Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES
- 1 Don Paterson's Ars Poetica
- 2 Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet
- 3 No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson
- 4 Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson
- 5 Form in Poetry
- Part II POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet
from Part I - PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES
- 1 Don Paterson's Ars Poetica
- 2 Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet
- 3 No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson
- 4 Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson
- 5 Form in Poetry
- Part II POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the introduction to his Faber anthology 101 Sonnets, Don Paterson offers a quasi-biological, quasi-mathematical explanation for the cross-cultural and transhistorical currency of the sonnet form. Noting that poets have been writing sonnets for 750 years, and in English for about 450, he argues that, ‘if some thirteenthcentury Italian had not “invented” the sonnet, someone else would have: we would have arrived at the sonnet as we arrived at the wheel, out of evolutionary necessity’ (xv). For Paterson, this is partly a result of poetry moving off the tongue and onto the page: ‘the visual appeal of an approximately square field of black text on a sheet of white paper must have been impossible to resist. Which is what a sonnet is, first and foremost: a small square poem’ (xvi). In his essay, close attention to the literary history of this particular square poem, with its familiar alternative traditions of Spenserian and Shakespearean forms, is combined with a materialist-psychological story about the dynamics of the sonnet. This is no less structuralist in its attention, for it turns upon the ‘turn’ or volta at its heart on the principle that ‘the human brain craves disruption and variation just as much as it craves symmetry and repetition’. Here Paterson insists that the division between octet and sestet, an eight-line unit followed by a six-line one, is ‘quite close to the mathematical ratio known as the golden section, or golden ratio’ (xviii). This chapter explores Paterson's use of this analogy with regard to sonnet form in its many derivations through his career, considering the craving for flexible symmetries and disrupted ratios – in particular with regard to music and poetry, literary form and the principle of variation.
Paterson notes that the golden ratio (a mathematical ratio of approximately 8.5, or 1.618) derives ultimately from the Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 21, 34, 55 etc.), and that both are ‘omnipresent in nature: in the whorls of a pine-cone or the seedhead of the sun-flower’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Don PatersonContemporary Critical Essays, pp. 34 - 48Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014