I’ve never been very good at deciphering poetry, which is
probably why Jen Bervin’s poem collections “Nets,” published in 2004, proved to
be quite a challenge for me. Bervin uses Shakespeare’s timeless sonnets in this
work of hers, graying out the majority of each sonnet and leaving about five or
six words in normal print to create her own short poems.
The idea of using erasures to leave her audience with
something new struck me as brilliant. The way Bervin makes use of Shakespeare’s
work brings the image of a sculptor to mind; she has removed much of a slab of
marble to reveal something new to the world – but the great risk she has taken
here is that said slab is a work that already stands on its own as a milestone
in history. This is comparable to taking Michelangelo’s La Pieta and somehow reducing it to a totally different piece!
Bervin was very brave to do this, but as we all know, with great risk comes
great reward.
An aspect of each of Bervin’s poems that beguiled me was the
extent to which she reduced Shakespeare’s sonnets. Using usually less than ten
words from a piece of at least one hundred, Bervin seems to have discarded most
of the backdrop piece. I can understand that she perhaps did not want
Shakespeare’s concrete presence in her work to overpower her words, or perhaps
she did not want readers that were very familiar with Shakespeare’s works to
only see how the words she chose connected to what Shakespeare once formed for
his audience. What marvels me, however, is just how effective using what only
seemed like ten percent of the sonnets was. While reading through Bervin’s
anthology, I did not once think of the 16th century playwright and
the influence he’s had on American literature. I took her words for what they
were, and what they could possibly stand for in present times.
I also admire the use of the title “Nets,” which is taken
quite cleverly from the title “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” I like this title
because the image of a net is for me one of bare minimum; a net is a very
basic, minimalistic, yet effective tool that captures or holds captive a
desired object. This is a perfect analogy for Bervin’s short poems, for they do
capture the reader’s attention via minimalist means.
My favorite of the poem collection was the erasure of sonnet
22, as shown below.
As an amateur poetry-reader I summed up the poem within the
first few reads, immediately focusing on the word ‘time’ as the big theme of
the poem. But as I tried to delve more into what perhaps Bervin wanted her audience to see, I realized
that these few words could go several different ways.
To me these eight words are emphasizing the fact that each
and every one of us on Earth is ‘from’ one date, possibly meaning born on a
single date, and yet from this piece I get a sense of not only the beginning of
my life but the end. I like the fact that Bervin chose to keep ‘furrows’ where
she could have ended the poem after ‘time.’ The former word gives a sense of
the endlessness, or abundance of time (I think of a string bunched together to
look like one simple entity, but that can be stretched out infinitely), and the
word ‘one’ shows just how small we are compared to the entire span of time.
I don’t think I could ever pull off erasure for fear of
having my backdrop piece overpowering what I am singling out from it, but
Bervin does a marvelous job.
Works Cited
Bervin, Jen. Nets. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004. Print.
I really liked your analysis of the piece, because I too felt that the work was excellent on a stand alone structure. It is not so much that we are expected to take the Bard's words as they are, but instead what Bervin is trying to tell us through them. So, I agree. I enjoyed your suggestion of the meaning of the small erasure, but I think it would help to realize the cut-off between where Shakespeare becomes irrelevent in the effect of the poem and where we need to focus on what his original sonnet was. On its own, the erasure is good and meaningful, but why not just take that on its own and omit the entire sonnet itself. The erasure serves a purpose, in my mind, in having to blacklight the original context because they seem to have two different meanings. Maybe the meaning of the erasure is more complex thant what it simply states and can be seen as an extension or break-off thought from the original to create its own creative thought. Sacchin's analysis took into consideration the meaning of the original, which would help him (if he had extrapolated on Bervin's meaning).
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