Sonneteering: Mark Haddon's “A Rough Guide”

Andy Verboom takes on Mark Haddon and the kitchensinkism of Canadian poetry.In reading Mark Haddon’s The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea for the (now-defunct) Northern Poetry Review, Alex Boyd commends Haddon for being “not afraid to throw in the kitchen sink.”This is one symptom of what seems a particularly virulent critical tendency, especially in the polis of contemporary Canadian poetry, to praise phantasmagoric imagism and lyricism without due readerly diligence toward underlying coherence. Hence, the list of ‘surprising things mentioned in this collection’ that serves as review fodder and back-cover copy for too many Canadian poetry collections—whaaa? jazz music and a famous racehorse and current biomedical research and a recipe for olive bread!? This tendency—let’s call it ‘kitchensinkism’—is doubly criminal: it can result in misreading unobviously coherent poetry as stylishly anti-logical and in misreading the deliberately incoherent (for which there is certainly a place) as mere faddish convention.Across the pond, Ranjit Bolt of The Guardian—staunch anti-kitchensinkist, “fresh out of indignation” at all the godless urinality of contemporary art—deems TTHATSGATVUT a collection of non-poetic, “interchangeable” “stuff.” Boyd and Bolt both treat “A Rough Guide” as exemplary of TTHATSGATVUTS, with Bolt fuming, “Take ‘A Rough Guide’ apart and reassemble it in a different order and nothing will have changed.” But while TTHATSGATVUTS is the accumulative collection its title suggests, Haddon’s images do not simply ‘heap up.’ Instead they enter into unspoken conjunctions with one another: there are unwritten ands and ors and sos, vapours of fairytale and fable, wormholes between registers.“A Rough Guide” is certainly not, as Bolt whines, arbitrarily rearrangeable. Quite a bit of meaning is lost if the first lines of the sestet (“Remember, every Friday we used to go / for a walk. I walked. You walked.”) no longer follow the direct imperative to “not refer to what somebody did / at a particular time in the past.” This volta—both a direct contradiction and a turn from imperative self-address and self-control to the introduction and uncontrolled address of the beloved “you”—provides a fairly reasonable suggestion of what the sonnet is “A Rough Guide” to: visiting a loved one with dementia (or meeting a former lover, or another situation in which emotional attachment and memory are at odds).The details bear this reading out well—the notion that “Not all the knives are in the museum,” for instance, marking our ironic ability to continue injuring someone even after we’ve forgotten who they are. What makes this a particularly interesting sonnet is its second volta, one accessible not to logic but to the ear, as the irregular meter of the first eleven lines turns to the childlike, nearly monosyllabic iambs of the final three:

This steak is very good. Sit down.There is no wine, but there is ice-cream.Eat slowly. I have many matches.

Here the heartbreaking (because heartless) simplicity of the post-dementia conversation is aligned with the inelasticity of the poetic form, and both are juxtaposed with the ‘free’ but emotionally constrained octet. The judgment that “Everything in the past is irregular” acts in three ways simultaneously: (a) as an admission of the poet’s failure to write a ‘correct’ sonnet; (b) as an assessment of the sonnet form as trivial (emotional depth is achieved, after all, without recourse to the “many matches” of available rhyme); and (c) as a nostalgia for a past in which lover and beloved could actually converse, whatever emotional mess that may have entailed.