Trevor Ketner, The Wild Hunt Divinations: a grimoire

 

[When forty winters shall besiege thy brow]

gowns web (herb hysteria)—let’s thin flowery
then—gaudy bicep—insistent herd—leaf dyed
to holy doorway—hunt syrups—doze—given
that i swallow debt, let me whorl—feed lard
/ ale / ill breath—they get eye winks—husband,
of thudhurt, eyeray, saltwar—sheets yell,
tan—nude hyphen—i knot woe; sinewy, it sees
fingernails (limp waters, a hand sea), leather sets,
he-messes—hewed out virus—debauchery: try a mop
or a match—i hot—i lucid—i wonderflush—stiffens:
exoskeleton / cum—my cuddly human mass—la,
sings a boyish brute in his coven—cut—yep,
hood him—we want a wren duet, to be shelter—
a cold thud (trans sob / melt)—oh welt / honeyed wife.

Manhattan-based American poet Trevor Ketner’s second full-length collection, following [WHITE] (The University of Georgia Press / Broken Sleep Books, 2021), is The Wild Hunt Divinations: a grimoire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), a book composed as a homolinguistic (English to English) translation of William Shakespeare’s one hundred and fifty four sonnets. As the back cover offers: “Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism.” One might argue that the true measure of art or form is in the range of its mutability (of which the sonnet itself is the perfect example), or perhaps William Shakespeare’s work have such a hold on the western attention that we can’t help but return to, as generations of writers across the past four centuries continue their attempts to rework or trouble Shakespeare’s language or attentions, seeking new ways through which to approach or respond. With echoes of Tom Stoppard writing the spaces only he could see through Hamlet to compose his infamous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), the most obvious comparison to Ketner’s collection might be with Vancouver poet, editor and critic Sonnet L’Abbé Sonnet’s Shakespeare (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here], through which she reworked and subverted the same one hundred and fifty-four sonnets through a form of “reverse erasure” to explore matters of the canon, race, identity and colonialism.

Ketner’s approach, obviously, works through a far different lens, although one that still aims to open, subvert and rework the perspective of those original infamous sonnets, and utilize those forms as a way through which to critique. Whereas L’Abbé lyrically stretched and smoothed over the jagged elements of Shakespeare’s patter, Ketner maintains a staccato trajectory of bounce and gymnastic leaps that reverberate across a remarkable string of tightly-wound phrases. As the author offers to open their “Notes” at the end of the collection: “These poems, what I call ‘divinations,’ were created with the assistance of an online anagramming tool and the source text of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. The first line of the corresponding Shakespearian sonnet is borrowed as the title for each divination. Using the line as the unit of meaning, the rule I set was to anagram line-by-line, so each line of the divination has all the same letters as the corresponding line in the Shakespearian sonnet.” Across a joyful space of patter, patterns and propulsive sound, Ketner writes a lyric energized as much as the original might have appeared to contemporary audiences in the Elizabethan era, updating content, concerns and perspectives, but allowing the elements of what might be possible through a language that could never have been previously imagined. “bled violent theme (tie testes, vibrate,” Ketner writes, to open the poem “[‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,],” “probe, observe)—he, erect in gown (into chafe)— / deerhush meets dawn’s cool pelt—i adjust his / to theirs—boy bulge softening—burn eye / (the letter for)—house’s dreadful holysea sway— […].”