Nets

"I know I’m cheating a little bit by squeezing in two books here! But there have just been so many writers who’ve been inspired to respond imaginatively to these poems — just as we have countless rewritings of the plays across centuries, across nations. The title of Jen Bervin’s Nets enacts the very project of her book. It’s an abbreviated form of the word Sonnets , just leaving ‘nets’ — as if she’s taken a net, and filtered Shakespeare’s words through it. She visually lightens certain phrases in a poem, leaving behind new, more prominent threads of words. When you strain your eyes, you can still faintly find a palimpsest of the greyed-out words from the original. But the newly bolded words remain clear, either underlining something that was already latent, or taking it in a new direction. In her words, she’s ‘stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible — a divergent elsewhere.’ In doing so, she partakes in a tradition of creative writers taking the front page of, say, yesterday’s Guardian , blacking out certain sections, and leaving the remaining words newly legible. Ronald Johnson similarly did this with Paradise Lost , weaving a residual thread of words, wending its way down the page. It’s visually arresting: you’re often startled into seeing something that you didn’t recognize before."