So I’m in Kramer Books yesterday, browsing through the poetry hoping something new will jump out at me, and — thanks to habit — I’m also scanning the shelves for names of former professors and mentors. My eyes fall (ow!) on one of my favorites, Phillis Levin.
Phillis was one of the more influential professors I studied with at Maryland in that she affected not just my interest in poetry in general but also my writing style in particular. Unfortunately for me, my first class with her was my final semester at College Park, and once I left the world of academia behind I never looked back, intent as I was on surviving in the "real" world. I cut ties with professors and students alike, closed my books, and left scholarly reading for those still inside the walls.
But back to this book that’s attracted my attention thanks to the name on the spine — it’s an unusually large volume, quite unlike the typically slender poet’s collections taking up the rest of the shelf. Turns out I’m looking at The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, edited by Phillis Levin.
From the introduction: "The sonnet is a monument of praise, a field of play, a chamber of sudden change. In its limited space it has logged, from the start, the awakening of a rational being to an overwhelming force in the self or the world. Its legacy of fourteen lines offers myriad challenges and opportunities, ranging from the technical to the spiritual. As a highly focused form, the sonnet attracts contradictory artistic impulses: in choosing and succumbing to the form, the poet agrees to follow the rules of the sonnet, but that willing surrender releases creative energy."
This book should become invaluable not just to poets and fans of the sonnet, but to anyone with an interest in poetry. Through the course of the 39-page introduction, Phillis provides a biography of the sonnet, from its birth at the hands of an Italian notary in the court of Frederick II to the amazingly constant variations emerging from the pens of 21st century poets. In addition to the more than six hundred sonnets in the anthology, there are explanatory notes, biographical notes, and an appendix on the architecture of the sonnet.
And the sonnets…oh, the sonnets. Everyone’s represented, from Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton to Cummings, Merrill, Merwin, Rich…classic to modern to postmodern. I’ll leave you with one of my new favorites:
And then there is that incredible moment,
when you realize what you’re reading,
what’s being revealed to you, how it is not
what you expected, what you thought
you were reading, where you thought you were heading.
Then there is that incredible knowing
that surges up in you, speeding
your heart; and you swear you will keep on reading,
keep on writing until you find another not going
where you thought — and until you have taken
someone on that ride, so that they take in
their breath, so that they let out their
sigh, so that they will swear
they will not rest until they too
have taken someone the way they were taken by you.
—Kate Light