I very nearly can't read Gary Lutz, though I want to just about every day.
Every time I read Gary Lutz, the problem is, I can't stop the sentences I've read from sounding out, percussive and recurrent, days after in my head. I think a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. I write a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. Actually, that's not a bad fate: the tactics and strategies of a Lutz sentence are well worth dwelling within.
Life could better subsist as a Gary Lutz sentence, and on Wednesday night, in a talk at Columbia University called "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," Lutz let the standing-room only audience (people in the corridor, straining ears, themselves agape) in on how he reads and thinks a sentence by the letter.
Drawing on examples such as Christine Schutt's phrase "acutely felt, clearly flat," Lutz pointed out not just the obvious correspondences between the two monosyllables (and let's not forget one is a verb and one an adjective posing as a noun) but also the way that the first phrase "contains the alphabetic DNA" of the second. He tracked individual letters and combinations of letters through sentences and paragraphs from Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Fiona Maazel, and Sam Lipsyte. Outlining his "poetics of the sentence" with a nod to Gordon Lish's ideas of "consecution" he talked about "the drama of the letters within the words."
In the hope that someone will publish Gary Lutz's talk, which is the most masterful and useful talk on craft and poetics I've had the pleasure of attending, I won't say too much more about it, except that a close look at the sentences Lutz has clocked up in his own works would be a great place to see how taut and locked a sentence could shut.
Instead, I want to swing this post to two places that I think are adjacent to both Lutz's work, his talk, and each other: the poetry of George Oppen and the Anglo-Saxon riddles. Bear with me, here. Look, Lutz-like, at the opening of Oppen's 1934 Discrete Series :
White. From the
Under arm of T
The red globe.
From under the "arm" or crossbar of the letter T in the word "white" we find the "e" of both "red" and "globe." "Thus / Hides the // Parts" as Oppen says in his next poem.
Or, later, the lines:
Between glasses--place, over which
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaitime passes--a false light.
As spectators for the "drama of the letters within the words" we can notice the way "l" and "a" run through this sentence, each getting ahead of its alternate: "la," "la," "a," "al," "l." What is within "glasses" is also in "place" and "place" is literally and letterally and latterly over "time passes" and thus passes over it - only to run into the "false light" which again contains the elements "between" the start and end consonants of "glasses."
A discussion of rhyme, off-rhyme, assonance, alliteration, cannot and will not suffice. What Lutz's reading of contemporary fiction offers to poetry - and this is a link he at least implied - is a letter by letter reading. The matter of the materiality of the text: not just the "live wood" Oppen calls his book, but the letters that are the "fiber."
Oppen's version of Objectivism (which has an ancestor, perhaps, in Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles"?) will be familiar to anyone who has read or, better, looked at the Anglo-Saxon riddles. I'm going to un-name them as riddles (that's a critical addition) and re-name them an Anglo-Saxon "Discrete Series." One point of connection is that contemporary critics, as Conte notes in his book Unending Design often try to name the supposed Object to which Oppen's poems are the cryptic description, just as Anglo-Saxon critics strive to name the word the Anglo-Saxon Discrete Series poems hide. Such approaches are not especially fruitful ways to engage with either series of poems. Consider this poem from the Exeter Book , typically referred to as Riddle 47 after the numbering established by Krapp and Dobbie:
Moððe word fræt -- me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd þa ic þæt gewundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra þe he þam wordum swealg.
We don't need a translation of this to observe the letter-drama the poem has as its object, to go beyond noting the expected three metrical alliterations per line in order to follow the letters and their interactions. "Word" for instance transforms into "wyrd" by the change of one letter and them "wyrm" by the change of one letter, and then, with one letter changing and two transposed, we have the "þrym," of "þrymfæstne." Or, in the modern English, "word" is swallowed and replaced by "fate/what happens" which in turn is swallowed/replaced by "worm/serpent" and then by "mighty," suggesting perhaps "fixed."
Lest this seem like mere letter-play, it's worth noting that the Anglo-Saxon poem thematically explores the permanence of words and letters. It either/both imagines a "moth" eating/swallowing words, a "thief in the darkness" or/and it imagines a reader reading a text without being "at all wiser for the words he consumed." This, we might imagine, is a reader who is not reading by the materiality of the letter.
The material pleasures, possibilities, and performances of individual and indivisible letters are at play in the various works of Lutz, Oppen, and the anonymous poet of these Anglo-Saxon challenges. This inter-century reading is a necessity: Carl Pyrdum noted at Get Medieval recently that there are important ways to read open-software and Windows-hacking through understanding that "Medieval book enthusiasts were DIYers. They made their own books. They copied texts they liked, freely editing and recomposing--or hacking, remixing, and cut-and-pasting, to use the right lingo." In other words, the constitution of texts, sentences, and even words were "open" to medieval readers and bookmakers.
Reading the work of 20th century poets such as Oppen and of course Susan Howe alongside the work of the Anglo-Saxon poet-compilers offers as a way to disturb the notion of originality and of postmodernism as peculiar and unparalleled. In short, it offers a way to read our now as also someone else's now. It takes the text back from a notion of an author or authority: the open in the Oppen, so to speak.
"I read very slowly," says Gary Lutz. He wants "books that are not page turners but that defeat the notion of page turning." To read slowly is not simply to value a thoroughness of reading; it is to attend to materiality and to the letter, to note tensions and contents, contexts and confusions.
This matters now: not more than ever, but maybe more than ever to us. On Friday night John McCain promised that "As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I've got a pen. This one's kind of old. I've got a pen, and I'm going to veto every single spending bill that comes across my desk." It may not be too alarmist to see this as an election about whether or not we're going to attend to the letter of what we're saying and what we're seeing. What does it mean to "suspend a campaign" or to "win" a war? We've been asking such questions for 8 years and 12 centuries and more.
It matters now, too, because of M. NourbeSe Philip's book Zong!, which I wrote about recently.
Where we stand on the political issues we are presented with does not have to do with our partisan interests or our party support. The last letters of the Exeter Book read:
Þeah nu ælda bearn
londbuendra lastas mine
swiþe secað, ic swaþe hwilum
mine bemiþe monna gehwylcum.
[though now the children of men, land-dwellers, swiftly seek my prints, I at times conceal my track from each one of them.]
Before and beyond us, language has already disappeared: "hwilum" becomes "gehwylcum," time disappearing into nameless persons. We seek swiftly, "swiþe," only to have language readily hidden from us, "swaþe."
What is the form of literacy we are demanding in the 21st century?
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