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When I
first read the title Sonnets my experimentalist
conditionings began to freeze frame as if hit by a medieval Petrarchan truck
driven by a deranged and groping John Donne. 'Oh no, holy sonnets,' I'm
thinking, recalling a rather dry lecture on the vagaries and wonders of the
Italian job as opposed to the Spenserian job. I'm remembering counting iambs
and pentameters and recalling the rules: first eight lines of octave abbaabba
- followed by six lines or 'sestet'. I'm shouting to the mirror 'Milton thou
thoudest be living at this hour!'; I'm calling to the God of Shakespeare
'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day!'; I'm saying 'look Stella we can't
go into this right now'. I calm down and have a few Saint John's and a Cap Colombie. Then I'm thinking no! It's an
experimentalist ruse, subterfuge, scam, deception, ploy, stunt - as the
thesaurus offers: that it won't be real sonnets but just fourteen lines of true
experimentalist experimentation to experiment with. Aaaaand no it's not this
either - but something quite unique.
If you are familiar with Camille Martin's work: the collages, the poems, the
essays, the interests, the troubled experiences, then you will know that you
don't need to count to fourteen over and over or do the ab's ab's till the
six pack glistens. And that its Sonnets Jim but not as we know it.
Sonnets is
exciting. 'Hey were talkin poetry here' I hear you say. 'Aye yir rite' I say
in my best Glaswegian - 'so whit reel men kin get excited aboot wurds'. Is
that a hoodie with a blade I see before me.
The first thing that you notice about Camille's sonnets is how good looking
they appear on the page - as sonnets do - nothing quite has the class of a
sonnet. Details I like: not using a capital letter lets the reader walk right
onto the beautiful lawn without jumping the capital letter fence - (you
metaphor tart! )
But lines! Beautiful lines everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
I love this:
VII
footfalls on snow pass other footfalls.
underfoot,
furrows crisscross the sleeping
kingdom.
and, from IX:
disoriented moths flutter toward quivering red
dwarves.
spring's quivering sheen dances
over a
meadow's candytufts. scribes afflicted
with dancing plague trace the
air in scribbles legible
to their
hearts alone. across the sky streaks a molten mass
of gold
orchestrating fragile heartbeats
A good dose of alliteration which is interesting - if not unsurprising given
Camille's musical training - and as we know sonnet means song. Here is a
return to traditional poetic device - sonnet, alliteration, metaphor: but it
all looks so modern so 'experimental' in a traditional way. The word
that comes to mind is craft. The poet has seen - no the poet has taken the
magnifying glass to the world: she has thought long and hard and she has
applied. The physical becomes 'cognitionized' and is transposed into the metaphysical of art and
advanced in a post modernist stream, as a conscript. We have an example of
the basis of an attempt to describe a condition, or a state of being, or
something concerned with changes to institutions and conditions.
And there is more than beautiful lines and incredible poetic craft - there is
the 'internal': driven by the poet's readings in cognitive science which is
applied in a stream of experimentalist nuance and guile:
if only memory held the key. if traces
were the key to grammar
not yet
grammar. if the brute sound waves of jackhammers
were a way to
witness. the memory of brutes is brutes
remembering
or som ething remembering brutes. cleaving
or cleaving
to. typical, like photographs imagining they capture
perfect
moods. just perfect, think the photographs
as they
capture brute space. they feel limited. if only they had
perfect
readers to rescue them, though readers are unreliable
witnesses.
they limit, they garble. they cannot rescue all
their
moments.'
And my favourite poem, 'XXXXX':
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the
concept
of
meaning.
is
every
bit
as
problematic
as
the
concept
of
mind
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sun was enamoured of the
that most, if not all,
the apples of the world have a sweet
"i'll lower my bucket," said the sun, "which
vast enough to hold the ruddiest apple of
apple tree beneath my path." the sun
into the first apple it saw as soon
the bucket returned. but the apple's meaning proved
for the sun. its rays turned the apple, as red
the reddest sunset, into ashes whose significance
sun was unable to fathom. in fact, the very
of the meaning
the once-rosy apple eluded the overheated
of the sun, consumed as it was by the problem.
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There is pain here.
The poet speaks to the unloved maybe the unlovable - the inside job, a being
who belongs somewhere else. Identity is an issue for speculation, as is love.
These sonnets offer an insight into potential. There are queries,
confrontations, songs of praise, and the existential:
i dissipate when you need
me most--what
am i?
i dig in when
you
most need to
be alone
with your
regret--what
am i? maybe
you won't mind
if i just
leave you
clawing the
air--what am
i? '
Apart from the internal there are other themes and influences: some of the
sonnets are inspired by sources such as nursery rhymes ("glasshouse
chimes"), street names ("the street names of toronto") and her
dream journals ("on merest sand"), for example:
glasshouse chimes
i
this is the
tune that paper sang.
these are the
words that graced the tune
that paper
sang. this is the loom
that wove the
words that graced the tune
that paper sang.
the street names of
toronto
i
a great
benefactor, you planted more fruit trees
in the
aftermath of your tragic death than during
your
expansive life. you discovered gold
and had music
piped in. and then your name lost an ÒeÓ
in a fencing
accident.
on merest
sand
i.
the levee of
the mississippi, high
as a mountain
ridge. the path, slippery, laced
with puddles.
how small, human-sized
the vast
river seems from this vantage point.
how ironic
it'd be, drowning in a puddle imagining
the undertow
of the mississippi. the levee
slopes down
closer to the banks.
Sonnets is a
delightful body of work. Even though we wander into the oblique there is
never alienation because the words are too beautiful, the experience perhaps
too pained, too accurate and weighted. We might be slightly or even much
excluded but it's like being chastised by a temperate being; we come up
against the word unconditional and it's charm and gentleness - and total
power overwhelm. And there is a deep connection with the reader at every turn
and aspect of the physical and emotional. Here a blood transfusion has been
administered into the Shearsman veins and it's application breaths life and
vibrancy into its avant-garde vision:
What we have is another pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the
norm or the status quo. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is
considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from
postmodernism, but
for the life of me who cares what 'ism' we have; for the fact is in the
experience and the experience here is joy and satisfaction.
I also feel that in Sonnets
there is has a restless energy that is holding back ready surge into another
spectacular sequence of experimentalist arias.
Bring it on.
© James
Mc Laughlin 2010
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