Pqrs

Poetry. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. It’s one thing to advocate for writing that pushes boundaries, mixes discourses, and transgresses the dominant aesthetic, but it’s quite another to actually write it. As a play, PQRS is not just unstageable, it is a monumental failure. That is, it fails with such clarity, indifference, legitimate anger, and abandon that it turns into a kind of monument, marking the point where the intellect’s pessimism collapses into the will’s optimism. The many models and forerunners for a project this radical include the posthumously published texts of Gertrude Stein, referred to explicitly here as ‘the most exhaustive syllabic implosion in prose of any language.’ But if Stein’s implosion was horizontal, PQRS goes vertical, running up and down the scale of rhetorics: essay, drama, lists of potential performance art projects, lit crit, film crit, music history, autobiography, back to drama, intermission, critique of capital, URL of a Tumblr page of women laughing while holding salads, back to drama (and: scene). ‘The text succeeds its own conditions.’ In dire and unsuccessful times, that’s the hope.–Brent Cunningham