| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penned in the Margins |
| Number of pages | 212 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781908058812 |
| Publication status | Published - 23 Apr 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Research Statement – Notes on the SonnetsAside from creating an intertextual work in dialogue with an iconic origin-text, the aim of this project was to explore the commonality between the prose poem and stricter, traditional poetic forms. At first glance the prose poem can appear undisciplined, but it is possible to render it as intricately constructed as a sonnet, wherein the place of cadence and rhyme is largely taken by image, tangent and content, while pertaining to a seemingly natural (albeit constructed) pattern of thought. As Virginia Woolf puts it: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” (Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925), p.130-131). The form of the prose poem (still a form which allows for internal rhyme and cadence, at times iambic pentameter) was chosen to contrast with the largely consistent form of the original; the sonnet being among the strictest, the prose poem the most loose and expansive. As a model for the prose poem, Baudelaire’s Petit Poems en Prose was chosen as an underlying text for its deceptively loose and conversational properties. The setting of the sequence was transferred to a communal party, in order to draw out the polyphony, ambivalence and multifarious qualities of the lyric voice; to extrapolate its social and conflicted qualities. Lyric poetry can arguably tend towards the solipsistic, but Notes views this as a misinterpretation. In fact, the ‘speaker’ of the sonnets is in constant intra- and interpersonal dialogue, with the views and judgments of contemporaries as well as the methods and models of scientific, medical, theological and philosophical thinking. As a work in direct correspondence to an existing, canonical text, Notes on the Sonnets is positioned to contribute to a branch of poetics that includes Sina Queryas’ ‘My Ariel’, Padraig Regan’s ‘Pearl’ and Jen Bervin’s ‘Nets’.