English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Spontaneous Sentences

Norman Weinstein. No Wrong Notes.  Meeting Press Bindery, 2005. 81 pages.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

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          There is something appallingly past tense about a sentence. How stubbornly it resists animation. Even this sentence, the one unfolding with breakneck spontaneity even as my fingers rush to find the right keys to transcribe its scatter-shots, even this sentence now bursting with viability and promise right here in mid-construction has already started to chill into an unsettling parody of locomotion, approaching the inevitable, necessary period that it can fend off for only so long.  There it is, or was. If you hang about for a moment after that sentence’s completion, linger a moment at the buzzkill period, to cast, like Lot’s wife, a fearful (and costly) look backward, you will see how that sentence has already settled quickly into a dusty quiet, sentenced to death. Despite legions of earnest middle school language arts teachers reassuring us with vivid and expansive metaphors that we readers, sentence-fed and word-fat, are like those daring explorers of old, we know in anxious (and honest) moments that we sentence-consumers are more like basement taxidermists, neighborhood funeral directors, and veteran coroners, those curious few who spend long hours in the forbidding chill of dead things.

           Reading strings of sentences then is rather like listening to stacks of Charlie Parker recording—the sheer energy of aggressive rawness tidily disciplined into careful form, the hot evanescence of creativity chilled. A generation twice removed from Parker, we can only imagine the dazzling kinetic bursts that must have imploded in nightclubs cloaked in hanging cigarette haze. Like classic Parker recordings, sentences never reveal their own process, never expose us to the raw heat of their own production, never suggest the alchemy of their own construction. We are left amid the forbidding chill of dead things.

            How energizing it is then to experience (“reading” does not quite cover it) Norman Weinstein’s audacious No Wrong Notes, a collection of “sentences.” Weinstein’s radical reimagining of the form merits the quotation marks because each sentence here is more an expansive, elaborate prose poem, each sentence a chapter of its own, sentences that move urgently with a pulsing sort of jazzy boldness that captures, despite the unforgiving cold impress of typeface, the tonic rush of the white hot energy of spontaneity, creativity, and rhythm. They are sentences that beg not to be read aloud—after all, what poem does not improve with recitation--but rather to be performed, Whitman blown through a saxophone, Gertrude Stein rendered on the trumpet. Weinstein reenergizes our awareness of sentences by letting them burst through the polite conventions of syntax and diction, overwhelm the tired assumptions of punctuation, the niceties of transition, and the decorum of structure. The sentences delight in their own colliding sounds, generating with apparent adlib ease an intricate aural weave.

            Weinstein loves his jazz, certainly, but knows his Bach as well; these sentences are a subtle mathematical play of consonants and vowels, a carefully scored “recklessness,” an orchestrated cacophony of sensual sounds and dramatic silences. Each sentence is given a title—“A Sentence Focused Upon a Jamaican Breakfast,” “A Sentence in Which Sidney Bechet Sounds Like a Jackass,” “A Sentence Evoked by a Hem Line,” “A Sentence as a Place to Sit Firmly”—each title offering an ironically reassuring context that immediately becomes riotously irrelevant as the prose poem breaks free of the conscripted boundaries of meaning to celebrate the busting-loose of constructing itself. The sentences refuse to settle for (and into) those sorry elaborate post-mortems we call themes. Form here is everything: fluid, elastic, confrontational, eccentric, demanding. The sentences boldly drop syntax, dispense with clarifying articles and the tidy bridge of subject-verb agreement—they unfold on the page like a Charlie Parker riff, chaos reluctantly agreeing to shape.

          Weinstein draws on his long fascination with collapsing cultural boundaries to construct a multicultural voice from the subjects and rhythms of any number of  significant ethnic and cultural reservoirs, including Jewish, Caribbean, and African. A poet of enormous range, a scholar (most notably on the dazzling language play of Gertrude Stein), an award-winning jazz critic (a longtime proponent of the African and Caribbean movements of the late 1960s and 1970s), and an accomplished teacher at all levels of education (currently at Boise State University), Weinstein brings that considerable background to these dynamic lyrical explosions. Quoting particular riffs here, wrenching especially captivating passages to demonstrate the command, the confidence, the sheer thrill of the aural engagements would be like humming a spare tune registered amid the crossfire of a Charlie Parker solo. Better to leave such exquisite moments for your ear. Like a Charlie Parker solo, these sentences are intoxicated by their own evolution, spellbound by their own potency, giddy with the energy of expression itself.

            Contemporary cynics, of course, a long generation removed from the discovery of wordplay that dynamited both poetry and fiction in mid- twentieth century, long removed from the nightclubs of bop jazz and the coffeehouses of the beats and now suspicious over such an unabashed display of naïve faith in the play of words and the possibility of reinventing form so long after the heyday of such heady reconstructionism, might dismiss Weinstein’s sentences as unforgivably nostalgic, full of gimmicky tricks that long ago staled into clichés (Cummings after all started sentences in the lower case to suggest immediacy, reassessed punctuation marks to minimize their intrusiveness, denied sentences the hatchet-cut of a period, hyphenated words to coin new words, freely transformed verbs into adjectives, nouns into verbs, etc etc tiresomely etc). But such dull-eyed cynicism would miss the liberating feel of these rousing explorations of the singing self, the music generated by the kinetic kick of awareness itself, how fragile moments of unexpected collisions of light, shape, sound, color, and feel find expression in a language that Weinstein so richly gestures is ours to reinvent.