Closed Form

Ryan doesn't seem like the type of poet to include closed form poems in her volume--she is entirely to unprecedented for that. So I was surpassed to see a poem entitled "Sonnet to Spring." After reading the poem, though, it seems like Ryan is mocking the traditional feel of sonnets. When we think sonnet, it's usually Shakespearean love sonnets, with lots of flowerly language and superfluous adjectives. Ryan's sonnet is the opposite:

Sonnet to Spring

The brown, unpleasant,
aggressively ribbed and
unpliant leaves of the loquat,
shaped like bark canoes that
something squashed flat,
litter the spring cement.
A fat-cheeked whim of air--
a French vent or some similar affair--
with enough choices in the front yard
for a blossomy puff worthy of Fragonard,
instead expends its single breath
beneath one leathery leaf of loquat
which flops over and again lies flat.
Spring is frivolous like that.

Ryan's diction is unexpected: unpleasant, brown, unpliant, litter, leathery, flat--all of these words don't really conjure up the typical thoughts of spring. The mention of Fragonard is interesting--the "blossomy puff" could be a mention to the French painter Fragonard or the French perfume factory. These are both images that would be similiar to the general image of spring...instead, Ryan uses the image of a leathery loquat (apparently some sort of Asian evergreen tree with yellow fruit). This sonnet has a similiar feel to the Sheakspeare sonnet that we read that described the lover as ugly...Ryan is rebelling from the image of closed-form stodgy-ness. When Ryan uses a closed form, she does include more words, which makes it easier for the reader to recognize the occasion/intention.