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: : : THE FLOOR OF THE KITCHEN is green tile. Coils in the toaster glow around bread. Fletcher cracks an egg with one hand and lets the insides fall into the oiled skillet. In his other hand he holds Joan Retallack's book How To Do Things With Words. In the background his computer is on. Its screen burns a poem into the air.
He flips over the book to read the back again. Borrowing the title of J. L. Austin's important philosophical tract, Joan Retallack seeks through poetry answers to Austin's questions about the relationship between saying and doing. Fletcher has read the Austin text, years ago, in his undergraduate days. He remembers some of it. Performatives, behavatives, locutionary and illocutionary acts. I am frying an egg. My semester is over.
His semester is over; all except for the grading, and that's going to be easier than normal this time. This semester, he taught Intro to Poetry Writing, and he has decided to give every student an A. This is not because he thinks their poems are good, but rather because he never quite made them understand that poems are not just feelings about your day run through a strainer. They believed until the end that poems are just lyrical diary entries. And Fletcher doesn't have any idea how to grade that. What grade should he give the person who is writing about having been left by her boyfriend, and whose poem reads like transcribed weeping? No / no / my heart. C? D?
It is not like he did not present them with other possibilities. See him in the classroom, in his shabby blazer, speaking: poems are machines for connecting disparate things in the world. That's what metaphor does; that's why metaphor exists. He underlines METAPHOR on the blackboard. The more diverse and far-reaching the connections between things, the richer your poems will be. Notecards taped above Fletcher's desk— Georges Braque: "I do not believe in things but in relationships between things." Andre Breton: "To compare two objects as far distant from one another as possible, to confront them brusquely and strikingly—this remains the highest task to which poetry can lay claim." Fletcher's toast pops up and he lifts the two slices out, drops them on a plate.
But his students all believed that writing is just opening up and spontaneously spilling out genius. The Kerouac Technique. All they care about is how to make their poems "flow." Thanks a fucking lot, Jack. What a fucking boon you have left to the world. (He wonders: do his students even know who Kerouac was? Not that it really matters: popular culture has repeated the image of the Beats so endlessly that they are now always in the background of everyone's mind. Even the students who don't know him know him.)
Kerouac: You're a Genius all the time.
Kerouac wanted poems to be like jazz. But he seemed to think that jazz was all about spontanaeity, wild undisciplined blowing. Fletcher thinks of jazz differently. He thinks of jazz (and poems) as being kinds of games. Systems, within which you do something in accord with a set of rules. You choose the rules when you build the system. He thinks Kerouac didn't know shit about jazz.
He flips the sizzling fried egg onto a slice of toast, presses the other slice down on top, carries his sandwich over to the computer, looks at the screen, letting his thoughts drift: games, strategies, moves.
He has a new crush: Isabelle. She's in the English Department, so he sees her around, but she's in Lit, he's in Creative Writing, so their classes haven't overlapped yet. He mostly has seen her so far in the hallways. She is not without a certain dorkiness—big glasses, straight brown hair, a certain shy turning-away from things—he admires these traits, inasmuch as they bespeak a kind of bookish intelligence. But it wasn't until Esmet's orphan Thanksgiving that Fletcher realized that the dorkiness masked a quiet sexiness: he spent a good part of the evening in a kind of trance, staring at the curve of her neck and the fullness of her lips.
The semester is over now, and this means that he won't see her again until January. He should have said something to her at Esmet's, before he left. He contemplated it: rehearsed lines in his head, a thousand variations on: do you want to get together over the break? For coffee?
A locutionary act is uttering a noise that you know has meaning. Perlocutionary acts bring about effects on the hearer. There are infinite, unpredictable possible effects. Persuading. Alarming. Upsetting. He is not sure what would happen were he to make a particular move. And so what did he do? Nothing.
In the center of the night sky of his poem, he types words, in a solid block, like an ingot:
should not
might not
has not
could not
do not
did not
will not
can not
A notecard:
Jasper Johns' notes on process:
Take an object.
Do something to it
Do something else to it
" " " " " "
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