Notes on The Sonnets E-Book

Luke Kennard

• Herausgeber: Penned in the Margins
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 179

Beschreibung

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021 Longlisted for the Rathbones folio prize A Poetry Book society Recommendation 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. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.' - Caroline Bird

Leseprobe

NOTESONTHESONNETS

Luke Kennard is the author of five collections of poetry and three pamphlets. His second collection, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Prize for Best Collection and his fifth, Cain, for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.

ALSOBYLUKEKENNARD

POETRY

The Solex Brothers (Stride, 2005)

The Harbour Beyond the Movie (Salt, 2007)

The Migraine Hotel (Salt, 2009)

Planet-shaped Horse (Nine Arches, 2011)

The Necropolis Boat (Holdfire, 2012)

A Lost Expression (Salt, 2013)

Cain (Penned in the Margins, 2016)

Truffle Hound (Verve, 2018)

Mise en Abyme (Tungsten, 2019)

FICTION

Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012)

The Transition (Fourth Estate, 2017)

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved© Luke Kennard 2021

The right of Luke Kennard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2021

ePub ISBN978-1-913850-02-9

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All of this takes place at the same house party. The order of the sonnets is determined by events. They are to be seen as improvisations, or annotations, or variations.

Notes on the Sonnets

I

‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’ (66)

Sometimes a party feels like a portal you have to pass through, sometimes not. I don’t know with cocaine. It’s like everyone cheating on the same cryptic crossword (9). My ideal recreational drug would be a pill that makes people feel more insecure and I’m the only one at the party not taking it. I’m in the kitchen with a man who says he can recite any of Shakespeare’s sonnets if someone gives him a number from 1 to 154. And I’m like, Wow, that’s great. 66? And he says, no. Not 66. Anything but that. I’m like, Okay, hahaha, you’re full of shit. He says, I’m not lying, I’m just not reciting sonnet 66, tonight or any other night. I hate it. This has honestly never happened to me before. Give me any other number. And I find that hard to believe, because if you’re asked to pick a random number from 1 to 154 the chances are it might be 66. But I sip from the rum and Coke someone gave me and I sigh and I say, okay, 102. And he starts, I swear this is a true story, he starts cold, My love is strenghten’d though more weak in seeming... I turn on the convection hob and put my palm on it.

‘O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide’ (111)

You give me the private signal to rescue you and I have to interrupt you kissing an artist on the staircase. I can tell that she is an artist because she is so covered in paint and so, now, are you. The way construction workers are always building things, the way demolition crews never really get to take a day off: the demolition never ends, they take it with them when they go. What’s our excuse? A writer is always looking for creative ways to fall into a threshing machine. You’re all, Woah, who invited the oncologist. We’re talking to an award-winning double-act. Do you get tired, we ask them, of being a double-act? Do people expect you still to be a double-act when you’re off-duty? But they say it’s okay because their act is based on the fact that they have no natural repartee. You have to do something which destroys you, some personal brand which subdues your nature: everybody knows that. What you draw out with one undefiant glance. Oh, you. O, you. I know. We will give each other a disease to which we alone are the cure, the cure that reinfects, the reinfection that’s the cure.

‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ (1)

We have been told that the perfect human is at the party. We look forward to meeting them and finding out what they’re like. Unassailable. Beyond reproach. Naturally there are rumours of their misdeeds. The perfect human is not perfect; this assumption reflects badly on us. Yes, the perfect human has done some pretty bad shit, but they’ve also been through a lot. They came from humble origins, but now they write celebrated papers demythologising the “humble origins” trope. They keep their money in a dirty pillowcase and distribute it generously. They don’t really like the one art for which they are recognised or the field in which they incontestably dominate; they prefer NASCAR. They say this in interviews a lot. There is not a single act of cruelty, selfishness and abuse of power the perfect human has committed which cannot be fully explained by systemic issues they themselves have gracefully endured and emerged triumphant. This is what we mean when we say the perfect human does not exist: we mean they are like Euler’s Identity equation. An equation so beautiful it has been compared to a Shakespearean sonnet. Five complex numbers are plotted on the complex plane and together form a “house shape.” When we meet them we will say that we are big fans. Big fans, the perfect human will say. My father worked in a factory that made big fans. But look at you now, perfect human, we will say, look at you now.

‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’ (2)

I rarely think of my son when I’m at a party, and then I remember something he said last night before falling asleep on my arm and it floors me. Maybe just come with me. This is me in the hallway talking to someone I don’t really like and the effort hurts my jaw due to the build-up of lactic acid. Maybe not. The room is blood-temperature. As if I could wake up with an ashtray mouth and find that I dreamed the last 7 years in a single night. If I thought about him it would be as if I’d brought him with me and I want to stress that it’s not him I’d be embarrassed about or even my own self-consciousness. I once bought bright red shoes and immediately regretted it. I brought my kid with me – can you believe that? It’s the people who’d say Why is there a seven-year-old at this party? I wouldn’t want their paucity of spirit / adaptation so exposed. Choose what you give yourself to, beautiful boy. It happens that I’ve seen exactly forty winters, even if that’s just a code for “lots”. I remember confronting you about the six empty boxes of Jaffa Cakes under your bed and you wondered why I’d assume you had anything to do with it. Oh babe, my apology for absence, mon semblable, my old excuse.

‘Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest’ (3)

Without meaning to we’re taking photos of each other taking photos of each other again. We’re outside the kitchen window getting high around a tin table until all I can talk about is a Rubik’s cube where every face is made of another smaller Rubik’s cube, but it would only work if they’re spheres. Then I get quite agitated and demand someone fetches me the pepper grinder because of the terpenoids, and I like the way the word feels in my mouth so much I just keep saying it, terpenoids terpenoids terpenoids. Unblessed in the evening air, unblessed. There’s such an obsession with wrinkles in sonnets 1-74 it’s as if the whole sequence had been commissioned by a luxury skin care salve. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have children so that they’d look like me; it feels weird even having to point that out. Although, you say, head cocked, reflected in the window I just photographed the people photographing themselves through, it’s actually quite important being pretty, isn’t it? More than we care to admit? I like having attractive friends. I laugh because you do. That’s a low-key outrageous thing to say. No it’s not. Anyway, everyone’s attractive. There is a warmth in just leaning against the windowsill with you I’ll come back to. I would like you to lie on top of me in a pile of coats. I would like you to hold me and knock insistently on the top of my head. I would like you to bask in the good thoughts I have about you.

‘But wherefore do not you a mightier way’ (16)

I think I told you about my friend who, when we were 17, had a date tattooed on his ankle and to my shame I can’t remember the exact date – XX.05.25 – because our idea was that we should all meet up in exactly 25 years’ time on Hamm Hill, surrounded by living flowers, whatever else was going on in our lives, whatever we’d done, whatever had been done to us, whatever, just drive over there from wherever we’d washed up, drawn by our own sweet skill or otherwise, and meet up at precisely 6pm on that day. But the consensus was that we’d probably only remember it if we got the date tattooed on our ankles; we didn’t think it possible to remember Happy Hour in the perfectly dingy Bell and Crown a whole 25 years later although, of course, I do. And he was the sweetest and most impulsive and he went ahead and got the tattoo the next week and we were like… Oh god, you took that seriously? 25 years seemed like a comically long time to us. He was justifiably angry – we’d agreed! It was a pact! We were all, No! It was hypothetical and also tattoos sound really painful. That’s endearing and also really awful, you say. You check my bare ankle to be sure it wasn’t me.

‘Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend’ (4)

From now on I am going to audit this party which means I will be present but not in the capacity of consuming anything or actively engaging with anyone. It’s like one of the more inscrutable parables / brutal parallels: the master gives one talent each to three servants. I’ve just checked and it turns out that one talent is 33kg of silver, which is worth loads. Anyway, one of them invests it; one of them really goes to town on it, hedge bets it or something like the first recorded disaster capitalist and, hey, makes a killing; but the third servant… he just literally buries it in the ground like a fucking idiot and mumbles something about knowing the master to be a ruthless man so he wanted to make sure nothing happened to the talent. The master is not impressed by this at all. That other secret chord which David played and the Lord hated it. Telling someone they’re too hard on themselves is the kindest thing you can say to anyone; you are a rare, self-sabotaging tree. How have you even grown in this crummy environment? Also, probably, it’s true and they may have some useful pointers. The day will come when they will throw us out of the temple and believe they are serving God and the devil will say, It’s got a little complicated.

‘If the dull substance of my flesh were thought’ (44)

I would also like my skin to be thought, but it isn’t. I have to carry it places, whereas thoughts have wings. A sub-party has started in the porch. We all have teleportation fantasies, but the quantum channel is always destroyed. So you could do it once and never come back. In such a way, in wishing it were otherwise, all science-fiction corresponds to our desire to renounce all responsibility for our actions. Crime fiction our desire to delegate. Criminality is bureaucracy in its purest uncut form. There is, though, some distant molecule forever altered, though you wouldn’t know it, turning up on your doorstep like an unsolicited submission. A drastic, last-ditch signal. So you can go back once and try again but do exactly the same things differently and exactly the same things the same because you already went back. Teleport to the last ditch. The ribbons above the window say Distraction is Perfidy. If the dull substance of my thoughts were skin we’d walk along the skin-lined thoroughfare and pause under a fleshy, pulsating tree, I’d say, In all this hideous world you found me.

‘Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war’ (46)

Moiety: two parts. Taxation. In property law, for instance, you own half your maisonette and lease the other half from someone else. The moiety in your brother’s eye. Some molecules are water-loving. Some molecules are water-fearing. In anthropology moiety means one of two distinct groups within a tribe.

I interned for three years as an interloper and now I care about things which should not concern me, broke the key off in the lock, spent the deposit. Here are the two parts of your country, here are the two distinct tribes within each half, here are... In French it just means half. In theology you own one of your eyes and the other belongs to God.

‘What’s in the brain, that ink may character’ (108)

A bible study group is meeting in the dusty space between the landing and the bathroom. Something bad must have happened at the party so people have fallen back on old habits. Sometimes you end up dating someone who attends a Pentecostal church where 1. There are doughnuts afterwards and 2. They speak in tongues for upwards of an hour during the services. If you’re like me you’d go along with it up to the speaking in tongues; if you’re like me, you’d draw the line at that because it’s presumptuous to think the Holy Spirit is being poured out upon you. So it was a relief to find prayers which had been through a rigorous peer-review process; which you are to commit to memory and speak over and over again. This is where the traditional Protestant line would take against the superstition of something too close to a spell, a riddle, an incantation; that they served us pretty well for seventeen centuries notwithstanding. This is me bedecked with swallows drawn to me solely by my indefatigable inner peace. This is me consuming the very substance of my soul due to what experts call “tinderbox conditions”. And really, what would you say to God, given absolute carte blanche? God… Um… But what I mean is, I do not expect you to mean it when you say I love you, which you do more frequently when you don’t, because we are junctions. I have loved you, I will love you, my love for you is in a permanent state of departure and arrival.

‘Let those who are in favour with their stars’ (25)

To unlook. I unlook for you. I try to attain a permanent state of unlooking. Ideally, you’re not with me. You’re in another room and people are admiring you. Someone has spilled wine on your dress. You are crouching on the floor by a decommissioned soldier. He has both his hands in yours and you are saying, I’m so sorry. People do not carry their awards with them, even if they should, especially to parties; Most Compassionate 1992. People with honours are not happy, but not because they fear the honours might be taken away or even because they feel guilty about the honours. It’s something else. ‘Did I really die for this?’ [Gestures vaguely at the party.] ‘Yes. And we’re not grateful.’ Does the warrior really fear being forgotten? I don’t know. Posterity is like a cat that thinks it’s Jesus: we wouldn’t even know. You don’t get this at all, but I love it when someone else has a crush on you. Something that never existed in the first place cannot be estranged. Better to marry than to burn, but both can be arranged.

‘As a decrepit father takes delight’ (37)

The way hangovers mature, in your 30s, into a kind of existential mould. I want the kind of success and happiness for you I want for my own children. I want you to feel loved and known or known and loved or, failing that, because really who can expect such extravagance, I want the ache to be transfigured into something you can use. Otherwise, knowing that you exist, that at this moment you are waiting for a train, that you have had to start the same page again because you weren’t concentrating, that you are tired, that if someone asked you something they would get to hear your voice. I love the channels dammed with exhausting half-thoughts. Funny how the latte has become one of the laziest class signifiers, as if every dead high-street didn’t contain at least two Costas.

‘How can my Muse want subject to invent’ (38)

The mathematician draws sequences of ws and ms in the condensation on the window. Every interval contains infinite transcendental numbers. Okay? Yes, I say, I’m genuinely interested. Do you want to draw the next one? m w m w w m w w w… No, she says, That’s too many ws. She draws another sequence. This sequence cannot occur anywhere in the infinite list of sequences, even though it’s infinite. Do you understand? No, I tell her, I’m an Intuitionist. Each muse is responsible for two muses who are in turn responsible for two muses who are responsible for two muses. Zoom out far enough and it looks like a flower, further and it just looks like the world. Look you did ask, she says, clearing the window with her sleeve. I was having a nice night. Take this party, I say. It remains forever in the status of creation, but is not a closed realm of things existing in themselves. Actual infinity was taken as a threat to the absolute infinity of God. At one point Georg Cantor sent a letter directly to Pope Leo XIII to clarify. All infinities are at the disposal of the Almighty. Cantor’s youngest son died in 1899 while Cantor was in the middle of giving a lecture on Baconian theory and Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s only son died aged 11 in 1596. Is it mindless sentimentality to feel sad about this? What is that feeling? The universe, if real, must be finite – she grabs one of my earlobes and squeezes, hard – in both space and time. You’re hurting me. The essence of mathematics is its freedom. She lets go of my ear. No-one shall expel us from the paradise it has created.

‘Your love and pity doth the impression fill’ (112)

So that there’s no uncertainty on the matter. So there’s a guy standing on the sofa, and a sofa is not an easy surface to stand on, and he’s reading out everything he’s ever written, from secondary school English Lit A-level coursework onwards. So we’ll be here all night. So easy to sneer at this, but just as easy to grab a beanbag, close your eyes and chart the gradual evolution of his style. So what’s required of us, when we find someone embarrassing, is to love them. So far beyond caring what any of you think of me where once I had – it’s unimprovable – an adder’s sense. So now it’s only you I can let down. So that’s that. So I am not read as neutral I have taken to exaggerating that which I can control, which is my scarf. So many more important things, so many dog-eared pages, so what. So everybody here died long ago, or soon they will. So give me your best guess, another drink, your disapproval, your disappearing act. So I know.

‘Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind’ (113)

The bridge. The mountain. The lake. The ibex. The chocolate cake. The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. The jar of cinnamon sticks. The slapping rain. The tiny dog. The paint chipped from the windowsill. The momentary concerned glance which passes like a shaft of light. The coffee cup. The flooded rails. The empty cracked shell of a snail. The grey fuzz of a scratch-card nail. The things we said inside the whale. Prostrate before the turning sail. The something and the something else. Betrayal of, betrayal from. Look over, through or set upon. The double dream, the double glaze, a less bad way out of the maze. Sometimes the action cannot match a long recalibrating daze. And sometimes, sometimes even when I’m the only one with you I want to text, ‘Are you okay? Is this guy bothering you?’