on Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets 1994-2022 by Henri Cole
… unlike writing, life never finishes.
— Robert Lowell, “History”
So uneasy in the asymmetries of its body, so insistent on subverting its sense of self, so ambivalent toward its own utterances — I speak of course of the sonnet, which described in these terms mirrors the contours of the modern mind. Phillis Levin even posits in her introduction to the Penguin Book of the Sonnet that the form embodied the spirit of the Renaissance by “acknowledging a deep privacy of individual experience while affirming the possibility of shaping subjective experience in objectively recognizable patterns.” Or, more succinctly, the sonnet crystallized the process of “a self arriving at self-consciousness.” And, considering its history, an impulse for self-reflexivity seems like an inevitable product of the form’s identity. With equal claims to musical and written expression, roots in both the English and Italian poetic traditions, and its facility in switching between sacred, secular, erotic, and political modes of diction, the sonnet is a mongrel form.
If my depiction of the sonnet seems singed by neurosis, the flames surely emanate from me. Yes, there’s an element of projection in my assessment — though as Michael Hofmann says, the poets who have mattered to him have engendered in him a “spark of transference.” Couldn’t that be true of a form, too? It’s this infinite receptivity to interpretation (or misinterpretation) that explains both the sonnet’s durability and flexibility throughout its existence, as well as the difficulty of defining it. Readers will know well the more superficial indicators of a sonnet, the fourteen lines, the shape of the Shakespearean variety versus the Petrarchan, the abundant rhyme schemes … but like any poem, a sonnet is not a mere collection of techniques. What, then, makes a poem a sonnet? To this question, Levin’s answer is not rational or descriptive but affective. A sonnet, she says, is a sonnet “if it feels like one,” due to its handling of subject matter, how the ratio of its parts are arranged, or because the poem makes “a series of sonnetlike maneuvers.”
So much for that. As I say, the sonnet is notoriously difficult to define, like God or the soul, reducing even the most astute of us, like Phillis Levin, to tautology. And Henri Cole as well, who in his afterword to Gravity and Center, his new collection of selected sonnets, provides his gloss on the sonnet form, which clearly owes much to Levin’s. “I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one,” he says, “and this doesn’t mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension [emphasis mine], the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poems enact.” Much like a sonnet, I resist the very means by which I make sense of this claim. For as frequently as I’ve been taught — as frequently as I’ve pontificated! — that poetry is not therapy, the metaphor that returns to me, upon reading this, is the shape of Freud’s 50-minute hour. The constrained block of time in which the second half is notably shorter than the first, the focus on states of feeling, the particular attention paid to changes in diction and tone. As well as the tendency to turn toward the form in moments of crisis, when one can no longer imagine how to proceed any further as they are.
Thus, Gravity and Center opens with “Arte Povera,” set in Rome, with the apparent exhaustion of a style —
In the little garden of the Villa Sciarra,
I found a decade of poetry dead.
In the limestone fountain lay lizards
and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source.
How pleased I was and defiant because
a dry basin meant the end of description & rhyme,
which had nursed and embalmed me at once.
Language was more than a baroque wall-fountain.
Such understated, plainspoken irony; all these wry self-indictments. Cole’s first three books — that “decade of poetry dead” — were characterized by the witty, meticulous, metrical, rhyming construction of the poems. Concerns attended to obliquely, yet finely. The influence of early James Wright as well as James Merrill figured prominently in the work: well-wrought urns; baroque wall-fountains. Not to mention their high rhetorical mode, satirized above with the absurd grouping of those proper nouns, Fanta cans piled in with Truth and The Source. And yet everything in these first eight lines has proceeded, despite the gentle self-critique, logically, linearly, descriptively, as one might expect of a sonnet — as I’ve been told, it’s a form given to argumentation. That is, until the concluding sestet:
Nearby, a gas-light shone its white-hot tongue,
a baby spat up — the stomach’s truthtelling —
a mad boy made a scene worthy of Stalin.
Ah, to see the beast shitting in its cage!
Then the lying — “Yes sir, Daddy” — which changes nothing.
My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain.
If this scene takes place somewhere nearby, as indicated, it’s the nearness of the speaker’s own interiority, previously deflected by the “description & rhyme” of the external world. At the volta (that principal of all “sonnetlike maneuvers”), one senses — I resist the drama of this analogy, as much as I believe it — two halves of a career in conversation. The narrative logic of the preceding octet is replaced by an associative one, collage-like, disturbing in its juxtapositions and ambiguities (is the voice in the penultimate line a child or adult?). Now each image feels more disjunctive, more distinct, more alien, and more unsettling with each line, until the poem arrives at the non-sequitur-ish final couplet, which doesn’t conclude so much as it stuns the reader, a typical gesture of Cole’s sonnets — an abrupt closure occasioned by the fixedness of the form, which feels almost like a retreat. Truth handled bravely but in increments. My wife the psychiatrist calls this tendency “doorknobbing,” the phenomenon of patients touching on the heart of the matter at the very end of a session (“By the way, doctor, my dad just died!”), just as they stand up to leave. No one, after all, writes what they can’t face about themselves. That’s how I explain the tepidness of most bad poetry, at least, or our perpetually abundant market for cliché, against the genuine risks Cole takes with his own inner life in these poems. And perhaps this is the freedom, and the safety, the small room of the sonnet provides him in their abbreviated intensities. In their severity and the sharpness of their insights, the closing lines of so many of Cole’s sonnets come at once as a shock and a relief.
There’s little gentleness in Cole as a sonneteer, toward either himself or the reader, especially in the early sequences like “Chiffon Morning,” whose subject is the deteriorating marriage of the poet’s parents, which one reads as Cole’s own tragic initiation into the human condition. But despite the intimacies achieved in the poems — “I admire her but wish she wouldn’t idolize / the one who bullies her. I once did that” — one seldom feels a stable autobiographical self coalesce, even after reading through the 136 sonnets (assuming one doesn’t forget “Sycamores,” which Cole includes as the epigraph to the collection) selected for Gravity and Center. We confront states of feeling, incidents of love or failed love, grief and solitude (perhaps our, and Cole’s, most constant companions throughout these pages), and in later efforts, scenes of domesticity — peeling potatoes, eating toast — all swerving into memory, self-knowledge, surprise, brutal acceptance; but never, I think, ending with the warmth of a memoirist’s touch. In Cole’s hands, the sonnet burns off the residue of biography and leaves us instead with this — a cool clarity of perceptions:
I tied a paper mask onto my face,
my lips almost inside its small red mouth.
Turning my head to the left, to the right,
I looked like someone I once knew, or was,
with straight white teeth and boyish bangs.
My ordinary life had come as far as it would,
like a silver arrow hitting cypress.
Know your place or you’ll rue it, I sighed
to the mirror. To succeed, I’d done things
I hated; to be loved, I’d competed promiscuously:
my essence seemed to boil down to only this.
Then I saw my own hazel irises float up,
like eggs clinging to a water plant,
seamless and clear, in an empty, pondlike face.
I wonder sometimes how much of my life I’d trade to write like this. A year at least, maybe two, I think; but then the remonstrations return. For as envious as I am of the plain, nearly invisible virtuosity of this writing — the mirroring of “face” with “face” in the first and last lines! That whole inferno plumbed between them! — there’s very little from these poems that indicate the poet would’ve wanted to live any life but his own. (Elsewhere, in “Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono,” he writes: “Thank you, Mother and Father, for creating me” — which is not a sonnet, and thus not included in this book.) That life has been difficult, lonely, sad, selfish, competitive, petty, full of suffering, but also grand, alert, resourceful, curious, omnivorous, not infrequently beautiful. Coming to the end of this whole collection, I hear the final words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that other revolutionary sonnet writer, who said on his deathbed: “I am so happy, I loved my life.” Although so few of his own terrible sonnets document anything that seems like happiness — more like a manic exuberance in the language — Fr. Hopkins’s final assent to life is Cole’s final achievement as well. The contingencies of a life are claimed and held together as … a life, rather than escaped or transcended. “Why do you leave / for happiness? Why not stay around awhile?” asks the speaker in the final poem of Gravity and Center. How surprising and how hard-earned to be met with this feeling which resembles belonging. “I feel saner in this place,” he writes. “I’ve paid my price / and am here for the duration.” As though the sonnet invites us, readers and writers both, to remember there’s still more living and writing to be done. Isn’t this a form of power, to know one can, after all, persist?
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on April 4, 2023, 192 pages, $30.00 hardcover]