Amy Gerstler’s Rhetoric of Marriage

Abstract

Amy Gerstler's many poems dealing with romance and weddings ironize customs of patriarchal marriage and, in an allied project, norms of lyric and narrative discourse. (1) In retelling and subverting some familiar marital stories, texts reconfigure storytelling itself, pointing toward new spaces and new opportunities for both amatory relations and textuality. Although Gerstler's scrolling texts tell stories of a sort, they are disjointed ones, filled with hints, echoes, innuendoes, and black holes. Stylistically, they seem inspired by Gertrude Stein, evoking plot of language more than a plot of character and event; one might say they try to recreate Browning's My Last Duchess in manner of Stein's Tender Buttons. These poems, then, ward off any attempts to impose a coherent interpretive schema on them. They remain a field of implications, their lively, witty, and overtly artificial style contrasting to morose marital melodramas their images often suggest. If poems hint at uncertainties and brutalities of love and ask how and why women and girls have been cast as custodians of everyday existence (Smith and Gerstler 1), they obliquely suggest nervous anxiety of our relations with language as well. Like other postmodern texts, particularly those influenced by Language movement, Gerstler's prose poems foreground play of language and invite reader to participate in construction of meanings that are always contingent. These poems invite reader to recall, however vaguely, precursory cultural texts that they revise and ironize. At same time, each sentence and section of a Gerstler text does not quite issue seamlessly from one that came before. This slight amnesia, this sense of narrative disruption, places reader in difficult position of straining both to remember and to start over. Things resist complete understanding, and poems thus interfere with an Enlightenment logic of linear narrativity, opening new spaces of collaborativity, bafflement, and ironized knowledge in which reader's awareness is invited to roam. By bending and reversing their precursory texts and by breaking bond between sentences and sections, Gerstler's poems reverse anxiety Plato expressed in Phaedrus: that because writing provides a better means of preserving information than does orality, it threatens to render human memory itself obsolete. Gerstler's poems highlight problematics of written discourse, requiring yet thwarting operations of both memory and understanding. In manner of scrolling news programs and commercials on TV or refreshable pages on Internet, Gerstler's texts mobilize and highlight elements of dissonance, juxtaposition, seriality, periphrasis, parataxis, and non sequitur. And just as her poems formally resemble electronic media (or malls), so they embed shards of prior texts (or products), materials ranging from Hebrew Scriptures, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot to fairy tales, infomercials, Walt Disney films, and Norman Rockwell souvenirs. These poems illustrate Marjorie Perloff's claim that in postmodern texts, the discourses of and mass media are not merely exchangeable; rather theirs is a relationship of enormous variation and complexity (xiii). The poems inscribe themselves sideways into a network of incommensurate narratives, images, and lyric moments. Gerstler has explained that she loves poetic energy that comes from the attempt to marry literary and popular culture--'high' and 'low' art (What Is 2). She tries in her poetry to deploy irrepressible melodramatics of American English ... with its distinctive mixture of slang and preachiness, elevated and silly, heady and democratic, lofty and colloquial, reverence and irreverence, straightforward and shifty. (1) If Stein's language is situated between representation and abstraction, as Peter Nicholls has said (119), Gerstler's appears to be located midway between popular culture and avant garde. …