"roses no such roses":
Jen Bervin's Nets and the Sonnet Tradition from Shakespeare to
the Postmoderns
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004
Nets is, quite simply, a clever and delightful
book that performs serious whimsy.[1] The trim, unpaginated, near
pocket-sized volume reconfigures 60 of Shakespeare’s
154 sonnets in a concrete, double-gesture of tribute and transgression, as
in the following transposition:
How many discursive registers do we encounter here? Whose sonnet
is this? Whose or which will? Shakespeare’s? Bervin’s? Ours? Nets is a gathering
of palimpsests. Each page stages this sort of gentle, incisive interplay between
Shakespeare’s ghostly language in the background and Bervin’s embodied
words in the foreground; between the fading English sonnet form and an
emerging so-called postmodernist line. (I’ll soon explain my wariness
about the latter classification). Bervin offers the following reflection upon
her method:
I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make
the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere.
When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed
in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with
or against this
palimpsest.
The volume’s cover illustration, spine, and title page together
intimate an intertextual poetics of playful negotiations between
tradition and innovation, imitation and creation, identity and
difference, reverence and resistance, converging and diverging
fields of discourse. Upon first glance, a reader may find this
image of a net on the book’s cover
which could be construed as figuring
not only an “openwork
material of thread or cord or wire etc. woven or joined at intervals,” but
also an amount “remaining when nothing more is to be taken
away”—as in net sonnet, for example.[2]
This detailed netting also establishes the importance of the
volume’s
visual field of signification, which literally and metaphorically
nets the sonnets, lifting the language off of the page. Bervin’s
netting nets the net sonnets, or, as the book’s spine announces:
NETS. This first linguistic title for the collection foregrounds
Bervin’s innovation, while the volume’s title page
presents an alternate configuration (THE SONNETS OF
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)
that places Bervin’s originality (and difference) within
and against a tradition (and identity). In all of these ways,
Bervin’s
whole book (as an aesthetic object) and individual pages (as
poems) operate sous rature: inscribing the gaps between text
and subtext
of each of the culled sonnets.
Nets thus shapes not only juxtapositions
of simultaneous fields of linguistic experience, but also rhapsodic
(often nostalgic)
lyricism in the new tracing lines that Bervin superimposes upon
Shakespeare’s originals. Considered from this twin perspective,
Bervin’s texts, therefore, are prose poems. I have argued
recently that such formal and thematic characteristics respectively
distinguish the cubist and surrealist attributes of the prose
poem’s
peculiar tradition.[3] Why ‘peculiar’? Because with
the prose poem, we’re dealing with a hybrid form that dwells
within and against a working context of and for generic and modal
innovation—however scrupulously achieved—that requires
a certain inconsistent protean consistency. This distinctive
indeterminacy to the prose poem’s form and content makes
the genre inherently open to comic (often parodic) treatments
of subject matter and
carnivalesque inversions of cultural, political, and social hierarchies.
As prose poetry, Bervin’s Nets could thus be rightly
placed within the context of what Douglas Lanier theorizes as ‘Shakespop’ parody:
each page in the book allows for ‘double-access’ because
the “act of transgression paradoxically depends upon preserving—at
least initially—some conception of an authentic, original,
or proper Shakespeare so that [the sonnet] can then be symbolically
[netted].”[4]
But are Bervin’s nets really prose poems?
Is Nets a sonnet remix? Are these works still sonnets? Are they
concrete poems?
Or, are these nets transpositions, as Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery
may affirm, in the tradition of Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1980) or Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS (1977)? If,
as those editors argue, Johnson’s “cosmic readjustment
of the monologic universe given in Milton’s Paradise
Lost” purges the
epic “of the linguistic detritus and semantic impediments
to a vision of the infinite”[5], then could a similar claim
be convincingly held about Bervin’s divergent stripping
of “Shakespeare’s
sonnets bare to the ‘nets’”?
I don’t think so and here’s why. Rasula’s and
McCaffery’s assertions subordinate Milton to Johnson, since,
from their perspective, RADI OS achieves the “vision of the
infinite” that had hitherto been blocked by “linguistic
detritus and semantic impediments.” On both accounts, I see
Johnson and Bervin as co-creators with their predecessors as well
as with their dialogic (not monologic) exemplars. A particular
strength of Johnson’s and Bervin’s transpositions,
I would argue, rests in their deft attention to the integrity of
the poetic conceit—a standard tool-of-the-trade during the
seventeenth century—operating at the levels of the verse
paragraph (in the case of Milton’s Paradise Lost) and the
stanza (in the case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets). The poetic
conceit can be defined as an arresting or complex metaphor upon
which a larger pattern (however fragmentary) of ideas, images,
or textual structures hinges.
Johnson’s unpaginated RADI OS reinforces
the central conceits in Milton’s verse paragraphs through
a process of etching that achieves on “each page . . . a
single picture.”[6]
Take, for example, Johnson’s reading/re-writing of one
page from Book III in the “1892 edition of PARADISE
LOST [he] picked off a Seattle bookshop shelf the day after hearing
Lucas
Foss’ Baroque Variations”:
All night, aware With glistering spires and wonder seized,
the
circling
extended
shade
from
pole to pole
Through the pure marble air
:
The golden Sun,
his
eye.
Johnson’s typographic, page-by-page refashioning
of Milton’s
text not only crafts the asymmetrical (w)holes in the epic’s
first four books, but also epitomizes a classic Miltonic experience—that
of ‘double-reading.’ RADI OS encourages reading
in all four directions (top to bottom, left to right, bottom to
top,
right to left) so that we might glimpse the coherent dialogic simultaneity
of Milton’s figures.[7]
In tandem with Johnson’s tribute to Milton’s poetics,
Bervin’s transpositions of the son(nets) reinvigorate the
central conceits in Shakespeare’s originals: her bold and
lyrical line in each text pays homage to the bard’s ideas,
images, and rhetorical designs. Consider, for example, Bervin’s
net #15:
Which words have been highlighted? “the
stars / the selfsame
sky / for love of you”. What is
the central poetic conceit in Shakespeare’s sonnet #15? One
way to answer that question is to allow the following reading:
the fixed stars that provide
the poet and beloved with regenerative (neo-Platonic) love also
secretly influence all forms of life that rise and fall according
to the measure of Time, thereby granting the possibility of transcendence;
poetry best conveys that paradox, and, in this case, engrafts the
beloved with new life through the sonnet’s articulation of
a variable pattern. Postmodernists allergic to Renaissance humanist
ideology might protest that Bervin’s emphasis upon a Godless “selfsame
sky” undermines any possibility for sacred, transcendent
meaning ostensibly emanating from the celestial sphere of fixed
stars. In this case, however, Bervin’s emphasis exactly matches
Shakespeare’s secular outlook. One of the oldest poetic conceits—going
all the way back to “The Lament for Bion” (ca. 100
BCE) by Moschus—is that of stellification or apotheosis whereby
the poet elevates the beloved to the stars of the poet’s
(not a god’s) own making: “the stars / the selfsame
sky / for love of you.” Among Renaissance writers, a common
theme was that the poet is a maker not of nature, but of a more
perfect second nature: “[Nature’s] world is brazen,
the poets only deliver a golden.”[8]
Bervin’s lyric line in son(net) #15 may,
at first glance, appear postmodernist, as I have provisionally
suggested above.
I would, however, caution readers against an unrelenting application
of that reading—emphasizing perhaps irony and transgression—because
here (as throughout Nets) Bervin’s playful and cogent
line, though departing from the English sonnet’s form,
actually recapitulates—in terms of content—key ideas,
images, and linguistic units from the originals. Bervin’s
nets net the Renaissance poetic conceits at the heart of Shakespeare’s
sonnets in a double-gesture of formal transgression and thematic
tribute. Net #135 (presented above) also plays with the crux of
Shakespeare’s poem—what Helen Vendler describes as
the “implications of a divided subjectivity” in sonnet
#135 (“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will”)—that
riddles with thirteen forms of WILL.[9] Only one page in Nets (Bervin’s
net #137) gives an exception to this rule. In that case, the transposed
sonnet underscores just one word (“anchored”), which
only begins to suggest the poet’s reading of and response
to that sonnet’s defining conceit.
In a recent review of Nets, Philip Metres
insightfully compares Bervin’s poetics to the craft of creating
a rubbing from an old gravestone: though time and weather have
worn away
the original,
the poet rescues and reconfigures a “partial version.”[10]
A striking and illuminating metaphor indeed. However, Metres also
advances a curious assertion that warrants further reflection:
that there “are few antecedents to Bervin’s project,
particularly in her use of Shakespeare”. Beyond the example
of Johnson’s RADI OS—perhaps stylistically
closer to Bervin’s Nets than anything else—we
would do well to recall at least three books by American poets:
Ted Berrigan’s
The Sonnets (“C” Press, 1964); William Bronk’s
To Praise the Music (The Elizabeth Press, 1972); and Bernadette
Mayer’s Sonnets (Tender Buttons, 1989). Each
of these volumes responds to Shakespeare and the Anglo-American
sonnet tradition.
Of the three books, Bronk’s collection may be the least familiar
among readers today, but demonstrates a vivid comparison (in terms
of form and content) with Bervin’s Nets. To
Praise the Music gathers 50 fourteen-line poems
that engage (each and all) with Shakespeare’s originals.
In a 1989 interview with Edward Foster, Bronk noted that the book
grew from “a period of
many months, maybe a year” when he was reading Shakespeare’s
sonnets very closely.[12]
However, Bronk’s fourteeners don’t explicitly line-up,
as Bervin’s do, with their exemplars: he never explained
which poem reanimates which of Shakespeare’s. Strong points
of contact do become conspicuous, though, after careful readings:
for example, “The Sense of Passage,” in my opinion,
works directly with the standard Renaissance poetic conceit we
could locate (as discussed above) in Shakespeare’s sonnet
#15:
It is as in the story—Orpheus sent
to fetch the ghost to another world—to life:
if we act just right it is possible.
Whenever the other body, the beautiful one,
offers to take us over, beckons to us,
we believe it is something beyond what a body is.
Our lust is to carry over—to transcend:
like climbers who make the places for their toes to hold
to circumvent the overhand of death.
(Power) will bring us intact to the upper side.
(Skill) (heroic virtue) (ruthlessness).
Nothing does. Constant survivors, ghosts
perpetually, our reach is really back
into the body myth of mortality.[13]
Bronk’s text operates inversely to Bervin’s net #15.
If, as I have argued, Bervin’s line formally departs from
the English sonnet’s visible presentation while underscoring
the poem’s thematic crux, then Bronk’s work formally
reveres yet thematically resists those same elements. Whereas Bervin
praises the Renaissance conceit—“the stars / the selfsame
sky / for love of you”—Bronk protests: poetry can not
preserve the essence of the beloved (of the “beautiful one”)
for a life beyond the death of the body because “Nothing
does.”
Where Bervin’s transposed nets lift and highlight clusters of key ideas
and images from Shakespeare’s originals, Bronk’s skeptical (if
nihilistic) translations overturn the conventional seventeenth-century, humanistic
conceits. Bervin’s net #24, for example, limns the following tracing
of “stell’d / perspective / through / windows
glazed with / eyes”:
Her line reinforces Shakespeare’s central
conceit that only the poet knows how to look through the painter’s
perspective to the inner window of the heart where the lovers’ eyes
reflect upon each other. At least two of Bronk’s fourteeners
address Shakespeare’s sonnet #24: “The
Want” and “The Fiction of Shape.” In both cases Bronk critiques
what Bervin celebrates. “The Want” deconstructs the reflexive
inter-subjectivity of sonnet #24 (“place, I want place, want I, / want
other place, other I, I want”) while “The Fiction of Shape” exaggerates
contradicting tensions between a desire for empty forms and for shapeless
contents: “I
am the unbeliever, lover of form, / the vector of empty spaces, fiction of
shape.”[14] These texts by Bronk also skeptically reply (I believe)
to Shakespeare’s sonnet #38, which articulates a conceit similar to
that of sonnet #24: the beloved’s light is more potent than the Muse’s
powers. In her net #38, Bervin underscores that crux through her phrase, “pour / in / light / these
curious days”:
Every work has at least one weakness, and I would
be remiss if I neglected to address this point. Nets is Jen Bervin’s fifth book of poetry: a very
slightly revised version of her M.A. Thesis (2001). Other reviewers may express
their disappointment with the brevity of Nets, and I would share
in that feeling. The book certainly could have been extended into an even
more exhilarating,
multi-faceted project. As it currently stands, the volume has essentially
just one trick to exploit. To less sympathetic readers, that single gesture
may
appear somewhat precious.
Are Jen Bervin’s nets prose poems? As I noted at the beginning of this
essay, Nets has been designed with a keen eye on the physical aesthetic. Everything
about the book engenders a particular reading experience, including the startling
effect of animation. Yes, animation. Nets actually moves like a flip book:
the son(nets) are identically placed on only one side of each sheet of paper
and, when the pages are flipped in succession, Bervin’s bold lines literally
dance right off of the page and out of the book, hovering in a liminal space.
That performance in fact reveals a prose poem enmeshed in the book’s
netting:
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A complete transcription of that lengthy and fascinating
prose poem—the
culmination of Bervin’s lyrical lines from each and all of her son(nets)—would
occupy far too much space here. I will offer these excerpted lines, however,
in order to rouse your curiosity:
Beyond all date bold
sovereign mistress over rack pleasure her quietus to render
beauty borrowed no name, no bower, so our becoming says
motion sounds the tender inward of hand, lips, boldness
extreme trust to make the having extreme
I have seen roses no such roses
I use the whole, and yet am I not
What has Jen Bervin done to the sonnets of William
Shakespeare? Whose poetic tradition is this anyway? I recently
asked those questions
(among others) to a group of English majors during a talk on the
sonnet from Petrarch to the postmoderns. Their responses were nearly
unanimous: Nets gives new life to the sonnets, to Shakespeare,
and to all fascinated/netted readers and writers.
Notes:
1. I would like to thank my colleagues at the University
of Denver, Rafael Fajardo and Miguel Angel Tarango, for their generous
contributions
of creative energy, expertise, and time to the digital files
that complement the text of this essay.
2. “Net,” Oxford American Dictionary,
1980 ed.
3. W. Scott Howard, “Human Crying Daisies:
Prose Poems, by
Ray Gonzalez,” Double Room 4 (2004): <http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_four/Ray_Gonzalez.html>.
4. Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 19.
5. Jed Rasula, and Steve McCaffery, eds., Imagining
Language: An Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 199-204,
244-52, and
246.
6. Ronald Johnson, RADI OS OI-OIV (Berkeley: Sand
Dollar, 1977).
7. Here I’m noting structural features in Milton’s
poetics (i.e., double-reading, dialogism, and simultaneity) and
their resultant readerly effects that are recognized standards
in the field. Rasula and McCaffery, however, suggest a monologic,
static, and restricted interpretation of narrative, tropes, character,
and plot in Paradise Lost, just as some critics are wont to read
Shakespeare’s Sonnets as overdetermined by a unified subjectivity.
On both accounts, I would encourage such readers to embrace a more
capacious stance toward the intractability of the original (as
well as of the more recent, innovative) literary works.
8. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” Critical
Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992), p. 145.
9. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 574.
10. Philip Metres, “Nets, by Jen
Bervin,” Jacket
Magazine 25 (February, 2004):<http://www.jacketmagazine.com/25/metr-berv.html>.
12. Edward Foster, Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman
Interviews (Hoboken: Talisman House Publishers, 1994), p. 17.
13. William Bronk, To Praise the Music (New Rochelle:
The Elizabeth Press, 1972), p. 11.
14. Ibid., pp. 28 and 33.
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