On Sonnets

"Generally poets viewing the universe, post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-J. K. Rowling, as meaningless, continue to feel the need to incorporate a fair amount of meaninglessness in their poems, the results not so impressive, partly simply because it’s hard to distinguish between chaos representing the chaos of life, and chaos which is just chaos."

  

This month we have a new poetry collection by David Beach, Jerusalem Sonnets, Love, Wellington Zoo. This is David's fourth collection of sonnets, and here he explains the attraction of the form.

David Beach winning the 2008 Prize in Modern Letters

Before I was a foe to Romanticism writing chopped-up prose sonnets I was a foe to Romanticism writing chopped-up prose shortish poems some of which in a bad light could have been mistaken for sonnets. As an example of early work, the following poem was published in The Canberra Times and then a little later in my self-published first collection ‘Apropos of Nothing’ (1993):

Headlamps

The film is over and lights

start to appear in the lot:

they flick on at random,

just a few at first, white

canes tapping the dark;

then the place goes up like

paper – a gorgeous pit where

the wild, jousting beams have

their few minutes fray until

the cars fly into the night.

Reading this poem now, I think it does contain a sense of the self being provisional. However, I wouldn’t call it anti-Romantic. Indeed it has quite a whiff of epiphany––the view mightn’t be from a mountain top, but it’s from some vantage, and some sort of significance is perceived. I might have felt I was battling the Romantics, but clearly had far from escaped Romanticism’s clutches myself. That’s not to say the poem is a bad one. Contradictions can be the stuff of art and the first year or so I was writing poems I think the contradictions in my position were productive.

  

However, that didn’t last, and over a period of a few years the poems dried up, until eventually I gave up poetry ‘for good’. That turned out to mean for a couple of years, when trying a few things I stumbled into writing sonnets. And writing to a form seemed to provide a kind of missing ingredient. In fact I saw the sonnet as a frame as much as a form. And having the poem ‘out there’, in some sense already occupying its space, prompted the lighter tone which had been eluding me.

 

The tone, as well as being lighter, seemed dare I suggest it, modern. I realise that the notion that poems might be modern should hardly be expressed nowadays without accompanying hollow laughter. But is a century of sparse achievement, more sparse the nearer one comes to the present, a reason for poets to give up on the avant-garde project?

The task can be put as how to write as a self which isn’t a soul, isn’t sovereign over the brain it’s a function of, doesn’t have even a secular essence it’s so shaped by circumstances. And the chief problem is that selves have a natural, probably a healthy, disinclination to be demythologised––it’s one thing to intend modernity, quite another to prevent the self insinuating itself back onto centre stage.

Restricting myself to sonnets helped with this problem because it did away with the Romanticism inherent in a ‘content generates form’ approach––previously indeed I would never have written to a form on the very grounds that to do so was inauthentic. And by calling a sonnet simply 14 lines, each approximately ten syllables, I had a form (frame) which fitted very well with my prose-does-the-job style. It became a case of cutting poetry back to its essentials––a doing away with the aura of the self by doing away with the aura of the poem.

It might be objected that just by deciding what a poem will be about the self grabs the microphone. I would point though to the cumulative weight of the choices made in writing a poem, and here I think, if the focus is wholly on the poem’s subject, whatever it is, the self’s pretensions can be reined in–– the poet ‘losing’ him or herself in the effort to do justice to the subject, to write on it with all possible vigour.

I’m not suggesting that prose sonnets are a magical pass to the modern. Indeed Romantics and other truth-tellers have been responsible for most recent prose-style poems, sonnets or otherwise––writing unpoetically because they want to convey their truths clearly. My point though is that the unpoetical approach is also available to poets who dispute truths exist. Generally poets viewing the universe, post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-J. K. Rowling, as meaningless, continue to feel the need to incorporate a fair amount of meaninglessness in their poems, the results not so impressive, partly simply because it’s hard to distinguish between chaos representing the chaos of life, and chaos which is just chaos. Prose sonnets, and especially sonnet sequences, are a way for moderns to keep hold of clarity and eloquence. Romantics hate the idea that their suffered-for wisdom and heart’s blood feelings don’t in fact come with any authority––that these are simply the product of the history behind any individual. To be modern is to accept what a complete accident any of one’s particular personal bedrock amounts to. And one sonnet after another, rocking out in pirate prose, seems exactly suited for this aesthetic of ‘anything could just as easily have been anything else’. The form maybe won’t generate the content, but at least it won’t subvert it.

Jerusalem Sonnets, Love, Wellington Zoo is released on 7 May, $25, pb.