Haunted by the Sonnet: Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man on Second”

In listing the “non-literary” analogs for form in certain kinds of contemporary poetry, Jonathan Holden identifies a way in which contemporary writers recover lyric, while pushing it in newer directions.

“Deprived by the modernist revolution of any sure sense of what poetic form should be, poets have increasingly turned to non-literary analogs such as conversation, confession, dream, and other kinds of discourse as substitutes for the ousted ‘fixed forms,’ substitutes which in many cases carry with them assumptions about rhetoric which are distinctly anti-modernist. Indeed, it is through deployment of such relatively 'personal' analogues as conversation and confession that a substantial number of our poets are attempting to recover some of the favorable conditions for poetry that had seemed to obtain before the triumph of modernism.”

This is good news for practitioners of fierce lyric, who wish to preserve the pre-modern virtues of lyric mode while not necessarily being overly constrained by the detailed requirements of specific forms.

Erica Reid, author of Ghost Man on Second, recently out from Autumn House Press, offers such a flexible approach. Her poem “Hermitage,” for instance, is a series of 13 haikus with a wrinkle, using words provided to me as the possible opposite for “hive.” “Part of Me Hurtling Toward” consists of a grid of boxes, each containing words that can be read up, down, or diagonally: “Found in” can lead to “silence,” “answers,” or “foundering.” “Foundering,” in turn, can lead back to “found in,” or to “silence,” “answers,” “pushing away,” or “part of me.” It may be, but sometimes it is merely play for cognitive pleasure. In “If Ever There Were a Time for a Long Title This Would be It,” the prose poem that follows continues to be part of the title, as it instructs us to “throw out the old rules, even the ones you made for yourself…There was a time when birds could not nest inside you, but who can remember that other life?”