Nets

To be honest, reading Nets was an intimidating experience because I often approach works of erasure warily. They scare me. Though I’ve never seriously attempted erasure, I don’t think I would be good at them. As a result of my fear, I tend to put myself in the mind of the reader and pinpoint how he or she might have arrived at the final product from the original piece, usually to no avail. However, now that I think about it, I think what fascinates me most about erasure poems is that they highly resemble psychology experiments. In the same way that an experiment director might place certain ambiguous images in front of you and ask you what you think, an erasure poem tracks the way you process certain selections of words and arrangements. In that sense, the production of erasure poems can seem extremely arbitrary, but are in fact somewhat systematic and depend on brain wiring and whatnot.

Concerning Nets, the issue of deciphering the erasure poem is exacerbated due to the fact that the original source is William Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are incredibly lush and potent with emotion and imagery. Consider  #63. In the original sonnet, Shakespeare utilizes such powerful diction, including words like “injurious,” “drained,” “youthful,” “confounding,” or even “knife.” However, Bervin selects only nine words from the sonnet to produce a concise, but equally evocative poem: “I am vanishing or vanished in these black lines.” Another example is poem #137, which is simply a single word, “anchored.” The way in which Bervin seems to draw each word so meticulously varies throughout the entire collection, but each poem tells a different story in its own individual style.

            As works directly derived from other works, erasure poems, such as in Nets where the original source is provided, intrinsically includes the dimension of space. In other words, the poems are not presented in some four-line stanza, but are splayed out throughout the page. In that way, the poems are not only about the words themselves, but how they are arranged and how they exist in space. With that in mind, it is interesting reading Bervin’s Working Note at the end of the book where she writes, “I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible --- a diverge elsewhere.” I think she uses her ability to alter the space dimensions of the poem to make her point concerning the relationship between poems and history. Bervin continues, “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us…when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” In her words, Shakespeare’s sonnets are the canvas for the erasure poems to come. The canvas provides the history and the context in the back of the mind while the poet is able to create his own poem out of that. Nets was actually my favorite book of poetry that we read as a class, and I expect to read more books of Bervin’s.