Partial Visibility: Short-Lined Sonnets
Twentieth- and twenty-first writers ring endless changes on the sonnet through disordered meter, misplaced voltas, and slant rhymes further hidden by enjambment. Some even dispense with these elements altogether. Seymour Mayne’s rhymeless “word sonnets,” in an outer-limit example, pare the form down to fourteen words without a turn. The sonnet casts just the faintest shadow on his invention. This paper, however, explores how, why, and to what effect some poets foreshorten pentameter while retaining other signature devices, focusing on “Sonnet” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Four Sonnets about Food” by Adrienne Su.
Elizabeth Bishop’s last poem, named “Sonnet” so readers can’t overlook the resemblance, enacts its concern with freedom through formal variation, but also, paradoxically, intensifies the form’s compression. Slant-rhymed in four-to-seven syllable lines, it is also inverted, with octave preceding sestet. From “The Man-Moth” forward, Bishop used “inversion,” a sexology term indicating gender role reversal, to encode what readers might now call queerness. The “narrow room” of the sonnet narrows further as Bishop performs a closeted silence. Yet her violation of the form also intensifies the poem’s exuberant final word: “gay!”
Adrienne Su’s sequence likewise concerns gender and sexuality; again, the lines are boiled down to bones like the bird Su uses to make stock. In the second of “Four Poems about Food” she offers her only parenthetical remark: “(I say ‘him’ only/ because it is a man/ in my house/ who eats and a woman/ who goes about/ the matter of sustenance).” Su depicts heterosexual love defined by a traditional gender script—nurture in spite of vulnerability. Yet she also imagines slipping free of smallness. Su and Bishop misuse the sonnet to suggest that little gestures can only ever partially reveal love’s largeness, as well as the instability of language and identity.
Elizabeth Bishop’s last poem, named “Sonnet” so readers can’t overlook the resemblance, enacts its concern with freedom through formal variation, but also, paradoxically, intensifies the form’s compression. Slant-rhymed in four-to-seven syllable lines, it is also inverted, with octave preceding sestet. From “The Man-Moth” forward, Bishop used “inversion,” a sexology term indicating gender role reversal, to encode what readers might now call queerness. The “narrow room” of the sonnet narrows further as Bishop performs a closeted silence. Yet her violation of the form also intensifies the poem’s exuberant final word: “gay!”
Adrienne Su’s sequence likewise concerns gender and sexuality; again, the lines are boiled down to bones like the bird Su uses to make stock. In the second of “Four Poems about Food” she offers her only parenthetical remark: “(I say ‘him’ only/ because it is a man/ in my house/ who eats and a woman/ who goes about/ the matter of sustenance).” Su depicts heterosexual love defined by a traditional gender script—nurture in spite of vulnerability. Yet she also imagines slipping free of smallness. Su and Bishop misuse the sonnet to suggest that little gestures can only ever partially reveal love’s largeness, as well as the instability of language and identity.
Lesley Wheeler's new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as The Common, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review, and her latest scholarly book is Voicing American Poetry. She is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah.