The sonnet form is often described in architectural terms – it is a box, a house, four walls, and a roof. It is also the act of renovation in itself, a process which makes the form an ideal site for contestation. A long line, a skewed rhyme scheme, or a collaging of other works build both a sense of breaking out of, and deep preoccupation with, form.

‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft’ is, when read as a sonnet, obsessed with the craft it is hostile to. This obsession manifests in formal tensions. Rhythmic patterns and breaks both gesture at and frustrate conformity, while the adamantly anti-poetic voice is undercut by a desire to ‘be like those poets who care about the moon’ (line 4). Use of the lyric tense locates and abstracts time, and metaphors both build and resist an emotive response. To illuminate these elements, I will consider them each in turn, as a series of mini-lectures on craft. This close attention to the poem’s form gives substance to the overarching sense of tension bound up in the verse.

Rhythm and metre

Hindi’s poem is emphatically unrhymed, and lacks any overarching metrical structure. A cursory count shows lines stretching anywhere between seven and 19 syllables, while clusters of unstressed points evade the two- or three- beat feet we might expect in standard accentual-syllabic scansion. But when read aloud, the points of emphasis at the level of the line tell a different story. A rhythmic reading sees more clear-cut patterns emerge, uncovering a stable through-line which draws the poem forward. Flurries of lightly stressed syllables cluster around moments of impact, while the heavily stressed syllables create a speech-like beat.

Considering this through-line against the poem’s lack of metricality echoes Edward Said’s contrapuntal approach to reading. Drawing on classical music terminology, Said first introduced the idea of a contrapuntal reading in ‘Reflections on Exile’ as a way to read the unwritten into and against a primary reading. A contrapuntal reading resists a univocal perspective, which tends to naturalise the stories of dominant powers, instead demonstrating a simultaneous awareness of both ‘the metropolitan history and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (Culture and Imperialism 51). Beyond the context of canonical English literature texts, this approach can be deployed to read contrasting and at times contradicting perspectives or methods.¹

In Hindi’s case, the cadence of standard speech is bound up in the poem’s rhythmic fluctuations. Lines expand and contract with metrical crowding, oscillating between short, clipped statements and long lines that bleed out of any expectation of syllabic conformity. Line 6, ‘It’s so beautiful, the moon,’ contains seven syllables and two heavy stresses. Line 11, ‘I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies,’ stretches over 19 syllables to support five heavy stresses. These lurches are curtailed by insistent end-stopping in all but one of the poem’s 14 lines.

The first line of the verse plays with an inversion. ‘Colonizers,’ when enunciated in an American accent, in particular, can be read as a dactyl, marked by an emphatically stressed opening beat. This is flipped to anapaest in the second half of the line, ‘about flowers.’ The two feet see-saw on the single-stressed ‘write’ at the line’s centre:

/   [ˇ]ˇ    ˇ |      /    |  ˇ    ˇ   /   |  ˇ |
Colonizers write about flowers.
(line 1)

This balancing act is tipped by the final syllable. The ‘flowers’ stretch over two feet, adding an extra beat to break the rhythmic mirror – a reading which sets up a loose patterning for repetition. The next line initially follows the see-sawing set up by the first, but a clustering of heavy stresses tips the rhythm’s balance:

ˇ  /    ˇ  |      ˇ  ˇ    /       ˇ  | ˇ    ˇ        /       | ˇ  ˇ / ˇ  |  /      |
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

/     ˇ   |   ˇ   /    |  ˇ  /   ˇ      |  /   ˇ   |
seconds before becoming daisies.

(lines 2–3) 

A repeated, rolling ‘r’ drives the verse forward, while ‘rocks,’ ‘Israeli,’ and ‘tanks’ each draw a stress, creating an end-heavy line which quickens pace. This momentum causes the line to spill over, spanning the sentence across line 3. Here, a four-footed, end-stopped line catches itself after the enjambment’s momentum. The scurrying of lightly stressed syllables evaporates, and the line is stripped back to a regular beat. ‘before’ and ‘becoming’ reverberate with consonant sound, knotting together with the sibilant ‘seconds’ and ‘daisies.’ The taut line folds back in on itself with this patterning, the full stop curtailing further momentum.

Lines 4–5 play with a loosely iambic rhythm, though predictable scansion is evaded through the heaping up of syllables. The final third of each line is swollen with heavy stresses, contained by consistent end-stopping. This clustering again accelerates the pace in the final moments of each line, but this is truncated by the full-stop:

ˇ     ˇ    ˇ   / |   ˇ    ˇ        /  ˇ  |  ˇ        /    |   ˇ  / |  ˇ   /     |
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

ˇ    ˇ / [ˇ] ˇ  |      ˇ     /   |  ˇ    /     |   ˇ     /     |   /   |  ˇ    /     ˇ  |
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
(lines 4–5) 

In line 5, ‘Palestinians’ are compressed into four beats, echoing the (audially and physically) overcrowded ‘jail cells and prisons’ which bunch up at the end of the line. This constriction gathers emphasis with the enclosing consonant ‘p’ at the line’s beginning and end, which envelop the line’s subjects.

This patterning switches again in lines 6–7. The ghost of a trimeter is outweighed by the subjects of beauty – the moon and the flowers:

ˇ     ˇ   | /   ˇ  ˇ ¶ |  ˇ    /      |
It’s so beautiful, the moon.

ˇ            ˇ  |  /  ˇ ˇ ¶ |  ˇ       /   ˇ    |
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

(lines 6–7)

In each line, the impact of the heavily-stressed ‘beautiful’ is compounded by the lack of emphasis in the first foot; a resistance which draws the rhythm back before propelling it forward. This thrust builds tension into the line, grating against the anti-poetic nature of the description. Caesura builds in a pause which draws attention to the passive formation of each sentence, causing the moon and flowers to sit out on their own, rhythmically abstracted from the rest of the line. Though the two lines sound the same, syllabic deviations prevent a true mirroring of rhythm. The ‘extra’ unstressed syllable from the ‘flowers’ holds on for one beat too long, resisting the expectations of parallel set up by semantic repetition. These lines draw the reader in to find a pattern, but obfuscate. They hint at simplicity, but deny it. A consistent baseline links lines 8–9 together, resuming the poem’s narrative progression:

ˇ  ˇ      /      ˇ    | ˇ   ˇ      /       /   ˇ  |  ˇ         ˇ     /   |
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

ˇ     /     ˇ     |  ˇ    ˇ  / ˇ  |  ˇ    /   |
He watches Al Jazeera all day.

(lines 8–9)