And Now, A Sonnet Celebrates 1 Year
A look behind, ahead, and a call for guest posts
Poets of all sorts! I am opening up this newsletter to guest posts within the next couple of months. Please scroll down for more information.
Keep to this strange road
I’m going to take a deep breath and admit something I don’t think many poets have the courage to admit. I don’t know how to write a poetry collection.
What I mean is, I don’t know how to collate poems in a group under a single title, drawn together in a theme that is somehow related to a vision of the artist. It is possible I once had an understanding of this. I recall vaguely that my graduate manuscript had a theme, but I doubt it had a vision. The vision seemed only to exist in the dream of publishing a collection of poetry, which is not a very great vision.
And yet, the books of poetry I open again and again have a clear thesis or experiment at work. The books I tend to put down are books where the poet seems to be playing the game of poetry, writing for the sake of themselves, not necessarily the art.
What’s the difference? I remember when my friend the poet Carl Adamshick bravely said he as an Artist he had a vision that must be shared with the world, and I was stunned by his audacity. And that put me in mind of a humorous observation once made by an M.F.A. student about M.F.A. students: they all think what they are writing right now is the most interesting writing there is; and it is, to them.
I have never felt audacious enough to believe my writing is something of import, let alone an Artist’s work, and I have since dropping out of the institutions of poetry tried to keep the sense of my writing toward a modesty that includes my work as neither less or more important than another’s.
That is, until now.
I came to be writing this sonnet series as a way to respond to the world around me, from the temporal stance of a blog, in order to keep poetry in my life that includes work, family, and home. Since I, like many, am not inclined to teach, and would prefer to have a suitable income to sustain a house and family, I have stepped away from the institutions of art but do not wish to give up on what brings me to art in the first place. The answer, to write a sonnet series published once a week on Substack, was a promising step in making sure I stayed at my art. What I didn’t expect was that it would help transform me into taking seriously my role as the Artist, and that I would begin to develop a form of poetry that steps toward an actual aesthetic, something worth sharing with the world, and something I expect the world to witness.
This new aesthetic is still being explored. It is not in the form of these sonnets, which as anyone familiar with contemporary poetry will recognize as the American Sonnet, first popularized by the poet Wanda Coleman. Instead, it is the fact that in this series I’m creating a long poem that has to do with identity, gender, avatars, and the burial of the gods; to this purpose I’m creating something new, which has predecessors, but has never been seen before in literature.
I have no intention of moving off this track, because there’s too much good stuff if I stay with it. I do, however, want to respond a little more to what the project is, and formalize my role inside it. To that end, every few weeks I’ll be taking the week off writing a poem to publish instead a short essay or creative piece involving craft, to be sent out instead of the poem, filed under “Materialisms”. This anniversary post is the first of those.
Reflections on the year
It is surprising to see how far away I’ve gone from the first intent of this series, which was to be a place to respond to cultural and political American events. The first ten sonnets focused on this, the darkness of 2020, almost to a breaking point. After a good summer break the rest of the poems of 2021 allowed for more standard lyrical reflections. So far this year I’ve been focusing on burial and immolation, which can probably be discovered by my close readings of “The Waste Land” and going back to Joseph Campbell’s myth-narrative books.
The reason for that comes from the attempt to figure in my mind a response to being a white heterosexual cisgendered male in a time when the power structures around that identity are being challenged. The first thing I wanted to create in this series was what kind of visions that hegemony seems stuck on.
The poem I still think best attributes that persona is sonnet no. iii, “Are you just a typical dude who loves barbecue sauce”
. . . Did you bluster and sneer once
By mistake, caught in a sob you worked to contort
Until your face went to leather, your boots grew spurs?
Two figures emerged from these first poems, the Dead Colonizer, and Mordred ( I/me ). The former came in some early poems that haven’t yet found their way into being posted — notably his notebook appeared in a recent post; Mordred ( I/me ) has finally been introduced in sonnet no. xlii but was a whisper of an idea all the way back to no. i. To me, the legendary Arthurian figure has been a perfect model for modern villainy; his descendants are Iago and Edmund, he figures in the antipathy of James Carker, and has been in actuality living at the end of my street as a drunk man-child trying to run over lesbians.
Mordred ( I/me ) also appeared in the form of Travis McMichael, the man who killed Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. He, along with Jay Danielson and Michael Reinoehl are examples of white men who have settled on violence as persona, a kind of white male delusion that they can move the world by destroying it. The fact that Travis was “roused from the couch” at 1 PM on a Sunday to chase and kill a man is at once pathetic and unnerving. Danielson and Reinoehl I have no sympathy for, but find an intense amount of empathy.
I hope lighter themes will get some footing in this series. I have two children who would like me to write a sonnet about dinosaurs; I have this amazing wife who can still find her embouchure ( that’ll make sense, eventually ). My vegetable garden begins to rise, always an exciting time in my life.
GUEST POSTS
I have had requests for guest posts, and while I’m here making a space for myself, it would be nice to include other voices. So I encourage you to submit: here are some basic guidelines.
I’m looking for sonnets: of course. The sonnet structure I do not care about ( there’s a caveat to that, please see below ), except that it is 14 lines long, preferably with a clear rhetorical turn ( volta ) at the 8th or 9th line.
I’m hoping these sonnets will work off of a theme that’s already in the series. One thing I’ve been saying to those that have shown interest in guest posts is that hopefully my posts will speak to you, and if so, please write back.
Please email me at jameskirkmaynard[AT]gmail[DOT]com. In the subject line, please write “sonnet submission”. Attach your poems with .doc, .docx, .pdf, whatever; you’ll notice I use screenshots of my poems on the posts, so that’s something you can do too!
Please only 1-3 poems. Please include a short bio.
Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, and I don’t care if they are published elsewhere, but please let me know so I can note it on the post. Content, especially online content, is always in flux.
Rights revert back to the author after publication.
My caveat : please understand that I am only interested in poems that stun and excite language, that have their own music outside of the structure. There are plenty of places out there to write your ABBA structured Spenser or Petrarchan sonnet, but these forms are outdated for this series. I encourage a rhyme scheme in poetry, but poems where the rhyme comes at the cost of the music and/or the rhetoric will be returned.
Guest posts will be once every two weeks, hopefully starting sometime in late May / early June.
Lastly, please help this series out by giving a click to the share button below.
Congrats on hitting a year of publishing here.
And for your book, feel free to reach out, not sure I can be of help, but talking about it always helps to organise your thinking. My first thought would be to tell you to look at your submission guidelines. There is some vision there.
I'm not an expert at sonnet writing, and the American sonnet is a new concept to me. Understanding what that means, helps in understanding your poems. So, thanks for that lesson. Still, I might consider submitting. Just for the fun of it. And because this American Sonnet thing is worth exploring.
Congratulations on hitting the one-year milestone, glad to see others still writing poetry!