The polyrhythmia offered to us in Talatum offers something else other than identity and "
thinginess".
It's the fidelity to the
thinginess of the thing that we see and we love, the painful decision to voyage out without looking back in order to inhabit that thing.
a piece all in one even small character" to "repeating one of Whitfield's sermons in the monotony of a school-boy" [886]), the dramatic change in printing practice visually stripped the noun of its stature and glory, its physical
thinginess, its metaphysical dominance ("in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns") and opened up the page-space as a more even playing field for the lesser parts of speech.
Maybe if you are making art that is a thing, maybe if that
thinginess is what you immerse yourself in, if you spend all that time away from about, if you are never attaching, maybe you are lost to words after a while, then someone comes along who is really good at manipulating and you can't make words push for you.
The sheer
thinginess of much of the writing is one of the rewards here.
"
Thinginess," another poem that serves as the power chord of the collection, says "But if you could isolate / the
thinginess / from its thing / the distillate / would be as abstract / as the slapback echo / of just-plucked strings / in the King's Ur-recordings / for Sun Studios ..." This is just what Guriel does: he takes things and lets them be, he offsets them in this poem of Elvis and babies and phonebooks and ducts, all these things that I doubt have ever been combined in a poem before, and he lets the things assert themselves, as themselves.
On the other hand, Flaubert's Madame Bovary is seen as a quintessentially realist narrative in its emphasis on tangible details, its "foregrounding of the
thinginess of the world" (58).
The very material "
thinginess" of the body is, paradoxically, evidence of the saturated plenitude of the divine other.
slipping away" from studies of materialism into a focus on "
thinginess" (75) and includes a critique of "new historicists and cultural materialists" who have just "picked up bits and bobs from Natalie Zemon Davis and Christopher Hill." Sinfield uses Jonson's Poetaster (1601) to look at writing under pressure in 1600, claiming that the play "is not documenting the author function, it is helping to constitute it" (82).
This accumulation of verbal nouns and adjectives conveys a dual sense of "
thinginess" and "happening," of many actions occurring simultaneously as the soldiers perform their routine activities.
"They Have Been Telling Things," together with some other poems pointing to "things," requires puzzling out the
thinginess, not quite the materiality, that may be indicated or achieved in telling (rather than "showing"?).