This past week I quietly passed five hundred sonnets posted to this blog. Or rather, very loudly passed it, because every sonnet is in some sense shouted into the world, but the actual passing was unremarkable.
Think about that, if you will: five hundred sonnets in September through January (with a tiny smidgen of February tacked on). And how many of those sonnets are getting read? Well, thankfully I know some of you out there read what I post - but how about the next day? How many of those sonnets are read after they scroll down out of the main page and into the archive?
I should be clear: this is in no way a complaint about my readership or about any of you who are reading this. I am immensely grateful and honestly somewhat surprised that people do actually read this blog, especially given the long stretches (necessary to reach 500 sonnets, I suppose) when it is nothing but my poetry. Rather, it is a musing about what it means to write poetry in this ephemeral-and-yet-permanent form.
A sonnet that is handwritten, or even printed, has a tactile existence; it can be passed around, anthologized, and so on; a sonnet online can be read and anthologized as well, I suppose, but it has a strange tendency to drop out of sight even though it is still recoverable, because it does not possess the odd urgency of physicality. If I have a book of sonnets, it asks to be read; it has an insistence that is in some way tied up with its physical existence. If I read one of those sonnets, there is a sense in which the very existence of the book asks me to read more - indeed, to read them all. If they exist, as these exist, in a cloud, online, do they have the same insistent urgency? Do they have a continuity, a collective existence that passes from one to another?
It seems to me that in some way they do not. Let me give some (probably statistically useless, but illustrative) examples. Of all the posts on this blog, the introduction to the sonnet has the most hits. My analysis of Horace Smith's "Ozymandias" has the second-most. They each have substantially more than any sonnet; in fact, together they have more than the top eight sonnets combined, and when you include my other analysis the gap grows (although since approximately 90% of the posts on the blog are sonnets, they do eventually make up the gap using the power of the long tail).
So the sonnets slip off the radar screen relatively quickly; they don't tend to be reread much. And of course (and again this is not a complaint, merely an observation) they rarely get commented on individually. So that raises the question of how valuable it is to have them as an archive, artistically speaking, as well as how I am to know which models to follow, since there is so little spread in their readership.
But the larger question it seems to me is the one about the sonnets themselves as a form. Traditionally, poems are edited - something I think I may have mentioned that I don't do much of - and possibly collated, and definitely considered. That is to say, they are intended to be looked at deeply, possibly (or probably) receiving multiple readings, and thought about at some length. By contrast, the blog model typically suggests, despite the presence of the archive, a sense of rapid motion on from one to the next, and a discarding of that which lies in the past. Given my own profligate writing style and the design inherent in the blog, it appears that the latter model is winning out: I produce poems as dissimilar as this, this, and this, and yet they fall equally into the same chronologically rigid trap. They fall off the front page and languish; when on the front page, they most likely are read once, quickly, to get onto the next in my prolific and unreasonable output, albeit I admit I have no direct evidence for that (although the stats on time-spent-on-pages suggest so).
This in turn raises the question of whether the sonnet has to, or ought to, or even can, change to accommodate or interact with this different model. Or does the model of reading change the sonnet without changing the words? Does the reader's different interaction with the poem in the different context make it a different poem? In some way, certainly, but I cannot help but think that in some way the medium does not fundamentally alter the sonnet, because the opportunity for reading in that style was available before; the likelihood of that reading style may have changed, but it cannot mean in any useful sense that the sonnet changed just because a different proportion of the readership reads it in different ways. But should the sonnet as written change? Is there an ideal way to write a sonnet with the knowledge of how it will be consumed? I cannot say at this point, although I would love to have some form of dialogue (rather than this mere monologue) about it.
I can say, I think, that the way I write sonnets has not actually fundamentally changed. I wrote them before, whether in Notepad, Wordpad, or Word, whether on a computer, in a notebook, or on a receipt grabbed from my pocket, and whether in ink, graphite, or digital bit, in the moment the mood struck me to write, in the way the poem came to me in that instant, and with a desperate sense of urgency. That is still true, but now they go on the blog, and sometimes do so after finding their way into one of those other forms first. So the process has not changed, although the later distribution has (and I no longer have to have a working pen or unbroken pencil with me, which is nice). Therefore the questions linger: should they change? And how, I suppose, as a corollary?
I wish I had answers, but I think the first step is identifying and considering the questions.
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