“Petrarch Sonnet No. 104″
I am becoming interested in the Italian (also know as the Petrarch) sonnet lately. I have been writing sonnets, but not classical ones. By that, I am thinking of what Strand and Boland stated:
Few modern poets have been willing to commit themselves to the major, architectural sequences of a Petrarch or a Shakespeare [sonnet]. Instead, the sonnet — with either the couplet at the end of the or the octave/sestet structure — has become a part of speech (page, 58)1
By that, I assume they mean that poets have kept the sonnet's basic outline but no longer bother with the structure that once made it a sonnet, thus it simply "a part of speech" in rhyming 14 lines. Perhaps this is the difference between the concept of "dabbler" and "ingenious" poets? One uses a form they never mastered. It's as Frost once quipped, "writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net." I don't know, I am not happy with that critique, either.
The last 100 years in poetry have been an active rebellion against everything that hints at Establishment2 but instead of taking the old forms to new heights poets seem to have just lost the abilities their predecessors once took for granted. While I do find Modernism interesting 90% of Post Modernism seems rather juvenile with its justifications and sycophantic insistence on its own blandness.
Perhaps every generation has seen most of its poets as bland, Byron certainly said so of the Poet Laureate Southley. But when we live in an era when awards are being given to strings of words you can't sing, you can't dance to, that dull the brain with their affected posturing something is wrong. I am all for savoir-faire, but I need to rollick and rejoice too, folks. I find it odd I have to go outside the realm of poetry to find the sonnet's influences on our culture. Who would have thought of ice skating and Petrarch?
September 11, 2000, saw Russian ice skater Ekaterina Alexandrovna Gordeeva perform her ribbon routine, Petrarch Sonnet No. 104, at the Spirit of Gold show in Simsbury, Connecticut. The routine is called this for the music played, Franz Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 (Sonetto 104 del Petrarca) as performed by Vladimir Horowitz.
Perhaps that is what I like about "the little song." You can be both a Language poet (I am still not sure what that really means) and a Formalist (ditto) in a sonnet. That is what I want to do. This is where I am heading. I want a funk sonnet, a hootenanny sonnet, a hip hop sonnet. I want music in 14 lines that sets the page on fire.
- Strand, Mark and Boland, Eavan. The making of a poem: a Norton anthology of poetic forms. WW Norton & Co.: New York (2000) [back]
- I wonder if anyone finds it ironic that the same poets who claim this privileged stance are now the Establishment themselves? Is it simply a case of "The Emperor Has No Clothes? Sort of like Johnny Rotten/Lydon endless self-important posturing, refusing to appear on Saturday Night Live because the show couldn't pay the outrageous fees the band demanded (ah, anarchy, ka-ching!) at the time and then recently quipped "we're not your monkey," when they turned down their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Talk about privileges … [back]