Hot Flash Sonnets: Flashes of lucidity from a poetic flasher

What do our bodies mean to us as they transition from being attributes to liabilities?  And what’s the use of formal poetry in an informal age?

Moira Egan’s latest collection of poetry Hot Flash Sonnets deals directly and indirectly with these questions.  Its’ catalogued under “1. Menopause –– Poetry. 2 Middle Aged Women –– Health and Hygiene –– Poetry. 3. Sonnets –– American 21st Century.”  But that’s not half the story.

The cleverly-titled collection does indeed allude to menopause, but Egan’s goals are broader.  These pretend to be flash-fiction sonnets, dashed off with one hand while drinking a glass of wine with the other, but their cleverness betrays them: here it is Egan who is the flasher, baring both body and soul.  Borges wrote that poets have forgotten how important it is to tell stories, but Egan hasn’t.  In flashes of lucidity, she connects her corporeal fate to the epic tale of the passage of time.  This is not just potery, it’s also fragmented narrative –– a novella trussed up in quippy verse with transatlantic perspectives and a multilingual lexicon.  Egan’s sonnets are more than sonnets: they refuse to behave –– spilling out of their clothes, bulging in inappropriate places, and making us feel slightly ashamed for not remembering to check her math, and count her feet and lines.

Egan’s Hot Flash sonnets also have a broader appeal than their title suggests. They’re not just about women who have reached a certain age, they’re about mid-life crises in general.  And here, with ironic wit and pathos, is where Egan shows her greatest strength.  Whitman wrote in his first preface that America is the greatest poem, and the poet the greatest American; but Whitman only wrote about the poet as young and vigorous –– during his post-stroke decades as an invalid in Camden, America’s most daring poet wrote not a poem about his own compromising condition.
Egan does.

We repeatedly lie in bed with her, insomniacs, sharing her extended mid-life panic attack, listening to the rain, a peacock (what else?), and the neighbor upstairs who wakes to tears.  We share her crow’s tracks, feel the internal heat, grow just as frustrated as her at the unstoppable reverse-puberty metamorphosing her body. The poems interrupt our reading with asides, jokes, definitions, rhetorical questions, snatches of Italian and French, and internal dialogues.  They ask not only, as we gow older, who we are –– but also who we were… as well as what do we want now, now that we’ve stopped wanting?
While the title would suggest I’m not quite a member of the target audience, I nonetheless find myself sliding the pencil from behind my ear and making notes, for instance in the margin of ‘Confused Complexion’: “Does my confusion need to be so present/upon the very face I need to live/in this judgmental world, in which I’m trying/to redefine both who I am and what/I might actually have done?”

These sonnets, and Egan herself, are also trying to redefine what the sonnet is, and was, and might actually have done (and be capable of doing).  Dante in his Vita Nuova dashes off sonnets like blog- or social-media posts.  Formal poetry was never supposed to be stuffy, and Egan has for years been on a personal crusade to increase the relevance of formal poetry by returning it to its humble, occasional origins.  These aren’t the bittersweet verse-missives of Dorothy Parker, constantly drawing attention to their limited form; nor are they the more somber and symphonic formal works of Elizabeth Bishop.  The tone of Egan’s sonnets falls somewhere in between, while their form pays –– or draws –– no attention to itself.  They proceed effortlessly as pop songs, which of course are our most popular form of formal poetry.

Egan’s anthology Hot Sonnets (edited with Clarinda Harriss) restored my faith in the usefulness –– the relevance –– of formal poetic form, and this collection continues to blaze a trail for other writers of contemporary, informal formalism.