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'American Sonnets' by Gerald Stern

Short-form poems aren't sonnets, but they are distinctly Stern

Sunday, April 14, 2002

By Kevin Larimer

	American Sonnets By Gerald Stern Norton $22.00

The poems in Gerald Stern’s new collection, “American Sonnets, ” are not sonnets.

Ranging from 16 to 23 unrhymed lines, they share little with that form of Italian origin, which may be precisely the point: Much depends on the adjective in the title that places these poems. But more on that later.

What is most compelling about the new book by Stern, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for “This Time: New and Selected Poems,” is not its formal elements.

It is the evidence that they were written with the same kind of attention to detail -- almost obsessive, really--that readers of Stern’s 12 previous books will find familiar.

Stern is a poet with an eye forever focused on the natural world, and it is not always the neat, manicured world of gardens and hydrangeas.

His early poems are set in ditches where dogs decay in the weeds, near swamps where mosquitoes sing in his ear. As he writes in his 1984 book, “Paradise Poems, “Mine was the nettle tree, the nettle tree.”

The natural world Stern inhabits is closer to home and is strewn with the domestic machinery of every day: sink, clock, walking stick.

But his signature fascination with the dirty, unlikely objects of poetry -- rotten eggs, a half-dead bee, chopped liver -- remains on display.

Most of the 59 poems in the collection are composed of single syntactical units. There is a significant lack of periods here.

Stern strings together an accumulation of thought with conjunctions punctuated only by commas and semicolons. The effect is a breathless, exhilarating -- though not necessarily merry -- poem.

To expose the connective elements of an “American sonnet” is to see the repetition that enlivens the poem’s subject:

“I could ... and once ... I could ... and how ... yet how ... and how ... and I could ... and I could ... we could ... now that we ... now that the wind ... and we could ...”

What Stern chooses to fill in the gaps created by these insistent repetitions --which could spiral into tedium in the work of a lesser poet -- are the uncertain ruminations of a poet struggling with universal questions of guilt, compassion, mortality.

Take, for example, the ending of “First Light,” a poem that takes the act of waking at dawn as a metaphor for innocence and the brutality of experience:

... and if it turns out

we were in a valley and those were mountains,

how dark it was and how I’d have to stretch

to see what’s left of the light, for all of life

is lowered like that, you start with a brutal lamp

and so on and so on -- I would have a hard time

explaining what was opened in my life

and what was destroyed, and how the streaks mattered.

For all the certainty of tone that Stern’s poems so often exhibit, the poet usually assumes the position of an engaged witness full of conjecture rather than omnipotence.

Stern includes the reader as he gropes for the clues to the large questions; he doesn’t claim to have the answers or the explanations.

For Stern, it is enough to state that “the streaks mattered,” and exactly how remains inexplicable.

Such modesty in poetry has endeared him to readers and prevents the grand poetic pronouncement that can too often feel unearned.

The strategy -- and it is a strategy, no matter how naturally it unravels itself -- is strengthened by the formal constraints Stern has adopted in his new collection.

While the poems are not, in the strict sense, sonnets, the form does limit their length. Stern’s previous book, “Last Blue,” set no such limit.

“One of the Smallest,” the four-page poem that opens “Last Blue,” includes a scene of dawn similar to that of “First Light.” But without the self-imposed stricture -- however arbitrary -- the poem lacks the other’s intensity:

... The light

of morning was gray with a green

and that of evening was almost a

rose in one sky though it was

white in another -- at least

in one place the light comes back --

and I disappeared like a fragment

of gas you’d call it, or fire, ...

The short poem -- Stern’s brand of short poem, call it a sonnet if you’d like -- simply has more torque than his longer poem.

In his new book, the poet still wanders his fields and gardens, but the clipped quality of the poems distills his observations, with all of their insistence and beauty and uncertainty.

Kevin Larimer is associate editor of Poets & Writers magazine.