Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Tell us how you entered that phonic space when you wrote Sonnet’s Shakespeare and what kind of conversations were you having with Shakespeare and with yourself when you began the book?
SONNET L'ABBÉ
The project itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean. And at the time there were conversations about appropriative poets where there were specific instances of pretty shady power dynamics around certain poets taking certain texts and presenting them as their own and saying, "This is just an appropriative poetics move, or I'm using the text simply as material and putting my name on it.
So those appropriative poetic conversations happening, and then people doing erasure poetries by blocking out and deleting were really interesting to me. And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text.
All of the critical writing was quite supportive of using the text as basically like marble, that you were carving or something like that. Just taking the poet's role as very creative, even though they were in effect destroying an original text.
So with all of that, I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian and in rooms where, classrooms where, playgrounds where, churches where, malls where certain signifiers of difference would make fitting in harder.
One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?
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One of the first songs that I wrote was - I was asked to write poetry for a little show that was Poets Respond to Music. And we were given a Pretenders album and my song was Thumbelina, and so I said, "Well, how about I respond with a song instead of a poem?" And so I wrote this song. And making decisions that are about vowel sounds and repetition was new to me because whenever I write poetry, I still do read it aloud to listen to how it sounds, but it's not quite the same as composing the sound in the moment.
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You know, when we were in undergrad, gender or orientation around being bi or straight or gay was what we felt empowered to explore. And that even as a person who at that point was like, Okay, I'm a girl and find myself desiring people with penises, that means I must be straight.
Right? I wouldn't have questioned anything other than like, Well, if I have this body, and I desire that kind of body, then I am straight, but in undergrad you could still make out with a girl and be like, I'm just experimenting, but now it seems to me that the opportunity to ask oneself about one's own gender is there. And the more I learned about fluidity, the more I thought about my own relationship to the pronouns that I've grown up with, the more I was like, I think that these other pronouns really more accurately express how I've lived most of my life. So they feels deeply right for me now.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Abigail Gray with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Abigail Gray. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.
The songs by Sonnet L’Abbé appearing in this episode Fair Fairy Tale, and Vanilla are recordings of unreleased songs, specifically prepared for this podcast.
