Word: sonnet
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Since the beginning of his poetic career, Lerner has experimented with form and structure. His first collection, “The Lichtenberg Figures,” is entirely composed of sonnets, while his second, “Angle of Yaw,” which was announced finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, is made up of prose poems. Having explored these two extremes, Lerner is now searching for something in between—a form that includes the structure of sonnet and the freedom of prose...
...order to deliver on this intimacy, Lerner has attempted to invent an entirely new form, rather than following the pre-existing structure of the sonnet or writing with the openness of free verse. He strictly regulates meter, punctuation, and stanza breaks, but not without constant and subtle variations, which permit his poems to avoid what Pound denounced as the “sequence of a metronome...
...summary of the narrative thread or a pinpointing of the poem’s speaker, for instance—are as important as emotionally subjective reactions. Both are more difficult (the former to produce, the latter to explain) in contemporary poetry than, say, in a Shakespearean sonnet. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare isn’t complex, or less complex than contemporary lyric poems. It is that the difficulties of poetry have spread from the depth of the emotion expressed into the poem’s literal coherence and project...
This attitude perhaps provides us with a clearer image of what Rilke is doing intellectually; however this often obscures the emotional force of Rilke’s poems. In the third poem of Rilke’s sonnet sequence, “Sonnets to Orpheus,” he addresses a youth, a “Jüngling,” who presumably has been writing bad love poems. Here is Snow’s translation: “It’s [i]not[/i], youth, when you’re in love, even / if then your voice...
This attitude perhaps provides us with a clearer image of what Rilke is doing intellectually; however this often obscures the emotional force of Rilke’s poems. In the third poem of Rilke’s sonnet sequence, “Sonnets to Orpheus,” he addresses a youth, a “Jüngling,” who presumably has been writing bad love poems. Here is Snow’s translation: “It’s [i]not[/i], youth, when you’re in love, even / if then your voice...