The Surprising American Sonnet

By AE Hines

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What makes a sonnet “American”? Is it simply any fourteen-line poem written by an American poet? What does it borrow from its Elizabethan and Petrarchan cousins — with their strict adherence to rhyme and meter, the octaves and sestets, the voltas between them?

Most (but not all) American sonnets are written in fourteen lines. Often (but not always) these lines are delivered in ten to twelve syllables. And while there’s typically no fixed meter or pre-determined rhyme, there’s a bounty of alliteration and slant-rhyme, making them sonically quite musical. There may be patterns, but then the poet will surprise us — say, employing monotone diction or the occasional repeated end-line rhyme. Fourteen lines suddenly give way to fifteen.

Or the poet may offer us a well-earned turn — a change of direction in thought that complicates or contradicts the poem’s initial argument. But does it always arrive, as with the traditional volta, after the first eight lines? Often, no. For any rule we wish to apply, we soon encounter an American poet willing to break it.

Beyond its mechanics, what’s most interesting to me about the American sonnet is the range of subjects it can address. How the compact machinery of this form — which for hundreds of years explored themes of love and longing — has been reinvigorated in recent decades to delve into cultural resistance and political outrage, or the deep introspection of Self. Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes come to mind as exemplars of the former, while Henri Cole and Diane Seuss present fine case studies in the latter. Compression, along with flexibility in rule following, gives the American sonnet its power to surprise. As Seuss put it in her book frank: sonnets: “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.”

This sums things up nicely. The American sonnet shows us what we can accomplish with austerity. Across fourteen (or so) lines, choices of diction and syntax rub against the poet’s subject. And the poet, pressing forward, finds that the imposition of even minimal constraints on the writing, the relaxing and tightening of rules, acts like a downward pressure applied to a wound spring. Often what we find are poems constructed like finely tuned machines — with well-crafted lines and leaps of discovery that otherwise would not have been.