Nets and Nots
Nat Raha’s niners, Sidney and Hayes; Sonnots, Containers and Love
written by
Joseph Hamilton
editor in chief
Young poets are often introduced to established poetic form via some variation of the metaphor of the container. A metaphor that expands to account for the concept of generative constraint, which states that by clarifying your poem’s rules, you might somehow unlock its potential. Whether by activating only certain muscles or by straining to flaunt the imposed rules.
1.
For the last seven years since we were seventeen we have been line by line undoing the technology of this closed system we accidentally made.
It’s hard to tell if this is right or just sounds it. Or, more likely, if it’s only by identifying intellectually with generative constraint that young poets are ever to give the likes of the sonnet the time of day. That only with very good reason would we first reach out for the sonnet, particularly when “free” verse so alluringly gives name to what we have all been looking for in poetry.
This naming of the container — one I have come across most often in the university — is squared off, however, before its most radical ends can be met. Missing are the theoretical questions of the container’s limits and insufficiencies, and so too the potential writing prompts that might arise from a serious pursuit of these lines of thinking. What for non-generative constraint? I don’t mean the point at which we abandon form, but rather the point of complete exhaustion, what appears to be form’s seizure. What we do when form is helpful but flawed, and how we might borrow and reject in the same breath. These are the dialectics of tradition, inspiration, and progress that would eventually force poets and academics to assess the entanglement of our liberal institutions in cultural production.
2.
I imagine that this undoing goes on until we’re dead and that our contributions to the language of deviance will either stick or not, with or without us.
The best exhausters of form let it behave less like a container and more like a body, one with its own conditions, politics, and general health. Form in this way can be both living and resuscitated, sick and designated sick, dying and killed off. Accounting for form’s extremities, for the slick moment of transition between sonnet and sonnot, is not the lofty work of grappling with the out-of-body, but instead the more difficult task of indexing acute states of embodiment.
The sonnot as an exercise operates as more of an anti-sonnet than non-sonnet, a difference which is as obvious as it is open to misinterpretation. In practice, we might be better off leaving any concern of indebtedness aside when evaluating the sonnot. Whether the sonnot is a love letter to the sonnet, whether it could never have come about without it, or whether it is a complete rejection of the sonnet’s special residency within a whitewashed canon, is beside the point. We are talking about a body in motion, one metabolising, one adapting to and overcoming external forces. Any intellectualised question of deference will betray material reality. Crucially, that this realm of nets and nots is a persistent, albeit unstable, mode to write love.
3.
A teacher said these new queer forms require new psychic arrangements and new defensive neuroses and in turn another teacher that wouldn’t be him.
I don’t mean to say all sonnets are about love, but I do see how love’s weight (and implied counterweight) has acted to steady the form’s driving cultural relevancy across centuries, in and out of fad, through war, across borders and toward new internationalist frontiers.
4.
After he said that, I knew how to place that feeling of being my own lab rat, not in the hands of a trained professional. I am today’s biology class passed from one teenager with a scalpel to another.
Love provides recourse to gauge the desires of both the sonnet and the anti-sonnet, as well as their moments of partial eclipse. A reclaiming of the sonnet’s preoccupation with politicised love allows us to reach through the translucent mask between the body as a surface and the accents of history enclosed in its behaviours, reflexes, and passions. Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and the famous line “look in thy heart and write” speaks to only one side of a body in love. And love speaks to only one side of Sidney.
Beyond the truths of his heart were the libidinal and economic drives of colonial adventure, conquest, and parliamentary influence. The limit of Sidney’s sonnets is not just one of length or metre. The thematic constraints — the poet’s crutch of the reader’s expectations — allow Sidney to ignore the parts of British aristocratic life that are straightforward, uncomplicated and designed to benefit him. The parts of life that are unpoetic compared to the throes of love which will at times resist his ambition and desire. The sonnet allows Sidney to access the luminous part of himself, but only by way of a betrayal of the dark.
5.
In fact everything that constitutes queer history reconstitutes us. I can’t touch any of it without slicing something vital.
In holding Sidney to contemporary standards, we broaden the scope of the sonnet’s insufficiency to include the insufficiencies of the arrangement of economic conditions in Elizabethan England. We also treat cultural output as real labour subject to specific social relations and paradigms reproduced by academic, governmental and artistic institutions.
The contemporary sonnot is a devotee to a different process in writing love. If the sonnet sets out to scribe the argument and union of love from within, and delineate clearly between what is and is not in the sonnet’s purview, then the sonnot instead orients itself from a deictic centre from which to survey love both as an embodied sensation and as currency. This is a gestural procedure whereby the sonnot realises its own relationship to form and body only by indiscriminately rendering the space around it, less concerned with formal constraints than with simple processing power. Not, how much should the sonnet do? Rather, how much can the sonnet hold as love passes through? Such undertakings, most often and understandably unravel as collection-length sequences, as in the case of Terrance Hayes’ already-classic American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin and Nat Raha’s more recent but no less dizzying Apparitions (nines), which having read a year ago I only have an adequate framework to write about now.
The flex of the sonnot doesn’t allow poets to rectify old insufficiencies of form but rather to feel out new ones. These are the insufficiencies of othered modes of loving, those which are racialised from without, those which are queer from within, those which speak from bodies either willing or forced to be in lockstep with the folds of history. These are not the bifurcated sonnets of Sidney; there is no time nor want for Raha to jettison biography, to parse materiality from art and distil higher love from lower life, poetry from economy. These are sonnets born of relationships — to other poets, to community, to capital — that contest cultural hegemony and reach out for fringe and radical tradition. In evolving away from heteropatriarchal ‘standards’, sonnots require new anti/skeletons to express porous social relations beyond the perfect capsule of partnership and marriage, founded instead on communal protest, solidarity, and revolution.
6.
And you can’t know this about me except via metaphor. That I am so out of touch with the world I spend all my time reading, you wouldn’t believe.
The body of Raha’s sonnots dis/integrate and repurpose themselves all at once, made up of such relentless slices and delays that the full constellation of meanings (the scene!) appears almost liquid, like disparate parts in a meteor shower. In dropping five lines from the sonnet, these niners disturb the expectations of volta, of well-managed, ultimately inconsequential argument and fetishised normalcy. This is an uneven terrain, whereon the thematic expectations of the sonnet, of flirtation and rejection, of vitality and degradation, explode and blurt.
7.
The moment a body’s in then quickly out of form, terrible, il/literate, dis/continuous. With sonnets, and their reasons. With essays, and their wanting new forms to contain sonnets, their wanting new sonnets to contain other reasons.
Here, conflict has material consequence. Here, love cannot be shut off from the conditions of unequal, transactional sociality; these being the local wounds of world-historic struggle.
8.
Yesterday I said don’t hate me, it was literally that easy, you stopped.
Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets are for all intents and purposes sonnets, and maybe for this reason — though by no means this reason alone — have entered a canon of contemporary poetry popular in university syllabi. These crowns of sonnets, however, do not chart love’s course as we might expect, given there is so much love here. Cohesion and continuity occur here as an afterthought, a reparative attempt to each time hold over-flowing psychic trauma in the bloated body of the 15th sonnet.
9.
“I lock your persona” in that same container Hayes knew wouldn’t be enough.
The collection reads as a subtle gesture to the hardest part of letting the body ingest love: to decipher and expel what love is not. This being the system of racial-capital America is founded on and, where it really matters, shows no signs of abandoning, or rather, dematerialising. As Hayes’ writes, “It is not enough / to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed”. The equation has been spelt out, one far more clogged, more arrhythmic than Sidney’s simple appeal to the heart.
American Sonnets, as time goes on, — alongside Raha’s niners, which are what reminded me of Hayes and at least formally speaking what grind the expectations of the sonnet into an even finer paste — coaxes the sonnot out of the sonnet. These works realise the very point of coherence where what is unceasingly loved and what is fundamentally unlovable become indistinguishable, and show in verse how this drama erupts from the body we can’t step out of.
*
Sidney, Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Collected Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by A. C. Hamilton, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sidney, Philip. "Sonnet 1." Poetry Foundation, 2024. (for web access)
Hayes, Terrance. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Penguin Books, 2018.
Raha, Nat. Apparitions (Nines), Nightboat, 2024.