Sonnet's Shakespeare by Sonnet L'Abbé

        In teacher’s college I learned the phrase “enabling constraints,” which are the kinds of limitations we put on ourselves to impel our creative force forward. When an entire world of possibilities is open to us, it’s hard to actually set a direction, so sometimes the only way to actually do good work is to have a specific set of limitations imposed on ourselves or from without. A few poets have stood out for having imposed rigid constraints on themselves, and Sonnet L’Abbé has added herself to their ranks with her poetry collection Sonnet’s Shakespeare. 

In the collection, there are 154 poems and each one incorporates the entire text of one of William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. If Shakespeare’s poems are considered timeless, L’Abbés have an immediacy to them. Despite being written between 2010 and 2017, these poems could have been written today, this afternoon. It’s incredible how the bard’s language has been co-opted into something entirely modern and urgent, addressing issues as far reaching as the use of Wikipedia to the Truth and Reconciliation Report’s 94 Calls to Action, to the culture of academia, to race and class, to misogyny, to tributes to Prince and David Bowie. The collection is extraordinarily rich and diverse.

What’s fascinating to me is how L’Abbé’s poems sometimes play up the connection to Shakespeare and you can catch hints of the rhymes of his original iambic pentameter. At other times, his verse is completely unrecognizable, rendered complete palimpsest by L’Abbé’s voice. What is the opposite of an erasure poem? L’Abbé’s poems so explode Shakespeare’s work that she renders him invisible through the very excess. More renders him less.

For the sake of comparison, let’s try to do a side-by-side. We’ll focus on “Sonnet XVIII” because I think it’s one of the most delightfully in-your-face poems in L’Abbé’s collection and one of Shakespeare’s most famous (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”). I bolded the first line of Shakespeare to see the comparison:

Sonnet’s Shakespeare’s syllabics stomp on patriarchies. Sonnet’s Shakespeare throats the bummers of daddy mythologies, art movement cruelty, oversimplifying bros, and more! Their temper wasn’t suited to crouching in the winds of dudes; in Sonnet’s Shakespeare they’re the dar- ling of budding poets who femme with varying abandon. Slummy lumber- sexuals are pleased hard by the masculine split open in Sonnet’s metaphoric                                                                                                         tada. This verse comes at William’s sonnet like a thot boss, as though it’s plot they have their eye on. As if heaven shines from his craft, he’s antholo- gized---but, soft! They enter his white space like a golden boy; their com- plexion dims not a smidge. Their rhymes are handsome, and very fair to Falstaff and Romeo’s father. But every empire in some time declines, by chance or nature’s changing climate. They rise of course; their Angelouing of great poetries is karmically determined. Do they scrubjugate ethically? Between the bard’s consonants and vowels they gum their ohms; his let- ters shall not fade, nor lose possession of a stretch of page they call totally fair. Trolling them who Britished Guiana, who Hudsoned Wînipekw, this aggroculturing of letters weathers colonial elidings: beneath hiphop brag, the precious words of England; chapter and verse sit in this shade. Geeks wish they’d chance to innovate tech as transformatively as L’Abbe’s lines invent poetic mode, though who cares about Western firsts, if, before long, lost atmospheres mean we all can’t breathe? Your eyes can see the bard’s original song because coloured lives letter in this back jacket propaganda. Judge this book by its dissin’ genius cover. They hustle a raced life, an aunti-erasure, up in Sonnet’s Shakespeare. (19)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:     So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

L’Abbé is just so clever. The way that L’Abbé flips the script on the masculine impulse of self-aggrandizement and turns it into a more feminine braggartism while also echoing unpictured Shakespearean figures (like the golden boy). 

Something I have not done—and could easily spend at least double the time it took to read this book doing—is a side-by-side comparison of each sonnet. I think of Shakespeare’s sonnets as being love poems dedicated to the dark lady and golden boy. L’Abbé’s poems also, at times, examine love, but at a different angle—there’s one poem, for example, that spins the idea of writing 154 love sonnets as an obsessive, creepy behaviour. The forms of love that emerge are often poems to friends, to parents, unborn children, and once in a while, to undeserving men lampooned for their buffoonery and slightly-concealed sexism, sometimes with a slight tinge of desperation.

In “Sonnet LXI”, L’Abbé offers the obsessiveness of young lovers that comes close to the spirit of the original sonnets. The speaker sits at a screen, hoping someone will facetime, but maybe he’s a “douche avoiding any reply to [her] emails” (62). The poem rides the line between compulsion toward and repulsion of. She’s wearing a nightie and asking if it sparks desire right before considering deleting his number, “but ladies like [her] will be your bootlicker if you’re nice” (62). The poem refers to emoji usage and ghosting and being left on read—a modern spin on a classic poem of devotion. “LXV” also picks up on the idea of undeserving men mistreating the speaker: “For boys understood that the less self I had, / the better to fuck with sad me. Corporeal, they animalled my enmity. / Like a dog eager to please, I was” 66). L’Abbé’s language is explosive and playful, haunting and rich. I’m trying to keep reviews short so I won’t quote more from “LXV” but it is absolutely worth reading, along with the rest of the collection.

Another standout is “CXX,” which addresses white therapists being unable to transcend racism while the speaker tries to overcome her own internalized racism. Meanwhile, the therapists are “almost always white” (121) (the auditory resonance with “right” is not lost on me). Meanwhile, she feels that she needs to comfort the therapists for hearing about racism that has happened to her. The poem She writes, “I still battle isolation, working to undo lessons / my nerves learned from white supremacy, from behavioural paradigms / counsellors had hammered into their masters’ degrees” (121). The critique of “‘universal’ palliatives to a psyche trapped in polite hellscapes / by multicultural mythologies and media tyrannies that your therapies couldn’t / validate” (121) is poignant, lively, and relevant. The poem continues, “I still can’t bend my head around mental health that doesn’t humble its assimilative assumptions” (121). It’s a fantastic piece both aesthetically and sociologically. 

In the name of keeping my reviews (reasonably) short, I’ll just reference one more poem that I think is absolutely brilliant. When I think about poets who have imposed enabling constraints on themselves, Christian Bök comes to mind. In his eunoia, each poem is limited to a single vowel. He’s a standout of CanLit experimental poetry. In “would CXXIII”, L’Abbé takes him to task. It’s a great surprise because she starts off, “No, Christian, it does/not matter that you shamelessly provoke” (124). Given L’Abbé’s focus on Indigenous issues (including children’s bodies buried at former residential schools), I thought for sure it was a poem in that vein. The rest of the poem, though, then focuses on a critique of Bök for being privately “mildly alt-right” (124) and suggesting that he’s somewhat of a white supremacist. It’s riding that line of love for his form and admiring it and recognizing that she’s in the same realm as his work and apologizing to the heirs of their experiments and constraints. It’s a gripping grappling with separating the art from the artist in “anti-representational norm”s and bridges into a compelling question about not “expressing authentic anything” (124). Nonetheless, her “inner architect is moved” (124). She continues, “I bow to such crystalline line design / within such strenuous challenge. My verse won’t best Eunoia; nor does / it wish to. Bro, my procedural lien is/not indebted to you. I name your / influence, despite the way your snark has justly tanked your currency. I / just hope to hell posterity can understand and our heirs can forgive me” (124). The fact that she anticipates the reception of her own work shows just how connected she is to the contemporary moment. And the courage! The courage to tackle one of the CanLit greats—such an admirable, confident position. I loved it.

The length of my review is starting to grow beyond the scope of the limitations I’m trying to impose on myself. I have to say, though, that Sonnet’s Shakespeare is a really compelling project. It’s a force to be reckoned with that is such a confident, ambitious work that it is nothing short of admirable. The range the poems express, the cleverness of the form, the craftsmanship and playfulness of the words—it’s a truly impressive contribution to the literary tradition. 

Give it a read! Happy reading!

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

        Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, if you ask me, doesn’t have enough Proust or enough squid, but remains a reasonably insightful book about language and reading. With the surging interest in the science of reading, it’s a worthwhile text; Wolf discusses the brain science for language reception and how that translates into our capacity for reading.

The structure of the book is pretty interesting in that it starts with a largely historical perspective. Wolf discusses the first records of written language, the objections Socrates and Plato had to the written word, the ongoing development of the written word in different places in the world, and so on. One of the most interesting part of the book to me was the discussion of cultural and linguistic differences and how those impact what we are able to communicate. For instance, Wolf explores how writing systems impact development for different areas of the brain and offers some theories for how people might think differently using different language conventions.

Following the historical background, the book then delves into the brain science of language. Wolf discusses the different areas of the brain that go into reading, what happens when they are impaired, and the connection between brain development and reading disabilities. I have to admit, the scientific language was a little lost on me—especially listening with the audiobook rather than seeing the words visually. The balance skews scientific, which pushed my boundaries a bit more than a more classic arts-based defence of reading.

An area I was hoping to see more of is how science plays a role in our reception and interpretation for texts. For instance, I felt it could have been more thorough in explaining why certain texts resonate or how different writing conventions create particular effects in us—that is, coming back to Proust a little more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, my notes on the text are pretty limited and it’s been a few weeks since I’ve read it, so I have very little to say. It was a good primer on some science of reading content, but I think its lasting impact on me is limited—perhaps it spoke too much to my brain and not enough to my heart.

Nonetheless, any book that valorizes reading is OK in my books. Happy reading!

The Woman from Andros (Andria) by Terence

        The Woman from Andros, alternately called Andria is the next play in my collection of Latin Classics in translation. It’s another comedy based around misunderstandings, secrets, and deceptions in along the lines of the previous Latin play I’d examined, Plautus’ The Haunted House.

The premise of this one is essentially a long game of marital chicken. Simo, an Athenian nobleman, is worried about his son Pamphilus’ morals and future. Simo suspects his son has fallen in love with a lowly woman, Glycerium—and indeed he is correct—and so sets about planning his marriage to Philumena. It’s a similar overbearing father situation akin to something like The Taming of the Shrew. While Simo is actually absolutely correct, he’s missing more information: not only is Pamphilus in love with Glycerium, he is also secretly engaged to her and she is pregnant with his child, about to deliver. Meanwhile, Charinus, who is actually in love with Philumena, is crushed by his friend’s sudden engagement to her. So, they’re all in a love triangle and trying to avoid the wedding.

Simo instructs Davus, Pamphilus’ slave, to ensure that the marriage goes off without a hitch, leaving him torn between allegiances. Does he help his master to remain faithful to his true beloved or avoid the inevitable punishment if he gets in the way of the wedding? The idea of tricky slaves trying to avoid punishment seems to be emerging as a theme in Latin theater…

Davus discovers that the wedding is a sham and engages in a series of deceptions for Pamphilus to save face. Simo is trying to expose Pamphilus and so he’s certain Pamphilus will refuse the marriage; Davus encourages him to agree to the wedding, which puts father and son into a game of chicken: who will back down from this wedding nobody actually wants?

The play is reasonably straightforward in that sense and has some comic moments with its dramatic irony. It doesn’t have the flowery language of a Shakespeare comedy, at least not in this translation, so the comedy is principally based on the situation and the characters’ refusals to concede. There are also some funny misunderstandings where Simo gets so close to knowing the truth but then misreads it. For example, when he overhears a baby being born he thinks it’s a tactic to scare the partners away from the marriage and that it’s all a ruse. Davus very kindly lets him fool himself and then speaks honestly, sort of, to suggest that the baby is a tactic from Glycerium to scare Pamphilus off from his marriage. 

The plot gets more complicated from there and I won’t trouble you with the details. Besides, for the humour to land, you’ll need to be at least a little surprised by the kinds of tricks the characters play.

It’s a fun little play that will take you about two hours to read. Might as well give it a shot.

Happy reading!

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

        Perhaps I wasn’t in the best place for reading The Bradshaw Variations, but it feels like a rare miss from Rachel Cusk. Cusk’s second place and Kudos left me feeling enlightened, if depressed, and I thought the characters and scenes were so powerfully wrought. Turning to The Bradshaw Variations, I can appreciate its project of focusing on the minutiae of a banal life, but it felt like both too much and too little.

Cusk’s writing of the minutiae, I think I read somewhere, is offered as a challenge to the male writers who dwell in the banal. I’m thinking about my scathing review of John Updike’s Terrorist, wherein pages are spent on him fat shaming a woman trying to pick up the remote control from the floor. Cusk dwells in similar minutiae, though not nearly as abrasively and in a much more philosophical register. I can get behind the philosophy of elevating the everyday (it doesn’t all have to be grand narratives and epic quests!), but even so The Bradshaw Variations felt a little thin.

The central premise is that Tonie Swann takes on the English headship at her school and the increased demands of her job mean that Thomas, her husband, has to stay home and care for their young daughter. Cusk explores the ways that such a change can impact family dynamics. One of my favourite scenes in the text is when Tonie corrects Thomas when he talks about their daughter’s friend’s mother. When he has a more extended conversation with her, he notices all the details that Tonie got slightly wrong and has that little bit of relish at his vindication.

In fact, the characters in the book are all pretty petty. In another scene, there is an older couple who tend to a garden. The man is out working and the woman is out somewhere, long after she’d promised to return home. The man gets increasingly annoyed and then engages in self-denial as his revenge. When the woman returns and finds he never had his tea and biscuits, he tells her, “You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait” (43). In fact, the narration tells us, “He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him” (43). When she insists on making the tea, he refuses: “I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper” (43). They engage in a back-and-forth where she offers and her refuses and so on and so on. In the pettiness of the moment there’s a philosophical introspection:

He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been. (43).

The image of a “dark bud straining to burst into flower” seems a perfect symbol for the moment. The ambiguity of “love or violence” being at the core of the bloom also encapsulates the tension of the moment and when she continues questioning him about why he didn’t have tea, “He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out” (43). I think it’s a great reflection of the way we hold certain expectations of others and how those expectations trap us to our own detriment. When the woman decides to have tea on her own,

He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin. (43-44).

I really like that moment. To me, it works as a standalone scene or a short story. It’s a scene that clearly expresses a particular kind of petty drama and the tensions of self-interest and relationship-building. It’s also a way of making use of the plethora of characters in the book in a way that feels self-contained and authentic.

One of my issues with the book is that I don’t really care about anybody other than the two main characters, and even then somewhat minimally. Thomas’ extended family is introduced; parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and so on. Mostly, I had a hard time distinguishing who was who—they all get introduced essentially at once and there were very few actual events to build an understanding of their lives. I think part of the point of the book, actually, is that none of the characters are particularly likeable. Tonie comes across as cold and superior, with the added insult of having an affair that is never addressed. From a plot perspective, the awful secrets of the book don’t seem to matter much. The fact that there is a secret is the point itself. 

I’m not giving up on Cusk by any means—her more recent work has been some of the most captivating work I’ve read lately—but I will say, The Bradshaw Variations just didn’t “hit the same.”

Nonetheless, happy reading!