Transcript
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Hello, Happy Holidays. We're over the hump of Christmas and sliding towards the New Year and I am cleaning up our archives. These are the shows that, for one reason or another, have fallen out of our archive. Been lost for a while. Today we reclaim an episode that's all the way from 2018. The sonnet. I'm dusting it off, sprucing it up, cutting out the extraneous material and delivering the goods. Like Santa Claus arriving a few days late. Maybe you could say we've returned the gifts that didn't quite fit and we're exchanging it for one that is the right size and color. Happy Holidays. Okay, let's get started. I'm Jack Wilson and this is an episode on the history of the sonnet. It's one of the simplest and best known forms in all of poetry, and since the 13th century, it's been the vehicle for some of the greatest expressions of love and often other subjects in the history of thought. A sonnet, said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is a moment's monument. Who invented the sonnet and who brought it to prominence? How has it changed over the Years. And why does this form continue to be so compelling? Let's jump right in and hear from the most famous practitioner of sonnets, William Shakespeare. This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed, and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd but thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow', st. Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in eternal lines to time thou grow'. St. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. An Ode to Sonnets and sonnet writing. Sonnets can preserve, can record, can live forever. The sonnet is a curious phenomenon when you think of it, when you think about it. 14 lines. Find 14 lines. That's it. Sometimes rhymed according to certain schemes. Sometimes rhymed according to a different scheme. More recently, not rhymed necessarily. Iambic pentameter at the beginning. At the outset. The earliest sonnets, a little less tied to that. Now, it's a simple form, very simple. A couple of rules. And those rules are flexible. And yet. And yet, even in this simplest form, we can identify the number of people who have written sonnets. Here we go. Here's a partial. Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Milton, Yeats, Auden Frost, Lowell Bishop, Philip Larkin, Spencer Keats, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Donne, Anne Sexton, Louise Glueck, Vezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, Rilke, William Blake, Coleridge, John Berryman, Neruda. Wrote a hundred, at least. Michelangelo wrote them. Yes, that Michelangelo. The painter T.S. eliot even snuck one into the wasteland. I could go on a lot longer. I created that list from memory, more or less. It's much harder to find a poet of significance in the past 500 years who never wrote a sonnet. Pope and Dryden, 18th century. Masters of the heroic couplet. Didn't go for sonnets. More recently, HD Avoided them. And Marianne Moore appears not to have written a sonnet. E.E. cummings, you might think. Except that. No, he should have been on my first list because he did write them. It's like an exercise that poets have been drawn to over and over for centuries. Why is that? Let's take a Different approach. Here we know when the sonnet was invented and who invented it. But I'm actually going to start at the end. Whenever we talk about how things change, I can sense people jumping ahead. How do things evolve? We think. We ask the question. And some of you out there start thinking creatively. The wheels start turning. You start thinking, Hey, 14 lines. That's been done to death. How about if I do a sonnet with 13 lines? Well, that's been done. So you say, okay, well, I'll do one with 15 lines. Guess what? Robert Lowell beat you to it. And so did Shakespeare, for that matter. And you keep going. You want to be new. You're creative, right? So you say, well, how about a sonnet where every line is one word that actually is an entire form? It's called a word sonnet. How about one where there are no words at all? A wordless sonnet. Surely I've. I've invented something there. Well, that is innovative. Except you're not the first. The poet Mary Ellen Salt has already done it. How about a satirical sonnet? A sonnet that explodes the whole idea of sonneteering. Well, take it away, Shakespeare. Here we go. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips. Red if snow be white. Why then her breasts are done. If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks. And in some perfumes is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak. Yet well, I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false Compare. That's Sonnet 130. But you're thinking, no, no, no, I can do better. How about. I know. How about dueling sonnets? Well, that's been done, too. How about a sonnet in search of an author? William Carlos Williams wrote just such a poem. Ghost sonnets, Chinese sonnets, Sonnet cycles. Done. Done. Done. Holy sonnets. Done by. Done. In fact, John Donne, that is. How about a sonnet where every line is a sonnet? Done. Cubist sonnet. Let me point you toward Ms. Gertrude Stein and her poem Susie Asato. How about 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous, the last sonnet consisting of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets in the same order in which they appeared. Well, I applaud you for being creative, but you're not innovative. That's that exists. It's called a crown of sonnets, and Marilyn Nelson wrote a good one. How about this idea? You say, okay, I'm not going to be inventive, but I'm going to be productive. I'm going to write five sonnets a day, and at my death, I will leave behind a half a million sonnets that tell the entire story of my life. Well, sorry, my ambitious friend. It's a great idea. I encourage you to do it. But you will not be the first. You will be the second person to do that. How about this one? Two lovers meet. They start exchanging lines. Their lines form a perfect sonnet, including their final two lines to one another, which they trade back and forth, completing their sonnet with a brilliant final couplet. A marvelous idea, my friend. And it's how romeo met Juliet 400 and some years ago. The point here is that the sonnet has a rich tradition. It's a tradition that might seem daunting, might seem like kind of a straitjacket, not only for aspiring poets, but for readers as well. Why do we have to follow this structure or live within these restrictions? Why can't we be free? But poets already have shown how free you can be within the sonnet form. So don't think it's a form you can demonstrate the weakness of. Don't think you can come up with something to demonstrate that sonnets no longer matter. Sonnets are going to outlast us all. You cannot defeat the sonnet, and you will not. It's better to jump in and celebrate this form, not to worship at its feet, but to explore its many facets and watch the best poetic minds as they see what they can do with it. And we can learn from their examples and delight in all of it. Let's delight in the sonnet, not as an old, stodgy thing, but as an exciting, dynamic thing. The word sonnet means little song in Italian. Now let's sing the praises of this little song. Let's sing a song of sonnets. Hey, maybe that's our innovation. Aha. Now we have something, right? We could sing a sonnet. Well, you know where this is headed. That's been done by Rufus Wainwright, who Sang Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 from the album Take All My Loves 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, which sets Shakespeare's sonnets to music. How about this? How about we take pop songs, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and turn the lyrics of those songs into sonnets? Rock. Well, there's a whole tumbler that does that for you. Speaking of computers, an automatic sonnet generator. You plug in a few words and it kicks out a sonnet that exists. We'll hear one. I made one about the podcast. We'll hear that at the end of the show. How about we take tweets and turn those into sonnets? Already done. Write sonnets, cut them up, and arrange the words and fragments into new poems. That's a 50 year old tradition, my friend. Poets have already been hard at work doing that. The sonnet sees you. The sonnet anticipates your every move. A story about a poet. A story that imagines that poetry is like Hollywood and a poet is taking meetings and trying to get his poem produced. Directors compete to make a movie out of his poem. Well, Martin Amos already wrote that story. It's called Career Move. And the poem that is the toast of Hollywood in that story, it's called Sonnet. Of course, you could get back at Martin Amos tweaking poetry this way by writing a poem about the novelist. Except that W.H. auden already wrote such a poem. It was, of course, a sonnet. Let's stop this fanciful business and turn back to the history of this glorious form. Understand that there have been as many creative minds trying to turn the form upside down and inside out and stretched in one direction and stretched back in another. Compressed, expanded, blown up, blown out, crossed out, crossed up, jacked up, knocked down, kicked around, exalted, revered, examined, discarded. Everything, it seems, has been done to the sonnet except one. Ignored. It's hardly ever been ignored. Let's look at the history. So we know where the sonnet came from. We already know where it's going. It's zooming into the future with all of these innovations that I've told you about. In fact. In fact, that's probably where it lives and has always lived. We look at the past, but the sonnet seems like it's living in the future, waiting for us to catch up. The history of the sonnet after this. Foreign. Hey folks, it's the holidays, which means you need energy and a robust immune system. 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