Whenever I try a Gertrude Stein related exercise or when I read on, I am reminded of the other factors that constitute language. We ask, what tone does this story have, what literary devices does the author employ in this scene? And in lessons we identify these same things in sentences and learn what they are. We put the legos together, but we rarely play with them one by one.
Though I’d say that legos are a good analogy, since they can be connected to each other out of context and still be something. Weldon Ryckman’s Thirteen of These Thirteen of These Thirteen of These takes structure, tone, theme, imagery and sound to craft a literary work.
The piece takes thirteen distinct, well, not things, but these’s, and brings out ideas of loneliness, fear and meditation. This is done through repetition, rhyme, wordplay and structure. I tried to find any single thing that ran through the whole piece. As the title suggests, there are thirteen sections. In the first section, you can add up all the written numbers and they will equal thirteen. But reading on that was not apparent for the rest of the sections. What does come up throughout is isolation, loneliness, body parts and cinema and art references. Perhaps there could be more of a theme running through the whole piece. It’s certainly there, but going over it again perhaps emphasizing certain notions that call out to the reader. However, I might be imagining that those notions even exist.
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