INTERVIEWS
The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 56 > Reviews >Paul Hoover's Sonnet 56

Sonnet 56
Paul Hoover
Les Figues Press
ISBN Number: 1-934254-12-6

Reviewed by James Owens


          Paul Hoover’s Sonnet 56 is a provocative and smart book with a wicked sense of humor and a deep concern for the subtleties of language that manifest poetry. Like a musician composing variations on a theme, Hoover gives us fifty-six variations on, or rewrites of, William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 56.” Hoover “translates” the sonnet into different poetic forms, such as a blues version or a haiku version, or rewrites it in different generic contexts, recasting it as an answering machine message or an academic course description. The premise seems simple enough, though one suspects that with a project such as this one the simplicity might disappear once the poet actually gets down to work. Sonnet 56 lands some well-placed barbs in the pretentious sides of contemporary literary culture while also examining the perennially troubled relationship between form and content in poetry. Along the way, Hoover has also written some good poems, which is no mean consideration, though this is the kind of book that makes one stop and ask himself, “Now, just what do you mean by ‘good’ poems?”

          Some of Hoover’s tactics will be recognized by anyone familiar with the mostly French, experimental Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) school of poetics. For example, the first rewriting is a “noun + 7” version of Hoover’s source text, in which each noun is replaced by the seventh noun following it in a chosen dictionary. Shakespeare’s opening quatrain reads,

Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might.

This becomes, in Hoover’s “noun + 7” rewrite,

Sweet love game, renew thy forecaster, be it not said
Thy editor should blunter be than apple-jack,
Which but today by feeling is allayed,
Tonality sharp’ned in his former mildew.

          Not everyone will see the point of a mechanical procedure such as this, which essentially removes authorial agency from the production of the new text, but that very removal may well be the point, questioning traditional assumptions about the collusion of “author” and “reader” in the production of meaning. Other Oulipian strategies are more accommodating to readers’ expectations. Hoover’s “homosyntactic translation,” which exactly reproduces the syntax of the source with new vocabulary, begins,

Bright winter, withhold your warmth, even though
Your grass is often greener than summer,
Which recently the snow made cold,
Today it’s frozen in a lovely whiteness.

          Ian Monk, a British writer who is a member of Oulipo, contributes an introduction to Sonnet 56. Monk offers some clues about how to read Hoover’s pilgrimage through the potential poems released from Shakespeare’s lines:
[T]here is no poetry without form, and a failure to think this point through simply leads poets to adopt the prevailing forms used in their place and time while mistaking them for something natural and inevitable. [Hoover’s] bending of the original sonnet into such a variety of shapes and sizes can thus be seen as a potent reflection on the relationship between poetic form and content.
          Beyond the strict Oulipian constructs that open the book, Hoover also offers rewrites of the sonnet in many more traditional forms, encouraging a reader to ask how this changes the experience of “reading a poem.” For example, what expectations are created, and either fulfilled or disappointed, when the content of “Sonnet 56” is reworked as a villanelle (which, in Hoover’s hands, yields a beautiful poem, regardless of its critical-philosophical implications) or as an epigram, or following the typical strategies of a particular school, such as the Objectivist rewrite?

You’ve had enough love today.
Tomorrow you’ll want more.

My eyes on edge for you,
the granary half-full.

A wave splits the shore;
a welter of shore-birds scatters.

Touch is near the skin,
soon to be asunder.

Desire by the numbers—
winter all summer long.

Chance has brought me here.
Candlelight: white birches.

          Some of Hoover’s freer and more inventive rewrites of “Sonnet 56” are imbued with a subtle and penetrating humor, directed against the academic/literary establishment’s adoption of critical assumptions as if they were, in Ian Monk’s words, “natural and inevitable,” rather than the changeable and fragile constructs they actually are, just as contingent on their own historical context as the texts they dissect. His reworking of the sonnet as “Course Description” for a literature class notes that “formalist readings are not allowed. All papers and class discussions must relate to the historic collapse of dominant systems of sense making in the post-Soviet period.”

          The culture of academic Creative Writing does not escape scrutiny. “Workshop” translates Shakespeare’s poem into a free-wheeling discussion in a poetry writing class at “Skyline Community College”:
Carla: I think there’s a problem with the analogy in the second line. "Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,/ Which but today by feeding is allayed,/ Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might.” Isn’t this a kind of mixed metaphor? It uses the language of sharpening, appetite, force, and love in the same sentence.

Instructor: That’s a good observation, Carla. Is that a new outfit you’re wearing?

Carla: Yes. It’s nice of you to notice.

Instructor: Anyone else? Come on, don’t be shy. Nobody? OK, let’s think it through. We all know that love can lose its force and begin to grow dull. The edge of a knife grows dull through use and has to be sharpened again. Right? So love is like a knife in constant need of sharpening.

Randy: Love’s not a knife. That’s stupid.

Instructor: Have you ever been in love?

Randy: Don’t think so. But I always keep it sharp, if you know what I mean.

Instructor: That’s enough, Randy.
          In his own “Preface” to Sonnet 56, included as number 47 of the 56 rewrites, Hoover writes, “Nature has forms, but culture is replete with them.” Essentially, culture is form, a series of formal operations enacted on the raw content supplied by nature, just as this book is a series of new creations—some beautiful, some with a keen critical sense of their own conditions for existing—enacted on the raw material supplied by Shakespeare. Anyone who cares about this process—that is, poets and serious readers of poetry—will begin Sonnet 56 with fascination and finish it with delight.
Enter your email:

Home      Register     About Us/Staff     Submit     Links     Contributors     Advertising     Archives     Blog    Donation    Contact Us    Web Design