against using “long words”), and\u00a0 T.W.H. Crosland in his 1917 “Sonnet Legislation” which offers twenty-one “rules,” agree that a\u00a0 kind of morality is involved in sonnet production.\u00a0 For Crosland, “the legislation is fixed,\u00a0 established, stable, and unassailable,” including the familiar restriction to fourteen lines of\u00a0 iambic pentameter with a fixed scheme of exact rhymes (for the Italian:\u00a0 ABBAABBA CDECDE or\u00a0 CDCDCD; for the English:\u00a0 ABABCDCDEFEF GG) with an emphasis on the “volta” or “turn” that follows the octave or precedes the couplet.\u00a0\u00a0 Crosland goes so far as to insist that couplets are not\u00a0 permissable at all (unless you are Shakespeare), and that rhyme words which sound too much like\u00a0 other rhyme words are forbidden (thus, although “wedge” and “sedge,” and “lodge” and “dodge,” are permitted separately, the pairings must not occur in the same poem).\u00a0 And he forbids “slang,\u00a0 cant, and foreign words and phrases, Americanisms, dialect, Greek, Latin, Romany, uncouth\u00a0 place-names; technical and scientific nomenclature, and names with unpoetic associations, such\u00a0 as ‘gramaphone,’ ‘telephone,’ ‘cinematograph.'”<\/p>\n

It is rare today to find a sonnet which adheres to such legislation.\u00a0 Slant rhyme and\u00a0 metrical variation abound, and in some cases the form is so approximate it may seem that the only thing that makes the poem a sonnet is the poet’s say-so.\u00a0 This is not merely a contemporary\u00a0 affectation, of course; Samuel Taylor Coleridge embraced a similar open-mindedness in his 1797\u00a0 “Introduction to the Sonnets.”\u00a0 Coleridge writes that the sonnet “is confined to fourteen lines,\u00a0 because as some particular number is necessary, and that particular number must be a small one,\u00a0 it may as well be fourteen as any other number.”\u00a0 Coleridge continues, “Respecting the metre of\u00a0 the Sonnet, the Writer should consult his own convenience–Rhymes, many or few, or no rhyme at\u00a0 all–whatever the chastity of his ear may prefer, whatever rapid expression of his feelings will permit.”<\/p>\n

Although I would argue that a sonnet can be any poem of approximately fourteen lines that, in its attention to meter and rhyme and structure, acknowledges its Italian and English heritage (which is to say, a poem that has the merest shadow of a traditional sonnet behind it qualifies for me as a sonnet), I did retain the somewhat more rigid requirements for my own sonnets, as I\u00a0 noted earlier.\u00a0 They are all fourteen lines; they approximate iambic pentameter; they all “rhyme”; they all contain a volta, or turn, usually somewhere around the ninth line; they all exploit the essential nature of the form to reveal (and sometimes resolve) emotional, intellectual, and\u00a0 spiritual contradictions.<\/p>\n

So why call such poems sonnets at all?\u00a0 Perhaps they are just fourteen-line poems that\u00a0 flirt with rhyme and meter?\u00a0 I would suggest that the classification of a poem is, in fact, very\u00a0 important, focussing the effect and meaning of that poem for the reader.\u00a0 In his Validity in\u00a0 Interpretation<\/i>, E.D. Hirsch insists that a reader’s “preliminary generic conception of a text is\u00a0 constitutive of everything he subsequently understands, and . . . this remains the case unless\u00a0 and until that generic conception is altered.”\u00a0 A reader approaching a sonnet has certain generic expectations that effect its reading. The whole history of the sonnet pulses behind it,\u00a0 energizing and empowering it.\u00a0 The ways in which the poem reflects and departs from that\u00a0 tradition become part of the meaning of the poem.\u00a0 By calling her fragmentary fourteen line\u00a0 poems “minimalist sonnets” (as with Hopkins’ thirteen line “curtal sonnets”), Mona Van Duyn\u00a0 invests them with meanings they would not otherwise have.\u00a0 The poem’s participation in the\u00a0 tradition affects how we read it, what it “means,” how it “feels.”<\/p>\n

At the end of my year, I had over four hundred sonnets.\u00a0 Of these, 108 (the number in\u00a0 Sydney’s Astrophel & Stella<\/i>, which occasioned other sonnetteers of Sydney’s day to restrict their own sequences to that number) seemed good enough to collect into a book.\u00a0 I debated about the\u00a0 structure.\u00a0 I knew that there was critical disagreement about whether to call Shakespeare’s\u00a0 sonnets “a sequence;” they have often been read, of course, as a kind a narrative involving a\u00a0 “fair youth” and a “dark lady.”\u00a0 But the status of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a true “sequence” is\u00a0 in some doubt, since it is not clear that Shakespeare himself placed them in the order in which we have them.\u00a0 The structuring was quite possibly done by his printer, Thomas Thorpe.<\/p>\n

Although I had not written the sonnets with a particular sequence in mind, I had found\u00a0 myself over the year returning to certain subjects and themes, many of them the traditional\u00a0 themes of sonnets:\u00a0 love (sacred and profane), death, the changing of the seasons, marriage,\u00a0 divorce, childhood, sex, religion, art, birth, the natural world, illness.\u00a0 Once again, William\u00a0 Stafford came to mind; I recalled that he once said that the way he structured a book was to lay\u00a0 all the poems down on the floor and then pick them up in the right order.\u00a0 I laid the 108 poems\u00a0 down, and, using chronological (the book moves from childhood through adolescence, middle age,\u00a0 and death) and thematic considerations, I shuffled them into place.\u00a0 The fact that I wrote the\u00a0 poems in such a condensed period of time (my five previous books all drew poems from a four to\u00a0 eight year period) helped ensure that they would be fairly tightly unified, each individual\u00a0 sonnet drawing meaning and power from its place in the context of the whole.<\/p>\n

By May 29, 1995, the 365th day of my project, the act of writing a sonnet a day had\u00a0 become so familiar it was something of an addiction. I even considered continuing for another\u00a0 year, but decided that that way lay madness.\u00a0 I didn’t want to become Merrill Moore, who, for all the praise of W.C. Williams, and for all his world-record 50,000 sonnets, is an-all-but-forgotten figure in American poetry.\u00a0 I didn’t want further to preclude the possibility of actually writing another kind of poem, which is what writing the sonnets had done.\u00a0 I forced myself to quit,\u00a0 which was both a relief (I could sleep in in the mornings; I could stop obsessing over topics for the next day’s poem) and a concern.\u00a0 I felt something like John Updike must have felt when he\u00a0 announced some years ago that he thought he “had unpacked his bags when it came to poetry.”\u00a0 I\u00a0 had written, in sonnet form, everything I knew.\u00a0 I had explored every childhood experience, every thought, every emotion, every spiritual crisis.\u00a0 There seemed to be nothing I hadn’t exhausted.\u00a0 Without the form to push me onward, perhaps I would write nothing.<\/p>\n

And for a year I found myself blocked, writing bad free verse, trying to repress the\u00a0 iambic pentameter which seemed to infuse every line I concocted.\u00a0 Although I haven’t yet completely recovered, I think I eventually will.<\/p>\n

Was it all worthwhile?\u00a0\u00a0 Did I waste a whole year in what might have been a mere novelty?\u00a0 During the year, as I revised sonnets, I began sending them to magazines for consideration.\u00a0\u00a0 I found that some editors who had always supported my work were bemused.\u00a0 Grace Schulman at The\u00a0 Nation<\/i> found them “interesting,” but didn’t take any.\u00a0 Peter Makuck at Tar River Poetry<\/i> wrote,\u00a0 “I liked you better before Count Formalism sunk his teeth in your neck” (three of the sonnets\u00a0 were eventually published in the magazine, in an issue compiled by a visiting editor).\u00a0 David\u00a0 Wagoner, who has been one of my most important supporters over the past twenty years, at Poetry\u00a0 Northwest<\/i> published two of them but rejected many more with the comment that he was unpersuaded\u00a0 by my use of iambic pentameter.\u00a0 When I sent a few to Peter Davison at The Atlantic<\/i>, which had\u00a0 published my work some years ago, and noted in a cover letter that I hoped I hadn’t wasted a year, he returned them with the ominous fragment, “I hate to say it . . .”<\/p>\n

On the other hand, many magazines, some of which I’d never had any luck with before,\u00a0 enthusiastically accepted them.\u00a0 One advantage of a sonnet is, of course, that it’s short, and\u00a0 doesn’t take up much space in a magazine–thus an editor always has room to slip a good one in.\u00a0\u00a0 To date, I’ve published nearly 150 of the 400 in such magazines as Poetry<\/i>, Southern Review<\/i>, Gettysburg Review<\/i>, Prairie Schooner<\/i>, Shenandoah<\/i>, Yale Review<\/i>, Christian Science Monitor<\/i>, New Letters<\/i>, Yankee<\/i>, The New Criterion<\/i>, The Formalist<\/i> (where one was a finalist in the 1996 Howard Nemerov Sonnet competition), and others.\u00a0 The book,\u00a0 containing 100, titled The Uses of Adversity<\/i> (after the line from As You Like It<\/i>:\u00a0 “Sweet are the uses of adversity”) was published in 1998 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, where Ed Ochester has been my supportive editor for many years.<\/p>\n

But, even had the book, or the individual poems, not been published, the project would have\u00a0 been worth it.\u00a0 I felt like a writer\u00a0 every day for a year; I mastered a form; I wrote poems and explored subjects I never could have\u00a0 explored without the aid of that form; I participated in a tradition that has been going on for\u00a0 700 years and will go on, I predict, as long as there are poets and there is poetry.\u00a0 I am\u00a0 convinced that Williams had it wrong; to me, all sonnets have said, and will continue to say,\u00a0 different things, and of some importance.\u00a0 Still, I sometimes do wonder:\u00a0 If, as Donne insisted, “he is mad which makes two” sonnets, what is he which makes 400?<\/p>\n

The Bad Sonnet<\/strong><\/p>\n

It stayed up late, refused to go to bed,
\nand when it did it sang loud songs instead
\nof sleeping, disturbing its siblings–couplets, quatrains
\nin their small rooms, began caterwauling–
\nand soon the whole neighborhood was awake.
\nSometimes it got in trouble with the law,
\nshoplifting any little thing it saw
\nthat caught its fancy:\u00a0 happiness and heartache<\/p>\n

slipped neatly in its pocket.\u00a0 It joined a gang
\nthat forged currency, bombed conventions, and finally
\ntried to bump off all its competition.
\nThrough a sequence of events, luckily
\nit was caught, hand-cuffed, and taken off to jail
\nwhere it would not keep quiet in its cell.<\/p>\n

“He is Mad Which Makes Two: A Sonnet Project” was originally published in the AWP Chronicle<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Uses of Adversity<\/i> was published by the\u00a0 University of Pittsburgh Press.\u00a0 For information on ordering The Uses of Adversity<\/i>, please choose Publisher Information<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sonnets “He Is Mad Which Makes Two”: A Sonnet Project Some years ago it came to me that I should write a sonnet a day for a year.\u00a0 Why I had\u00a0 this revelation I’m not sure.\u00a0 I had, for some … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":41,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-56","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/56\/revisions\/133"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}