On Sonnets & Machines: a mechanical history of the sonnet and the poetics of the machine
by Wystan Loope
“…on the 7th of December, The Odd Review made a post on Substack inviting anyone to comment a single line of poetry that could be contributed to a ‘Sonnet Machine’. The idea was, if we got fourteen lines, we would have a sonnet, the most basic tenant of the sonnet being its 14 lines. The original note and the comment can be found here.”
We are machines; not metaphorically. Don’t our finger-machines plug into our hand-machines? Our hand-machines into our arm machines? We are machines. Our bodies are machines and they, in turn, plug into a city-machine by way of underground Tube or subway-machines that are not unlike our own arteries. Just as our subject-machine plugs into a social-machine and that social-machine into a state-machine. There is no metaphor.
Similarly poetry can be seen in its smallest measures as machinic couplings and intersections. For its smallest machine we might take a letter, a simple character, a mark, a consonant or vowel, a flow. Does this not plug into the syllable? The syllable into the word-machine, the word into the line-machine and/or sentence machine. And we can continue, stanza-machine, poem-machine etc.
But this wouldn’t quite be the sum of it. Because even our finger is an assemblage of phalanges, muscles, nerves, cells, membranes, nuclei, cytoplasms, proteans, molecules, atoms, each its own machine. And furthermore, there is the evolutionary assemblage as this finger of ours through chance encounters has formed from the lobe-finned fish. as Thomas Mann points out in his novel Felix Krull. “As far as the shapely feminine arm is concerned, one should never forget that the limb is simply the hooked wing of the primordial bird and the pectoral fin of the fish.” Nothing natural but chance encounters of machines.
Likewise the word: this unit in itself arrives, not readymade, but formed from a long etymological journey. The word ‘finger’ for example: from Old English finger, ultimately from Proto-Germanic fingraz. It is cognate with Gothic figgrs, Old Norse fingr, or Old High German fingar. deriving from a previous form fimfe, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European pénkwe (meaning 'five') from which root we have also the words ‘fist’, ‘quintessence’, ‘punch’, and ‘pentameter’.
And so, similarly the sonnet, that most plastic pentametric apparatus, was developed as a collage. The sonnet is a machinic assemblage made up of other poetic forms. It was ostensibly invented by a Sicilian courtier named Giacomo de Lentini in the 14th century who joined a pair of quatrains to a two triplet stanzas from a Sicilian folk song he had heard. The result was a chimera of a poem (or perhaps the analogy of a Frankenstein’s monster is more apt), fourteen lines in length with the form 4 lines-4 lines-3 lines-3 lines. He called it sonetta, meaning ‘little song’ and the form is still used today as the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.
The sonnet remains, for whatever reason the most insistent and durable poetic form in the English language. This is in spite of the many hands, languages and regions it has passed through. From Sicily it found its way to Tuscany where it found Dante and Petrarch, whose sonnets were translated into English by Thomas Wyatt in the 1530s. In the fledgling language of English, this strange collage of courtly French and Anglo Saxon, the sonnet spread happily as a virus. It developed new strains, was inflected by the more rhetorically malleable quatrain of the Anglo Saxon tradition with the turn, or volta occuring after the 12th line in the form of a rhyming couplet (4-4-4-2) made famous by Shakespeare in the 17th century. From there it was passed down to Donne, and then Milton who moved it from its troubador themes of love and erotics to encorpotate intellectual and political matters. For about two hundred years it was neglected only to be revived by the Romantics and eventually exploded by Gerard Manly Hopkins into a strange 11 lined creature called the curtal sonnet at the end of the 19th century.
The sonnet persisted in the 20th century despite modernism where it was explicitly adapted and avoided. It survived even the complete deconstruction of Oulipo, Language poets and neoformalists. So that it becomes difficult to articulate with certainty now, what the sonnet is. It’s not simply fourteen lines anymore: there are sonnets that have been 11 lines, 16, or even 7 (John Ashbery’s ‘Two Sonnets’ in The Tennis Court Oath come to mind). Poets like Ted Berrigan have tried even to discard the rhetorical ‘turn’ by making a sonnet of cut-up lines, collaged with snippets of conversation. What the essence of the sonnet is remains, therefore, slightly ambiguous and as difficult to pinpoint as a scent.
As with figurative painting, there has been a recent revival of a more traditional Miltonian sonnet with Terrence Hayes leading the way with his American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). Though I can’t help but think there is a certain romantic nostalgia in this revival as with the revival in painting. The sonnet with its rhetorical force, we should remember, like the representative painting, is a lying machine invented to seduce. It is here that we arrive at the ‘Comment Section Sonnets’. They are strange, they make little sense read all together, but arranged into the form of a sonnet something happens. They have been written by more than thirty people. Noah Lee Swann, the editor, has only arranged them, acted as the adhesive, the bonding material, what Foucault calls ‘a rational and concrete intervention in the relation of forces’.
These sonnets, if they are poetry at all, are so barely poetry that they are maybe better considered ‘almost-poetry’ like an infectious microbe which is almost-living. And yet! isn’t this precisely how the sonnet was invented by random, ad hoc experimentation and evolutionary collage? Despite this poetic desert, as the astute reader will find, these sonnets still have the sonnet’s turn on the Italian 6th or Shakespearian 12th line – despite it all they speak – which gives them at least the appearance of life, like a scarecrow animated by a gust of wind. Despite the complete disunity of meaning, the sonnet, the little song, is still present. It’s this small song, this barely present music, this gust of wind, that survives in this wasteland of the automaton and the chimera, and the fact of its survival is humorous, lively, ridiculous, obstinate, even, at times hopeful: from out a crack in the asphalt, a small, green shoot persists stubbornly like virtue.
Listen to a reading of this poem.
Comment Section Sonnet #1
It was all a glassblur And it never occurred to me to turn the lights on I opened the door and I let the world quietly step in I held a spider in my palm If you can believe such a thing Sitting with my cat on my lap in the sun. My hands are full of plums and full of water My heart stutters inconclusively then targets you There is grease and dirt packed under these fingernails, under these wings She was my love in the storm. Her whole body shakes while she is looking at him. It does take two to make such a big mess. If only I could fart without shame If only the flamingos could save us
Listen to a reading of this poem.
Conceit Moments Sonnet #2
where the prince left his silver, I keep losing my shoes fleeting mouse weeping massively in the fire When I turned 50, I disappeared. I was the woman who inhaled the fly. Swimming over the drowned towns of Fish House and The Vly Not a human doing, but a being Caught up inside 10,000 Julys. The gray dawn rises over the bare tree. Give me a break. 14 lines of free verse does not make a sonnet. every cigarette is a therapist… Every sunset a saviour Thank you for considering my application. How annoying good advice can be.
Listen to a reading of this poem.
Commie Contents Sonnet #3
I heard the strangest noise while i was sleeping The stories of my skull sponge then my bed sheets fall asleep My line starts with a full stop. Never talk to a pitcher who’s throwing a perfect game What a shame to play a game without a worthy foe Sorry, my reply’s been lost amidst the garland and tinsel and wintry tchotchkes. that's so fun!! here's my contribution: we fade into words on a screen Living worldly memes, becoming mindless enemies To spin a web without a thread FUN! Here's mine: The elf hath sat upon thy shelf It’s coming for you.