I hear a familiar voice in Kim Addonizio’s collection of poems What is This Thing Called Love. I hear the language of the narrator who speaks sometimes in her verse novel Jimmy & Rita. I feel that same stark, brutal existence of characters in love, which I felt with Jimmy and Rita, in many of the poems in What is This Thing Called Love, a fitting title for this assortment. I also experience the many open and closed forms that Addonizio plays with. In fact, she is very playful as well as sexy in many of her poems, including her blues pieces, but it is her “Sonnenizio on a Line From Drayton” that really catches my attention.

I realize with this poem yet another variety of the sonnet form. Addonizio notes that “the sonnenizio is fourteen lines long [like the sonnet]. It opens with a line from someone else’s sonnet [in her case Michael Drayton’s LXI of his sonnet series Idea],² repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet” (Addonizio 33). Addonizio follows this pattern, and in her sonnenizio, she not only repeats the word “part” from the first line of Drayton’s sonnet, but she also enables the speaker in her poem to negotiate one last intimate rendezvous with Drayton’s speaker. I believe this added connection between the two poems is done intentionally. Drayton begins his sonnet:

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free; (lines 1–4)

Addonizio begins her sonnenizio:

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
or kiss anyway, let’s start with that, with the kissing part,
because it’s better than the parting part, isn’t it—
we’re good at kissing, we like how that part goes: (1–4)

Clearly Addonizio’s speaker playfully negotiates “the parting part” of the whole situation, and the poet’s play on the word “part” skillfully adds to not only the underlying humor of her poem but also the power of repetition in all its forms. Addonizio’s readers see many permutations of “part” as her speaker uses these variations to entice the lover—who could very well be Drayton’s speaker in his sonnet—into one last round of lovemaking before they “part forever” (line 14). Addonizio continues:

we part our lips, our mouths get near and nearer,
then we’re close, my breasts, your chest, our bodies partway
to making love, so we might as well, part of me thinks—
the wrong part, I know, the bad part, but still
let’s pretend we’re at that party where we met [reminiscent
   of Jimmy & Rita here]
and scandalized everyone, remember that part? Hold me
                                                        (5–10 bold added)

The line endings do not follow any sonnet rhyming pattern; however, Addonizio’s use of permutated repetition each time we hear “part” moves the poem along, adhering to the conventions of the sonnenizio. Furthermore, the poet’s play on the root of the word “part” works, as “partway” and “party” seem natural to what the speaker says to the lover. These words are not forced into the form because of repetition; they are pleasant ways to vary the repetition and add to the speaker’s seductive statements to a lover ready to give up on love.

Additionally, Addonizio’s sonnenizio parallels yet compliments Drayton’s sonnet as both endings leave us questioning just how powerful love is. Although the point of view of Drayton’s speaker changes in his last quatrain and couplet, the questions of love remains:

Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,
When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover! (9–14)

Here, Drayton is quick to escalate the passion of the lover, so that even close to death, his survival can only occur because of love.

Addonizio’s speaker, however, is constant throughout the seduction, never swaying from the lover:

…………………………………………….Hold me
like that again, unbutton my shirt, part of you
wants to I can tell, I’m touching that part and it says
yes, the ardent partisan, let it win you over,
it’s hopeless, come, we’ll kiss and part forever. (11–14)

And the reliance on the sonnenizio form helps the poet with this constancy. Keeping with her repetitive pattern and using end rhyme in her last two lines, Addonizio conveys the more logical answer to Drayton’s speaker: that we all may surrender to lust but must still part with love, for whatever the reason is, whether we want to or not.

I found this form to work nicely for Addonizio, and I would like to write something similar in the near future. Her play on a word and clever use of repetition transformed what could have been a somewhat raunchy surrender of lust into a classy conveyance of the reality of love as well as love lost.

¹ Written for semester coursework with Beatrix Gates.
² Please find this info on Luminarium Editions.

Works Cited

Addonizio, Kim. What is This Thing Called Love. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Drayton, Michael. “Idea—LXI.” Luminarium Editions. 6 March 2006 <http://www.sonnets.org/drayton.htm>.

Please see other work in this issue by author.