New Work

It’s been a while since I posted here, and a while since I have wrote anything, for various reasons. But I’ve picked up again on an old idea I had about infected texts. The basic idea is to take a Sonnet, and have it become infected by a retrovirus. Why a retrovirus? Because, in common with all viruses, they need to hijack the machinary of their host cell in order to replicate more of themselves. Retroviruses do this by using something called Reverse Transcriptase to rewrite their RNA as DNA which is then inserted into the host cell’s DNA, with the instruction to produce copies of the virus. The Sonnet is very traditional, and irrespective of it’s many variants has remained stable over time. It would be interesting to write a Sonnet sequence on idealised topics treated naively, from a realist or Platonic standpoint: The Soul, The Good, The Beautiful, infected by a retrovirus: reductionist neurobiology, moral relativism, the failure to establish objective aesthetic laws. Being a retrovirus, the infection could take the form of a radical undermining of the Host poem’s original meaning, or an ironic gloss on it. 

I wrote other notes for this project, on the back pages of a works notebook: Sonnet debris: exploded Sonnet with scattered cellular debris, as after retroviral assemblage and outbreak. A Sequence. The Sonnet hijacked, used, by something it cannot contain, and which leaves behind traces of itself, not only in the evident disruption and breakage, but fragments of it’s own idiom. What is it that the Sonnet cannot contain, master, formalise? Integrate into it’s tradition?

In the meantime, I wrote a couple of Sonnets using the genetic code for a retrovirus to partially determine the vocabulary.

Retrovial Sonnets

 1.