Hyperlinks and Candy Bars

The "essays" of Coolidge and Stein seem wed in their distinction from the others, but both are distinct in different ways--and really, all the pieces attempt to whip up some sort of distinctive voice. So much for that idea. But Stein's and Coolidge's essays come closest--for me--to the idea of poetics as a distinct genre. Both engage in circumnavigation that implodes their ability to "prove something" but ratchets up their intrigue, their generosity toward tangential interpretations. All caramel, no nougat, etc. Maybe caramel is the wrong word. All hyperlinks, no nougat. A candy bar made of hyperlinks and chocolate.

Stein does this through her peculiarly prescriptive and self-conscious style, her attempts to subvert style and rewire style. I mean, most everybody that writes about her apes or pays homage to that voice of hers. It's a dance. People want to copy it. Most communicated are the gyrations; for all the information she delivers, she most delivers a delivery. I don't mean to say she doesn't throw out seven million brain needles. She says: "When I first began writing, I felt that writing should go on." She talks about question marks and colons. About dogs and paragraphs. Breath, the intensity of complication, and French trains. Her wry skewering of gender-fried writerly roles ("to please a young man"). Stein lacks not for content. But discussion of her ideas in class returned again and again to the blunt charm of reading her writing, the performance of its ongoing self-construction. Or, as she notes: "As I said Henry James in his later writing had had a dim feeling that this was what he knew he should do." This sentence dallies, discovers and spins a pattern--"had had" + "that this" + "was what"--as though language were a body for both gesture and gyration, as if in the middle of moving your hand down a list of budget items in the PowerPoint presentation, you jittered your wrist a little in some robot dance move. But you had planned it all in advance.

And likewise with Coolidge, though in the opposite fashion. Given the lecture format, Coolidge can't sculpt or stylize to Stein's degree. But he too must perform: wire the rigging of his brain to accommodate the audience--sniffling, scraping shoes, yawning--route his points on language through a "hey you" sort of show. Without this format, I doubt we would have ever had such direct and revolutionary statement as "I don't think there is one word." That is not a statement designed for writing; that's a statement designed to make an audience sit up. The proverbial jolt, but also chucking himself into a corner so he can talk his way out of it: "just what the hell does he mean by that?" When he talks about Beckett on Page 158, he first does the boring Beckett quote, but then he digs under the Grey Poupon veneer of that quote to wiggle the audience by the earlashes, recapture them:

"'To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.' The mess. The mess. And we're in a mess now. Look at--we're packed in here, for one thing. I mean, we have fifteen kind of electric toothbrushes."

To me, this speech chunk is very similar to how one might construct a poem. I might be intrigued by an idea, by an abstract, floating, gauzy thing--something like the impersonality of suburban sprawl, California ranch houses (see: Coolidge's new poem "Mr. Hush is Here" in his new [chap]book from Fewer and Further Press: "Counting on Planet Zero"). But I can't just smoke my pipe and pomp up that idea for all to see. First, there is:

The hey. The hey. And we are the hey. Look at us--directly addressing the audience, for to remember where they are. I mean, (then) some crazy laugh line.

To examine that process and recognize how much that resembles how I treat the relationship between a poem and its audience makes me very self-conscious--or even more self-conscious than I already was. At some point, I hope, this will turn inside out and I will never be self-conscious again. Instead, I will treat myself like a strange but jovial outsider, and I will offer myself mocha Mates and oatmeal raisin cookies. We will laugh and clap each others' backs a lot and go "I know! I don't understand that either." Maybe they will commit me to Parkview, like the Porter Wagoner song. And in that famous Nashville mental institution I will develop an utterly singular performative poetics style that will guarantee me a decent VH1 special. My own candy bar?