While I was away on vacation, the first issue of Sixty-Six arrived, & I have to say that reading it through gave me great pleasure. I've always wanted to see a journal where new poetry & a disciplined response to that poetry could co-exist, side by side. To narrow the field to a chosen form simplifies such a dialogue, increasing the likeliness that one side will be relevant to the other. (Unlike, say, the essays that appear in Poetry magazine, where the one hand rarely has any idea what the other hand is doing.) As with any new journal, the inaugural issue tells a lot about what the editors have in mind.
There are seventeen original sonnets, one being a reprint of an old Edith Wharton sonnet, four others forming a feature on Jill McDonough. McDonough has been working on a series of sonnets about executions in America for some time now, & her book Habeas Corpus is coming out with Salt Publishing this year. The editors offer a short essay explaining how the poet researched her material through extensive historical documentation - newspaper coverage, private journals, letters. The poet adds a more in-depth description of her process, & then cites Todd Hearon's remark, that the shape of a sonnet suggests a gravestone. She makes another interesting remark, not fully explained, that she finds sonnets to be "about the size & shape of my hand," which observation suggests "the empathetic quality of the form."
McDonough's sonnets tend to be slant rhymed, sometimes assonantal, sometimes consonantal, rarely using full-rhyme until the closing couplet, & even then, not always. Her meter is equally loose. When she does employ the iambic pentameter standard, it often underscores some essential point ("The first electrocution New York botched…"- "I've read a lot of these, they thank a pastor, / warn others to be good, admit some crimes" - "…She said she never robbed that girl / but did admit that she deserved to die...") At the same time, the poet is more attached to the found material, keeping the phrasing as she found it, than to sculpted scansion. She is not trying to create perfect Parnassian formal pieces out of these stories. There's enough tension between the form & the material, though, to keep the poems interesting as sonnets. I find it relevant that in addition to her research on the death penalty, McDonough also references Medea & Othello, a nod to the literary tradition.
Few of the other original sonneteers keep to a strictly kosher formalism. Wharton does, of course. Hers is one of the oft-dreaded "sonnet-on-the-sonnet" variety. Self-consciously old fashioned, even for 1891, when it first appeared, she addresses the Sonnet, as a "Pure form, that like some chalice of old time / Contain'st the liquid of the poet's thought." A sonnet is consecrated, making sacred the distillation of a poet's lofty mind, & those readers who partake of it are sharing in a communion of sorts. A valid metaphor, it is no less true when the poet's mind dwells on historical data or other, nominally non-poetic subjects; McDonough's execution sonnets celebrate a Mass for the dead, as much as Wharton's.
Richard Newman sticks close to pentameter in the opening lines of both his sonnets, "Your Gaze" & "Like This," but allows some syncopation despite his rather traditional themes. Rhymes, heavily slanted, but recognizably Petrarchan. I found myself wondering if, with a little more crafting, he could have made his measures smoother, & if doing so would have moved him to be more definite in his character's actions. In "Like This," he's talking about a reticent couple. "They never touched when others were around…" He tells us their hunger can only be guessed at, that they walked the margin of the beach, that they are having a conversation unheard. Then, the ground opens up & swallows them in the ninth line. After this slightly delayed volta, the speaker switches to telling us about himself, allowing that he is an unreliable narrator, but insisting that it's true, the ground did swallow them. "Then they were gone. Like this." It's hard to say if the poem succeeds. If it's trying to say that this is how a relationship breaks up, then it hasn't done quite enough to give us a sense of the relationship; the vanishing trick at the end distances us from the two, the "they" where we began. Then again, it teases. I read the poem over & over. Is it mortality we're really talking about? Is this a Freudian triangle: Mother & Father disappear, & leave us disappearing in their wake? There's a fascination to it.
Emily Merriman's "The Fig Tree" is a perfectly-rhymed Shakespearean on a conventional Scriptural subject, which also starts out in pentameter. The poet drops the first unstressed syllable in the third line without shaking up the flow. When she does this again in the sixth line, the stagger is more apparent. She drops a whole foot in the tenth line. Was this a intentional withering? Metrics aside, there's an unexplained shift in the eighth line, "…that he cursed me, us just standing there…" Prior to this, the fig tree is the speaker, & the only other character is the Son of Man. Who is this "us just standing there / as fruitless as each other and as free / with what we had, which wasn't much?" After this, we're back to the first person tree. It feels as if the poet, perhaps, had trouble with the volta. Still, this is among the stricter sonnets in the issue. Merriman's other sonnet "Sonnet III" is as direct as prose, but the meter is much looser, to the point of word-jazz.
Does variation damage or invalidate the sonnet? That question is what keeps sonnets delicious, so sweet & so cold. Even if Merriman jags up the expected line, she does get some line-breaks worthy of Williams or cummings. "To let the poetry in side / ways…" The rest of the original sonnets here are decidedly post-modern. I'm not sure if Peter Brady would consider himself a language poet or a Deep Image poet in his heart of hearts, but his poems, the first in the journal, are musical, imaginative, & alive. Slanted to the point where the rhyme disappears, & almost void of meter, his poems are obviously sonnets, & cry to the tradition to give them shape & context. I don't buy that "establish" & "trace" rhyme in any way, but I could tell they were placed in a manner to suggest such a possibility. (I suspect "vanish" was the intended mate for the former.) Other poets here invoke Hopkins & Pound & Robert Lowell. This is no longer the classroom sonnet tradition, where all the spoils are divided between Petrarch & Shakespeare.
Three of Christina Mengert's translations from Petrarch do appear here, along with a short essay on translation. Baudelaire (tr. Richard Gibson) & Lorca (tr. Stephen Tapscott) are also represented. The eleven translations in all also include lesser canonical sources, one from the German of Herbert Eulenburg, & another from a Polish version of a Hungarian poem by Sándor Kándyáni. Some, like Gibson's Baudelaire, tried to make readable approximations that reproduced the original form. Others, like Mengert's Petrarch, made no attempt to keep the sonnet a sonnet. Tastes differ on this. For my part, a translation that makes no effort to mimic the feel of the original (including its technical strictures) fails to communicate the poem's reason for being a poem. On the other hand, Sixty-Six has a policy of including the originals, en face. This at least offers one the chance to see for oneself. Tom Delaney's translation of Snopek's translation of Kándyáni's poem "Luźny sonet" (Loose Sonnet) was still delightful to read in surreal English, even though I haven't a prayer of reading it in the original.
Finally, there is a feature I hope Sixty-Six keeps in the future. "Clearing House" is a listing of sonnets placed in other magazines at the present time. It cites & comments on each appearance of contemporary examples, useful to anyone who cares for sonnets in general & to academics trying to study the phenomenon in its wild state. Most of all, I hope it helps to lay to rest the illusion many have that sonnets can only appear in so-called "formal friendly" journals. Poetry is twice-sited; Plowshares; Agni; Poetry East; Poetry International; Boston Review, again twice; & others. The editors of Sixty-Six even take notice that sonnets by Rose Kelleher & by Rick Mullin were nominated for the Pushcart this year. These people are thorough, if not beautifully obsessive. Just the people I want to be running a journal of sonnet studies.
