Lin-Manuel Miranda's Sonnet at the Tony Awards

The sonnet just got a boost in the news in the reporting of this year's Tony Awards, as Lin-Manuel Miranda, the brilliant author of Hamilton: An American Musical, recited one in accepting his Tony for composing the musical. This poem has been published with a couple of different line divisions, none of which (that I've yet seen) make it a sonnet--but I think there is a set of line divisions that would make it one.

CNN has Miranda's 'sonnet' without line divisions at all

"We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play when senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall, and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer and love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. As sacred as a symphony Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride. And thank you so much for this." 

(From http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/entertainment/lin-manuel-miranda-sonnet-hamilton-orlando/)

This is probably appropriate for Miranda's well-known spoken-word, hip-hop origins, but it's not a sonnet. Sonnets have lines, meter, and rhyme. And of course they include the "thank you so much for this," which refers to the Tony award but probably isn't intended as part of the poem.

Vanity Fair has it as, basically, a ballad (four quatrains), although they don't emphasize the quatrain divisions.

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees

She is a perfect symphony of one,

Our son is her most beautiful reprise

We chase the melodies that seem to find us

Until they’re finished songs and start to play

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us

That nothing here is promised, not one day

This show is proof that history remembers

We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger

We rise and fall and light from dying embers

Remembrances that hope and love lasts long

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love

Cannot be killed or swept aside,

I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story

Now fill the world with music love and pride

(From http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/06/lin-manuel-miranda-tony-speech)

This isn't a sonnet because a) sonnets have 14 lines, b) sonnets are consistently rhymed, and c) it's a ballad. Ballads aren't sonnets; different lyric forms exist for different reasons and uses, and it's not helpful to conflate them. There's nothing wrong with Miranda's poem as a ballad (except that he called it a sonnet). This was how I first encountered the poem set, and it has a strong appeal--partly because the lines end up the same length or roughly so throughout. But it's not a sonnet, which is a problem given that Miranda told us it's a sonnet.

The NY Times has it as follows:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees

She is a perfect symphony of one

Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us

Until they’re finished songs and start to play

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us

That nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers

We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;

We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.

I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story

Now fill the world with music, love and pride.

(From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/theater/lin-manuel-mirandas-sonnet-from-the-tony-awards.html)

This is not a sonnet; they've made it 14 lines, but they wrecked the rhyme scheme and the line lengths end up really weird and inconsistent. Nice try, but it's not quite there.

EW reports the line divisions very oddly, dividing some lines with a virgule (/) and some with actual line breaks:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done/ She nudges me towards promise by degrees / She is a perfect symphony of one/ Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they’re finished songs and start to play/ When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers/ We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger/ We rise and fall and light from dying embers remembrance that hope and love last forever. 

Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside/ I sing Vanessa’s symphony. Eliza tells her story. [we] fill the world with music, love, and pride.

(From http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/12/tony-awards-2016-lin-manuel-miranda-sonnet-orlando, italics removed) 

This is almost there, but like the NY Times version, it too ends up mucking up the rhyme scheme (and actually ending up as a thirteen-line poem) because of what looks like a missed line division in the third from last line.

So what do I think Miranda's sonnet should look like? This:

My wife’s the reason anything gets done

She nudges me towards promise by degrees

She is a perfect symphony of one

Our son is her most beautiful reprise.

We chase the melodies that seem to find us

Until they’re finished songs and start to play

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us

That nothing here is promised, not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers

We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;

We rise and fall and light from dying embers, 
Remembrances that hope and love last longer

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.

I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride.

 Now this is a sonnet! 14 lines, rhyme scheme, and meter. The meter changes in the last two lines of the sonnet, but this is not unprecedented: Sir Philip Sidney's great sixteenth-century sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, frequently moves from iambic pentameter in the first twelve lines to hexameter in the final couplet. Miranda's move is more dramatic, into duodecameter (twenty-four syllables a line, twice as many as Sidney's twelve-syllable hexameter), but it fits his aggressively innovative and over-crammed poetic style. The strictest form of the definitions I've introduced in my Introduction to the Sonnet (beginning here) would exclude it for the meter change, but as I've noted before in different contexts, as long as the poem builds up an expectation of consistent meter, the rhetorical effect of a sudden change towards the end can be very effective while remaining within the tradition of the sonnet.

Why does this matter? I'm sure, to many people, it simply doesn't. Lin-Manuel Miranda called it a sonnet, so it's a sonnet. But I believe that there is a reason we don't just call all poems, or even all short lyric poems, sonnets. There is a value to having standards and constraints within--and against--which to work. Writing a sonnet is different than writing a ballad, than writing an ode, than writing anything other than a sonnet, because of its particular constraints, its particular history, and its particular rules. In Lin-Manuel Miranda's sonnet (once properly set as a sonnet) we can see the particular ways in which he plays with those rules: by keeping fairly strictly to the iambic pentameter mode in the first twelve lines, the powerful expansion of the meter in the final couplet (and especially the moving "Love is love..." half-line, which begins the metrical change, going far beyond the pentameter restriction all on its own) is substantially heightened. Compare the Vanity Fair setting of the poem as a near-ballad with the sonnet setting above, and you will see that the final two lines of the sonnet are remarkable for their vitality and power in a substantially different way than the final quatrain of the ballad. This power comes not just from the words of Miranda's poem, but also from its context. Alexander Hamilton, the subject of Hamilton, was particularly known for writing "Non-Stop" (in the title of the first-act finale) and so the overstuffed last two lines are not just moving in their content, but in their Hamiltonian nature. The strong caesuras in these lines (after the last "love" and after the penultimate period, respectively) are what clearly suggested to the Vanity Fair editors that these should be line breaks, but both come more than halfway through their respective lines, which is a signal to us that they are in fact caesuras--and that this is in fact a sonnet.

On the Blog as a Medium for Sonnets

So a question that constantly occurs to me as I write this blog is what the medium of the blog means for and does to the poetry I produce on it. This question, for me, breaks down into the following parts: what does it mean to make poetry ephemeral, as each day's poem is superseded on the front page by the next's? What does it mean, conversely, to have every poem searchable and archived? What does it mean to have so much poetry produced so quickly, and none of it edited? And finally, what does it do to have such a formal poetic form placed into the context of such a modern medium?

What does it mean to make poetry ephemeral?

This is probably the question that worries me the most, or perhaps not worries me but nags at me. I write a lot of poetry here, as you know if you take even a glance at my archive or even at the front page. But each one, whether good or bad, whether a labor of lengthy love or the work of a moment, whether precious to me or not, drops off the radar incredibly rapidly - and at the same rate. Who reads the archive? And if you do read the archive, how do you know which poem to read? In this sense, the medium portrays the poetry as if it were all created equal, which it manifestly is not. But because every poem disappears from view, never to return, there is no way to keep the best poems around, or, therefore to produce improvement in the poems by recognizing success or failure and keeping the examples of each before one's eyes. The poems become mere ripples in the stream, and lose their solid presence. Poems are meant, in some sense, to stand as "a moment's monument," in Dante's words, or "marble or the gilded monuments/of princes" in Shakespeare's. How can the poem be a monument, how can it immortalize anything, if it itself is ravaged by time, and indeed ravaged more rapidly than the physical objects to which it is compared? Does a poem lose something of its identity, of that crystalline quality that I desire it to have, if it disappears soon after its creation?

I hope, and think, the answer is that it does not. After all, if I write poetry in a book, or in a Word document, or in any other format, is it presented to the world any more than it is at the bottom of my archive here? Certainly not, and indeed, it is less available, less noticeable, less useful. Of course, if I were to write my poetry in another medium, I could collate and correct it before publishing it to somewhere it could be read by others; but equally, there would be a good chance that the poems might become permanently voided because I lost them, forgot about them, or simply refused to show them. How can this medium be considered more ephemeral than that? The apparent ephemerality of the poems is simply an artifact of the fact that all the poems I write (with few exceptions) are available here, and therefore the constant stream of them, and their constantly visible renewal, makes each one looks less important. Yet I would write the poems in any case, and they are certainly no less important and no more ephemeral here.

But, on the other hand, what does it mean to have them all archived?

The flip side of the above point is that, unlike other media, this medium provides a searchable, browsable archive of everything I've produced. Certainly from a personal standpoint this is both a good thing, as I have easy access to my work, and a frightening thing, as whatever personal truth is contained in the poems is not only publicly available, but available with its own history tagging along behind it. It is rather difficult to escape one's past in such a context. But I am more concerned here with a poetic, artistic level than a personal one, to the extent that they can be divorced, and on that side the issue is more the one identified above, that the archive is undifferentiated and therefore not ideal to use. So it is less useful than it could be; if I could find a way to differentiate the poems by quality, or by audience response (which I suppose could be achieved by comments), then the presence of the archive would become a much greater tool for poetic development. It does however tie me, however usefully, to my poetic past; it leaves the exploration of my poetic development, however achieved, open to the willing eye. At the moment this is only an archive of the past few months, along with spotted moments of My Old Sonnets, but if I continue it will grow and become both more useful and more interesting as a record of my poetic past, and of how I have developed as a poet.

What does it mean to have so much poetry, so quickly, without editing?

This jockeys with the first question for my attention, and indeed they are closely related. The role of editing in poetry is one that I have struggled with. I write my poems very rapidly, almost compulsively, and though I do edit them in the process of writing them it is very hard for me to edit them afterwards unless it is long afterwards. It is not, as it might seem to be, an issue of excess of passion, but rather an issue of being too close to the moment of creation; a sonnet that has just passed hot out of the forge of my brain needs time to cool before it can be reshaped. Or at least before I can reshape it. So in a sense, editing would not happen even if I were in another medium, just because of who I am and how I write.

Yet the blog medium is, admittedly, peculiarly unfriendly to editing, especially compared to other electronic media, such as simply typing in Word. The archive moves on so quickly, and posts that are edited themselves do not pop up on the frontpage but rather wherever the original was in the archive. So the tendency is simply to forge on, rather than to go back, and even if one does go back the edited poem is invisible unless reposted. So there is a distinct pressure to move onward, ever onward.

This in turn leads towards greatly increased poetic production in terms of numbers of poems. I have written well over three hundred sonnets for this blog. Petrarch wrote, or at least published, that many sonnets in his entire life; Shakespeare, less than half as many. This is certainly not to claim a position for myself alongside those two poets, but rather to point out the effect, in some ways, of the medium's constant push for novelty rather than reworking of old material. I am, and in some sense must be, continually presenting new sonnets and new work, and therefore exceed greatly the standards of quantitative production traditional for the sonnet. This is accelerated by the way in which the medium interacts with editing; otherwise I might perhaps spend more time producing better work out of the materials already at hand rather than creating anew.

What does it mean to have a formal, traditional form in a modern medium?

Besides the production point addressed above, the interaction of something so old, traditional, almost arcane as the sonnet with the slambang speed of the Internet interests me. This is perhaps particularly true because of the traditional approach I take to the sonnet (nothing without consistent meter and rhyme, please!). The speed and almost sloppiness allowed by the medium interact interestingly with the precision demanded by the form. I can push out the sonnet as fast as I can write it, technically speaking, but I can only write it as quickly as I can find the right words to fit the form; the form, and not the medium, is the constraint, the limiting factor, which is substantially different than it is when I write by hand, and even in some ways different than when I type into something like Word (because then there is a lag in publication, which permits more editing - see above - which in turn makes the form itself no longer the limiting factor). This has probably contributed in turn to my facility with the form, but it has also created a situation in which there is no automatic check that allows me to edit as I go along by making me pause as I compose, since the composition can flow as rapidly as it likes and be immediately posted. This in turn must have an impact on what eventually gets published, as there is less of a space for contemplation of the production either during or immediately after the process.