"What Beauty Was": Jen Bervin's Untimely Sonnets

Abstract

Abstract:This essay examines the historical and material relationship between William Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jen Bervin's Nets (2004), an unusual edition of Shakespeare's sequence. Nets emerges from the avant-garde tradition of erasure poetics, yet it relies on and revives the temporal and material complexities of early modern textual practices. Further, it articulates its own position within literary history in distinctly Shakespearean terms, as a hinge between pre-modern and modern poetics. This essay argues that Nets both is and is not an early-modern object. It articulates a chiastic repetition of the Sonnets: repeating the past yet sustaining its difference.