Belle Randall says, 'I believe in erasing the page until it rises like a nappy fur and even the white space is a palimpsest of ghostly pencil lines. That 'There will be time...for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast,' may be cause for rejoicing.' This poet rolls, squeezes and pummels the language until it's putty in her hands--at which point it becomes totally unworkable and she has to begin again.

Not anyone's idea of how poems ought to be written? Of course not, no more than ripping out seams until threadbare is an ideal manner of dressmaking, but obsession and perfectionism conspire to keep the conscious mind occupied so that the unconscious may occasionally be glimpsed poking its nose blindly into daylight.

Thoughts on the Sonnet

The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language
has been done...by taking a simple form, like iambic pentameter, and
constantly withdrawing from it , or by taking no form at all, and constantly
approximating to a very simple one.
- T.S. Eliot 'Reflections on Vers Libre'

A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
- Robert Herrick 'Delight in Disorder'

The word sonnet means 'song,' but sonnets are often structured more like arguments than songs as we know them. Shakespearian sonnets often hinge on neat logical reversals and arrive at conclusions too pat for cotemporary sensibilities ('But if the while I think on thee, dear friend/All losses are restored and sorrows end'). For these reasons I have known many poets, even formalists like Thom Gunn and Dana Gioia, who resist writing them, and it was with some dismay that I found myself drawn to writing these--worse, heard myself explaining to friends that writing them felt like 'rounding the bases, barely touching them, skidding into home.' I could see in their eyes that I wasn't supposed to say this. But why not? Because it sounded like an amature? But it was a good feeling--the clatter of the bat, the roar of the crowd rising to its feet as I rounded the quatraines--What better proof that these were American sonnets?

Virtuosity is not necessarily the aura one wants in a poem. Bob Dylan never sounds like a virtuoso, for all the art we atribute to him; he sounds like an amature. I liked it that my sonnets about marriage sounded homemade. When most people check to see if a sonnet is 'correct,' I suppose they run their eye down the right-hand margin checking out the rhyme scheme. This is a bit like using a template to grade a test. By this measure the following sonnets must often be found hit-or-miss. And yet, please note, (as if this could make up for it) that they often rhyme outside the template. I like it when this happens. It suggests the fecundity of the untidy housewife. Her wild civility. I wanted to stretch the form to its breaking point, and yet not break it. There's a mind's ear, as well as a mind's eye, and if you listen there, I believe you will hear, in counterpoint to the sonnet's propriety and measure, another beat, closer to ballad, demonstrated by the following lineation of the first poem in the manuscript.

DR. PHIBES' LAMENT

Oh love, I've held you in my arms so long
you've gone from lover to cadaver,
from skeleton to dust;

have struck the prong that holds one note forever,
have tried to savor the old palaver,
the cold leftovers of love;

have learned to cover up my head and pray,
as if each day were Tuesday shrove,
the decades reeling off;

have grasped the way an infant grasps
the finger of its father, like
a Chinese finger puzzle;

have knelt before the Sphinx until my knees
wore fossil prints, but in the end
the things I felt

fled like skeins of smoke above the wand
and murmur of devotions in the wind.

The poem as it appears in the sonnet sequence True Love:

OZYMANDIAS

Oh love, I've held you in my arms so long
you've gone from living lover to cadaver,
from skeleton to dust; have struck the prong
that holds one note forever, have tried to savor
the old palaver, the cold leftovers of love;
have learned to cover up my head and pray,
as if on Tuesday and every Tuesday shrove,
the decades reeling off; have grasped the way
an infant grasps the finger of its father,
like a Chinese finger puzzle; have knelt
before the Sphinx until my knees wore fossil
prints, but in the end the things I felt
fled like skeins of smoke above the wand
and murmur of devotions in the wind.