Geoffrey Nilson Reviews Sonnet L'Abbé's Sonnet's Shakespeare

Sonnet L’Abbé. Sonnet’s Shakespeare. McClelland & Stewart. $21, 190 pp., ISBN: 9780771073090

I once attempted to write an essay about sampling ethics in contemporary poetry – that is, if and when it is permissible (and indeed expedient) to utilize found text in the composition of a poem. I soon realized I was woefully unequipped to tackle such a subject. I had not read widely enough and my privileged white middle-class place in the world meant I had always possessed the power to appropriate. I lived on unceded Qayqayt territory in the province of my birth. My Norwegian and English ancestors were complicit in the European land theft of the Canadian prairie, before moving west and doing the whole thing over again. “Homesteaders, they called themselves, by principle: ‘home’ was theirs because they were the first to fence it.” Maybe I wasn’t the best person to say what constituted ethical appropriation of a text (if such a thing was even possible).

Sonnet L’Abbé, by contrast, is substantially more qualified. Her essay “Erasures from the Territories Called Canada: Sharpening the Gaze at White Backgrounds” is exactly the kind of paper I had hoped to write, outlining poetic erasure as an “explicitly politicized, cultural critique,” [1] one that should be “participating in the politics of what is represented and what is not.” [2]

Those principles are on full display in L’Abbé’s newest book of poems Sonnet’s Shakespeare. The source text is 154 Shakespearean sonnets, and each of L’Abbé’s new, densely-layered prose poem consumes one sonnet, breaking it into fragments and absorbing it as she writes over and through the source. The source sonnet and new prose poem couldn’t be further from each other – one concise and swimming in white space, the other a sprawl of language in a claustrophobic font size. In spite of these differences, the iambs bubble in the line, like Shakespeare’s backbeat locked in the pocket of each overwritten sonnet. 

This metric pulse is something you hear when reading the poems and only ‘see’ when the source text appears as lightly shaded in contrast to the overwriting. The reader’s brain uses pre-attentive processing to help see what is different, but when that visual cue is removed, nothing differentiates the source(s). The poems appear whole. Fragments float unreadable in the background of the collection. But with form (however unavoidable) so intimately discussed on the book jacket and in the press release, what more can a critic offer? 

No text concerning sonnets would be free from the classic theme of love, but this is a book about its consequences for a mixed-race woman in Canada. At times violent and frustrated, L’Abbé endears herself to the reader with her candour on topics ranging from rape to masturbation, from the joys of backyard joints to a social history of racism that runs counter to national narrative. The reader traverses the gaps on the strength of her metaphor. One gets the impression this voice is both personal to the poet, and a sort of symbolic embodiment of Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ speaking over his derision: “I was busy, shaking off Shakespeare writing ‘tan sacred beauty’ to mean beauty’s loss.” She “swallow[s] story that’s older than church,” and when words are not capable, she resorts to vowels of the unsayable, that which can be only sung, “turning contrarily to the i  ê i a o i.” 

Sonnet’s Shakespeare has a paradoxical reflex; it asks not look at me, the poem, but look at the world, too. It seeks to liberate the “I” by embracing it completely; “I” is no longer static, but may signify anything: self and stranger, treaty and land, colonizer and protestor, celebrity, date, teacher, child, and survivor. The voice “open[s] books, looking for empathy,” but is also ruthlessly self-critical: “I’m robbing someone, or something (a self I don’t know, a lost address) and flushing the spoils before my inner authority can retrieve what’s undone.”

One might call the work confessional or diarist, but that would be severely limiting, unless one is referring to the prose of Anaïs Nin, or the long-poem as reportage of Daphne Marlatt. L’Abbé creates a colony of objects in our spaces through IKEA products – “alsvik faucets, klubbo coffee tables, lindstal handles and knobs, norreskog odorous candles” – in the same way Marlatt creates a colony of objects in a place through cataloguing Steveston, BC (“Christmas cards in English from Chinese friends, Sunday School biblical pictures, calendar, odd socks, receipts, broken crockery” [3]). The collection, like the list, is never just one thing, one connection, one subject, or one person; ‘it’s impossible, alone, to be a movement.”

And movement is exactly what is needed to decolonize the relationship with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, where the legacy of genocide, broken treaties, and widespread “residential schools fostered lifelong survival modes.” No time for performative wokeness: “Do it for no praise which raises your profile. Make amends as actions [you] can body, and live a respect to relations, to elders, to words and circles.” When L’Abbé includes copy from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action, she sensitively adjusts diction and rhythm, creating a reverent tone. The original source sonnets seem actively placed within these new list poems, a deliberate decolonization; as in, there are instances in our future where the considerations of the Indigenous people of Canada will and should be the dominant force of our political narrative, and settlers (and their literature) will need to find their own place within those primary concerns. 

Sonnet’s Shakespeare is a text that finds “a kind of sublime, an extreme of language” through formal constraint and experimentation. Its erasure of the Bard is a necessary deconstruction that highlights the immutable wit and rhythm of the source. The poems forcefully confront their own individuality and are “finished being alone in this terrestrial longing;” a way forward is only possible with collectivity. What could be more dangerous and essential than that?

Geoffrey Nilson is a writer, editor, visual artist, and the founder of poetry micropress pagefiftyone. His work has appeared recently in PRISM, CV2, Coast Mountain Culture, and is forthcoming as part of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds from Caitlin Press in winter 2020. He lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt First Nation.

[1] Sonnet L’Abbé, “Erasures from the Territories Called Canada: Sharpening the Gaze on White Backgrounds,” in Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries, ed. Gregory Betts and Christian Bök (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2019), 199.

[2]  Ibid, 220.

[3]  Daphne Marlatt, “Steveston,” in The Long Poem Anthology, ed. Michael Ondaatje (Toronto: Coach House, 1979), 106.