What is the sonnet’s relationship to place? Phillis Levin, in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, defines the genre through spatial terms: “The sonnet is a monument of praise, a field of play, a chamber of sudden change.” As a monument, the sonnet generally holds fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. As a field of play, these lines may appear in the Italian pattern, grouped and rhymed abbaabba cdecde; the English pattern, abab cdcd efef gg; or other stanza and rhyme patterns. The volta offers a chamber of sudden change: a dynamic shift in perspective. With these formal conventions, the physical form of a sonnet is parallel to that of a landscape; small details might change, but the lay of the land—the poem’s identity as a sonnet—remains recognizable. Accordingly, John Barrell describes working-class poet John Clare’s sonnets as geographic comments, where “the form of the sonnet is identified with the ‘bounds’ of a landscape,” and Jennifer Ann Wagner calls the sonnet “a ‘situation,’ [of] a time, a place, and a problem.” Such a focus on place, however, has not always been central to the sonnet.
While early Italian and English sonnets contemplated the beloved (e.g., Dante Alighieri＊s twenty-five-sonnet sequence in Vita Nuova [1293] and William Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets in 1609), the British Romantic sonnet revival expanded the sonnet’s approach to matters of place. Consider the scientific detail of Charlotte Smith’s “Written at the Close of Spring” (1784), the urban topographies of William Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” and the nature/human relationships in John Clare’s “Open Winter” (c. 1832–37). Recent sonnet-writers’ emphasis on place continues, as in Terrence Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), where American ecologies act as characters and metaphors for ongoing colonialism and white supremacy. Still, many sonnet anthologies continue to emphasize the sonnet as an expression of private love between humans, including few (or no) sonnets of multispecies relationships or place-based meditations.
Mid/South Sonnets, edited by C. T. Salazar and Casie Dodd and released by Belle Point Press in 2023, remedies this gap in sonnet anthologies by providing long-overdue attention to the sonnet’s interconnection with place. Mid/South Sonnets collects sonnets by sixty-six poets with connections to the American South, a region Salazar and Dodd define as “from Oklahoma to Florida.” The editors give particular attention to what they term the “Mid-Southern States” of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Mid/South Sonnets’s design emphasizes these writers’ connections to Southern place(s). The three total interior and exterior cover images are of fire insurance maps (one each from AR, MS, and TN). These maps’ grid-like patterns seem to affirm settler geographies; yet, by juxtaposing colors and shapes, they destabilize colonial ways of understanding in favor of what overflows, questions, and provokes. In this way, these cover images show how the diverse poems within Mid/South Sonnets also disrupt the often white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, and classist domain of sonnet-writing for diverse writers, subjects, and styles from an often marginalized region of the United States.
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The American South is a region of past and continued white supremacy, seen, among many examples, in the past enslavements of Black peoples and removals of Indigenous peoples, as well as in contemporary police and state-legislated brutality against peoples of color. Perhaps for these reasons, questions of belonging and home are central throughout Mid/South Sonnets. In their introductions, Dodd affirms “the expansiveness of Southern culture,” and Salazar emphasizes that “the question of what constitutes the South” is “friction-filled.” Thus, Mid/South Sonnets does not intend to make boundaries but instead to acknowledge “the relative arbitrariness of the lines drawn.” The anthology heightens engagement with these questions by offering contributors multiple opportunities to place themselves and their work. For example, the table of contents lists each writer’s name, followed by parentheses for their formative homestate(s). Meanwhile, all writers’ biographies, gathered at the end of the anthology, include the writer’s current homeplace. This homeplace is most often a city and state (e.g., “Louisville, KY”), but sometimes a state (“New Jersey”) or a broader region (“Mountain South” or “Middle TN”), which often differs from the state cited after their name in the table of contents.
The difference between these writers’ formative homestates in the American South and current homeplaces (about 50 percent different from the table of contents, and about 85 percent in the South) makes tangible these complicated questions of place and belonging. In so doing, Mid/South Sonnets echoes questions of many place-based projects created amid globalization, migration, and diaspora: How is this region defined? How (and by whom) is belonging defined? How can diverse contributors ethically claim home, or, perhaps more broadly, “ties throughout the American South,” lands where many nations and peoples have been displaced?
Salazar and Dodd craft Mid/South Sonnets with attention to ongoing white supremacy across the nation and in American publishing. Of the sixty-six poets included, sixty have one work included (albeit sometimes a double sonnet, such as Steven Levya’s “A Double Sonnet Instead of an Introduction,” or a multi-part form, like T. K. Lee’s “Come Fool Circle: A Three-Poem Cycle of Fourteen-Word Sonnets”). Six poets each have two works included, and most (but not all) of these featured poets are writers of color. While I hoped to read more writers of color, particularly Indigenous writers, I appreciate how Salazar and Dodd amplify those present in this anthology and acknowledge how the editors work for more equitable publishing within systemic national attempts to marginalize writers of color. (A future anthology of Mid-South poetry might more easily include Indigenous writers if more writers from Oklahoma, bordering Arkansas and home to almost forty federally recognized tribes, were included.) For audiences interested in reading more Indigenous poets with ties to the Mid/South, one might consider Ruth Margaret Muskrat Bronson’s (Cherokee) 1920s series Sonnets from the Cherokee as well as contemporary poems by Chip Livingston (Mvskoke), Sy Hoahwah (Yapaituka Comanche/Southern Arapaho), Santee Frazier (Cherokee Nation), Jennifer Elise Foerster (Mvskoke), Lara Mann (Choctaw Nation), and many more.
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From the first poem of Mid/South Sonnets, these writers and editors disrupt ideas of the sonnet as entirely, or purely, the ancestral domain of Eurowestern writers. The anthology opens with Stacey Balkun’s “Carthage,” which begins as if an ars poetica on sonnet writing:
Now the fog rolls in like fallen clouds,
clings to potholes in clay roads and we
pretend we’re in a field, stretched on our backs:
the symmetry of sadness. We intuit storiesfrom the mist. . . .
Carthage is an ancient city on the coast of northern Africa, but Carthage is also the name of numerous cities in the United States, including, of interest to this anthology, Missouri and Texas. Balkun asserts that the sonnet, then, is and has always been Southern, and the poets in Mid/South Sonnets offer studies in this form—“stories // from the mist”—that both make visible this tradition of Southern sonnet-writing and, also, make space for a more robust, diverse practice.
The strength of Mid/South Sonnets for writing and literature classrooms is in how most of these poets look slantwise at traditional forms and choose, instead, to experiment. (While more examples of traditional English and Italian sonnets might be useful in the classroom, many other sonnet anthologies and free online resources offer such sonnets in abundance.) For example, John Vanderslice’s “Conway” offers an English rhyme for the octave before turning to couplet rhymes for the sestet, but with long ten-to-sixteen-syllable lines. Perhaps in a comment on traditional sonnet forms, Vanderslice’s speaker remarks, “I sit as the last living human in historical time.” In “Border Sonnet: Special Census of the Population of El Paso, Tex. January 15, 1916,” Andrea Blancas Beltran offers a sonnet in rhyming couplets “to be read forward and backward,” as her footnote shares, in a meditation on the violence of governmental language:
Dirty, lousey: the mayor’s vocabulary.
No one knows how to spell your name. Reports vary.
Most of these collected poems’ convergences with traditional rhyme patterns occur in the octave, with the final six lines often splintering away from these containers, as when CD Eskilson’s “Arkansas Bans Healthcare for Trans Youth” uses couplet rhyme for the octave (aa bb cc dd), then erupts into the contained fracture of an envelope sestet (e f g h i e).
Two of the most innovative sonnets in the anthology are by Makalani Bandele, appearing side-by-side as identical fourteen-word (and, thus, fourteen-clue) crossword puzzles, one without answers and one with handwritten answers: “a little bit of blackitolism revisited” and “a little bit of blackitolism revisited with answers.” In a nod to the Italian sonnet structure, Bandele’s crosswords seek eight words across and six words down. Her clues and answers are lyrical evocations, as when the clue for 1-Across, “a chunky flame flickers in the spaces,” is answered “realness,” or when the clue for 12-Down, “how b-boys rock the document to the break,” is answered, “slick.” Since the few English- and Italian-style sonnets in the anthology can tend toward abstraction and archaism (e.g., with lines such as “Repent, address any bureaucratic issues, / Wordless time, a sanguine syllabus of saints”), much more exciting are—and, thus, much more space is given to—sonnets that instead break with Eurocentric sonnet traditions to demonstrate this form as a vibrant, diverse, experimental ecosystem.
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Salazar and Dodd present Mid/South Sonnets’s poems in a thematic flow, and poems with similar forms often appear side-by-side, encouraging teachers, readers, and writers to pair these poems in a discussion of what a specific formal choice might afford across different poems. For example, Mónica Teresa Ortiz’s “Sonnet II, for ricardo flores magón” and Nikki Ummel’s “On the Ferry to Algiers, for Lisa Pasold” begin with a dedication to an individual and continue as fourteen-line poems with a truncated final line. However, Ortiz’s poem emphasizes a “you” and “we” in her near-ten-syllable lines, while Ummel’s poem emphasizes a first-person speaker in expansive lines long enough to require the poem’s landscape orientation on the page. How do Ortiz’s and Ummel’s truncated final lines, following such different preceding line lengths, affect readers differently? What layers of meaning accumulate through these poems’ opening dedications? How is the experience of both poems shaped by encountering Ortiz’s before Ummel’s? Such opportunities for dialogue appear across the book, making Mid/South Sonnets a generative choice for literature and writing classrooms.
The near-center of the anthology holds a sequence of six sonnets that are “after” or “for” a person/poem, with three of the six being “for” the next poet appearing: Jianqing Zheng’s “Abstract Duality, for George Drew” is followed by Drew’s “Little Louisiana Rooms, for Darrell Bourque,” which is followed by Bourque’s “Second-Rate Mystic, for Iry LeJeune.” In the instance of following Drew’s poem by Bourque’s, this ordering offers Drew’s appreciative homage to Bourque and introduction to Bourque’s formal work. As Drew writes of Bourque:
How not applaud the freedom
implicit in extending an ordinary pentameter
to six- and seven-beat lines, and then some
Readers can then carry this knowledge over the page to Bourque’s poem and bear witness. And indeed, in “Second-Rate Mystic,” Bourque’s long lines spiral on only four rhymes (abab cdc dcd abab), a pressurization amplified by his use of ampersands and repetition, as in:
In parceled light the only measure
I knew was true was measured sound. So, I made breakdowns
& two-steps & laments, easy as flowers returning to sun. I broke
the mold of who I was supposed to be with air. . . .
These intuitive links, like the sonnet’s form, make each sonnet and poet another line in this interconnected tapestry.
Sometimes, Mid/South Sonnets’s physical design itself facilitates innovative readings, such as Ashley M. Jones’s “hoppinjohn: a blues, after Tyehimba Jess.” Here, two sonnets appear on facing pages, both aligned close to the center margin, encouraging readers to experience them as two distinct sonnets (e.g., a “part one” of fourteen lines and a “part two” of fourteen lines) as well as a single, wide, doubled sonnet of fourteen total lines. While both pages follow distinct English abab cdcd efef rhymes for the first twelve lines, one finds a closing couplet rhyme (gg) only when reading the short final lines across the page, making this innovative poem perhaps the fullest example of an English sonnet across the anthology. Consider these opening lines (where the white space between lines represents the anthology’s physical page break):
she’s got some eyes—bette davis, no, black— the white blending around it—a whole note
on our plates, she shimmies between the rice supple with salt and onion and butter
and makes a lucky meal where there is lack— this marriage on our Sunday plate, we float—
not lima, pinto, just blackeyes suffice. this here’s a john that hops like no other.
By including such expansive, less-traditional sonnets, editors Salazar and Dodd push against simplified tropes about this poetic form and this geographical region, showing sonnet-writing and the American South as vibrant, contemporary, and exciting.
Mid/South Sonnets does not claim to be exhaustive; its editors offer, instead, “a single moment in which poets hailing from or living in the South across a spectrum of race, class, gender, ability, and age all said here I am.” Here, moments of direct physicality (like SG Huerta’s “Do I water my cat / or make more pasta”) speak alongside moments of shimmering lyricism (like Maggie Rue Hess’s “What is truth. A blink in the evening / rather than a wall of light.”) to reckon with the complexities of locating home in the American South, with the ongoing violence of white supremacy across these stolen lands. In Mid/South Sonnets, Salazar, Dodd, and these writers avoid easy answers to questions of home and belonging, leaving readers—of which I hope there will be many—realizing with Raye Hendrix’s speaker in “Birmingham Double Sonnet,” in the lines that close this poem and this anthology:
no outrunning
what built you even when it leaves a bruise.
We were always meant to come home.
In Mid/South Sonnets, Salazar, Dodd, and these writers avoid easy answers to questions of home and belonging, encouraging and challenging us to come home together.
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Mid/South Sonnets. Edited by C. T. Salazar and Casie Dodd. Fort Smith, Arkansas: Belle Point Press, 2023. 92 pp. $19.95.
