Letter to Barnwood from Willis BarnstoneHaving read a ms. of 100 sonnets, by Willis Barnstone, we asked him to share his thoughts about his experience with the sonnet form. Here is his reply, including a poem.
The first sonnet I wrote was the first poem I tried to do in rhyme. I was in a writing course at Columbia with Louise Bogan (the only writing course I took) and she assigned a sonnet. I was attracted by the cadence, the controlled thunder (and lightning) of the form, its circularity. Then years later I translated the complete sonnets of Louise Labe, some 24 poems, and about the same number of sonnets of Jorge Luis Borges. Surely from this apprenticeship I learned the craft, and then began the sequence of A Rose in hell, 190 poems written these last two and a half years. Prior to this all my books of poems were free verse.
After I reached 100 I stopped and wrote other poems for six months. Becoming obsessed with the form, I wondered whether I could switch back. Not a problem, but now I have again returned, fatally, as Cavafy wrote about his vices, to the pleasure of the sonnet. The sonnet is the most narrative and dramatic of verse forms because it is 14 lines of one breath, even when it is broken up into short lines. So it is the longest verse form commonly used. Its lyricism is encantatory because of the repetition; it can fall fatally into aphorism—Shakespeare’s final couplets show this. And in Shakespeare, at his best, the poem itself moves from aphorism to prophecy.
My sonnets are the commonly used combination of Shakespearean and Petrarchan models: 2 quatrains using different sets of rhyme in each quatrain as Shakespeare did, and then the Petrarchan sestet or freely falling rhymes. So the octave is ababcdcd followed by efgefg or any ordering thereof, such as efgfeg or efegfg and sometimes efefgg in which by accident as much as intent the octave conforms to the Shakespearean form.
When I write a sonnet I usually know when it is finished. I have been lucky and am grateful that I’ve finished many now that I like, that are worthy. But though I may work with a certain faith, until the poem is written I’m quite miserable. Faith keeps me at it; the defects stab. When I lucky the faith is such that I know I’ll overcome the defects (it is usually so). But often I don’t quite have that belief, as in the sonnet enclosed, and then I’m surprised after the agony of doubt.
Often I write about places I am not. So after 18 years in Indiana, it is right that I think of Indiana while in Brooklyn. I’ve often noted how the pampa of America ends halfway between Indianapolis and Bloomington. Then it gets poor, fundamentalist, southern beautiful, cranky, lovely, as New England, but almost gothically big and humid. From any state, the entry into Indiana is into the precincts of the Goths. I love much of the landscape, many aspects of the people, particularly the janitors at the university, whom I drink with and know better than any Hoosiers. But while I have no real home (and many assimilations), Indiana will always be foreign and I’ll be a ghost there. If I die there, I don’t wish to be buried there, though I hardly care what happens. I am more at home in Athens or Andalucia or even Peking. Some of these thoughts I tried to express. So the theme of the ghost, the beauty, the America, the Indiana without Indians. When I speak of my sons, it is their childhood and adolescence, for they are now in college in New England, and one is in Africa. But they made the natural step and were of the country (how could they not be?).
I hope the lines run together, are not too disjointed. I was surprised when the sonnet did come together, for I was stuck for a week on the first line and the last four lines, and now they seem to me the best. The poem has a lot of old English alliteration. Our barn actually has Anglo-saxon joints. So “the bluffs. But in a barn I placed a bed”abounds in bs, while “ing the Blue River bendable as yarn” is pliable. The “KKK comes out / of the wet gothic woods” has a cacophony of k sounds like John of the Cross’s “Un no se que que quedan balbuciendo.”
If I am lucky the sonnet works. If not, it is wooden, academic, forced. I feel natural writing sonnets. Soon I’ll be free of them and go back to the short and long poems of earlier collections. And then I may wish again to find a form to work against, to free the imagination through strictures, and to develop a cumulative voice as a result of a sequence.
Thanks for asking me to write this.
A Ghost in Indiana
The pampas of America begin
north of our barn. Glaciers smoothed down the earth
for buffalo and corn, but I live in
the poor hills where farmland isn’t worth
the taxes, and the KKK comes out
of the wet Gothic woods. Our humpbacked barn
is rusty in the patient twilight. Scout-
ing the Blue River bendable as yarn
or glowworms, I am not a Baptist red-
neck like my sons who often paddle through
the bluffs. But in a barn I placed a bed
and desk, and dreamt the world. Here on the hill
of vanished Indians I go out a few
nights to hear trees talk. Ghostly, I am still.Willis Barnstone
Archetypal Confrontation
In the dream, your mother's table was set
with dishes of clear glass. I could see through
the whole dinner, understand it all, yet
nothing seemed quite so transparent to you.
Just before we ate, everyone went off
into another room except for two.
I sat, fingering the elegant cloth;
she stood proudly by the stove. Silence grew
between us. I heard your voice somewhere near.
Uneasy, I lay my head slowly down.
"I am so tired," is all I said to her.
My words were unacceptable. She frowned.
Defeated, I had nothing more to say.
She called you to eat. You came right away.Grace Butcher
Waiting in Line
You the very old, I have come
to the edge of your country and looked across,
how your eyes warily look into mine
when we pass, how you hesitate when
we approach a door. Sometimes
I understand how steep your hills
are, and your way of seeing the madness
around you, the careless waste of the calendar,
the rush of people on buses. I have
studied how you carry packages,
balancing them better, giving them attention.
I have glimpsed from within the gray-eyed look
at those who push, and occasionally even I
can achieve your beautiful bleak perspective
on the loud, inattentive, shoving boors
jostling past you toward their doom.With you, from the pavement I have watched
the nation of the young, like jungle birds
that scream as they pass, or gyrate on playgrounds,
their frenzied bodies jittering with the disease
of youth. Knowledge can cure them. But
not all at once. It will take time.There have been evenings when the light
has turned everything silver, and like you
I have stopped at a corner and suddenly
staggered with the grace of it all: to have
inherited all this, or even the bereavement
of it and finally being cheated!--the chance
to stand on a corner and tell it goodby!
Every day, every evening, every
abject step or stumble, has become heroic:--You others, we the very old have a country.
A passport costs everything there is.William Stafford
Mother
Each year she dwindles, a wisp in a huge apron,
burdened with the weight of abortions,
beatings, thefts, whatever we areup to. She's supposed to advise us, be
our working oracle, lay down sentences
like bricks, build walls, houses, steelskyscrapers to protect us from accident
and erosion. Her eyes are so old it
hurts us to look at them. We knowwe've told her more than we wanted,
worn her thin as a nickel, edgeless.
Nickel words, nickel eyes, nickelold body dropped in the slot.
We're dancing to her music
winding down.Phyllis Janowitz
Two for Tea
How we bloom and shutter
on the pale peau de soie
sofa, proving ourselves
ladies encore une fois,
crumbs of glaced
cakes between our teeth.Each hour the clock hands
touch twelve as we etch
erratic pathways into
our particular parks.
Will she reveal her abysmalfear of elevators? Should I
conceal my ignorance of Jung?
And never touch or brush
my hand against hers?
And our words, our wordshop and cross and cirlce in
hoary games of tic-tac-toe,
timidity making us
alert to every sneeze.
Afternoons advance, thickeningthe window panes. Twin
wintery voices ice the dark.
We groan separately
at separate stupidities
and wonder why we don't
say what we have come to.Phyllis Janowitz
