A TWIST OF ROTTEN SILK

Lines from William Shakespeare’s plays are plucked out and reassembled to make new verse in these sonorous poems.

Playwright Okuni ranges through Shakespeare’s oeuvre for lesser-known snippets of dialogue, which he reshapes into sonnet-like stanzas of 11 or 12 lines. The poems play very loosely on classic Shakespearean themes, prominent among them being the travails and traps of (especially royal) power. “My Crown” features lines from Henry VI, in which a furious Queen Margaret offers a paper crown to the pretender York before killing him, and concludes with Falstaff’s jibe, “and this cushion my crown,” mocking all such foolish headgear and pretense. “Brutish” cites Richard II and Coriolanus on the insincere cant, accretion of sycophants and henchmen, and lack of integrity that attach themselves to power. “Proclamation” invokes various Henrys to skewer the theatricality and empty promises of demagogues. (“All the realm shall be in common. All things shall be in common. There shall be no money.”) “This is and is not” reprises Shakespeare’s fascination with false fronts and illusions, while “How Like a Dream” explores his notion of life as a series of actors’ roles. Echoing Lear’s plaint—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”—“This Abruption” ponders the confusion about identity and purpose that bedevils us. And the title poem—taken from a line accusing Coriolanus of shredding his oath as contemptuously as he would a ragged piece of cloth—warns of the indeterminacy and treachery of language and memory. (Okuni emphasizes this message by including versions of the poem in Arabic and Japanese, repeating the English version verbatim two pages later.)

The writing in these poems is excellent since so much of it is cribbed from Shakespeare’s rich, chewy dialogue, as in “Beware My Follower,” a lugubrious medley of lines, mainly from Macbeth and Lear—“Croak not, black angel, I have no food”—on death, hunger, wounds, and spookery. Okuni’s project is to arrange the lines to tease out—or at least obscurely hint at—patterns and cryptic meanings. But meaning is frequently a secondary concern to the sheer aural effect of Shakespeare’s verse; indeed, “Kerelybonto” consists entirely of the nonsense language—“Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo”—that Shakespeare invented for All’s Well that Ends Well. Okuni’s arrangements emphasize the rhythm, repetition, and resonance in Shakespearean lines, blenderized down, in some cases, to commonplace phrases and words. The surprising result is poetry whose hypnotic incantations supersede its sense, giving it a high-modernist feel that brings to mind the work of Gertrude Stein, as in the contradictory cadences on the enigma of the self in “I Am Hers I Am His.” (“I am hers. I am his. I am hurt. I am I. / I am in this. I am in this earthly world. / I am in this forest. I am in tune. I am left out. / I am light and heavy. I am like you they say. I am lost. / I am mad. I am meek and gentle. I am merry….I am not mad. I am not merry. / I am not of many words. I am not old. I am not sick.”) The Bard would have been impressed.

A fresh repurposing of Shakespeare’s words, musical and beguiling.

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025