NETS
130 pages
ISBN: 0-9727684-3-2
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Orders: www.uglyducklingpresse.org
Publication Date: 2004, Second Printing 2005, Third Printing 2006, Fourth Printing 2008
$10.00
READ AN EXCERPT
Nets in Web Conjunctions
PROCESS NOTE
I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the "nets" to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.
RESPONSES TO NETS
" . . . Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing."
— Paul Auster
“Nets arrived today and I have been drifting through it all day. I say "drifting" because it encourages a kind of drifting or floating attention that I associate with looking at cloud studies or with dreaming. It was strange, too, because I was just reading a book called *Veils,* a collaboration between Cixous and Derrida—and then your book of veils / nets arrived. I love the way some words/phrases seem to band together while others seem to meet or miss each other across vast distances (who knew the sonnets covered so much ground!). There is such a poignancy here—or maybe a plangency—that comes from your vision of the words as so tenuously connected. They seem to be on a long and uncertain journey. In your 21st century Shakespeare, the difficulty of communication—the possibility that souls never touch—is beautifully delineated. I have been focusing primarily on the bolded text, and yet the unbolded text is also there in my reading—sometimes as merely a sound blur, the rush in the mind of words that never find their way—articulate—into our voices. These words seem further away—in time and space—they seem to come from a dictionary almost bled white. But they exert a tremendous power—and while at first I thought they were quiet, later they seemed to be roaring. And those that arise in bold out of them almost seem to be escaping something.”
—Marta Werner
Alter Nets by Beverly Nelson
In Chicago in 2006, the artist Beverly Nelson showed me the altered version of Nets she made. She outlined the bold text, or "nets" with colored thread, connecting each page to the ones next to it. In my process note at the end of Nets, Nelson makes her own erasure by selecting words from it.
© Beverly Nelson 2006
© Beverly Nelson 2006
REVIEWS
The Believer 3:9 (November 2005). “The Lost Symphony.” (Paul Collins)
“Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.”
American Book Review 26:2 (January/February 2005). “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” (Jocelyn Emerson)
Indiana Review (Summer 2005). The Collaboration and Collage Issue. (Jennifer
Scaife)
Double
Room 5 (Winter/Spring 2005). “"Roses no such roses":
Jen Bervin's Nets and the Sonnet Tradition from Shakespeare to the Postmoderns.” (W.
Scott Howard)
Aufgabe 4 (Fall 2004). “The SonNETS of William Shakespeare by Jen
Bervin.” (Christine Hume)
“Bervin shows us ways in which we might open up pre- or over-determined uses of past structures without erasing them—making the poems all the more complex by their refusal to dislocate. Her Nets is context responsive and responsible, without the knot of lyric-envy and linguistic guilt of many contemporary poems that pillage the past for strangeness, or worse, for an energetic imagination that might impersonate the writer’s.”
Frontlist Books Seminary Coop Bookstore, University of Chicago (Summer 2004).
"The results of Bervin’s mining of the sonnets are alternatively haunting, surprising, and prescient in their reductions of the originals. While many fragments incisively refer back to the process of distilling meaning, Bervin finds words that speak to the present. Thus, in Sonnet 64, Bervin evokes the collapse of the World Trade Center, “I have seen/towers down-razed/loss loss.” Nets is a compelling, inventive, and quietly startling new work.”
Rain Taxi 34 9:2 (Summer 2004). (Noah Eli Gordon)
The Village Voice (May 28, 2004). “The Connections: A Selective History of Instant Inspiration.” (Ed Park)
Jacket 25 (February 2004). “Phillip Metres reviews Nets by Jen Bervin.” (Philip Metres)
“…Bervin’s text breaks the urns of the sonnets into their fragmented parts, thus rendering the ghostly whole wholly ghostly.”
