Composition

The sonnet is unique as a poetic form in that it is driven by transformation. The volta, or turn, is traditionally included in the second-half of a sonnet, and it is where the poem must enact a moment of change. These six poems are, in their own way, sonnets based on Chinese characters. They all contain voltas, but they themselves are also moments of change. The poems vary in their aspects and are ultimately not bound to the particularities of what we would consider queer subject matter. What they do have in common, however, is a preoccupation with strangeness, deniability, and the unease and thrill of moving between places, languages, and bodies.

The first sonnet of the sequence, 不 / No, begins in a state of negation. Queerness, as uncategorisable as it is, is perhaps easiest to define by what it is not: not normative, not confinable, not static. When we describe a thing as odd, we are saying that thing does not align with the grain of the world. With oddity also comes hesitation and denial, and as the speaker or speakers move through these sonnets, they often find themselves moving against that well-defined grain. That moment of strange friction is where change is catalysed and made concrete. It is where we locate the in-between space in which we exist, the gap between what should be and isn’t, the ‘nothing that holds what we want’.

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Programme notes by Eric Yip