Sunday, July 4, 2021

rob mclennan: The Nerves Centre, by Angela Szczepaniak

The Nerves Centre, Angela Szczepaniak
DC Books, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

The latest from Canadian poet Angela Szczepaniak, now the London-based Lecturer and Programme Director of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey, is The Nerves Centre (Montreal QC: DC Books, 2021), a book subtitled “a novel-in-performance-anxiety / in ten acts / 131 stanzas / 2417 phonetic utterances.” The author of Unisex Love Poems (DC Books, 2008) and The Qwerty Institute (Annual Report) (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2012), Szczepaniak’s The Nerves Centre offers itself as “a series of poems about performance (and other) anxiety, told through the jittery stop-and-start actions of a stage fright-afflicted Performer who can’t speak while on stage. […]  Constructed from recordings of actual panic attacks that were poorly transcribed by increasingly confused transcription software, then reshaped into poems for the page, these sound and breath pieces create a palpable experience of a Performer caught in the moment of panic.”

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.

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press in April 2022. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com