Questions/Examples

Queer Paragraphs
questions and examples in poetics
by Lonely Christopher


William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon… No/Yes

The Ambiguities. What is a queer poetics? Alice Toklas does not answer. “In that case, what is the question?” That is queer poetics. This paradigm is architected on a foundational ambiguity. Example: Amy King writes herself out of taxonomy as introduction to her queer poetics. She begins, “I do not…” A negative impulse pushes the question farther and further: outside. This is an adventure in negotiating away from taxonomy. The engine of negative capability. Amy King writes about what doesn’t define her: “Such frames, these houses, do not hold, do not truly shelter nor constrain, do not even do good work as metaphor for the storehouse of my body, my language as system.” The sign vehicle crashes into a telephone pole. Ryan Doyle May promises: “We will burn definition’s home.” Queer poetics is a measurement of measurement’s failures, the unanswered question: a messy celebration of the unanswerable. Where do we put this? Gertrude Stein: “Next to vast which is which it is.” Is it? No/yes --- it is and isn’t.

A Thematic. Queer poetics doesn’t mean entirely in earnest, it’s an amorphous rubric, no incumbent constitutionality. That is, it is not shaped by a coherent/canonized value system that’s purposed ideologically against a heteronormative poetic tradition. A queer poetics isn’t implicitly correlative to any particular politics and/or politic responsibilities and/or praxis. It should exist outside the power structure that contains that discourse, but become accessible by readerly politicized positions. Example: a queer poetry is not the gay poetry. And yes it can be, but the latter has to solicit the former and only borrow it like a costume. That’s why there’s a lack of representative anthologies of queer writing: editors grasp out for queer and sculpt the material snatched from the far corners of definition into a shape conditioned by hegemonic discourses. This problem is recognized by CAConrad thus: “How queer was the poet?” The queerness isn’t in the poetry, the poetry’s in the queerness. And furthermore: “Queer poets are poets who need to create the best possible poems they have to offer, and need to do so without the policing of how many queer items appear in a poem to be considered queer. The fact that you are a poet who is queer is enough. The experience your body has carried into time will create the poem. And the experience of being queer WILL be in the poem, whether it's automatically recognizable or not.”

The Complications. Restatement: queer poetics is not predicated upon a culture; culture is differently articulated through the processes of a (descriptive) queer grammar. Amy King, here again, posits a behavior: “In its mercurial condition, queer poetry may throw a wrench in the cogs of the white male heterosexual default setting.” This, however, arrives with the caveat: “A queer poetry may offer a few common features [but] there is no single identifiable trait that enables the culture-at-large to recognize, absorb, contain, and imprison it.” Stein instructs us: the change of color likely, the difference prepared, and sugar is not a vegetable. Queerness haunts the machine, articulating differences. We don’t know what it means totally but we think it’s without totality. Stein: “Do you know by what means rockets signal pleasure pain and noise and union, do you know by what means a rock is freed when it is not held too tightly held in the hand.” The value generation of normative poetics functions like a statement with an empty subject: It is.. In this example, the verb is linguistically considered “avalent,” but that’s a misnomer insofar as the directness of the statement operates as the valent curtain over a surface of its essential problem (“it” also isn’t); a valence, in other words, is a length of decorative drapery attached to a frame in order to screen the structure or space beneath it. Queerness introduces existential arguments that complicate the conceptual valency of the definable/singular --- queerness pushes the structure centrifugally in other territories.

A Form. How do queer “values” form and operate? An opera: “He asked as if that made a difference.” Burroughs wanted to discover what was not human, instead of asking after definition, in his treatment of what we are and why we do what we do to each other. The monster tells the truth because of the difference, the difference makes it monstrous. The operational form of queerness works as difference, as a difference engine, processing values analytically, chewing up judgments. That’s an asking of questions as if that makes a difference. The grammar of a queer poetics is an anti-lesson in morphology. The site of an application of queer grammar becomes a living difference. When a queer poetics, in its liquidity, pours into an ideological shape --- the result doesn’t re-form queerness, it queers the form. Amy King writes: “A queer poetics is not only about what is but is equally about what is not. We live in relation to each other, regardless of our best efforts to divorce and secede. The human species is a community that communes even beyond its species. We do so violently, sometimes kindly and in multiple capacities.” The form isn’t divorced from the relationship --- the relationship as a question of differences. Photographer Richard Avedon’s motto: The No forces me into the Yes. “I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and what happens between us.” Queerness reads the naked surface of form, what’s underneath the drape of it is, and examples the structures that define by negative process. Andy Warhol isn’t dead.

The Distinctions. Bourdieu: “I believe it is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions.” Queer poetry is the rhizome lurking within the normative order. The monster attacking an institutional address, &c. The outlaw mode troubling the dominant definition: quietly infecting the postures of the cultural logic that states “it is” --- with problems, multiplicities of “it is this and it is not and/or this is not this this and/or it is this and this is not not this and/or it is not this not this and this is this and not it and/or this is it… not…” The value will explode and flower. Queerness hacks the cultural code with difference. “Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make[.]” Queer poetry happens in the negative space of the distinctions. Queer poetry is not verse by heterosexuals. Nor is it fundamentally verse by homosexuals, its chief practitioners. Its subject is subjectivity; its author is a performance artist and a scientist writing out emotional math in the theater of meaning. “There is no there there,” an absent voice rises. Amy King responds the we know “that there is no there there, there is only now and then now, there is no permanence, and that knowledge encourages the exploration of what now really is beyond the false fences of security, of a center, a normal, for higher dreams and greater privileges that can be shared between us, among us, in our constant becoming, however fleeting, however impossible […]” Queer poetry is questions and examples, is a problematic’s florescence. There: there is a question/problem floating in space, waiting to become what isn’t what is, waiting to grow into a black hole of others’ actualization[s]. “The result is that they know the difference between instead and instead and made and made and said and said. / The result is that they might be as very well two and as soon three and to be sure, four and which is why they might not be,” quoth Stein again. There is no queer history that’s not the history of disturbing our convenient and singular drapes. The anachronistic possibilities of queer poetics are hidden like land minds across our retrospection: ahistorical resonances waiting to blow up the surface area of meaning’s government. We attempt to write/inscribe queer poetry onto the ideological domain of a systemic totalization --- regardless of normative context, which we understand as a suppressive agent, we interrupt again and again the scripted conversation and hold up a dark funhouse mirror to institutionalized perspectives. A sonnet by Shakespeare is a queer threat if the reader makes the distinctions. The queer library hasn’t been written yet, happens everywhere, and is not going to be finished, ever.

A Love.
“I do love roses and carnations. / A mistake […] / I call it something religious. You mean beautiful. I do not know that […]” All of this is a neologism meaning and not meaning love; love becoming its other, poetry’s description[s] blurring, this the flow of argot pushing and shoving the way “it is” out of itself, this a version of how queerness means not finally but now: when we pull back the decorative drapery obscuring this subject, this essay, and this terminally unfinished sentence […]


The Sources. The Ambiguities: Gertrude Stein’s last conversation reconfigured; “The What Else of Queer Poetry” by Amy King (Text); The Anatomy of Gray by Ryan Doyle May; “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein. A Thematic: “What’s a Queer Poem?” by CAConrad (Text). The Complications: Ibid by Amy King; paraphrased from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein; “An Instant Answer” by Gertrude Stein; “Valence” definition paraphrased from the Oxford American Dictionary. A Form: “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Gertrude Stein; Ibid. by Amy King; Richard Avedon interview, source unidentified (found here). The Distinctions: “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste” by Pierre Bourdieu; Ibid by Bourdieu; Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein; Ibid by Amy King; “Patriarchal Poetry” (again) by Gertrude Stein. A Love: quote re-contextualized from “Lifting Belly” by Gertrude Stein. Further Reading: Amy King’s essay (online) “The What Else of Queer Poetry,” excerpted here generously and probably beyond recognized allowance, is an intelligent treatment of the liberatory indeterminacy of queer poetics qua general term (the above was fully inspired/provoked by her text); see also: “Patriarchal Poetry” by Gertrude Stein.

Sentimentalist's Complaint

Adventures in Subway Reading
The Nostalgia of Printed Matter vs. the Ambiguity of Digitized Text
by Lonely Christopher

Here follows an anecdotal observation from a member of Gotham’s minor literati. I, amateur book detective (or snoop), am noticing more commuters cradling an ebook reader, usually the Kindle, on the subway. It’s obvious the format of digital readers (ereaders? whatever) is insidiously, for us who can’t sleep of nights over it, maturing out of a novelty stage and entering the general usage. This is confusing and scary for most writers and many readers for a rainbow of silly and serious reasons. The immediate loss I notice here has to do with my own intrusive spying on the leisure activities of strangers. Who doesn’t enjoy scoping out what a fellow passenger is reading on the train? Today, on a platform, I caught a malnourished brain in possession of a hardcover copy of one of the books Chuck Palahniuk wrote after I fully stopped paying attention to what he publishes every year. Yesterday, a twee, graying man was perusing a Modern Library edition I went to comic lengths to identify while hanging over him on the 1 Uptown (I blame my eyesight for the failure). These little invasions are a dynamic element of traveling with fellow readers; they’re causes for casual judgments and unrealized communions.

In remembrance of recently deceased champion of messianic neurotics, Mr. Salinger, I recently returned to a volume of his for comfort and enrichment (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction); reading the famous little white book, with is rainbow band in the upper left corner of the cover, caused me to become extremely self-aware on the subway. His books all look alike, which recalls the ereader problem, but at least the title is printed clearly on cover and spine --- preventing the mistaken assumption that I was actually reading, god forbid, Catcher in the Rye. Still, was somebody judging me from a casual remove? Should I have rather kept my guiltily sentimental choice in reading material safely concealed in the privacy of my room? I worried anxiously some grad student was frowning at the superficiality, the downright phoniness, of picking up an author in the wake of his death --- let alone one so accessible and beloved by uncritical teenagers. I would faint, nay die, from embarrassment if I saw her, my auditor, sternly grasping an edition of Being and Time, peering over the margins and tsking me. I made sure the next tome I brandished publically in transit was Faust. Instead of anxiety I felt a certain elitist pride (which almost distracted me from my dislike of Walter Arndt’s limp translation).

Regardless! this experience was and remains a precious one, in my “book,” no matter the circumstance. It’s frustrating to witness a fellow rider openly reading some text when the nature of said text is rendered unrecognizable from being presented in the uniformly drab format of an ereader --- that is, printed, in self-erasing digital ink, across the pale face of a tablet’s screen (so that woman over there might be reading Dan Brown or Proust, for all I know). There are some, certainly, who must find it convenient to dock a library within a lightweight plastic container; undoubtedly, the girth of plenty books prevents easy subway perusal. It’s less of a strain to bring with you this week’s New Yorker than The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. (Withal, I admit, there’s a sound argument against the efficacy of trying to concentrate on serious literature in the screechy, bumpy environment of a train barreling though a tunnel --- but I’ve certainly tried lugging giant collected editions of difficult or subtle writers on subterranean trips, sans regret. I read most of Moby-Dick underground, actually.) The fact is: weighing your bag with unwieldy books for a literary schlep remains, more than an impractical failure of the form/function model, a sentimental matter of tradition threatened by new technology.

Every once in a while I spot a hipster fifteen pages into Infinite Jest (another hefty but rewarding lump to transport); an unlikely subject, say a security guard, reading Flaubert in the original; once even, at Carroll Street, I cringed at a man in a hunting jacket with his face smashed into that memoir Sarah Palin did with a ghostwriter. Noticing these things becomes a sort of hobby, vacation, or at least a diversion from the torturous conditions of the metropolitan subway system. It doesn’t mean anything, and nothing comes of it, but it’ll be missed when it’s gone. Anyway, I will miss it already, mourn it. It’s a dynamic aspect of the otherwise overwhelmingly unpleasant (not mention potentially dangerous) experience of riding with the MTA.

While mostly a passive activity, the potential for accidental interaction or exchange lurks like a quiet promise. I read in public as frequently as I watch public readers; the idea that this might provoke a conversation with a stranger is a small amusement. I’m afraid in my experience this almost never happens, though. The major exception was, once on the Chinatown bus to Philadelphia, I noticed the passenger seated next to me had a highlighted coursepack, with copied pages from Gender Trouble, open in her lap. “Ah!” I noted, pleased, “Butler!” She was a grad student at U Penn, it turned out. We proceeded to have a conversation about theory, with little asides gossiping about academia, which made the bus trip pass much quicker than usual. The other examples I can think of weren’t as significant, but here they are. Once, in a public space, a portly man with a cane interrupted a friend and me, busy studying copies of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, to tell us that we ought not over-analyze that classic work of modernism --- in fact, he informed us, we needn’t read the novel at all: a long walk on a foggy June morning produces the same result. The final episode actually happened on the subway and is again related to Joyce. I was traveling on the G to Greenpoint, drunk as hell to meet some friends, and becoming extremely excited while rereading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In my glee, I turned to the elderly Polish lady sitting next to me --- and slurred something at her that I’m sure I thought was entirely profound re Joyce’s story. The woman reacted with alarm and changed seats. I’m not sure if that counts.

I’m usually too much a coward to yell across the car at somebody interesting reading something I recognize and am enthusiastic about. Maybe that’s a socialized behavior that keeps me from the misconduct of, for recent instance, the toothless man I gravely witnessed making single female passengers on the F train maximally uncomfortable by swaying directly over them and pointing a lecherous grin into their laps. Generally, fellow passengers revert to the survival mechanism of outwardly ignoring their surroundings while remaining surreptitiously vigilant. This retards possible interaction between an unrecognized fellowship of readers, it’s true. I have a particular, wholly unrealized, fantasy about bonding with a stranger over subway reading material that I’ll share forthwith. I daydream about noticing, on the Manhattan-bound C, a cute boy my age totally engrossed in a dog-eared copy of something by Gertrude Stein (Three Lives, sure, but I would go gaga if it were The Making of Americans). It would remind me of how I years ago discovered Stein while standing in the C train on my way to the Museum of Natural History. I opened a library copy of Tender Buttons and presently missed my stop, such was my amazement at her language. In this boy-watching scenario, I’m also reading something intelligent --- perhaps re-familiarizing myself Barthes’ S/Z, say. The coincidence would be too attractive to shrug off. I would boldly approach the boy with Stein in his lap and, cradling my own book like a purse, inform him how dearly I love Gertrude. He’d respond in kind and supplement his appreciation with an insightful mini-lecture on repetition and substance. We’d forget our initial destinations and disembark around Central Park. After a long, engaging colloquy we’d decide to move to Paris and get married. Only I hear the trains don’t run all night there.

I suspect I am of the final generation that shall retain any nostalgia for the book as singular object. When negotiating a publishing contract recently, I had to parse the implications of “digital rights” vis-à-vis the distribution of my own book. My message to the publisher was that there is no problem with selling my title in digital form (not that I had a choice) --- but, as far as the author is concerned, the book should fundamentally be defined by its physical incarnation. Maybe that’s old fashioned. There’s just something too suspiciously amorphous about digital reading at the moment --- as if a book, once digitized, disappears ghost-like into its technology. For a reader, especially a techno-savvy one, the idea that a digital book never goes out of print is a revelation: permanent access to texts in a state of de-commoditized anti-materiality! Reconciling that formlessness for authors is a different story. Plus, who will ever catch somebody on the subway smiling down into a book you wrote when it’s reconfigured as a bunch of constantly-erased letters washing over a little gray screen? The personality of the book as object is being replaced by the utilitarian absence of the digital situation. This is not a polemic on the subject, but a stupid sentimentalist’s complaint. I’ve tried to divine the title of a text being read by a commuter holding a Nook or Kindle: it’s nearly impossible without mutant eyesight, which I lack, or ingloriously huffing down the reader’s neck and squinting invasively at her device --- and that probably constitutes sexual assault, which is a serious crime.

Here Come the Consequences

Vacuum Poetics, a comedy
by Lonely Christopher



The poet’s problem is meaning. Poetry doesn’t mean anything. How does poetry happen anyway and what function does the poet serve therefore? The definition of creative writing, the taxonomical poetics determining species of creative writing, is the engine of subterfuge that maintains the myth of significance --- poetry is because of what it is not and means because of what it doesn’t. Anyway, all poetry is acceptable. Most of it is actively directed against engagement with the poet’s problem of meaning. The poetics that allows for the influence of the vacuum is terrifying. Think of Beckett: was he stupefied in retrospect by the absurdity of his project, as he neared death, asking, “What is the word?” And Stein’s last words: “What is the question?” There is nothing but the question, the question of meaning. Meaningless, poetry has no history; it never began and won’t terminate. Buadrillard writes, “There will be no end, because things have always already happened. Neither resolution nor absolution, but inevitable unfolding of the consequences.” Constant determination, all the binarisms enabling such sloppiness as this very misguided theme, obscure the irresolution of every argument with the promise of differentiated architectures of ultimate meaning. Meaning isn’t coming for us, not ever. What is the word? Most people think poetry is about the autumn leaves and the delicacy of love. The page erases the guts out of love and leaves a wordy, husk-shaped signifier. Meaning’s blessing is in never reaching creative writing, no matter how resolute the disbelief foundational to students of the writerly pursuit. Poets & Writers is a sad, false church like, you know, those mutants that worshipped the Bomb in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.” Everything is like that. How does poetry happen anyway and what function does the poet serve therefore?

Poetry is lucky because it has no place in the idiom of mainstream capitalism, as far as this kid can discern. Poetry is bargain bin specials for alcoholic sentimentalists. The great poets don’t matter (so thus with the retards); this must be allowed before they become readable --- this must be a required education in said valueless accomplishments. The creative text we stereotypically most adore, in the canon, Hamlet, is an engine for its own negation --- redeeming nothing, refusing to validate signification or modalities of humanistic connotation, the play chews itself up on the page until there’s just nothing left of it (having become a black hole that ate itself). Creative writing denotes structurally, this is relative, but the honesty of Hamlet is how it realizes the futility of this pageant of textuality (dressed up as objective confidence, or the possibility thereof) and rudely sabotages the formal system supporting its sick game. The great works of art are those with enough awareness to struggle with the vapidity of their formal logic --- or to know well enough to accept it, anyway. Warhol turned everything into surface. He defeated the orotund puffiness of hegemony’s artifice by living there, at its location, like a house, blurting the infuriating slogan, “I don’t know.” Most poetry is but an effigy, assuming poetry doesn’t become until it develops some position on its fundamental unbecoming. What is known as a poetry is more like a symptom of the poetry that has yet to be rendered legible for the subject (reader/writer). An aware poetics dares asking, “What is the word?” and withstands the injurious humiliation of finally getting the universe is a thing of no agency and answers are impossible. Would that were to settle anything! All poetry fails to cease: tough luck.

All this jargon is fake, callow. Institutionalization posits opacity and neologisms qua fucking rampaging Godzilla. A poet is ruined by the wrong education. Since we’re already at the tea party, let’s wallow in absolutes. The most successful artist in history, that we know of, is Henry Darger. When his life’s work was discovered, near his death, he stoically remarked that it didn’t matter what happened to any of it because, “It’s too late.” What does this mean? That’s not the question, sorry. What is the question? The question is what the poet has to work with. Poetry doesn’t mean anything. The poet’s problem is meaning. “There will be no end.” Thus, it’s never too late for it to be too late. There will be poetry as long as there are consequences. Here come the consequences.

Pigeons on the Grass, Alas

All Saints
Re an opera to be sung: the recent staged oratorio version of Four Saints in Three Acts presented at the CUNY Graduate Center as part of an event celebrating the 75th anniversary of its Broadway premiere
by Lonely Christopher



Gertrude Stein is not known for her libretti, but her first collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts makes radical use of the operatic form and, paradoxically, was popularly received on Broadway in 1934. The night before I became accidentally aware of a program, at the CUNY Graduate Center, dedicated to the opera, I fell asleep --- drunk, wearing shoes --- listening to The Mother of Us All, Stein’s opera about Susan B. Anthony. Hungover at work in the morning, I happened to read a notice about this daylong event that was already in progress and would conclude with an oratorio performance of Four Saints in the evening. I abandoned my employment and got on the subway. The train is where I remember reading Tender Buttons for the first time. Stein has been the most important writer to me for years --- curiously, only recently did I find and begin to listen to recordings of the two operas. My avoidance was casual, encouraged by what little critical treatment of the project I’d read. I became aware of Four Saints from a biography of Stein that described it as rightly ignored because the conservative music (churchy and juvenile, even) didn’t match the radical text; Alex Ross, in his survey of music in the 20th century, dismisses the opera as silly and the original production as racist. The Broadway run featured an all-black cast, which was unheard of then. Virgil Thomson failed to articulately explain this decision, but Ross’ reaction is embarrassingly starchy. The singular concept, with its historical significance, can be understood as problematic or liberatory. Accusations of insensitivity aren’t helped by Stein’s cringingly worded opinion: “I still do not like the idea of showing the Negro bodies.” I’m aware of some alternative critical perspectives that are more thoughtful: the hypothesis that that aspect resulted from white composers’ hip admiration of black culture and/or blackness characteristic of the musical climate of the time (Show Boat and Porgy and Bess are examples of this tendency, maybe) and then a queer reading positing the otherness of the black saints as a locum tenens for the outsider position of homosexuals (which both collaborators could only address using the encoded conceits of the closet). Regardless, the whole project was so bizarre that its status as Broadway hit seems impossibly uncanny --- black saints arranged in tableaus on a set wrapped in cellophane and fabric (to abstractly represent Spain), no narrative progression, and sung text such as, “Letting pin in letting let in let in in in in in let in let in wet in wed in dead in dead wed led in led wed dead in dead in led in wed in said in said led wed dead wed dead said led led said wed dead wed dead led in led in wed in wed in said in wed in led in said in dead in dead wed said led led said wed dead.” The success dates from a period where Stein received general recognition (long awaited) for her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: she returned to America for a sensational lecture tour, saw her name in lights in Times Square, was the subject of intense national press coverage as well as innumerable jokes and references (the theme of a department store window display was based on the opera’s title; New Yorker cartoons poked respectful fun at her; a headline announced her arrival stateside, accompanied by her “secretary,” describing her as the author whom few comprehend). Her celebrity was partly serious but also the product of bemusement; today it’s inconceivable. She’s now relegated to a specialized corner of academia, as evidenced by the program of lectures and panel discussions leading up to the performance at the Graduate Center. The audience was small and old; the organizers and participants were critics, writers, scholars, curators, &c. --- all with major Stein related projects. The woman who introduced everyone is the author of a book (which looks rather self-published, egotistic, and is printed in a really tacky narrow sans serif font) mostly about a libretto she wrote about Gertrude. The atmosphere was one of esoteric devotion (I wondered if Ulla Dydo was there): at one point I witnessed a scholar (who is preparing a book on Stein as well as related curatorial work) itemizing a display of memorabilia that was provided by a private collector (who was there, proudly assisting her list making). Eventually people who had never written a book/thesis/libretto (or even an essay or blog entry) about Stein arrived for the oratorio performance and the recital hall was filled to capacity. I sat between individuals who, like me, were clearly alone: a lady who produced the text of the libretto and read along the entire time and a man who chuckled at almost everything. I am not a frequent concertgoer --- and when I manage it the circumstances usually find me stuck at the upsetting remove of the fifteen buck standing room seats at the Met (never try that) or sitting in the second mezzanine directly behind a large pole at BAM --- so I appreciated the intimacy afforded by the space. The stage just fit the orchestra, choir, and principal singers (and left no room for the three dancers) --- when the concert began, the startling and waltz-like opening blurts struck me like a vehicle; the sound had presence/immediacy that the album hadn’t educated me in or, to start, prepared me for (and yet the sung imploration is to “prepare for saints”). I understand how Thomson’s style could be derided as simplistic and insubstantial, but that’s also a common complaint about Stein --- I think nothing of it in that example because my enjoyment of her has metastasized in earnest (I’m helpless: it’s a final property). When the music began I wasn’t intellectualizing, I was silently allowing for the pulverizing relationship between what I heard and that I heard. Unfortunately the epiphanic and teary amazement of the opening wasn’t sustainable under the circumstances, although I don’t know if it’s valid to complain that a performance failed to constantly make me feel that the only tense is the present and that I am made of pure light. The whole thing was indescribably enjoyable, although the minimal dramatization was questionably staged and there were several annoying glitches. The director apparently began her career with an early production of The Mother of Us All. I’ve been listening more to The Mother of Us All lately than Four Saints although it’s less complete/resounding and, compared to the unlikely novelty of the earlier collaboration, of a much more conservative bent (imagine Stein writing a celebratory scene, the music patriotic and march-like, with the lines, “The vote! The vote! The women have the vote! They have it each and every one. It is glorious! glorious! glorious!”). The recent preferment of the second opera is sort of shallowly motivated --- The Mother of Us All is way catchier. The director’s history with Thomson wasn’t demonstrated in this staging, unfortunately: the sentimental smiles forcefully plastered on the singers’ faces quickly turned creepy/sinister, the costumes looked like pageant robes borrowed from the basement of a Midwestern church, the lead baritone had some vocal trouble and generally seemed wrong, a stage door kept slipping open and accidentally revealing a wheelchair ramp, and corny images (possibly the results of hurried Google image searches for “sky” and “water droplets”) were projected insincerely on the upstage wall. Regardless, nothing could prevent Four Saints from actualizing its avant-garde gorgeousness. Many will never experience this opera as originally presented --- or as later interpreted by Robert Wilson --- but the opportunity of even a weakly dramatized oratorio abridgement provides an uncommon profit after being restricted to on an old vinyl recording transferred to digital format. Four Saints doesn’t operate according to operatic convention --- it is a pageant exemplifying the holiness of that which “makes it be not be makes it not be at the time. The time that it is as well as it could be leave it when when it was to be that it was to be when it was went away.” Which is a fact.

Around Is a Sound

Writers On Music

This is a series of short essays about music from the perspectives of young writers. Several members of The Corresponding Society have been asked to address the subject. The participants have academic backgrounds in fields such as literature, poetics, and history; they are enthusiasts, but claim no formal musical qualifications whatever.

Compositional Modalities
by Lonely Christopher

Poetry and music are composition. The difference is in modality (in the general definition). Sound is the substratum and form is the anatomy of both arts. Some binarisms for poetry and music: the latter is explicit/exoteric, the former is implicit/esoteric. A popular separation between sound in daily communication and musical composition is culturally supported; the technical distinction between semantic language and poetic composition is apparently more problematic. A young writer is likelier to receive unsolicited advice on his craft from his dentist (or his relatives) than a young composer. (The dentist can confidently belittle the former subject because she writes in the patient’s file, she doesn’t sing into it.) Yet, a modal similarity is found in formal qualities of composition: poetry and music are not gleaned magically from the ether but wrought/constructed using methodical grammars. Correlatives between the modes are articulated through a structural perspective. The importance of form in writing is disordered through common attachments to the result over the process (the signified over the signifier) in the use of semantic language; poetic resonance has been misattributed to the tumid gestures of realism. The criticality of poetic form isn’t realized by mimesis; beyond retarding postures, when the referent miscarries (ruining the parlor trick), there remains textual architecture. Nondenotative music is a construction site of compositional arrangement. Consequently, a clearer relationship between the makeup of a poem and processes of musical composition becomes evident. The technique of repetition and variation used by Gertrude Stein in “Many Many Women” (1910) can be read as ancestor to the additive and subtractive processes a musical line is subjected to in Philip Glass’ Two Pages (1968). Unlike writing, music exists at a remove from referential functions of semantic language; therefore compositional formalism is readily available for the musical (whereas it is sociopolitically problematized for the poet). The minimalists articulated this understanding while eschewing the strictures of academic serialism and et cetera. Steve Reich developed a process that he called gradual phase shifting: two operators (either tape machines or musicians) commenced to play an identical pattern in unison repeatedly as the tempo slowly increased on one side, moving through unsynchronized combinations until reestablishing simultaneity. According to this method he composed It’s Gonna Rain (1965), wherein two identical tape loops of a recording of a street preacher were lined up and played on separate machines until they shifted out of synch with each other and created pulsing sound patterns, and Piano Phase (1967), an application of mechanic phasing to a score for two pianists. Reich treats units of aural data in a way that articulates systematic construction and process as a presence of the piece instead of something opaquely behind it. In Reich’s seminal essay, “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), he writes, “I am interested in perceptible process. I want to be able to hear the process happening.” Equivalently, the structural poet can spell the architecture of his work across the page. Examples of the machinery of the piece being the piece can be found in the early writing of Vito Acconci: “READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW […]” (from an untitled poem, circa 1975). Musical and poetic modes converge in the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), written by Philip Glass, with a libretto including writing by Christopher Knowles. The totalized shape was constructed by Glass and director Robert Wilson; the music, frenzied or ruminative, is rhythmic and articulate (cyclic and additive processes build complex structures). An extract of the spoken text, written by Knowles: “This love could be some one / Into love / It could be some one that has been somewhere like them / Tis one like into where that one has been like them / Well, it could be some like them / Those like into where like that into this […] The ones are / The ones are / The ones are are / The ones are like / The ones are like into where the ones are the ones / The ones / The ones are like into this / The ones are like that / it[.]” Knowles’ pieces are always compositions of syllabic units and repeated shards of language, formally accumulated with an autistic focus on structuring/processing data. Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) has a comparative relationship with its libretto by Gertrude Stein. It seems like Thomson is often dismissed as a tonal modernist of lesser importance than his highly canonized colleague Aaron Copland, and this specific work makes contemporary critics nervous because of its radically bizarre Broadway run with an all-black cast (the concept tends to make some these days uncomfortable enough to scorn it as a deeply racist spectacle and an antiquated embarrassment not fit to consider seriously), but here is something that presents a structurally advanced/sensitive understanding between the language and music, wrought by both talents, which also pushes a theatricality so bold it remains misunderstood these many decades later. The black Catholic saints from Spain singing, “pigeons on the grass alas[,]” apparently decorated in cellophane and grouped in tableaus, and the absence of conventional narrative are elements that accumulate into an idiomatic renegotiation representative of Stein’s compositional tendencies. Thomson isn’t overwhelmed by the novelty of Stein’s challenging project (for which she was internationally notorious then) --- rather, he undertakes to read the mechanics of it and create music that constantly demonstrates, in his own mode, a systematic solidarity. In an investigation into American tonal composers in the first half of the 20th century, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound (2004), theorist Nadine Hubbs analyzes the musical setting of Stein’s linguistic abstractions. Of a duet in act two she writes, “The accompaniment is a sustained, arrhythmic F#-major triad, its voicing immobile throughout this scene. […] Thomson offers up ardency and gorgeousness in this score. But he is always careful to do so dissociatively --- that is, apart from […] the staged scenario, and never in moments wherein [it] would conventionally call for such effects. It is in this regard that his music surely can be called abstract and a perfect compliment to Stein’s text: Where ‘something is about to happen’ for one, the other adopts the counterbalancing pose that ‘nothing is ever going to happen’ --- and what is ‘about to happen’ in any case never does.” The music now, as with the language, sounds like it operates using elements of a familiar paradigm, but the grammar becomes insidiously reshaped. Thomson’s score is beautiful in fits and starts --- it is confidently rude in earnest, articulating a designed renegotiation of a codified mode through processes of abstraction. A Stein sentence might not offer syntactic handles to stabilize the casual reader (who can absorb information with ease if only it is presented normatively); in this opera, what the music is doing technically reaches to settle down conservatively for brief sequences, but definitely possesses a prevailing slippery charge that results from how what the score does and how it does it render the details of rhythm, melody, harmony, and et cetera weirdly unfamiliar within a rubric of received compositional logic. In this, the music and the libretto support each other. Indications of scene changes are sung: “Scene eight / To wait / Scene one / And begun / Scene two / To and to / Scene three / Happily be / Scene four / Attached or / Scene five / Sent to derive[.]” These occasions arrive repeatedly, sometimes unordered, and impractically --- the result is structural dissociation, as signifiers are arranged according to an order other than their prescribed functions and paired with rhyming fragments. Elsewhere, Thomson emphasizes some basic circular language with an epiphanic tone of triumph using horns, cymbals, and exultant bel canto style: “Once in a while / And where and where / Around around is a sound / And around is a sound / And around is a sound / And around / Around is a sound / Around is a sound / Around is a sound and around[.]” The result is the shining awkwardness of new architecture that reflects Stein’s writing; withal, it provides compositional balance between textual and musical modes in a singular fashion not replicated in Thomson’s operatic setting of Stein’s libretto for The Mother of Us All (1946) --- which is comparatively well behaved. Poetics and music also meet, differently, with John Cage. His work sometimes feels like an interface between the aural and the conceptual. Reich criticized Cage for using compositional processes that are imperceptible in performance; nevertheless, Cage’s piece 4’33’’ (1952) could conceivably be argued as a foundational work of minimalism. I recently watched it performed in California, where it has become a museum piece at the SFMOMA. While aural experiences likely to result from 4’33’’ could be recreated, after a fashion, at any time by any individual, the ceremonious framework of listening to and watching it performed makes the piece. The composition is a structured “silence” lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds; when I witnessed it the musician worked from a score consisting of blank pages, but an alternate version featuring empty staves was displayed in facsimile. 4’33’’ is not a formal erasure of content, but an absence of content supplemented by a formal process that reframes the silence, or lack thereof, as the text’s performance. The musician is prescribed functions that constitute the mechanics of the performance: he sits down in front of the piano, opens the score, utilizes a stopwatch that times his actions, twice opens and closes the keyboard, turns pages, bows at the end, et cetera. The function of the audience is likewise emphasized, as they must process the lack of musical content and the actual lack of silence within silence as it is performatively framed. 4’33’’ is a hybrid (or a mutant) of music and poetics --- it uses neither written words or musical notation directly, but articulates the substratum and anatomy of both arts (insofar as it is about sound and is formally structured). Poetics is quite musical. These two compositional modalities are perhaps the closest related of any of the distinct branches of the arts. The relationship is found in the composition --- both in structural conceptualism and in formally considerate praxis. Different modes, but maybe, as Hamlet said, “two dishes to one table.”

The Reading of The Making of Americans

The Making of the Gradual Reading of The Making of Americans
Being the History of a Reader’s Progress
by Lonely Christopher

On Sunday, November 23rd there was a congregation assembled to incite a progression through a notorious text from Gertrude Stein’s corpus that’s widely considered her swampiest and least readable: the six-hour (so-called “first installment” of a) marathon reading of The Making of Americans was staged at The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The event was organized by students operating under the rubric of hybrid poetics, under the instruction of writer and publisher Rachel Levitsky. This petite band had addressed works by Charles Bernstein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Rachel Zolf (who visited one afternoon) but the class was to conclude by designing and undertaking a monolithic reading project. Beckett’s fiction, the theater of Brecht, and The Alphabet by Ron Silliman were among the diverse suggestions --- but we decided enthusiastically on Stein’s unruly early novel. The Making of Americans is currently available in an unabridged paperback edition from Dalkey Archive Press, but the text was long out of print (sometimes only procurable in heavily abbreviated form) and seldom read in full even by the most ardent Stein aficionados and critics. When I happened to lug my copy to class, we marveled at the blockish weight of the thing and decided the only way to enter it was to hold a drastic marathon reading. Such an approach to this text is not without precedent: Rachel recalled the 1992 Paula Cooper Gallery reading and I soon found a recording by Gregory Laynor on UbuWeb. Our reading was to be mostly localized within the Pratt community, attended only by the brave (or, fleetingly, the curious), and well documented despite its intimate scale. As the date approached I began to feel increasingly guilty about my involvement in the conception of this project. I love Stein --- my poetics wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t discovered this love --- but I can’t deny that reading her can be an excruciating experience; one that yields an intense sort of alphabetic, epiphanic gratification only after sustained engagement. I feared we wouldn’t be able to launch significantly into the 925-page galaxy of the novel in six hours because it takes me practically six months to thoroughly complete a work of hers that is a quarter of that length. Also I had never participated in a “marathon” like this --- some of us read Proust’s voluminous magnum opus once, but it took an entire summer. For me reading Stein had been a private struggle and private pleasure. I recall spending hours feverishly perusing her book How To Write after finding a fascinating rhythm while simultaneously listening to Philip Glass’ Music with Changing Parts; I remember the first time I opened Tender Buttons and was excitingly startled by the calculated abstraction of her object portraits. The Making of Americans makes monstrously adventurous use of the form of the novel; it can be said to be a “hybrid” work, I posit, even in the context of Stein’s corpus. This mammoth thing exists in a space somewhere between the psychological impressionism of Three Lives and the circular taxonomy of a piece like A Long Gay Book. As literature the novel is a rhizomatically exploded familial pastoral. The few scholars I’ve read who are familiar with the whole thing tend to point to the novel primarily as evidence of biographical specificities re Stein’s childhood. That isn’t wrong but it’s certainly also reductive. The Making of Americans isn’t about Stein’s family but about every American family. The narrative progresses sluggardly --- everything considered cyclically --- in such a way that family experience repeats until losing singularity or distinction (thus turning queer --- to invoke Stein’s usage of the term). This sort of problematizes the familiar in a way inaccessible by narratives that conflate the expansive patterned quality of American existence. Stein writes: “And then there were so many ways of considering the question […] and the many ways to look at them led to many queer things.” The reading commenced in the Pratt Institute library at 2pm. Picasso’s portrait of Stein was projected on the wall, each reader spent about twenty minutes behind the podium (although the computerized clock was broken ergo, as it was often hard to keep time when speaking through Stein, presentations ranged from ten to forty minutes), and it was frequently documented by a photographer and a filmmaker. By way of introduction, Rachel Levitsky played a recording of the author reading an extract of her novel and then the first volunteer began: “Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’” The most pleasant discovery we made about the novel is that the reading experience, perhaps especially considering the collective atmosphere of the event, is more delightful than arduous. Stein’s prose can become overwhelming enough to cause a rupture through which readerly bliss can be accessed (this is most true of repetitive compositions like Many Many Women); The Making of Americans is so widely feared and neglected I assumed the text operated as the foremost example of that compositional technique. Yet while it certainly exists quite radically within the form of the novel, it seems that when a readerly surrender to the style is presupposed the book is, from the start, an exceptionally friendly animal. Spending six consecutive hours with it became more of a happy challenge than a malevolent punishment. Halfway through the event some of the audience had wandered off and been replaced with others, but none of the organizers appeared weary or bored (At 6pm Rachel whispered to me, “This is fun, I love this!”). I feel like I experienced the novel more than I read it --- since I didn’t always read along in my copy with the speaker, and for several hours allowed the words to wash over me gently (but, I don’t think, incidentally), I wouldn’t cite my presence at the event as proof that I “read” any of the novel (even when I was actually at the microphone speaking the words I wasn’t internalizing it on the level I would if reading in solitude). I never listen to audiobooks, and am a rather slow and deliberate reader, so my definition of the act of “reading” a text is pretty specific (conservative?). For me the event was more like an introduction to the act of reading, which was much needed considering how untroubled I have been by leaving The Making of Americans untouched on my shelf. When I presently take up the book again and read the pages that we covered during the marathon I might feel as if I’m re-tracing somewhat but I suspect that will be a welcome support (or a foundation as I study closer the aspects of the writing that I may have glossed in listening). Something else that definitely distinguishes the group reading from personal engagement with the text: each individual presenter articulated a unique delivery that shaped the meaning. Some softer and slower styles de-emphasized the cyclic patterns of the writing, bringing out buried resonances; more fragmented and particular deliveries accentuated the ungainly syntax and the gradual progression through repetition. A few casual volunteers, likely strangers to Stein’s idiosyncrasies, tripped awkwardly over the language or even became emotionally disturbed, but that was also educational. I tried to read in the usual way that I verbalize Stein: as fast as possible with extremely precise enunciation that compartmentalizes the grammar (and its queerness) while expressing a cyclic rhythm. I was fortunate to be able to read an exceptionally witty section wherein the character Julia Dehning takes daily walks with her father and tries to convince him that her suitor is worthy to marry. The extensive repetition of the dialog and its slow trudge toward minor variation (and, finally, a tentative resolution) is somehow wholly accurate in its exaggeration and exasperation. I’ve never encountered such well-conceived dialog from Stein outside of her popular novel The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. We averaged a little less than twenty pages an hour and concluded on page 108, but if making The Making of Americans was a gradual process for Stein I suppose it’s apropos that we will be gradual in our way through. To begin to conclude this summary I hereby direct the interested reader toward Stein’s essay “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” from Lectures in America. It might serve as an introduction to what she’s here doing. Now: we will continue climbing the mountain of what she’s here doing as we keep making progress through the novel being a history of a family’s progress. I will finally end with a collaged extract from William H. Gass’ intoxicated foreword to the Dalky Archive edition: “[Stein] mimics the movement of life itself, aims at a target reflected in a mirror, returns, redoes […] because life belongs to the progressive present, it is living, but living is ‘same after same,’ it is variations on a theme, a deep theme, made of the mixtures of natures […] how does it happen that we feel we are present in a present our reruns make us absent from? shifting gears, poking in a purse […] if the feeling failed to materialize, we’d be as good as dead […] and every one of us will die, but only a few, a small sum at any time, can remember --- really remember --- something of some such thing: when our organs no longer peal, when our words no longer rhyme.”