Like many contemporary poets, Brandy Nālani McDougall and Margaret Rhee evoke the sonnet in ways that both adhere to and stretch its formal bounds and exploit expectations of what the sonnet itself represents, employing the sonnet and its associations to amplify their investigations of language, love, and power. In her series “Ka ‘Ōlelo,” McDougall, a Kanaka Maoli writer and scholar, portrays the challenges and satisfactions in reactivating a native language suppressed by colonial oppression. In her speculative poetry collection Love, Robot, Rhee, a Korean American poet and cross-media artist, portrays a human-robot love story that manifests through multiple formal and evolving iterations: algorithms, testimonials, and sonnets.
As a long-time practitioner and teacher of sonnet writing, I’m interested in the ways that these poets layer devices such as repetition and internal rhyme onto the form and when and how they depart from the sonnet’s traditional requirements to augment their political and literary interrogations. I’m also interested in how the sonnet’s durability—its ability to be torqued and shimmied to the poet’s purpose— enables enhanced meaning. Both sonnet series foreground dialogue between two speakers, and both speak to poetry as a peculiar type of language, where conversations about past and current destructions and future intersections can make their own forums.
McDougall’s sonnet sequence “Ka ‘Ōlelo” was published in 2008 in her debut poetry collection, The Salt-Wind Ka Makani Pa’akai (Kuleana ‘Ōiwi Press), which explores family and culture as they intersect with historical and contemporary colonialism in Hawai’i from the establishment of plantations through the brutal conquest of the kingdom of Hawai’i and its long aftermath. In “Ka ‘Ōlelo,” which means “language” or “the word,” the poet focuses on the reclamation of a Hawaiian language erased by English-only schools and laws, which persisted through the late 20th century. In the second poem in this series of five sonnets, McDougall recounts how her ancestors were forced to repress the speaking, reading, and writing of native words, often through violent means:
Like the sea urchin leaves, pimpling its shell
as its many spines let go, turn to sand,
my great-grandfather’s Hawaiian words fell
silent, while his children grew, their skin tanned
and too thin to withstand the teacher’s stick,
reprimands demanding English only.
The law lasted until 1986,
after three generations of family
swallowed our ‘ōlelo like pōhaku,
learned to live with the cold, dark fruit under
our tongues.
(lines 1-11)
In the opening simile, McDougall likens her great-grandfather’s suppressed words to the crumbling of sea urchin leaves or spines, which become sand, disintegrating into a larger monolithic landscape under great pressure and the erosions of time. In lines 9–11, the poet compares the repression of language to swallowing “pōhaku” or stones, which are then described as “cold, dark fruit under/our tongues.” In both metaphors, words are portrayed as elements of the natural world, initially made inert and buried but capable of resurrection, kept dormant but possibly alive in the mouths of living people.
Throughout the sequence, McDougall conflates natural elements—the wind, the ocean, seeds, fruit, and animals—with language and the human body, emphasizing the interconnectedness of land, language, people, and other beings, all capable of living, dying, and speaking. The poet’s homeland also provides a kind of foundational language that cannot be obliterated, as underscored by the last lines of the sequence’s first poem: “English could never replace/the land’s unfolding song, nor the ocean’s/ancient oli, giving us use again.” (lines 12–14)
In the above passages, as elsewhere throughout the sonnet sequence and the collection, McDougall interweaves English and Hawaiian words, deftly switching from one language to the other without italics or translation, equalizing the positions of one to the other and encouraging the non-speaker of Hawaiian to learn these words, thus mirroring the process of language acquisition that the poet-speaker undertakes throughout this series, as she and her grandfather talk about the loss of Hawaiian and then take language lessons together.
The last three poems in the sequence illustrate the difficulties and pleasures of learning a new language, especially one imbued with so much personal and communal history and systemic denial. In the sequence’s final poem, “’elima” or “five,” the speaker describes her “unripe tongue” as “a blind ko’e that must feel its way/through the liquids, mutes, and aspirates of speech,/the threading of breath and blood into lei,” (lines 5–8) emphasizing the physical arduousness of acquiring new/old speech, and again blending the human body with animal, plant, and language, and highlighting the impossibility of separating one from the other. These lines are immediately followed by the series’ conclusion as the speaker and her grandfather study Hawaiian together and converse:
“E aloha. ‘O wai kou inoa?”
I ask, after the language CD’s voice.
“O Kekauoha ko’u inoa,”
my grandfather answers, “Pehea ‘oe?”
So, we slowly begin, with what ‘ōlelo
we know; E ho’oulu ana kākou.
(lines 9–14)
The speaker and the grandfather’s reclamation of their native language is embodied and accentuated by the litany of Hawaiian phrases that dominate the sonnet’s last six lines. In McDougall’s series, Hawaiian literally has the last words, which translate to, “We will cultivate.”
This message and the intensified deployment of Hawaiian phrases at the series’ end are especially striking within the context of McDougall’s choice of form, as all of the poems in the sequence are Shakespearean or English sonnets with each poem adhering to the form’s usual rhyme scheme of alternating rhymes followed by a concluding couplet. As an ur-English poetic form, the Shakespearean sonnet provides a sharp backdrop for words in non-English languages, spotlighting the portrayal of resistance to the forced imposition of English as a colonialist endeavor. In addition, McDougall’s supple invocation of the sonnet and its opportunities for heightened meaning through coincidence of sound and defiance of expectation, enacts another of this series’ reclamations, as the poet punctures the repressive power of the colonizer’s language by also claiming it as one of her own—and shaping the sonnet to her own purposes through sense and sound.
In the second sonnet quoted above, “’elua,” or “two,” McDougall employs internal rhyme to emphasize the severity and monotony of the English-only instruction the speaker’s great-grandfather experienced. The b-rhyme of sand/tanned is echoed in the next two lines by the quick succession of withstand, reprimands and demanding, the rhyme emulating the repetitive motion and sound of the teacher’s punishing stick. In the opening lines of the sequence’s last sonnet, “’elima,” McDougall deploys exact and internal rhyme to convey the unstoppable power of a once repressed language being reborn, likening it to an indigenous plant’s growth:
As the ‘ape shoot, whose delicate shoots
shoot forth their young sprouts, and spread, and bring forth
in their birth, many branches find their roots
in the dark, wet ‘ōlelo the earth bore.
(lines 1–4)
The word shoot(s)— connoting things both natural and organic and human-made and deadly—a plant and a weapon—is repeated three times, acting as noun, verb, and synecdoche, the exact rhyme amplified by the slant rhyme of sprouts and with the interwoven internal rhyme of forth/birth/earth creating a dramatic sonic chamber, not meeting but exceeding the sonnet’s requirements. The poet here delivers a choir of sound, stretching the form.
Notably, it is also a moment of familial connection between the speaker and her grandfather as they study Hawaiian together that reverses the generations of linguistic oppression in “Ka ‘Ōlelo,” and affectionate rapport also animates Margaret Rhee’s first collection, Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017), which depicts a romance between a human poet and a robot who is both literal and allegorical. While The Salt-Wind Ka Makani Pa’akai looks to the past as ravaged and rich ground for revitalization, Love, Robot, whose title nods to Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel I, Robot, optimistically looks in the other temporal direction. In an interview concluding the book, Rhee, who works in multiple fields—she studied both poetry and robotics at UC Berkeley, creating a chatbot game based on the Turing Test, while pursuing her PhD in ethnic studies and new media studies—notes that she is “interested in progress, the future, and imagination.” (Rhee, page 90)
Love, Robot chronicles the romance between a poet-speaker and a robot from first meeting through the waning of lust and tenderness within the mundanity and exhaustion of domestic partnership. Employing a variety of forms—free verse, algorithms, prose poems, and sonnets—Rhee humorously depicts the robot as both real—“I loved you because you could make beautiful things:/magical world of red bathtub boats” (“Make, Robot,” lines 1–2) and “there is no sweeter lullaby than the hum of your servomotor” (Sleep, Robot,” line 11)—and metaphorical, with the robot emblemizing difference in general and queerness in particular as in the poem “Street/Rap,” in which characters converse about the “Out for Robots” campaign to win the right to marry.
True to traditional content, the sonnet sequence, “Human Attempt at Sonnets (Part 32),” evokes the difficult middle-late part of the romance, riddled with betrayal, infidelity, and underappreciation. Although Rhee mostly eschews the sonnet’s usual features, I read the first four of the five poems as Shakespearean sonnets. Two of these poems are composed as four tercets followed by a concluding couplet, and all four embody the English form’s typical movement, accruing meaning line by line and building toward a bold and pithy conclusion, as in:
Damaged hardware and software. Nothing to update.
But baby, yes, you know. I still want all the bits of you.
(“Lemonade,” lines 13–14)
And:
Remember the cheap laborer named robot
She deserves some snuggle, sometimes.
(“Sriracha,” lines 13–14)
All four also employ a volta in the expected place, with Rhee providing commentary on the turn as a requirement of the form in the third sonnet, “Sriracha,” in which the robot laments her forlorn state as neglected worker and lover, “Remember what I do for your world. I make things/turn, and move.” (lines 7–8) and “There is never going to be a turn in this song” (line 12), referring both to the relationship and the poem. Here and elsewhere in the collection, the robot is metaphoric and real in the sense of being our ubiquitous, deeply depended upon, and intimate partners who see and hear us, even when we don’t acknowledge them.
In the sequence’s untitled fourth poem, Rhee goes full-meta, employing the anaphora of “The sonnet is human” to explore the intersections of being human, being machine, and being a sonnet:
The sonnet is human in its form and intent
The sonnet is human in its turn - - Volta!
The sonnet is human in its rhyme
The sonnet is human in its fourteen lines
The sonnet is human in its little song
The sonnet is human in how it stresses & unstresses
The sonnet is human as a container of love
The sonnet is human in how the couplets fail
The sonnet is human in how it seduces
The sonnet is human in how it clings
T
he sonnet is human in how it lures me in
The sonnet is human as a mesmerizing spell
The sonnet is human as it must turn
The sonnet is human in its mechanical urge
Like McDougall, Rhee is keenly aware of the sonnet’s position as an ultimate form, a kind of chrysalis of poetry in the English language, emblemizing all that poetry can do, including its association with human-ness as individualized, idiosyncratic expression and feeling. And like McDougall, Rhee employs the sonnet’s elevated position within our culture to amplify her meanings, here, both commenting on the sonnet’s prescribed properties and its simultaneous purported human-ness and machine-like qualities, its rigors generating expression that is indeed unique, as demonstrated by the poem itself, which resembles a machine in its repetitions, but delivers fresh messages that question the distinction between human and robot.
As in the sequence’s other poems, Rhee knowingly jokes about the investigation of the unanswerable questions of what it means to be human, machine, or sonnet, even as the poem proceeds through its declarative lines. Lines 11–12 provide a witty allusion to Alexander Pope’s famous aphorism, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” by introducing an intentional error, splitting the word “The” over the two lines, making the poet and the sonnet fallible.
In very different ways, Rhee and McDougall portray the limits of language and its marvelous malleability, with both poets magnifying language’s ductile properties by speaking to its misuses and ever-renewable capacities, employing sonnet sequences to funnel their expression, speaking through and to the vessel itself. Both poets also expand the limits of language and poetry: McDougall by melding language with aspects of nature and Rhee by blurring the line between human and machine. The fifth and final sonnet in Rhee’s series entails the biggest formal departure from the form, consisting of only 7 words, all in all-caps and all in a huge font spread across the page, the words being, “THE ROBOT SONNET IN 2048 IS NANO.”
Here, Rhee cheerily anticipates the sonnet’s failure as a received form by foregoing all of the old features and having the dispersed form of this sonnet mimic the ethereal nano-ness of future sonnets instead. In this poem, the poet-speaker envisions a future in which robots write sonnets, which are embedded and everywhere, intimately intwined with us like PFAS, beneath detectability but widely distributed—in our blood and our brains, the air we breathe and the water we drink. In Love, Robot, this gesture is generous, the poet-speaker anticipating a future in which robots, who have been allegorized as unrecognized laborers, queer beloveds, and other othered people get their say by writing sonnets with a worldwide audience. And as in McDougall’s sonnets, the once subjugated subject gets the last word, which happens to be a poem.
