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Illennium

Illennium is a sequence of 72 cut-up sonnets modelled on Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (1964), which was analysed in detail over several months and its component textual parts colour-coded. My framework was drawn from sociological writings on shame, primarily ‘Shame as the Master Emotion of Everyday Life’ by Thomas J. Scheff, but also those by Kohut, Sapir and Goffman. Within it, the role(s) of shame, embarrassment and guilt in a specific short-lived relationship, and in the tradition of writing love poetry, were explored. A set of partly-completed through-written sonnets not included in the series but lurking behind it provide recurring leitmotifs. Interwoven with these, and sampled by aleatory methods, are Laforgue’s Dernier Vers, Rimbaud’s Illuminations and a poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym; Keats’s letters and poems, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Enid Blyton; other less canonical works, including a joke organ donor card and Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Punch and Judy. In keeping with the orientation of the New York School poets, works by local visual artists (Rhona Tooze, Glenys Cour, Keith Bayliss) also provided recurring touchstones, as did more obvious refrain-devices (e.g. deaths of the famous / weather events during the year 2000). The poem reflects its sick (the ‘ill’ of the title) subject’s concern with a spectrum of manifestations of shame, from abjection to an empowering blushing brazenness, as well as the shaming difficulty of using the lyric ‘I’ in post-Romantic. To what extent is embarrassment an egotism which is simply out of its depth? Material is both flaunted and concealed or encrypted (proper names and events are split, incorporated, anagrammatized; thus, ‘John’ split as ‘Jo’ and ‘hnhnhn’, an unvocalized noise of arousal). There are points where the speaker is presented as ashamed at being ashamed; this may trap him in it, or lead the shame-rage spiral’ that leads further towards abjection.