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The sonnet is a little song—or sound. I see it as an explosion, as an
intense moment in time, a meditation on a single theme, and a kind of short
story. The sonnet is essentially a paradox and a contradiction, even a
collision, even a riddle, but not always. That is the key probably to the
arrangement, eight and six, intricate rhymes, a turn (volta)
somewhere after the middle. If I were twenty-two, I think I'd get started on
the sonnet in earnest, it does so many things, it's such a delightful form,
so radical. And I wouldn't wait till such a late decade. Everyone
knows—or should know by now—that the sonnet does not have to have
fourteen lines; there are sonnets with thirteen lines, and Gerard Manley
Hopkins has one with ten and a half lines, and George Meredith's, in
Modern Love, are sixteen. Nor do they have to rhyme, or be in iambic
pentameter, or even have the obvious turn. In answer to the question, why is
it a "sonnet" then, one answer could be that it feels like a sonnet,
or it works like a sonnet, or it has the strategies of a sonnet, and the
poet knows he is composing in a seven-hundred-year old tradition. Also it
is a sonnet because of the extreme subjectivity, the reconciliation of
opposites, the extensive use of argument, and its nature to illuminate,
though not only sonnets do these things, nor do all sonnets.
My own, American Sonnets, are typically twenty lines. Why I came to
that number I don't know, though I don't believe it just happened. Maybe I
needed more space for narration or argument. For revelation. As far as
meter, it's the same loose pentameter line I always use, though it's
sometimes pure iambic and it sometimes goes over. Once I started writing
the poems in this volume, I was under their spell, I was excited—even
haunted. I felt that something different was happening to me, and I didn't
know why. I was struck by their absolute subjectivity. I always move from
the self, but this was different. The poem didn't wander as much as my
other poetry, and it seemed to settle on a single, contained emotion. As
often as not the sonnets are about personal encounters: buying roses from a
Haitian in New York City and bonding with him, remembering the filth of
Pittsburgh, throwing stale cigars out of my window in Philadelphia to some
homeless men on the stoop. My editor, who had been
asking me for a memoir, when she first heard these poems, said: "My God,
you're writing a memoir in verse"; and certainly memory was the driving
force, and recapturing the emotion. The subjects came to me as gifts,
visitations, and I finished the group in a year and a half. When I reached
fifty-nine poems, I was through, no question. And I was delighted there
was a sequence, as there often is in the sonnet. I had a story to tell,
something to recover. I am grateful for what happened.
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