Description:
It is a truism that a persistent trickle of water carved out the Grand Canyon. In Jono Schneider’s first book, this truism can be applied axiomatically where an inexorable flow of words erodes the extraneous to reveal vast muteness. Within this space, narrative traces arise, skirmish, and disappear. Familiarity exerts its own betrayal where “the only promise I can make is the one I will never reveal.”
The horizon to which Jono Schneider returns again and again is not so much disclosed as shaped and reshaped: it ceases to be a thing and admits only to a rhythm. The painter Leonora Carrington asserted that magic is “being aware of presence without definition.” Here you will find a book in which such enigma is enacted.
— Elizabeth Robinson

“...But I Couldn’t Speak...” occurs in and as a moment, one that it has opened for itself in the midst of a story so that its meanings can emerge. This is what Julia Kristeva has termed “the moment of accomplishment.” I belongs to the time of appearance, the temporal zone that everyone brings to the stories they are involved in. As readers of this wonderful book, our own involvement begins within its exquisite, noticeable sentences, which flow unimpeded except by the excitement they produce in the reader; we want nothing better than to pause at each of them, not in aesthetic wonder but so as to participate in the action that is this book.
— Lyn Hejinian

In Jono Schneider’s “...But I Couldn’t Speak...” every sentence is its time there. In each sentence, slow rigorous satisfying, relation to life ‘outside’ and to ‘living’ is that. We don’t slip out of the sentence or look elsewhere. Nothing is simply demonstrating something else. The reader is held again and again in this occurrence. It is as if a form of automatic writing to make a slow voice.
— Leslie Scalapino

The characters in Jono Schneider’s prose have names like “hunger” and “silence.” They are more than words. You encounter them in passing, as in a narrow street. They come a bit too close. You must reconcile their passing and their staying with you.
— Gil Ott

REVIEW

A well-known poet once announced that she had finally figured out how to read Ashbery. “You read 3 lines, and that’s the end of the poem. And the fourth line starts another poem.” She apparently considered the fact that the poem periodically autorefreshed to be a flaw.

Dubious as this method may be for reading any poet, it’s a fairly accurate description of the experience reading parts of Jono Schneider’s book-length sequence, …But I Could Not Speak… Far from a flaw, the frequent autorefresh rejuvenates the language and the thinking; it is the method by which Schneider moves among layers; it generates a tension of echo and absence that is the poetry in this extended prose/poem/essay/anti-novella.

The sentences in this polyphony of sentences are frequently their own beginnings, strutting off in different directions in search of a way into speech, a way toward a future ending, but resonating with the pasts both of the preceding sentences and of distant unspoken events. This is a book about time, and the book’s every moment is a reminder that time is both now and not now, but mostly not now. Time is not plot but the field that makes language possible, the field to which language is eternally confined.

The book’s strategy of eternal return is part and parcel with its inability to come to a conclusion, either structurally or narratively. Language begets language. In the end, we only arrive at a question about language and identity: “When does writing return my face?” Thus …But I Could Not Speak… propagates, riding the interference waves of speech and writing, memory and action.

The consistent quality of the language here is amazing—amazing for how interlaced and how sustained are the autorefresh and echo; so much so that it seems practically impossible to sample the piece without dragging all the rest of the book along with it in the net. You can’t possibly get the full impact of what I’m saying here without reading the book. But here are a couple of tastes that might entice you to do just that. Near the beginning:

Things were happening too slowly for us to simply understand them as we saw them, and it was difficult for everyone to continue without substantial and permanent revision. And yet time was further than the truth content of any given statement that might have entered the room by way of what I may have said in there. Sure, the dogs would not catch me, but I was no less nervous as I heard them becoming more restless in the distance. I wrote that because the distance was not as you might think, was not even as far as the word or as far as the word makes it out to be.

And near the end:

The seriality of things made way for consumption, unlike the act of ducking that the survivor told us was the perfected familial image of a masked urge. I concluded that shortening everything can reverse the coin’s dissatisfied face. Water runs along a nearby path, close enough for an earlier proposition to seem downright eerie…. and we gasp and gape as we glimpse these inner limits and the goo to which they stick.

This book is also representative of a recent trend among prose poets—the long prose poem sequence. Usually the prose poem sequence serves a controlling episodic narrative or controlling consciousness that stands in for a plot by centering a structurally disconnected narrative. Here, though, sequence and episode themselves are the controlling structure; they do not serve a narrative. On the contrary, the submerged narratives of the book seem to be there as not quite an afterthought—at best as the ongoing meditation’s objective correlatives, which gain no special status by correlating. This structure and this strategy are eligible to stray too close to the Scylla and the Charybdis of tedium and self-absorption, but Schneider is dutifully strapped to the post. He tries to keep looking forward, though time and language allow him only to look at what he is saying.

—Brian Clements

Excerpt

“She sat on the couch and explained the theories to he who was also a composer of some renown; the slice balanced curiously on his knees, he rocked comfortably backwards. It would be much later when he was finally able to reach the door with composure. She saw how long it took his anger to subside in books.....
He spoke of what drove him back once again to seek support in a slow voice.
Now it is the doors that close. Time polarized all things with evaluations. But this did not mean that I had them. The memories I decided to accept were those I was in the process of erasing to eliminate their sharp corners.
She felt that leaving a notebook near the bed was as close as she could possibly get to dreaming into perfectly readable writing. I stayed home; I read the kinds of books I wish weren’t written so as to mine a particularly painful depth, throughout which I feel the pure confusion of hitting a horizontal wall. Some body parts needed more protection for the protagonist than others; and yet when I lay in bed my hands sought only one to save because of how small and sad it seemed to me, even in the dark, when it slipped unnoticeably into an invisibility seen more clearly in the window.