Letter to Barnwood from Michael Heffernan
I'm movedd to write this after rereading Willis Barnstone's earlier Letter to Barnwood and deciding that he has said excellently well many of the things I usually try to say about the sonnet, especially concerning the way it has of freeing the imagination and calling into play the ghostly presences in the psyche. What I have to add may seem antithetical to the point of contradiction: I want to suggest that one of the things we do with fixed form, in this age of Deconstruction, involves a process by which we dismantle the old structure and reconstitute it in a new way to say something that hasn't been said quite that way before. The sonnet is simply one of many models for invention, which include not only all the available examples of rhymed and metered poetry but the abundance of free poems that have themselves been generating their own by-products for over a century. I’d prefer to think that, when I take on a “traditional” form like the sonnet, what I end up writing is a kind of anti-sonnet. I’d even suggest that all formalism in poetry begins by tearing down the old models in order to rebuild them. I like to remind myself that the Petrarchan sonnet is itself the product of two hundred years of evolution from the earliest Sicilian examples, and that the Shakespearean sonnet’s prototype was stumbled upon when Thomas Wyatt, failing to find English rhymes to match those in the sestet of his Petrarchan original, rearranged the pattern to end with a couplet, which eventually became a standard feature of the so-called “English” sonnet. Pattern, by itself, is never sacrosanct. Its primary function (if I can derive a primary function from a primary effect) is to challenge and bestir the imagination.
One thing I tried to do in “Grandmother” was to push the sonnet as close as I could to prose without going over the brink. The sonnet is a natural paragraph; hence, a natural field for this kind of adventuring. With “Grandmother” I decided to free the line in the direction of good narrative prose while maintaining what I thought was a severe restriction with the use of only three rhymes in a scheme that bases itself on the typical combination of Petrarchan and Shakespearean. I enjoyed the odd freedom of working with three interesting rhymes that helped the poem suggest its own directions as new possibilities for rhyme words began to open up new ways to develop the subject. (A study of Yeats’s rough drafts of “Sailing to Byzantium” in Stallworthy’s Between the Lines showed me some years ago how Yeats’s rhyme choices often preceded and apparently suggested developments of subject-matter. I was intrigued enough to go ahead and try to see if this method would work for me, and it did.) I can remember distinctly, for instance, how the search for a rhyme on “neck” gave me the idea for the poker-card image through the suggestions of the word “deck,” which may seem as if the image was forced into position, but it seemed natural enough to me, since my memory of my grandmother often involves card games, which she loved. That, of course, is the old This-Really-Happened Fallacy, but for me, in this case, it works.
At some point I think all this has to turn on a fundamental question of how serious we are when we do this. I definitely oppose the posture implied by form-for-form’s-sake purists, as well as by those who are busily interested in the possibilities of sheer reduplicable contrivance (the people who contribute to Mason Sonnet contests, for instance). I haven’t attempted a villanelle in over twenty years—a form which, since Dylan Thomas brought it to perfection, has become the special province of ladies with three names. I am equally hard-pressed to take seriously all those who find in worthwhile to enter into controversies over the virtues of free verse and, most difficult to imagine, the prosody thereof. I think I am safe in saying that every contemporary poet wants eventually to write good free verse and, likewise, every contemporary poet must be aware of the difficulties in doing the “good job” T. S. Eliot said all writers of “vers libre” must want to do. One of the reasons we call it “free” is that every writer of free verse is free to create and to resolve his own problems in poetics every time he attempts to make a line come out “right.” Paradoxically, one reason I am happy to fetter myself with traditional forms is that I have discovered that it is less time-consuming to accept the strictures of a more or less limited way of the playing the game than it is to take on the far more complex task of raising and negotiating a new set of formal problems with every line laid down.
A further word about “Grandmother,” perhaps by way of indicating one of the gifts I think I got from doing this particular poem in sonnet form. The original notion was to relate an incident from the daily life of my German grandmother, who often toiled in her tiny backyard garden in Detroit. I’ve always wanted to catch part of her life in a poem. She was one of my dear ones. But, in the course of making her talk toward the end of my poem, I discovered that I wanted to have her sound something like the Irish grandmother (or great-grandmother) I never knew. The lady in the poem, mainly because of what I end up having her say, sounds to me like a composite, finally, of several grandmothers known and unknown. Maybe the one in the poem is the real one. In any case, it was the sonnet and its possibilities that set me the task of inventing her as she appears in this embodiment. I’m glad to have her here, whoever she is.
Grandmother
Sometimes I go back to where she is
leaning above the garden with its stems that look
like rhubbarb sweetening the afternoon. The sky's
blue never lingers this way except in the back
of the part of my head I keep them in, the ones
I left there where she is. The sweat on her neck
chills her when she stoops and looks where the sun's
ambiguous forehead glances like the King's in that deck
of poker cards we played with. Her thumbs are spoons
dipping the dirt. She gathers her breath and prays:
Lord, make me brave to praise you for such luck
as I must learn to live with to the end of my days
evidently, thanks to your good grace. Some afternoons
she would talk like that. Often it got that black.copyright 1983 Michael Heffernan
SanctuaryUnder Their WingsOn winter days the snow
in the air shows how
the wind works around buildings,
fathering from the eddies
of the last row of houses
to single gusts crossing the open spaces.We learn the unseen effects of our work,
the ways we arrange the air with our walls.
Somewhere, the wind always
whines at the corner of something
placed in its path.This morning I put my palm flat
against the kitchen window, melted
a clear place and waited.
Birds came to the feeder, struggling
against the wind then lighting delicately
under the small roof.copyright Bill Boggs
Walking across the park in April
when the blossoms were out
you told me you felt so young again you wanted
to take my hand and swing it
running away at fifty falling in love
you said yes falling because the plunge
begins in heaven with the angels
falling they hold us under their wings
to break the fall.copyright Shirley Kaufman
Spring
And red poppies
And after the flower-spattered hills
the Dead Sea. Sunlight
peeling off the old skin.Not wondering how it happened.
So that the surface floats
on its warm back, smilinng.So that the body loosens itself
to kindness. The one thing
we're ready for.copyright Shirley Kaufman
Secrets
Love, when you hold me
nothing is reducible to meaning.The caves
that open their dark mouths
out of the cliffs
have revealed their secrets
and their secrets are only bones
as we areWe see by the light of them
in the dark
as they grow luminous.I feel them silencing each thought
that perjures itself in words.copyright Shirley Kaufman
