Luke Kennard, Notes on the Sonnets
‘Lo! in theorient when the gracious light’ (7)
Language, although it’snot said so often, is actually brilliant. I mean just look at it. We took toomany pointers from depressed short story writers when really language is sowonderful I can only celebrate it sub-lingually. I’ll rub my wings together orsomething. I’m just going to come right out and say: that’s not a good reasonto have a son. It never even occurred to me. I only want to be temporary custodianof a soul as strange as mine. But I know you’re trying to say something nice. HonestlyI like you and you’re beautiful. If you climb this hill it would make you veryold. 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 Iavoid any role which could be described as “Oedipally significant”. In one rooma man stands by the dimmer switch, slowly turning it all the way up then allthe way down repeatedly. Not so much a fantasy as a mistake, and a barely plausibleone at that. Tell him to quit it.
Havingpicked this up recently at a bookstore in Chichester, England, I’m a bit lateto British poet Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets (London UK: Pennedin the Margins, 2021), a prose-poem suite that each play off a different one ofWilliam Shakespeare’s one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. As the back coveroffers: “Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchicprose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains darkmatter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud actionfigure. 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 anytext that is able to prompt such a variety of responses, allowing for a fluidityand 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 alonewould make an impressive (and essential reading) list: Vancouver Island poetand critic Sonnet L’Abbé wonderfully inventive Sonnet’s Shakespeare(Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here], Manhattan-basedpoet Trevor Ketner’s homolinguistic translation The Wild Hunt Divinations: agrimoire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and even St. Catharines, Ontario poet and critic Gregory Betts’ morerecent visual epic, BardCode (UK: Penteract Press, 2024).Thereis a heft and an immense sense of play to this collection, structured nearly asa collection of self-contained pieces that accumulate into something far morecomplex, reminiscent my experiences reading through J. Robert Lennon’s shortstory collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Press, 2005) and JoyWilliams’ short story collection 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books,2016) [see my notes on these two here]. The narrative arc of Notes on theSonnets might not fully exist, and yet, it does, even if only in the mindof the reader, seeking out patterns across a wide array of notes, moments, seeming-randomnessand a party that seems endless, captured across more than two hundred pages ofKennard’s deep-thinking prose. If James Joyce could write out a day, why not thissuite of prose poems around a party as well?
