Intimate and Infinite Forms: Toward a Transmigrant Poetics
by Samyak Shertok“My mother is my favorite immigrant,” announces the speaker of Eduardo C. Corral’s “To a Blossoming Saguaro.” “After her? The sonnet.” I had never thought of the sonnet as an immigrant until I encountered this poem. As a being with an agency? Or an artistic commodity forcefully brought across the border against its will, appropriated and exploited? An immigrant like me? From migrate from migrāre: “to pass into a new condition or form.” What new form did the sonnet, upon crossing the continental border, assume? What ghosts did it leave behind in its motherland? Earlier in the poem, the speaker reveals to the saguaro, “You have more rights than the undocumented: / I need a permit to uproot you.” And I wonder what rights the sonnet has. I wonder if the sonnet has more rights than me.
If we subscribe to the Aristotelian concept of poetry as an art of mimesis, then a poem becomes an act of representation. This raises questions that are both ethical and political: Who is representing whom? Why? And how? In her introduction to “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network,” Caroline Levine writes: “Form always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping.” Ordering implies hierarchy. Hierarchy implies power structures, which, to me, are inherently political. I also want us to consider form as a space with a set of rules, and those conventions, the “tradition,” can sometimes act as the gatekeeper who determines what’s included in and what’s excluded from this space. And it is these rules, this tradition, the marginalized poet must navigate—follow, bend, break, rewrite—if she is to ever get admitted into this space.
As a writer of color, I’m all too familiar with how the marginalized bodies are rendered either invisible or hyper-visible. As hyper-visible, we become a target. As invisible, we cease to exist. The poetic form for a marginalized poet then becomes the body, the face, the very evidence of her life. It no longer remains merely a matter of craft or aesthetics. The form becomes inseparable from the minority poet’s idiosyncratic, complex, and ever-evolving identity. Through this special section of poems, I wanted to create space for the lesser known and international poetic forms from writers with diverse backgrounds. Forms that celebrate our roots and our aspirations. Forms capacious enough to accommodate our multi-consciousness and polyphony. Forms where we don’t have to explain or prove anything to anyone.
It was a joy and honor to read works by so many poets in response to my call. I must admit though that I was a bit disheartened not to see more submissions on international forms, but the ones I did receive felt radically intimate and infinite (including the broken hyangga and nesting notes which I had never heard of before). Ideally, I also did not want to include more than one poem in any given form, but almost half the submissions included sonnets. And they were terrific, so the issue ended up being very sonnet heavy. I hope each sonnet offers something different formally. I also wanted to make the issue more inclusive, but despite my best efforts, I could not fully achieve that objective.
The poems I was fortunate enough to accept for this special section stunned and enlightened me. Steeped in tradition yet formally innovative, these expansive works embody and amplify ambiguity and multiplicity. In these poems the legal and the lyric collide, visual art inspires a becoming, the dropped lineation echoes the speaker’s emotional terrain, the collective and the individual grow together as “myrrh in a minefield.” I hope that this folio comprised of ten distinct forms—the ghazal, broken hyangga, décima, sonnet, villanelle, word-bank test, ekphrastic couplets, prose block, golden shovel, and nesting notes—deepens and expands our understanding of the ethics, poetics, and politics of forms. The audio accompaniments where the authors discuss their rationale behind the forms further illuminate these poems. I want to believe that this folio is a small effort toward imagining a transmigrant poetics of form, one transcending all borders, free of any ownership, into a new dimension without “origin or terminus.” In “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian posits, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces… It is form that provides an opening.” May these wrought and deeply moving forms that continuously transmute and reinvent themselves also open us.
