Double Exposure: A Craft Essay on Sonnets and Skinny-Dipping by Manny Blacksher
I am devoted to modern and contemporary sonnets. There’s no other form I know that invites both intimately small and exorbitant subjects to fit into the same few lines with a handful of precious words. The sonnet’s already been extolled by countless poets and critics. I’ll tell you a secret: in the 90s, when I was struggling to find a “voice” and develop some kind of signature “type,” I studied Ciaran Carson’s collection, The Twelfth of Never, and thought, “This isn’t just a terrific sequence; it’s a practical manual for generating good poems.” I grabbed onto Carson’s practical examples, and—though I write different sorts of things on occasion—I come back to sonnets.
One of my ‘open’ secrets is that I mostly struggle to write confessional poems. The more intimate and awkward the subject is, the more likely I’ll feel compelled to frame the poem as a fictional persona’s experiences. With “Jetsam,” it all came out in a rush. I’d been irritated at failing to have written a coherent, finished piece in a long while. I hunted for something, anything, that was vivid and interesting enough to tease at. It was late spring, I think, and I remembered the gang of young reporters and copy-editors I was hanging with in Montgomery, Alabama during the 90s while I taught freshman and sophomore English. We were mostly grubbing away at entry-level jobs, so outside work, we played poker and drank ninety-nine-cent margaritas on Thursday nights and skinny-dipped at the lake an hour away.
With a pang, I recalled finding out that summer that the university had laid me off, at a moment in my career when I wasn’t even aware of what a lay-off entailed. Job lost, I’d have to move back in with my parents in Birmingham and say goodbye to many of those talented, ambitious folks.
I thought of the unexpectedly-comfortable invulnerability that naked swimming at night with friends conferred. I remembered Phily Larkin’s image for poetic form: “A glass of water/ Where any-angled light/ Would congregate endlessly.” Bobbing in the lake with others did feel something like ‘endless congregation’, but nothing so classy as a Platonic water glass’s formless form. More like a pint-sized beer can lost accidentally in the lake. I’m confident wicked Philip Larkin had his own homely experiences with empty tins of Bass and Sterling, maybe as far back as those vertiginous college years when he was “winding up a gramophone in a punt to play Armstrong’s ‘Body and Soul’.”
