“In [Erica] Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet.”
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?”
“My Grandmother Cannot Understand Why I Would Want to Hear Her Birth Story,” advertised as a “found poem,” appears to be an unedited transcript arranged into irregular stanzas. It begins thus:
“Are you sure there’s not some more interesting story you would like to write about?” Many disavowals follow, as the grandmother doubts her ability to remember or tell the story accurately, while casually weaving a tale about her own mother giving premature birth to her, a five-pound infant, not predicted to survive, yet there she is telling the tale many years later. It ends with poignant uplift.
And that’s why I had to stay in the hospital
For 6 months. She said that her sister
had asked the doctor
about my chances of living,
and the doctor said
that he wouldn’t give a nickel for my life.
But I did live.
Another poem, “Five Story House,” is organized in stanzas as “ground/second/third/fourth/rooftop.” In part, it recounts how “I never had a bedroom at my father’s house. For a time, before he remarried, he laid a mattress on the floor & it was mine.”
Interviewed in the MFA Writers Podcast, Reid comments that contemporary writers are not necessarily averse to formal poetry. Rather,
“…the way we’re thinking about form is changing. A lot of hybrid work, I would consider formalist. There’s a huge swath of writers who are drawn to some kind of constraint or formal property. It’s just not the buttoned up kind of poetry most people think of as form. There are people who find constriction freeing, and I am one of those. Sitting down to write a poem feels like floating in the middle of the ocean. It’s too open. It’s terrifying. Constraint helps me enter the poem.”
The fierce lyric poets I have been considering generally do not find the need to form a new avant-garde, nor to issue manifestos or form groups or even coalitions. Rather, they comprise a loose, largely unconscious confederation of poets whose concerns, whether private or social, extend to matters of form—and to the question “How may I avail myself of form + experimentation to signify in the way I want?” What binds them in part is respect for lyric as such, even as they understand that form is always and has always been under renovation. No one has yet surpassed W.B. Yeats’s epigrammatic comment on this matter: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” He goes on to add that:
“Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.”
Therefore, we innovate perforce as we seek truth, whether private or public, taking necessary liberties which, in turn, burnish ancient forms into renewal. The sonnet, for instance, has constantly been modified since its popularization by Petrarch in the 14th century. Its inherent durability combined with the ingenuity of many faithless acolytes has allowed it to be stretched, even shattered, for 700 years, somehow always recovering its essential shape. Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, far from constraining sonneteers, have served as Platonic forms against which to ground one’s own poiesis. As there exist no federal or international laws prohibiting even the most radical experimentation, those who object to the sonnet as too confining protest too much. All forms are ultimately mutable, and that is how they survive changing tastes and approaches. Attempts to throw them over forever generally prove fruitless, for someone inevitably will be out there practicing them, seeing what new thing they can do with it. Yet, oftentimes a sonnet just will not do and is too constraining a throwback, no matter one’s commitments. Fierce lyric looks both forward, often as an extension of a supposedly disdained modernism and postmodernism that “deprived” poets of the lyric juice they thirst for, while still finding succor in past epochs’ closer adherence to various consecrated forms—yet also finding new equivalents, such as the ones Holden cites. With or without revolutionary fervor, the process of writing poetry, coming up against both inherent constraints of language and ones imposed by the existence of a literary tradition, is contemplative.
Terrance Hayes is a skilled practitioner of sonnet form yet has no shibboleths regarding it. In the deliberately ungainly titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison”],” Hayes does follow the fourteen-line format. After that, there is much departure: almost no rhyme; loose, prosy and jumbled meter, and a peppery argumentation in the form of is a meta-sonnet. It is a sonnet-decrying sonnet. He questions the very nature and use of sonnet form, its implied racial and cultural failures, all the while making a different kind of sonnet. Its rhythm is purely its own.
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.
Its lyric adherence to arresting imagery worked against rhetoric, while issuing a fiery (if partial) denunciation of the sonnet as oppressive, is one of its strongest (and most traditional) aspects.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
The form’s historical “gym/crow” status nevertheless allows it to “undergo a beautiful catharsis.” All the same, Hayes’s poem ends on a pessimistic, ambivalent note, expressing the paradoxical wishes to “love you” and “to want you destroyed.” Even if it may be interpreted as a call to poetic action, its directive is ambiguous. Love? Destroy? Both, if possible? Its invitation to subversion makes one want to rush out and try something radically new and inventive with sonnet form, to investigate whether its possibilities are exhausted or not. The recent anthology The American Sonnet, which I use in my graduate poetics seminar, offers a robust sampling of the African-American sonnet tradition in the United States, raising new questions and possibilities.
As for Reid and Ghost Man on Second, her crowning achievement (pun intended) in this collection is a crown of fourteen sonnets, “Emily,” in which the last line of each sonnet leads to the next. It deals both with her lifelong vexed, sometimes tormented, relationship with her mother, and with her troubled marriage. Appropriately, the meter gets metrically roughed up, while at other times perfect iambic pentameter reigns. The fluctuation is intuitive, emotion driven. Her grievance is less cultural, political, and encompassing than that of Hayes, more attuned to private suffering. One begins with a clash of iambs and trochees that simulate head-butting.
Unstoppable mother, immovable daughter.
Later, it sashays while describing the daughter’ so-called insolence:
if Persephone strides in with pomegranate-
red juice around the corners of her lips—
In another poem in the sequence, the poem opts for an extra syllable, something of a scrambled alexandrine to emphasize the ache.
It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.
I noticed this the first year of my marriage—
Those years were peaceful, which I could not stomach.
Other times, Reid enjambs her stanzas to emphasize the tone of complaint. The sonnet that begins “My mom gave me her crash course on the world” is a crash of course, one that embodies how the daughter used to lurch around, reacting to her mother’s “shifting moods.” The very theme, and the fact that this is only the fourth sonnet of fourteen, leads to seemingly shapeless or non-existent stanzas, though in fact they accurately portray the lack of closure. The final couplet nearly snaps us back into the traditional sonnet, though the two-and-a-half-line sentence still keeps us slightly off balance.
I am trying
Not to reduce our past to a cartoon
The way we sometimes end our myths too soon.
Like Hayes, she doesn’t want us to get too comfortable with measure for measure Shakespeare-style writing, in which the poem reads like a logical proof of matters of the heart.
Denise Levertov’s sometimes helpful “Notes on Organic Form” refers to stanzas as “units of awareness.” While this more intuitive nomenclature reminds us that the principle of grouping lines ought not be mechanical in nature, nevertheless, a stanza by any other name is a stanza. She lauds Gerard Manley Hopkins’ inscaping, the perfecting of which does make his poetry rhythmically and organizationally singular, more flow than arrest. Nevertheless, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” and “Pied Beauty,” sinuous as they are, each exists of exactly two stanzas. Whether he arrived at them organically (probably he did) or by using a flow chart is beside the point. The pre-existence of forms—in no way—implies that each time we sit down to write a poem, we do not have to grope toward it, for that is generally the nature of the creative process. By choosing to write a sonnet cycle, Reid has the liberty to hew to, or depart from, the most traditional aspects of the sonnet, allowing herself a spacious terrain on which to explore its current possibilities, and to meet the psychological and emotional needs that spurred her to write the cycle. Embracing the cycle lets her absorb mid-20th century freer verse tendencies to the virtues of structure. Reid’s verse has an organic dimension but does not pretend to be sui generis.
I have remarked earlier on the submerged formalist tendencies of poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath who used confession just in the way Holden suggests (cited at the beginning of this essay), going so far as to make elegy seem more biting and personal rather than ceremonial and distant. Such poets do lyric a favor by demonstrating that half-measures can be the best measure, allowing a poem to expand into territory not strictly covered by a given form. In this compromise, the “organic form” of Levertov becomes possible, not as a proposition opening the way to infinite forms, but to find a way to renew concepts of form that have come to seem rigid and rote. Levertov is right to the extent that a form is, or should be, a living thing.
In Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet. Whether it dwells in the magnificent fourteen sonnets about her difficult relationship with her mother that form a crown, or in other poems that are more low-key about their status, or still others that show metrical or other echoes of that venerable yet plastic form, the sonnet haunts Reid’s consciousness as surely as any familial estrangement.
But her adventures into form, again, are various. One of my favorites is “Sestina Obbligato,” another meta-poem, which begins with “The orchestra ambushes me with Mahler’s Fifth.” She mocks her own lack of musical ability, before distracting us from it with the excuse that “places are music” and insisting that despite her ineptitude with maps, “I can get you where you need to go. Ask anybody.” The next stanza gives way to fretting about her weight, while the following one details her mother’s weird visit to the dentist to get wisdom teeth pulled and ending with bruises on her throat. And so goes successive starts at slapstick, all the while in acceptable sestina form, before self-doubt takes over and she asks, “Which of the brave muses/will claim my janky poems, the ones that blur/comedy &bruise, elegy and sway?”
And as if reminding us that her poetic departures in this multifarious are as important as her adherence, in the envoi she comments that “In music, the obbligato must be played precisely the way it was written.” To which one at this point is tempted to object “Not!”.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
