Icon or Manhole

In The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), Trevor Ketner rearranges the raw material of William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets into a collection readily attuned to the queer erotic vocabulary of the 21st century. Each line of Ketner’s 14-line poems (sonnets?) is an idiosyncratic combination of the letters of Shakespeare’s original. The Wild Hunt Divinations joins a tradition that includes Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics (2005) and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (2012), edited by Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault, with the additional gambit of sustaining its procedural conceit for the entirety of Shakespeare’s corpus. In the book’s concluding “Notes,” Ketner explains, “Using the line as the unit of meaning, the rule I set was to anagram line by line so each line of the divination has all the same letters as the corresponding line in the Shakespearean sonnet.” Ketner subtitles the collection “a grimoire,” the magical connotations of which remain suggestive if unexplored, but the emphasis on historicity resonates throughout. Much like the practices of scrying, tasseography, or aeromancy, the words open the present to the past (and possibly a future), but it all feels rather whimsical without a protagonist to lend the story a sense of purpose. In the case of The Wild Hunt Divinations, the protagonist might not be a character—and certainly not a coherent lyrical subject—but form itself.

For poets, the notion of form often summons a list of given structures, each with its own prescribed constraints and features: the end words of sestinas repeat in a specific pattern, sonnets tend to turn, haikus suggest the seasons. On the other hand, poets are also provoked by the projectivist aphorism that Charles Olson attributed to Robert Creeley: “Form is never more than extension of content.” This split is simple and messy at once, and, as passionately debated as this binary is, it doesn’t reflect the broader scholarly conversation around form that has taken place over the past decade. Ramzi Fawaz’s Queer Forms (2022), for example, is guided by a very different conception of form. Fawaz defines the word as

the coalescence of an apprehensible material shape, including the molding or crafting of its substance, and the imaginative reconstruction of that shape in the mind’s eye. This involves the mental process of forming a picture of something in one’s consciousness and imbuing it with conceptual and affective meaning.

In Queer Forms, Fawaz aims to connect cultural forms to social and political forms, so such a malleable (and creative) definition feels necessary and apt for his project to succeed. Form, in Fawaz’s usage, is more akin to iteration, instantiation, or substantiation: “Although aesthetic forms give provisional order or structure to identities, experiences, bodies, or affects, their primary purpose is not to delimit or restrict the phenomena they represent but provide an adaptable container for meaning-making.” Fawaz stresses the “provisional” nature of forms; they flash up in an instant, they mutate, they articulate culture and politics, if only for a moment. And though Fawaz’s Queer Forms does not include a discussion of poetry—somewhat surprising given its interest in the queer social movements and literature of the 1970s—his definition of queer forms feels tailor-made for Ketner’s poetics: language that is provisional, temporary, iterative.

The Wild Hunt Divinations plays on Shakespeare’s sonnets in a way that is determinedly historical because of the particular queer language that informs them, and at least briefly contrasting the book with Shakespeare’s sonnets is worthwhile if only to better grasp the particularity of Ketner’s reformulations. Let’s start at the beginning, with Shakespeare’s first sonnet, which provides a clear theme for what follows:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory

Plot is unnecessary to appreciate the sonnets’ elegance, although they are purposive in their attempt to persuade the beloved to produce an heir. For modern readers, this is a rather queer setup: one man floridly flattering another in an attempt to convince him to conceive a child with a woman who is mostly hidden away. This triangulation exemplified queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of homosocial desire in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), an important touchstone for Ketner’s collection. Of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which she reads as a kind of novel of patriarchal manners, Sedgwick writes, “On the whole, the project of instilling in the fair youth a socialized, heterosexual identity is conducted firmly under the aspect of male relationships and solicitations. If any one attitude toward women is presumed in the youth, it is indifference, or perhaps active repulsion. …” Though Shakespeare’s sonnets have been adopted by readers and poets as a gay or queer text—see Oscar Wilde, André Gide, W.H. Auden, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—Sedgwick cautions that such recuperation, if it can be called that, is fraught at best and doing so may even amount to trafficking in the same misogynistic indifference or repulsion being taught to the beloved.

By contrast, Ketner’s poems embrace the feminine, queer, nonbinary, and libidinal. Let’s look at the first poem in the collection—which borrows its title from the first of Shakespeare’s sonnets—“[From fairest creatures we desire increase,]”—as an example:

recites desire: runic frame / seas of trees—raw
bead rhymes their teeth—bone tug, ivy tear—
chamber he beauteously / dress it tepid
to see they shimmer, hiding her / ram rib
tits—heterocountry hag / birchwood tune bent
weightless—us: fun filth / flat amethyst battlefields—
i am manic, naked, answerable—feign hue
(too yellow cyst / housefly thefts)—tree heft
warms heart—wrathful thorn neons to dot the
god or ash—tin daughter, lend any ply
bow; bend it to hunt—(hit)—new, synthetic ruin—.
(sung) a drinking stag wreathed in tender calm—
brittle pewter, holy stone, i gold shut
and throw these teeth—a duet—gravel—boyed.

In this poem, as with The Wild Hunt Divinations generally, the lyric intensity of address and the novelistic character of the sonnets fall away as Ketner’s anagramming dissolves sense. Sense is shaped (restored?), however, through the introduction of additional punctuation marks and italics. This is Shakespeare in Emily Dickinson drag by way of Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups. The lexical emphasis on the fleshy, embodied, sexually alluring, and genderqueer suggests a disintegration of the homosocial triangulation that Sedgwick described so that new gendered and sexual possibilities may emerge. Ketner’s project brings to the surface a renegade queerness that was (apparently) always available through the matter of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If Shakespeare had arranged the letters differently, we might have read the opening couplet of “Sonnet 91” as “i riot sleek—loins met (rhythm)—girlish, i boner / (berried stem)—i wet shoe—i fetish—icon or manhole—”.

One way to appreciate Ketner’s achievement is as an unabashed expression of what had always been latent within Shakespeare’s sonnets: their “true” homosexual content—the possibility of giving language to “the love that dare not speak its name” between Shakespeare and … the Earl of Southampton? Christopher Marlowe? Gossip and speculation about Shakespeare’s sexuality continues: Rene Weis’s 2007 biography Shakespeare Unbound is just one example. This controversy animated a number of conversations about reclaiming a gay and lesbian canon in the wake of gay liberation, culminating in a proliferation of anthologies such as Stephen Coote’s The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983), which included 15 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Such a de-closeting of the sonnets, Sedgwick reminds us, belongs to a practice of reading Shakespeare’s poems ahistorically, and Ketner’s collection opens with an epigraph from Between Men:

The Sonnets are different from Leaves of Grass in that their popularization, never mind their popularization as homosexual documents, did not occur until centuries had detached them from their original social, erotic, and narrative contexts. The tradition of the Sonnets is the tradition of reading them plucked from history and, indeed, from factual grounding.

In other words, a reading of the sonnets that insists on their “true” theme of homosexuality reveals more about readers (and their desire for history) than the text at hand. However, rather than reassert such a criticism of naïve readership of homosexuality, Ketner seems more interested in the afterlife of the historical desire to read the sonnets as queer texts. The Wild Hunt Divinations participates in the bad tradition of reading the sonnets, false and perverse as that may be.

Why participate in this tradition? This is an abiding question for Ketner’s poetics, carried over from their 2021 collection, [WHITE], which incorporated assemblage, (re)combination, and juxtaposition. In that book, Ketner brought together two projects: one inspired by a retrospective of the mid-century American painter Robert Rauschenberg at the Museum of Modern Art in 2017 and another that resignifies the major arcana of the tarot through poetical autobiography. True, it’s not always clear where on the ledger to situate individual poems, but the book requires the semblance of a binary (or several). Possible schemes might include the life of the artist versus the life of the poet, the avant-garde versus the socially acceptable lyric, the monumentality and portentousness of the the Tower versus the quotidian affairs of regular life: “Through the north window of the café, across / the parking lot of the laundromat, there’s a building, / four stories, stripped of siding, windows wrapped in plastic.” Bracketing [WHITE]’s disappointingly shallow interest in “how we think of whiteness in America,” as the book’s jacket copy states—many other collections have done this more powerfully, including Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks (1997), C.D. Wright’s One With Others (2010), and Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction (2018)—it’s noteworthy that both [WHITE] and The Wild Hunt Divinations focus on and remake a canonical male artist who has been central to the task of developing a gay artistic/literary lineage.

Returning to Ramzi Fawaz’s Queer Forms, briefly, readers might say that Ketner’s poetry reminds them of the revolutionary potential of earlier forms—insisting on the queer character of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Rauschenberg’s co-invention of postwar modernism as a kind of liberatory practice. Ketner’s poetics is a flex of imagination, which Fawaz casts as a practice that can be developed: “a cognitive faculty that enables people to project existing categories, concepts, identities, or worldviews into unfamiliar arenas of experience, thereby enabling the generation of new figures for thought.”

Ketner’s books are not overtly political: no slogans, no 20 yards of linen, no utopia. Instead, their poetry registers a certain kind of strain on contemporary sexual politics; Ketner recalls an older queer interest in Shakespeare in an era that has seen, in the legislatures of 44 states in 2023 alone, the grave failure of earlier sexual politics to advocate for and protect the lives of people marginalized by gender and sexual norms. Scott Branson’s recent essay "Gay Liberation Failed,” published in the Baffler, could prove a useful complement to Ketner’s overall project. Branson’s history of failure looks to the parallel development of gay liberation and the women’s movement:

In a sleight of hand, both movements ended up chasing the trappings of traditional gender—a separation of sexes that actually works quite well for the state. [Guy] Hocquenghem notes that the political longevity of both the gay and women’s movement, in the United States in particular, arises from their claim to the right to privacy, which, as Hocquenghem writes, ‘tends to become an immense system of compensations between subgroups, defined by the risks that they run and the ones they make others risk.’ In other words, through these movements’ ultimate willingness to broker with the sources of power for inclusion, we gain a liberalization of sexuality in deed—and a piecemeal extension of the law’s protection to specific groups defined by the extralegal norms of race, gender, class, migrant status, etc. The laws become inclusive of this new protected group, who get to model themselves on the norms of the white bourgeois family, while the trans woman, the folle or effeminate man, sex workers, other criminals, the unhoused, and pederasts are pushed further to the margins.

Echoing Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Brason recounts, again and again, how queer people—especially those historically excluded from the rights-based gains of gay liberation and the women’s movement—have been attacked in the name of “the children,” who must be protected from the contagion of queerness. But, as Branson underscores, the purported concern for children masks the true struggle animating anti-queer violence: “consolidating state control along the line of property rights” and, in this case, the control of children through a definition of their autonomy.

If it seems as though we have traveled far from Ketner’s poetics, it would be prudent to remind ourselves of Ketner’s relationship to the child at the center of Branson’s account. More obviously, in [WHITE], Ketner is the child responding to queerness, as in the poem “6—The Lovers”:

I want to learn
how to give you your injections, measured hand
 
helping to balance the body with what dwells
inside the body—soon hair, definition
in back muscles and arms. I mean to say
 
I can’t wait to continue together, naked,
having sex everywhere. We’ll always be poor;
smoke, mountain, angel above it all.

Queerness is an education in practice and time. [WHITE] foregrounds this education through a similar/simultaneous biography of the major arcana and Rauschenberg. The fool and the artist grow into the allowance that they “have at least four selves,” so that multiplicity, contrast, and transness are, paradoxically, their measure. Rauschenberg, meanwhile, leaves readers with a dualism: accepting the world as it is (“I finally decided to just leave him alone, / let him simply stand there elegantly in a field.”), he nevertheless yearns for an unachievable ideal (DRAW A RECTANGLE IN THE AIR AS / HIGH AS YOU CAN REACH).

The Wild Hunt Divinations, by contrast, is decidedly impersonal, relying less on a biographical account of the artist or an autobiography of the speaker. Modernists such as T.S. Eliot championed impersonality, as in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a vexing charge for later writers interested in asserting personal experience as a way of politicizing structural inequities. Procedure-based poetics, such as Ketner’s anagramming, make a mess of the personal/impersonal distinction—at once participating in the ruse of objectivity (producing poems much like an algebraic function) while necessarily involving a number of individual decisions about the execution and contextualization of the procedure that produced their poems. (The ideal of a procedure-based poetics remains, much like Rauschenberg’s “RECTANGLE IN THE AIR,” a figure of unattainable desire.) In the case of The Wild Hunt Divinations, Ketner was required to make innumerable choices about how to transform Shakespeare’s sonnets. In a supplemental note available on their website, Ketner again explains the process:

After I entered a line from Shakespeare’s sonnet into the anagrammer, the tool would present me with a group of words, a lexical pool, and I would then select words I was interested in or that held heat or resonance with my themes. After I selected a word, the anagramming tool would refresh and show me a new list of available words based on my previous selection(s). I’d then select the next word and the next and so on and so on, deleting and shaping until all letters had been used and I was left with a line I was pleased with.

Ketner’s pleasure dictated the final form of these poems, each of which was guided by a personal sense of resonance, grammar, beauty, and satisfaction. There is no explicit politics to The Wild Hunt Divinations, except—and this, Ketner suggests, is a powerful exception—the politics of molding, expressing, asserting, and publicizing queer desire.

Still, The Wild Hunt Divinations is most interesting to consider off the page: as a gargantuan procedural challenge, as a modest intervention in the history of constraint-based poetics, as another entry in the (queer) reconsideration of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the canon of Western literature. The book is massive—more than a gross of poems—and the results of Ketner’s anagramming can feel purposeless, even tedious, without the novelistic structure or at least the narrativity of Shakespeare’s originals. I feel as though the libidinal excess of these poems should excite me, but the sheer eroticism doesn’t really inspire. Actually, the repetitive, unrelenting sexiness of the poetry flattens what is special about this collection, and even “non-sexy” words such as amethyst are repurposed several (19!) times throughout the collection.

Off the page, politicians and pundits across the country target the most vulnerable members of the queer community—drag performers and trans folks. The word eradicated has been used, anagrammed out of the transphobic ether surrounding us. So many of us are terrified, so many are concerned for our friends. Do we turn to poetry, when poems prove to be a weak shield against fascism? They may nevertheless have something to teach us about what we’re capable of and where we’ve been. This is what Ramzi Fawaz’s Queer Forms proposes and what Ketner’s The Wild Hunt Divinations vaguely gestures at: there are models, flawed and historically contingent as they may be, of forms of bashing back. Queerness is not to be praised for only (or merely) denaturing identity but also for its public shows of resistance—specific, concrete, available for repurposing in the present. Fawaz writes, “Forms establish the conditions for something new to appear in the world, including previously unfathomable expressions and interpretations of gender and sexual being while cultivating mutual understanding about these categories’ extraordinary heterogeneity.” In defense of our lives, and the lives around us, we do have poetry: a record of unfathomable expression.