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The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays

edited by Dora Malech and Laura Smith

University of Iowa Press, 2023
Paper: 978-1-60938-871-3 | eISBN: 978-1-60938-872-0
Library of Congress Classification PS593.S6A44 2022
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.04209

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies.

Contributor List: Essayists
Abdul Ali, Baltimore, MD
Anna Lena Phillips Bell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Jodie Childers, Queens, New York
Benjamin Crawford, University of Alabama
Meg Day, Franklin and Marshall College
Donna Denizé, St. Albans School
Michael Dumanis, Bennington College
Jordan Finkin, Hebrew Union College
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Northwestern University
Anna Maria Hong, Mount Holyoke College
Gillian Huang-Tiller, University of Virginia, Wise
Walt Hunter, Clemson University
John James, University of California, Berkeley
Matthew Kilbane, University of Notre Dame
Diana Leca, University of Oxford
Ariel Martino, Colgate University
Nate Mickelson, New York University
Lisa L. Moore, University of Texas at Austin
Timo Müller, University of Konstanz, Germany
Carl Phillips, Washington University in St. Louis
Zoë Pollak, Columbia University
Jonathan F.S. Post, UCLA
Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK
Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia
Hollis Robbins, University of Utah
Nathan Spoon, Joelton, TN
Marlo Starr, Wittenberg University
Yuki Tanaka, Hosei University, Japan
Tess Taylor, Ashland University
Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan University
Eleanor Wakefield, University of Oregon
Lesley Wheeler, Washington and Lee University
Jon Woodson, Howard University emeritus

Contributors List: Poets
Elizabeth Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Julia Alvarez, Maggie Anderson, Tacey Atsitty, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Henri Cole, Wanda Coleman, Countee Cullen, William Cullen Bryant, E.E. Cummings, Meg Day, Natalie Diaz, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rhina Espaillat, Tarfia Faizullah, Robert Frost, torrin a. greathouse, Marilyn Hacker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Anthony Hecht, Lynn Hejinian, Leslie Pinckney Hill, Anna Maria Hong, Langston Hughes, David Humphreys, Helen Hunt Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, Helene Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Douglas Kearney, Richard Kenney, Joan Larkin, Emma Lazarus, Mani Levb, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Nate Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, George Marion McClellan, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Claude McKay, Joyelle McSweeney, Lo Kwa Mei-en, James Merrill, Phillip Metres, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simone Muench, Marilyn Nelson, Craig Santos Perez, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Posey, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Adrienne Rich, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyeser, Kay Ryan, Diane Seuss, Fradel Shtok, Aaron Shurin, giovanni singleton, Patricia Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Nathan Spoon, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Su, Lorenzo Thomas, Dunstan Thompson, Natasha Tretheway, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Mona Van Duyn, Ellen Bryant Voight, Margaret Walker, Lucian B. Watkins, Phillis Wheatley, John Wheelwright, Jackie K. White, Walt Whitman, James Wright, Elinor Wylie

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Dora Malech is associate professor in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and editor in chief of Hopkins Review. She is author of Flourish, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Laura T. Smith is professor and chair of the English Department at Stevenson University in Maryland. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

REVIEWS

“With keen observation and rigorous inquiry, The American Sonnet documents and celebrates American poets’ vital contributions to an ancient, global verse form. The poems and essays collected here situate the ‘American sonnet’ within a centuries-long conversation about how poetry happens on the page and in the mind. By centering diverse, living American poets for whom the sonnet is a way to think deeply about social and political questions, this work offers a timely snapshot of our urgent literary moment. The American Sonnet is a feast of discovery for all readers.”—Kiki Petrosino, author, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

“The American Sonnet will be embraced by all who’ve noted the lack of diverse scholarship on the sonnet, particularly regarding historically underrepresented sonneteers. Malech and Smith have deepened and expanded the range of our thinking on this form. I can’t wait to teach this book—and be taught by it.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“I can’t imagine a group of people with whom I would be more excited to talk with about the sonnet than the essayists herein, nor talk more illuminating than their essays. And the sonnets themselves cover whatever the essays don’t (more Dunstan Thompson in anthologies, please). This is an ideal anthology.”—Shane McCrae, author, Cain Named the Animal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction

Poems

Sonnet III. On the Prospect of Peace, in 1783

To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. 1768.

Sonnet—To an American Painter Departing for Europe

Woods: A Prose Sonnet

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips

Her Eyes

Assurance

One Night

A January Dandelion

Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother

Slow through the Dark

On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake, January, 1900

Electrocution

The Matrix

Sonnets That Please

Hyla Brook

To Madame Curie

The New Negro

“So Quietly”

A Plum

Sonnet

America

Sonnet I

next to of course god america i

from “Sonnets from the Cherokee”

Roman Fountain

Phallus

Two Weeks

From the Dark Tower

Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

Sonnet of Intimacy

Sonnet

Frederick Douglass

The Struggle Staggers Us

History

the rites for Cousin Vit

A Lovely Love

This Tall Horseman, My Young Man of Mars

moonshot sonnet

The Beginning

The Feast of Stephen

The Broken Home

May Morning

from “Twenty-One Love Poems”

Butchering

Sonnet: To Eva

Sonnet XXXIV

Sunflower Sonnet Number Two

the death of fred clifton

“Vagina” Sonnet

The Eye of the Storm

I want this love to be resilient

The bride is in the parlor, dear confection

MMDCCXIII½

Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up)

Say Uncle

American Sonnet 18

American Sonnet 79

Tears, through the patchwork drapery of dream

I come to cafe, I sit, I bear

Sonnet for Her Labor

Glass Is Not Crystalline

Postcard from Kashmir

from “33”

Questionnaire

from “Salutations in Search Of”

The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do

Arte Povera

Givingly

Against Teleology

When

Millie and Christine McKoy

Graveyard Blues

from “Four Sonnets about Food”

Nude Palette

from “The Black and White Sonnet Series”

Ismail & Abla to Ahmed, Their Son

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison)

from “Nets”

Kiddo

Sonnet Done Red

from “Toxic Sonnets”

Duplex

The Tradition

from “Ka ‘Ōlelo: ‘elima”

My American Crown

Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum

Love in a Time of Climate Change

Lacing: XII

from “Boy Corona”: Crucifying

The Alien Crown (The conquerers came and wrote the conquered into being)

African american literature

Ars Poetica or Sonnet to Be Written across My Chest & Read in a Mirror, Beginning with a Line from Kimiko Hahn

Essays

The National and Global Sonnet

Jahan Ramazani | Self-Metaphorizing “American” Sonnets

Benjamin Crawford | The Rising Poems of America: Nationalistic Origins of the American Sonnet

John James | Origins of Rupture: Emerson, Wheatley, and the Early American Sonnet

Gillian Huang-Tiller | E. E. Cummings: The Iconic Metasonnet and the Cultural Emblem of the American “i/Eye”

Timo Müller | Sonnets into the American: Translation and Transnation in the Harlem Renaissance

Walt Hunter | Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet: The Sonnet Sequence and the Global City

Matthew Kilbane | John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer

Donna Denizé | The Resonances of McKay’s Sonnet Voice, Then and Now

Whose Sonnet?

Carl Phillips | Whose Sonnet? (A Transgression)

Nathan Spoon | The Sonnet As: Neuroqueerness in the American Sonnet

Ariel Martino | “From the you to me”: Interpersonal Exchange in Margaret Walker’s For My People Sonnet Sequence

Lisa L. Moore | The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury

Jodie Childers | Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson

Michael Dumanis | Subverting the Tradition in The Tradition: Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet

Meg Day | Deafing the Sonnet

Wrestling with the Language and Tradition

Hollis Robbins | Wrestling with the Language: Dialect and Form in Paul Laurence Dunbar

Zoë Pollak | Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Jonathan F. S. Post | Frost in the Company of Shakespeare and Wordsworth

Michael Theune | Strange Voltas

Lesley Wheeler | Partial Visibility: Short-Lined Sonnets

Nate Mickelson | Sonnets and/as Boxes: Ken Taylor, Joseph Cornell, and the New Lyric Studies

Rebecca Morgan Frank | Standing in One Place to Move: The Repeated-Line Sonnet

Anna Lena Phillips Bell | “This resonant, strange, vaulting roof”: Contemporary Sonnets beyond Iambic Pentameter

Diana Leca | Kay Ryan’s Miniature Sonnets

Marlo Starr | Restaging the American “Freakshow” in Olio: Tyehimba Jess’s Syncopated Sonnets

Home, Interiority, Intimacy

Stephen Regan | Broken Hearts and Broken Homes: The Desolation of the American Sonnet

Eleanor Wakefield | Helene Johnson’s “Barbaric Songs,” “Choked”

Tess Taylor | But Could a Dream: Form and Freedom in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Domestic Sonnets

Jon Woodson | Gwendolyn Brooks’s Esoteric Sonnet “A Lovely Love” as an Alchemical Metatext

Anna Maria Hong | Three Mothers, Two Eves: Female Virtuosity and Outrage in the American Sonnet

Jordan Finkin | A Plummy Sonnet by Mani Leyb

Abdul Ali | Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When”

Yuki Tanaka | Animals and the Self in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth

Acknowledgments

Index

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