TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I hope you don’t mind if today I geek out on a particular poetic form: the sonnet. From the Italian sonetto, or “little song,” the sonnet is one of the most recognized forms in English. There are two different kinds of traditional sonnet, Shakespearian and Petrarchan, and although their rhyme schemes are different, they have a lot in common: both fourteen lines long, usually written in iambic pentameter — the meter that sounds like baDUM baDUM baDUM baDUM baDUM — and they both contain a sonnet’s signature turn, the volta.

“Volta” is a musical term for a turn: It’s a point of transition, either grammatically or conceptually. The volta is the but wait! think again! not so fast! moment in the poem. It is a poetic plot twist, a complicating of the poem.

We think of a sonnet as expressing an initial idea, but then there is a turn to something else. A sonnet presents a problem and then an answer, but often not the expected one. I think it’s helpful to see a sonnet not just as a poetic form, but as a fourteen-line rhetorical strategy. It’s a framework inside of which the poet must turn, and turn quickly.

What draws me most to this form as a poet is that the sonnet is a diamond-maker. There are horizontal and vertical pressures acting on the poem — horizontal because of the syllable count, vertical because of the line count. The sonnet demands an incredible amount of compression and economy, and this intense pressure can crystallize language, thought, and feeling, making the poem incredibly vivid, immediate, and surprising.

The sonnet has survived multiple centuries by always adapting. In a contemporary sonnet, poets are altering its shape and rethinking what the container can hold. Women in particular have transformed the formal tradition of the sonnet in America — poets like Wanda Coleman, who invented the unrhymed American Sonnet. Other women who helped transform the contemporary sonnet are Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, Monica Youn, and Diane Seuss.

Today’s poet is part of this tradition. If a sonnet is about turning to the unexpected, then the poet takes it further by looking in unexpected places.

Sonnet Overheard at Phonebooth
by Elane Kim

Goodbye,  but said without really meaning it. The way
the light touches you like something scared. Or my armful
of sunspots and the milk expiring on the countertop
and many unopened tubes of paint and hair ties
lost to the unmanicured wild. The sheer loneliness
of your body on the cosmic scale. There’s so much
I’m not telling you: orange tickets, limpid rain,
the last train home. The kindness of every shadow, the way
something patient keeps count beneath the rib cage.
Goodbye,  meaning, I will see you right after this call.
Meaning, I am leaving a message at the tone and a song
that will loop and a bird or two to peck at all the crumbs
I have left behind.  Meaning, I am still here, listening,
waiting for the train to arrive.

“Sonnet Overheard at Phone Booth” by Elane Kim. Used by permission of the poet.