Standing in One Place to Move:
Repetition as Disruption and Expansion of the Sonnet
Repetition as Disruption and Expansion of the Sonnet
Repetition has always been a key feature of the sonnet, whether through its original formal structures of rhyme and meter or through other sonic features, including word repetition, that build each individual poem. In this presentation I will examine the use of repetition in American sonnet “mashups” that fuse the sonnet with received forms of repetition. Such mashups, or hybrid forms, both introduce the histories and capacities of other forms to the sonnet, and complicate, or even disrupt, its rhetorical structures. At the same time, they also extend the long history of repetition as a tool for reimaging the sonnet. Examples will include Langston Hughes’s “Seven Months of Love: An Unsonnet Sequence in Blues,” which brings together the sonnet and Blues structures; Gwendolyn Brooks’s joining of the sonnet and ballad in her sonnetballad; Terrance Hayes’s “Sonnet,” which repeats a single line; and Bernadette Mayer’s “[Sonnet] name address date.”
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon UP in 2021. Her sonnets have appeared such places as The New Yorker, Pleaides, and The Georgia Review, and have been set and performed as art song. She is co-founder of the journal Memorious.org.