Some say that formal verse never really went away, but there has been a definite resurgence of discussion recently about the value of writing poetry with some type of formal constraints. In the December 2006 issue of The Cortland Review, Tony Barnstone wrote a “Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet,” calling for a new way of thinking about formal verse.
In her collection, Gravity’s Dream: New Poems and Sonnets, Kate Light has already done many of the things Barnstone proposes: she doesn’t always stick to meter, she plays with line length, varies the rhyme patterns, doesn’t always go for a perfect rhyme sound. In short, Light “mixes it up” a bit.
While many poets will contort the syntax of a sentence to fit the form of a poem, Light will allow the language of the poem to dictate the form, even if that means bending the rules. For example, the first stanza of the sonnet “We Never Fought”:
We never fought.
We never said a nasty thing – no putdown no snide
comment no sarcasm hovering on the side.
We never fought. Nothing to apologize about.
You never said, Shut up I can’t think! Though you could
have; I often said Shut up to my thought
which was in deep worry at whether you would
love me in the end. Which you would not.
In her blurb for the book, poet Molly Peacock calls Light a “twenty-first century Edna St. Vincent Millay,” an apt comparison as Light’s verse (as did Millay’s) often revels in the emotional ups and downs caused by love in its many forms. These lines from “Love Holds You in My Mind” are timeless:
I’ve tried and tried but cannot say
enough for you. How deep am I –
that I should feel and fail and fail each day
to reach you, show you, or deny
the lines I am caught up in – that they
move me on toward you, who move away.
Though she has much in common, thematically, with her formal predecessors, Light proves that poets can actually have fun with form. That it isn’t just the stoic iambic pentameter of a century ago.
79 pgs.
