Linguistically Innovative Poetry

With the revival of interest in poetic forms amongst poets and as a focus of study from early modern to contemporary times, the sonnet has come up once again on the critical compass. This article sketches out the various ways in which contemporary British poets – whether mainstream or linguistically innovative/avant garde – negotiate or reclaim the space of the sonnet form in their work. After a review of the historical and contemporary stakes of sonnet writing, this study focuses upon three main ways of writing the sonnet, which can be found amongst the proponents of both poetries : the parodic or self-reflexive sonnet, the sonnet as process, and the sonnet in translation.

Keywords : sonnet; new formalism; contemporary poetry and poetics; Agbabi, Patience; Robinson, Sophie; Riley, Peter; Lopez, Tony; Monk, Geraldine; Oswald, Alice; Walcott, Derek; Paterson, Don; Atkins, Tim.

Art thinks via sensation; this, of course, includes poetry. To an extent, this means that the differences between thought and feeling are imperceptible. So: how does contemporary innovative poetry present thought about ethics? Contemporary conservative poetry presents the illusion of representation via an image of a classic lyric subject whose ‘voice’ presents a moral lesson for its readers from a vantage point of assumed wisdom. This has been a primary feature of Movement Orthodox poetry since Larkin. Contemporary innovative poetry, on the other hand, such as that by Jennifer Cooke, tends to eschew or at least problematize the image of the lyric subject and, along with it, the vantage point of moral wisdom. Instead, innovative poetry is ethical in a sense derived from the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari. This means that the poetry does not offer moralistic meanings but will rather explore ethical significance; and, more significantly in itself, it will do so primarily through sensation. A reader is placed in proximity with events; is compelled to experience the ethical significance of specific encounters, rather than generalized moral abstractions. Not only this, but the poetry itself, in its innovative play, compels an ethical encounter as its performance by a reader (silent or otherwise) necessitates movements of becoming through a thrilling and perplexing beauty that is productive of a species of joy: a yea-saying that is ethically ‘good’ in itself for Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari.