From Ellen Bryant Voigt’s essay “Structural Subversion,” in The Flexible Lyric (Univ Georgia Press, 1999):
In short, if the narratively impaired can learn to tell a story, even the narrative-fostered, narrative-fated southerner can learn not to. One might start with a formal arrangement that counters the linear and sequential with juxtaposition: before/after, then/now, if/then, thesis/antithesis. Such dichotomy is the underlying principle of the sonnet . . . [p. 110]
From Ellen Bryant Voigt’s essay “The Flexible Lyric” in the same volume:
. . . every English poem is linear, read (or heard) left to right, top to bottom, and similarly processed. Narrative knows this and works openly or slyly in the discursive or linear grain, tracking possibility and consequence, which in turn depend on some assumption of time-driven sequence. Like trauma, lyric contradicts the linear—it “stops time”—and to do so uses simultaneous, sometimes opposing perceptions, a dense fabric of emotive language, highly musical arrangements of texture, and alternative organizations of those arrangements. The structures codified by Petrarch and Shakespeare were just such alternatives, devised in general service to lyric and particular service to paradox. [p. 135]
As a sort of corollary to Voigt, I would draw your attention to a fine interview with Maryann Corbet at The Nervous Breakdown. Corbet says:
Ideally, a rhyme scheme should drive the poet down into the subconscious to fish up things she might not otherwise find. But it often takes me a long time to figure out which tugs are little silver trout and which are old boots, so I’m chary about rhyme.
To which I might answer, maybe there’s no distinction. I mean, no less a light than Paul Muldoon says it’s okay to be entertaining and popular.
A propos of nothing (except maybe being popular or finding rhyme), I’ve been writing villanelles this last week. Yes, I’ve written villanelles in the plural, but no one says they were good ones. Good or bad, I find that the form brings out the comic in me. The darkly comic, true, but I can’t seem to write a truly serious villanelle, such as “One Art.” (Villanelles I have published here and here.) Even my Pushcart-nominated villanelle at qarrtsiluni has a sort of whistling-past-the-graveyard humor.
With the sonnet, on the other hand, I find it much easier to achieve a sort of high seriousness in rhyme. (One of the best sonnets I ever wrote is published here and can also be found in Exot Press’s collection Filled with Breath and in Weaving a New Eden.) But still with the same playfulness, I suppose. I am, after all, an earnestly playful person.
Thanks for the notice, Sherry. An occupational hazard of speaking in metaphor is that it means more than we thought we meant. Old boots are indeed entertaining and popular, though I was thinking primarily of the ones that ended up at the bottom of the lake because they were, in fact, junk. We fish ‘em up, consider whether they can possibly be worth the effort expended, and sometimes we can’t do anything but throw them back in. Ah, language!
Hello Maryann — thanks for dropping by to comment. I confess. I was actually being very unfair to your metaphor and skewing it to suit my own purposes.
I’ve caught my share of boots — about three this week in fact — and that metaphor itself is entertaining and even Muldoon says efforts to be popular don’t always succeed and you’d just as well go on and try to write good poetry (my very skewed paraphrase).
I do find that rhyme pushes me toward undiscovered country — except perhaps in villanelles, where I am letting a goodly number sink back into the murk. (And that is a mixed metaphor if ever I saw one.)
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