‘No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.’ by Robert Fitterman
Book Review by Diana Hamilton
When Robert Fitterman reads from No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself, he puts loneliness on: with a yellow OBEY cap and a sad-sack voice, we get the first, exterior sign that the poem’s collected expressions of sadness — reconfigured in lines that grow increasingly long as the book progresses, every other one indented — work to create an individual figure to whom these feelings could be attributed. Fitterman’s book-length poem persistently redirects attention to the possible existence of this speaker, and not only as an effect of the first-person pronoun; the poem’s chosen “material” and its organization docreate what seems like a largely masculine, self-pitying loneliness, but the more surprising move is its maintenance of this speaker quaspeaker. By which I mean, more specifically, a speaker qua writer. But which writer?
One writer here is Mary Shelley, whose words appear early in the book, where the speaker has “Just finished rereading Frankenstein” — why does the specified “re-” of rereading seem especially sad? — “a virtual”
treatise on loneliness: believe me,
Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone;
Miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures?
I can handle anyone’s sadness and loneliness as long as its not my own.
This passage is a useful starting point for the book’s relationship to its own writing. It seems to offer a meta-statement on how the book operates, but stops short with a “not my own” that misdirects; like the book itself, it points to its own construction only to emphasize the individual constructive procedures’ subordination to the whole. Though the quote refers in at least three ways to the repurposing of others’ expression — first, by recounting a scene of rereading; second, by quoting that text at length, but using line breaks to turn it into “poetry”; and third, by defining the speaker as someone who, like Fitterman himself, appropriates others’ sadness — the actual emphasis of this book falls much more on the “my own” than on “anyone’s.” As others have noted, the main literary intervention here is the collage’s ability to maintain the simulation of its projected character, a preference for coherence over disjunction that can be seen in many contemporary books written via appropriative methods: rather than emphasizing the polyvocality of gathered found materials (or appropriating only a single material, where the effect of unity may be less surprising), it emphasizes style’s ability to keep these materials connected.
I do not want to conflate “style” here with “form,” though, as Susan Sontag forbids when she tries to answer the question, “How is one to exorcise the feeling that “style,” which functions like the notion of form, subverts content?” This problem is particularly relevant to No Wait, in which neither the “content” (and the quality of having a clearly defined content is itself a particular stylistic trait, Sontag notes) nor the “form” is especially unfamiliar, but in which the style that seems to shape both is excitingly (and straight-up well-written-ly) new. And part of what defines this stylistic function is, of course, what we usually identify as form: in this case, one borrowed from James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem.
This has something to do with the sense of stylistic novelty: Fitterman makes it seem like the right time to borrow from Schuyler.
This question — which prior forms make themselves newly available? — often seems, to me, like a good way to define the contemporary. By this, I mean that something about a form guarantees that its use will involve an acceptable level of divergence from an original. It is not simply a matter of quantities of time’s passing: right now, it would be stupid to copy Rimbaud’s attitude towards luxury, and marginally less stupid, but still questionable, to imitate, say, Pope’s diction, whereas it is a really good idea for this book — and perhaps others! — to “borrow its poetic form, loosely” from Schuyler.
At least two effects make this form work well for No Wait. The first is the result of the best part of Schuyler’s lines, the polysemy of constant enjambment, which makes the poem feel more directed towards a literary effect than merely “fascinated” with a certain set of found materials. At the same time, the regularity of this form prevents the descent to crafted cleverness that happens when poets look for the line wherever it seems best. This regularity also contributes to the seeming unity of the utterances themselves.
The second effect relates to the difference between Fitterman and Schuyler’s materials, although not in a way that relies on an actual reading of Schuyler. Reading No Wait, I often get the impression of a tension between the structure and its language, as the former maintains a certain alien quality; it seems as though it comes from somewhere else, and in encountering the language it shapes, is forced to grow (as the lines do) to accommodate this tension. In The Morning of the Poem, this form takes what look like first-person authorial feelings and, by regulating and juxtaposing them with strange images, seems to formally attribute them to the possibility of other speakers; the lines might become aphorisms attributable to the general public, even: “How easily I could be in love with you/who do not like to be touched.” Repurposed by Fitterman, the form does the opposite work: it takes what look like generic feelings, attributable to many writers or to the internet itself, and, by regulating them and juxtaposing them with each other, seems to formally attribute them to a writer, to this writer:
It’s not like
I’m waiting for anyone to text me back or anything, when you feel like a ghost,
You don’t feel sad or happy, you feel nothing: you feel numb, uninspired And empty — it can’t get any worse. I tried so hard,
Here is one difference between style’s function and form’s: the former can apply the latter while providing it with a new function. Of course, this has to do with what gets fed into the structure — the fantasy of content’s separateness from form — since I just cut off that quote in the middle of a line from a Linkin Park song. But it is not the appearance of Linkin Park (or similar sources) that defines Fitterman’s language here; these shitty lyrics, stripped from their recognition, could be anyone’s sadness. What defines this book’s style, in fact, is its ability to make lines seem like poetry that, excerpted in brief, seem like nothing at all, not even the implicit interestingness of internet content or popular culture. This will be a problem in reading this review as well; the book is truly cumulative, and the longer a quote, the easier it is to see why it is so good.
Because of this need to read long passages to follow the book’s accumulative effect, I am vexed by the fact that many responses to date have claimed that this book is not meant to be enjoyable or read, but only “thought” about. It is true that we have been told to think this about Conceptual Writing, and it also true that the author here is a well-known conceptualist. Despite these two facts, which have been applied to hundreds of other books as a replacement for actual understanding, they do not add up to this particular book’s illegibility. This book is, honestly, a total delight to read.
Like the assumption the book is unreadable, the claims that it primarily has something to say about the Internet and its gadgets, or about collage and its ethics, mirror other problematic critical gestures. Too often, the recurring markers of the contemporary are permitted to stand in for interpretation; one likes or dislikes a work because one does or does not already believe that borrowing text from the internet is a good idea, because painting is or is not outdated, because the exhibit does or does not juxtapose a surprising number of media. This is why it may be tempting to say that Fitterman’s book is interesting because it involves appropriation — the critic makes a misguided connection to labor practices — because it deals with internet content or our devices — the critic insists that we read the poem in the same ambient way we read iPhones — because it is polyvocal — the critic either celebrates this Whitmanesque democracy or wrings hands over the ethics of using another’s voice — etc.
Despite this temptation, this book succeeds not because of these attributes, but because ofhow it does whatever it does with them; this provides one useful, though obviously too-simple, distinction between good and bad contemporary art. Of course, defining that howis hard, and I know I have not succeeded. I have not even told you about how the speaker is suddenly “like a lonely flute,” “now,” (2) or even how, of course, he never resembled a flute at all, not because the speaker’s words are borrowed, but because the literary effect here is constantly being disbursed across larger units of text. The lines get longer; the poem’s speaker becomes capable of having grown up both popular and totally alone, and of inventing fictional worlds for comfort, worlds that come together only to be cast out by his certain comfortlessness; the poem continually creates a bigger space for its subject. Not just this, though: I have not even told you how it ends:
Dying alone in the woodlands, isolated in my empire of solitary death. Total sadness, total darkness, total coldness, total pain.
This review originally appeared in August 2014 in Coldfront.
