Sonnets & Time

A while back I was re-reading Shakespeare's sonnets at the same time as I was reading Anthony Hawley's "p(r)etty sonnets" in Forget Reading. This was kind of interesting because it made me think even more than I might have otherwise about the relationship of Anthony's poems to the sonnet tradition, but I was particularly struck by the way each set of poems engages with time. So for example here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And here's a p(r)etty sonnet from Forget Reading:

no poem works
but may try and be some
may try and dig a ditch
may try and rig a memorable tall thing
called city, called obelisk
or president's head
what an error what a dumb rational
gig when poem is better off
jobless everywhere
even with shovel with drill
poem cannot build so useful
a drawer
poem is no tomb
but loiters and makes new time

Sonnet 18 almost literally becomes a kind of shrine or tomb for the object of the speaker's affection, whereas Anthony's poem leans insolently against the front of the local drugstore. (Also the "makes new time" bit at the end sort of gives me chills.)

So then right after reading those two books together, I read Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets, which also tangle with time:

I'm a poet with no preparation
Only invented moments
My husband is in France
Baby-sitter is ill
Husband returns to work
Children are ill
I've prepared this
without time
and yet like Charlie Buckets
I expect to enter
a place of no hunger
a realm of pure imagination
This makes me angry
Dear, poetic deficit

Laynie Browne's sonnets aren't the kind that stand monumental once and for all. They happen daily. You fit them in around working out or doing your job or taking care of your kids whatever it is you do. Similarly, I want to think the "forget" in Forget Reading is an adjective. This is the kind of reading you forget as you go along. It's not a thing to remember so much as a way to behave. Maybe this is something like what Adorno calls "mimetic comportment."*

Nearly unrelated note: I'd like to know what it is about sonnets (if it is something about sonnets) that makes them amenable to thinking about time. Is it just because Shakespeare did it? Because sonnets are short and often come in a series?


*Or maybe not, but I never pass up an opportunity to say "mimetic comportment." It makes me dance on the inside.