Collab. With E.E. Cummings "I like my body"

 I HATE MY BODY

i hate my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite a flawed thing.

cellulite better and stretch marks more.

i hate your body. i hate what it does,

i hate its hows. i hate to feel the want 

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

-gaunt-sallow ness and which i will 

again and again and again 

despise, i hate touching this and that of you, 

i hate, slowly gazing at the, meatless bones 

of your decaying frame, and why-is-it comes 

over thinning flesh....and empty eyes big gaping holes,

and i possibly like the ill

of leaving me you so quite used.

Minimalism of Nets

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 16^th 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.

The stars, the selfsame sky, [all] for [my] love of you.

                Nets by Jen Bervin is a collection of erasures. Her canvas are a collection of about 150 sonnets by William Shakespeare. The erasures, as Bervin says, “make the space of the poems open, porous, possible – a divergent elsewhere” (151). They make reading the poems truly a unique experience. In this essay, I will discuss the relationship of the erasure to the sonnet while focusing on one of these erasures. The erasure I chose comes from Skaepeare’s sonnet 15.

the stars

                                                     the selfsame sky

                                                for love of you.

                The above erasure is a short  poem of three equally short lines. Most of the erasures follow this pattern and I was tempted to call some of them haikus, and I actually believe they are. According to Shadow Poetry, a haiku does not necessarily mean that there has to be a 5/7/5 syllable structure. Actually, the other definition as mentioned here (http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/haiku/haiku.html), defines a haiku as a poem that contains seventeen syllables or less. Furthermore, the page goes on to outline the structure of the haiku where the first line is the setting and the remaining two lines are the subject and the action. So in a sense, Bervin’s erasures, as seen in this case, can be argued to be haikus. What I find most convincing is that the erasures do not have more the seventeen syllables.

                However, the setting, subject and action do not necessarily appear in that order. I would say the setting is the sky; the subject is the stars; the action is the love. I guess this is the restriction of dealing with erasure but clearly, Bervin did try to achieve a form similar to that of a haiku.

                The meaning of Bervin’s erasure, to me, is quite straight forward. But there seems to be something lacking. It speaks of the stars, and sky that the stars are in. Yet, somehow, they are related to the love of someone, as if something about the stars and the sky, dictate or influence the love. I think, this is where Bervin’s erasures begin to relate to the sonnets, and this is why I chose this particular one.

                In this sonnet, Shakespeare talks about how time ages someone, taking away their youth (“Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,/ To change your day of youth to sullied night”).  And the stars seem to flaunt their youth in the face of men and plants. And on seeing this youth, they decide that they too want to grow with Time under the same sky as the stars (Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;/ When I perceive that men as plants increase,/ Cheered and checked even by the selfsame sky”). Unfortunately, men fall prey to this mockery of the stars and Time takes away their youth. But Shakespeare believes that that even though his love grow old, he will immortalize this person, possibly in the form of the sonnets. I would probably say it is seen in the following two sonnets where Shakespeare continues his discussion of Time and aging(16), and continuing in Sonnet 18 to describe a young maiden.

                It can be seen, that standing alone, Bervin’s erasures seem so, “open.” The erasure clearly sets up the subject, setting and action yet does not give the relationship between the three. This leaves the poem very much up to how the reader will interpret it, rather than how Shakespeare intended.

Net Number 63

‘Nets’ is a collection of poems where author Jen Bervin has used erasure on selected sonnets by William Shakespeare, using them as a canvas to draw out her own unique poetry.

My personal favorite is the erasure done on sonnet number 63 to produce the following poem-

I am

Vanished or vanishing

In these black lines

This was one of the poems that stayed with me long after I had read the collection of poems. It is an extremely short poem in free verse- that is, it does not have any set meter or rhyme scheme. What I loved about this was that despite how small and concise this poem was, every time I read it, I got something different out of it. The first time I read it, I pictured being lost in woods- it was a powerful image, and it stayed with me. Each time I read it after that, I interpreted it differently, but the feeling of being lost or being consumed by some unknown thing remained constant. That feeling was what I enjoyed most about reading the poem. I have always been a fan of erasure poetry because it’s interesting to see how a poet can draw out something completely different from the intended meaning of the original text. However, when I read sonnet number 63 by itself, I discovered that Jen Bervin’s poem stood in consonance with what the sonnet was about- the erasure work stood with it as opposed to against it. In sonnet number 63, Shakespeare talks about how he is fighting time to immortalize his lover through his poetry—so that when time overcomes his lover-when he becomes old, he would still stay young “in the black lines” of Shakespeare’s poetry. The black lines are what keeps Shakespeare’s lover immortal- forever young through time. I pictured the lines as this black liquid that traps Shakespeare’s lover in cryogenic sleep. So, when I read Jen Bervin’s poem against the background of Shakespeare’s sonnet- I felt that she had distilled the essence of what Shakespeare was trying to say. The “I” in the poem was Shakespeare’s love that was being slowly consumed by the black lines, to be forever preserved in black cryogenic sleep with his lover. The woods that I imagined were Shakespeare’s words; the woods were the black sleep. The sense of uncertainty in the line, “vanished or vanishing” agreed with the feeling of being lost in the woods. However this is just my interpretation of Bervin’s poem.

As someone who loves to write, the lines also spoke to me because they echoed what I feel about great writing- that is the kind of writing that a writer can disappear/vanish into- that completely envelops the writer- so that the words on the paper and the writer become one.

The erasure work done in ‘Nets’ by Bervin is excellent and the poems though short are powerful and though provoking.

-Smriti Bansal

Works Cited

Bervin, Jen. Nets. New York: Ugly Ducklinge, 2004. Print.