Sonnet L’Abbé, Sonnet’s Shakespeare

XXVII

When I arm myself with rationality, realism chastens me into myth. Disabused by the raced men arrested post-race, full-on reality numbs. White knights brave a world that I read about; they snob at begging, snub at journalists. Money remains my headmistress. Though I work my mind, a white-enough body’s work’s exponentially more valued, so for what share pen I my thoughts? Fair, seldom fair-wheeling, trade socializes bidders’ international dominance zeal. Our spills’ grim images don’t slow the jealous brands. Gatekeepers smugly redirect poop-seeing eyes to squalid things opponents wish to hide; I look with niggling soul on dark insides. So what? I’m chastened afresh. Race-blindness doesn’t see the somatic in the visible. The rational mind says soul is imaginary—but what insight presents itself clothed, styled, fashioned according to uptown admen? Why does light lessen the view? Why did lieblichs ever liken a Jewish girl to—An intelligence hunts, languaging, chastening. Lonely nights make subdued lacks dawn; bright blazes the author’s righteous candour. Her bold-face not-news plows through disabling pity, daily misogyny, life’s male bias. By knighting my mind I form a third person, pleasing gods. As for myself, I cannot quit Sonnet’s effing odds.

In the works for some time has been Vancouver poet, editor and critic Sonnet L’Abbé third full-length poetry title, Sonnet’s Shakespeare (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019). Given the comparatively more traditional lyrics of her first two collections—A Strange Relief (McClelland and Stewart, 2001) and Killarnoe (McClelland and Stewart, 2007)—the conceptual framework of Sonnet’s Shakespeare is quite a shift in approach, even in just the fact of her lyric not as an end, but as a means to open up an entire range of possibilities and considerations. The poems of Sonnet’s Shakespeare deliberately work to expose the limitations of the canon of English Literature (specifically one that doesn’t evolve), and the liabilities of leaning too heavily on such a single element. Expanding, overwriting and writing between and around Shakespeare’s lines (literally subverting Shakespeare’s intents and purposes), L’Abbé turns each of the immortal bard’s one hundred and fifty-four sonnets into something far more culturally relevant, subversive and explosive. As part of her “Spotlight,” posted in February 2017, she wrote as her statement on the project, then still a work-in-progress:

North American contemporary poetry has seen a recent surge in poets practicing erasure poetry, an approach in the avant-garde collage tradition, where the poet takes another writer’s text and “writes” by deleting words from the original until a new poem remains. The most pertinent example for the purposes of framing my work would be Jen Bervin’s 2004 book Nets, which she made by erasing words/letters from Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The author in erasure practice has been compared to an editor, to the pruner of a shrub, and to one who “opens” the text to “ventilate” it. I think erasure practitioners can also be compared to censors, to deleters of authorly expression. Like-minded Canadian poets nourbeSe philip, Shane Rhodes and Jordan Abel have all used erasure (on legal documents as well as other writers’ texts) to allegorize the censorial practices of colonialism.

But another strategy colonizers have used, besides attempting to eradicate extant cultures, is to reframe the stories of colonized people, to “talk over” existing voices so loudly that the cultures are, at important levels of voice, silenced. Though colonizers often nearly destroy the legibility and foregrounding of the presence of original cultures, they are never fully successful at erasing the original cultures they mean to displace.

I am similarly successful and unsuccessful when I write, from the perspective of both colonizer and colonized, over the “traditional territory” of English literature and attempt to impose upon it my own descriptions of the world. This is a different mode of erasure, a palimpsestic mode, one that hides the original text in plain sight, and attempts a muted bivocality in the reading experience. The original poem exists in its entirety on the same page, but reading it requires a cultural knowledge that remembers what to look for.

Sonnet’s Shakespeare is expansive, playful and wonderfully vibrant, wholly ambitious and incredibly precise. Through writing out a process of expansion, L’Abbé subvert the erasure form (itself a process of subversion), working in the exact opposite direction, managing to breathe new life into a form that has seen many examples over the years, but few real advances or surprises. Works by M. NourbeSe Philip, Shane Rhodes and Jordan Abel, as she mentions, are obvious exceptions, and of course, American poet Caroline Knox did do a “reverse erasure” in her 2008 Wave Books title Quaker Guns, composing the poem “Source Text,” as though it the “source” from which E.E. Cummings might had built his poems “SONG VI” and “SONG VII.” (one could also speak of Gregory Betts, who developed term “plunder verse,” which is an erasure variant under a different name). L’Abbé, for her part, uses the expansive, “reverse erasure” form to explore matters of the canon, race, identity and colonialism (which Shakespeare’s work, taught throughout the world while ignoring home-grown literatures, has become impossibly intertwined). As she writes as part of her 2016 Touch the Donkey interview:

Its procedure is an allegory for colonialism: I write from the perspective of both colonizer and colonized, “over” the “traditional territory” of English literature (Shakespeare’s text) and attempt to impose upon it my own descriptions of the world. The process is a mode of erasure that works by overwhelming rather than excising, one that hides the original text in plain sight, and attempts a muted bivocality in the reading experience. The original poem exists in its entirety on the same page, but reading it requires a cultural knowledge that remembers what to look for.

I’d already thought her lyric shifts from her debut to sophomore collections were more in line with what I was seeing in collections by publishers of more experimental works (over, say, the flavour of titles long published by McClelland and Stewart), as L’Abbé twisted and twirled the language in expressive and playful ways—less a lyric line than a pulsing reverberation—and this book continues that sense of lyric sound and movement, almost as though McClelland and Stewart, in part through bringing in Dionne Brand as poetry editor, had to catch up to what L’Abbé was already doing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Caroline Knox

Caroline Knox's [photo credit: Juliana Knox] tenth book of poetry, Hear Trains, has just appeared from Wave Books in Seattle.  Her  previous books are The House Party (1984) and To Newfoundland (1989), both from Georgia, followed by Flemish, Nine Worthies, Quaker Guns, and He Paves the Road with Iron Bars (Winner of the Maurice English Award). She has received grants and awards from The Fund for Poetry, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poetry magazine.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, The House Party (Georgia 1984) changed my life permanently, because its reality in my hands made me know that writing books of poetry was my chief job.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As the eldest of four children, I was read to a lot by relatives from two generations.  They read, so I read.  I'm sure end rhyme is entertaining to children!  Reading time was a wonderful game.  Sound was enchanting.  The poetry book needed no plot (as did fiction).

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Of course, it got easier to put together poems that felt like a real book, belonging together, as time went on.  I can't remember a time that I wasn't writing poems.  And I never wanted to write fiction!  Poetry was plenty of work. These days when I put together a book, I often take out a poem or two or three that seem weak. This could tighten the book up.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I'm always working on a book, as well as on the poem in front of me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I've done public readings from the beginning -- for decades.  In grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it was UNDERSTOOD that you shared your work; you got up in front of the class and read it, and there was discussion.  Almost always constructive.  We all got used to it.  Most of us enjoyed it.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don't think I have theoretical concerns beyond making each new poem as strong as I can.

I try always to put into my new work elements that I haven't used before:  surprising new words I've learned, unexpected elements like odd names for products, or new trends.  Where did Steampunk come from, for instance?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Well, all writers are different, I hope!  And we should each try to sound like ourselves the best we can (unless we are intentionally writing in the voice of an animal or a bird).  I think it's often hard for a poet to write a good poem with a strong political message, or a poem that points out cruelty and describes it.  Often the message overpowers the poem.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I've always had an excellent and diligent editor, and I'm extremely grateful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

From James Hazard, my thesis director:  Put into your poems material that hasn't been there before.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I'm never not writing, even at the supermarket.  I make notes there.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don't get stalled.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Late fall frost.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Other people's conversation.  New slang.  What poem could it go into?

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Nothing.  I would just like to keep writing in the mode or modes that I'm in.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

A professional alto singer in a chorus.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I couldn't stop, and i don't need to.  I had a husband and three children.  Whatever we all did, my poet life was easily practiced.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Not great, but VERY good:  Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov.  This is a study in obtuseness and laziness!

19 - What are you currently working on?

Poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Caroline Knox, HEAR TRAINS

HEAR TRAINS

So sault means “jump,” as in

sauter in France, but not

in New France! In Old France

the I dropped out. In New,

they kept it: Sault Ste. Marie,

the leap, the rapids. But

in a linguistic roux, Sault

became Soo, reduced. Very

practical, actually, like

semaphores or an aquifier.

Why, clouds needing airfoils

ballooned up over the skiff

portage under the overpass

of the Soo Line and north to the

Soo-Dominion connector,

as sailors to the top.

They say skip because the ship rolls;

hear trains while asleep slipping into foul-weather gear,

hear trains while asleep.

Massachusetts’ poet Caroline Knox’s tenth full-length poetry title is HEAR TRAINS (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019), a collection of nuanced and expansive narratives that explore the ways in which we interact with and experience the world. There is such a richness to these poems, a descriptive and lyrical abundance that stand without a single wasted word, thought or image. “This / found me in philosophy,” she writes, towards the end of “BLUE POEM,” “and / happy to see blue as richly / useful, applicable in time / and space.” Part of the pleasure of her poems is in the unexpected, as she composes pieces that appear linear and possibly even straightforward, but are anything but, providing surprise in image, connection and turn. Her short poems are sketched as short scenes, as punches; her longer pieces explore longer thoughts and threads, finding the thread in the jumble, and vice versa. Referencing T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, she writes of two dogs in “TWO MIDDLE-AGED SPRINGER SPANIELS,” a meandering cascade that includes: “There were nice-looking worn rugs on the floor, and the two / elder dogs / ran around and around on the rugs, crumpling them. They barked no one / bark, / but hurled themselves faster and faster around the room, / messing up the rugs completely and dissociating them from their rug pads. / The dogs were / shedding all the while.” I am also quite taken with her explorations of language, such as her examination of the different roots of “chaos” and “inchoate” in “POEM,” that includes: “Well, / both words are lovely / noises to dramatize / confusion.”

Given the strength of her work and publishing history, I’m a bit surprised to see so little exploration on her work online via interview; in an undated interview for the third issue of American literary journal Jubilat (a short excerpt of which exists online):

Your poems seem to celebrate names and naming. Could you talk about where that celebratory impulse comes from?

I always want to discover a name to put in a poem such as Chidiock Tichborne, an almost impossible poet-name to say. I love naming and renaming, finding odd or strange or interesting names or ways of looking at things. I also love being surprised. I have a fear of writing the same poem over and over again, so I keep looking for more details that I haven't put in poems already. I don't want to get stuck. Don't poets feel that way? That they don't want to repeat themselves?