Luke Kennard, Notes on the Sonnets

 

‘Lo! in the orient when the gracious light’ (7)

Language, although it’s not said so often, is actually brilliant. I mean just look at it. We took too many pointers from depressed short story writers when really language is so wonderful I can only celebrate it sub-lingually. I’ll rub my wings together or something. I’m just going to come right out and say: that’s not a good reason to have a son. It never even occurred to me. I only want to be temporary custodian of a soul as strange as mine. But I know you’re trying to say something nice. Honestly I like you and you’re beautiful. If you climb this hill it would make you very old. Meet my replacement in the world; I think he’s upstairs playing on my phone. I cannot accept the role of head of department because my contract stipulates I avoid any role which could be described as “Oedipally significant”. In one room a man stands by the dimmer switch, slowly turning it all the way up then all the way down repeatedly. Not so much a fantasy as a mistake, and a barely plausible one at that. Tell him to quit it.

Having picked this up recently at a bookstore in Chichester, England, I’m a bit late to British poet Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets (London UK: Penned in the Margins, 2021), a prose-poem suite that each play off a different one of William Shakespeare’s one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. As the back cover offers: “Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.” There is something quite fascinating about any text that is able to prompt such a variety of responses, allowing for a fluidity and mutability that even the genius of Shakespeare could never have imagined, and a list of further responses to these sonnets over the past few years alone would make an impressive (and essential reading) list: Vancouver Island poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé wonderfully inventive Sonnet’s Shakespeare (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here], Manhattan-based poet Trevor Ketner’s homolinguistic translation The Wild Hunt Divinations: a grimoire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and even St. Catharines, Ontario poet and critic Gregory Betts’ more recent visual epic, BardCode (UK: Penteract Press, 2024).

There is a heft and an immense sense of play to this collection, structured nearly as a collection of self-contained pieces that accumulate into something far more complex, reminiscent my experiences reading through J. Robert Lennon’s short story collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Press, 2005) and Joy Williams’ short story collection 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016) [see my notes on these two here]. The narrative arc of Notes on the Sonnets might not fully exist, and yet, it does, even if only in the mind of the reader, seeking out patterns across a wide array of notes, moments, seeming-randomness and a party that seems endless, captured across more than two hundred pages of Kennard’s deep-thinking prose. If James Joyce could write out a day, why not this suite of prose poems around a party as well?