The Reality Street Book of Sonnets [Paperback]

On the Poetics List the allegation was made that Jeff Hilson's book is too London-centric and that the talented poet publishes his friends at the expense of other British poetry circles. I always imagined that, if I were making an anthology, I would first off canvass all my friends and see if they had something suitable, and if they had written any sonnets, and I was Jeff, I'd be all like, "E-mail them to me as an attachment!" In fact every anthology I've worked on has operated this way. From California I can't tell if the REALITY STREET BOOK OF SONNETS has too many people from London but I can tell you this, it seems padded down with people associated with Reality Street press and books, and sometimes this work doesn't seem of the highest quality. But again if I were the publisher of the book, I would want to see my lowliest author represented as well as, whoever, Harryette Mullen or John Ashbery and people who get published all the time anyway.

No matter, it is a big, expansive collection bursting at the seams with a richness and variety that surprised cynical old me. A friend had told me this was an excellent book, but I rolled my eyes thinking, "Sonnets?!?" for I'm of the opinion that even Jack Spicer, my specialty, wrote too many sonnets and what are we going to do with all of them. Adjusting my vision, I reviewed my friend as he sat opposite me at the bar, his rep tie, his trim lapels, the part in his hair so cleanly chiseled and you know what, he did look like the sort of man who would enjoy roughly 2,000 sonnets, the number Hilson has included. Well I took a Kierkegaardian leap and wound up enjoying my time with this book immensely. Its handsome design ensures that there are never too many sonnets on any one page, while its chronological order (poets arranged by birth date) gives us a rough sense of the generations of sonneteers and how they think differently of themselves and their social practice. Are there many American writers here? Oh yes, he has done his spadework and flung the net far, including to my surprise the exquisite "Sketches for 13 Sonnets" written by the Black Mountain inflected poet Ebbe Borregaard (one of many poets who, in these conceptual times, has in fact abandoned poetry entirely in recent decades). In fact the book begins with a nod to the US, as Edwin Denby and Bern Porter, Jackson Mac Low and Mary Ellen Solt, Borregaard, John Clarke and Ted Berrigan make their presence known right away. There's a huge gap in time between the birth of Edwin Denby and the birthyear of the first UK poet included here (Tom Raworth), and the editorial apparatus never really explains why; the book thus seems bottom heavy, as it were, with positive rafts and shoals of talented London based poets all disinventing the sonnet wheel within what seems like months of each other. It's a terribly exciting time to be middle-aged or young in London and doing sonnets, and in the Americas one wonders what this book would look like had Jeff never read an issue of Chicago Review nor seen a catalogue from Coffee House Press, because otherwise the pickings are slim.

I'm having all my students read this book and look forward to a companion piece in which each of the poets, those still alive that is, explain why they consider their poems sonnets, for what's missing is a theorizing poetics which would account for the development of the dismantling process, as well as the reaffirmation of form embodies in such a volume, such a smart and luscious volume so ably edited by a practitioner with vision.

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