The Nerves Centre, Angela
Szczepaniak
DC Books, 2021
The collection is structured in ten acts—“Act Natural, Be Yourself,” “Take a Walk, Jump Up & Down, Shake Our Your Muscles,” “Practice Controlled Biofeedback,” “Avoid Thoughts that Produce Self-Doubt,” “Connect With Your Audience – or – Intermission: It Pays to Advertise,” “Be Prepared: Practice Practice Practice,” “Focus on the Enjoyment You Are Providing Others,” “Limit Caffeine & Sugar Intake,” “Visualise Success: Don’t Focus on What Could Go Wrong,” “You May Benefit from More Intensive Therapy.” It concludes with a final “Bow” and two Appendices—“Glossary of Selected Utterances” and “Dramatis Personae”—as well as a “Post-script by a rawlings.”
speaker rolls out series of starjumps and gluteal fishsquats
there is a kind of jumping jack that
only the best mettle
can muster
the speaker dare not attempt such a jumping jack today
but one day
maybe (“Act 5”)
As rawlings offers to open her post-script, a short essay in which she examines the play and structure of Szczepaniak’s text: “In her play Identity: A Poem, Gertrude Stein wrote, ‘And so to turn excitement and not nervousness into a play …. Let us try’ (Stein and Dydo 1993, 589). Szczepaniak twists Stein’s call-to-arms by turning nervousness and not excitement into a play. A deep dive into scripted performance, general anxiety disorder, and performative anxiety, The Nerves Centre breaks down the seeming effortlessness of approaching the microphone, inviting playfulness into the difficulty inherent in tackling performance-related anxiety.”
The resulting text does result in a rather compelling visual text as a visual transcript of a combination of sound poem and stuttered performance, halting a staccato across the page. The Nerves Centre plays with stage direction, sound and stress, performance, the structures of self-help, signs and abrupt and halting phrases that stretch and accumulate, sometimes uncomfortably, across not only the page but across silences and held breath. “speaker skips toward microphone,” she writes, opening “Act 7,” “bright readied [.]” It is interesting to see how Szczepaniak has shifted what is usually seen as a detriment to performance and crafting a performance through that lens, akin to Jordan Scott utilizing his stutter into the performance-utterance of his poetry collection blert (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008). If Scott’s project asked “What is the utterance?” then Szczepaniak’s The Nerves Centre explores her own pauses, hesitations and halts to ask a similar series of questions. What is the utterance? What is the performance? rawlings’ ends her post-script, writing:
With a surfeit of recent poetry publications materializing around mental health, disease, and medicalization, Nerves is a welcome self-assessment salve or salvo – a mediation, meditation, interrogation of how language performs in a body anxious of performing language anxious of performing body anxious of languaging, anxious of anxiety. Where Fiona Templeton asserted in You: The City that “Theatre is the art of relationship” (Templeton 1990, 139), Szczepaniak focuses on the relationship with the performed, performing, strained, observed self in the little theatre of literary genre hybridity she has innovated.
