36 :: this sentence gives flavor :: 4/13/01
Fletcher is reading a student paper entitled "Title." Very metafiction, he thinks. He circles the word in red pen. He momentarily considers adding some comment, but the best one he can come up with is come on. Which actually is more or less the comment that he feels like putting on all the student work he reads. Come on— separate those list items with a comma. Come on— when you change topics, start a new paragraph.
He has to get through a stack of papers that's roughly the thickness of a novel. This is the fifth such stack he's worked his way through this semester. No wonder he's not writing as much as he should — after throwing himself around in the tangled briarpatch of student syntax for a few hours, he no longer wants to think at all about the way words fit together. The language centers in his brain fatigue, and he just wants to stare into the color fields of his Rothko poster and dissolve. Or drink a beer and listen to jazz CDs, concentrating on the lines of the melodies. All the pleasures of rhetoric—narrative and idea, argument and agreement—embodied in something other than words. Dave Holland, Conference of the Birds. Often he'll just end up watching The Simpsons: staring at black print on white paper all day long wearies his eyes, and the bright pastels and simple shapes of that show are visually soothing.
But, for God's sake, he wants to be a writer. And blowing an hour every night watching the syndicated Simpsons back-to-back wastes time— valuable time. Writing time. So, of course, does grading these papers. Fuck. He repositions his pelvis on the chair, hunches lower over the kitchen table. Scribbles comments in red. Misplaced modifier. He knows full well that this student doesn't know what a modifier is, but fuck it, he can meet them halfway but that's it.
He tries to make the process useful to him. In his poems he tries to use words that have particular charges, that carry particular energies. So he sets his students to work: he assigns them to tear advertisements from magazines, to find the "charged phrases" and analyze the connotations that they carry. To map the borealis of meaning that surrounds each word. He hopes that some of his students will hit upon nuances that he wasn't aware of, and that he will be able to mine those nuances for his poems. In this sense he uses his students as antennas. (He should pass that one on to Jakob.)
Words have energy, he believes this. The ones with the greatest charge burn for him with a kind of light, a color outside of the visible spectrum. (He doesn't think he's the only poet who sees things this way, either. Anne Carson, in her new book, writes this on the word marriage: Look how the word / shines.) His poems are attempts to call attention to these charges in print. He feels limited by the page and its standardized sizes: ultimately he feels like each word should be immersed in a cloud of other words— its associations and counterpoints —which should extend indefinitely in all directions. Language as atmosphere, as weather. A book with pages of infinite area. In the library of his mind there are other fantastic books as well: a book that begins with only a single word, which is read by a reader who adds whatever word the first word summons, creating a book of two words; a third reader can add a word inspired by either of the first two, or both, and so on, the book becoming a branching tree of language. You could gauge the relative charge of particular words by looking to see which ones would most gnarl and bristle with other words.
He flips a page in the paper he's reading. His students can't help him to detect charges; they're not adept at it. He reads: This sentence gives a negative flavor to the reader. This sentence gives flavor?
As soon as April is over he's free till August.
It's almost 5:30. There'll be a Simpsons on soon.
