Robert Fitterman

Metropolis 16

Part list poem, part postmodern landscape, part essay on urban planning, the poem
“Metropolis 16” from the book Metropolis 16–29 (Toronto: Coach House Books,
2002) is a two-dimensional distillation of three-dimensional commercial architec-
ture. From Fitterman’s schematic diagram of proper names, the poem could be
projected to reconstruct almost any inhabited locale in America, with its endless
variations on the same numbing theme. Suggesting a formal analogue to the cultural
poverty they describe, the stanzas slowly diminish—their malls literally stripped—
to the dregs of the final tercet’s desperate alliterative shuttle. Here, the coloniz-
ing postwar expansion and homogenization of social space by corporate capital is
played out to its deadening dead-end end game. Shop, eat, shop—the triangulation
of sites of consumption in the poem’s final line recalls Guy Debord’s description of
a map accompanying “Paris et l’agglomération parisienne” (Paris: Essais de sociologie,
1952–1964 [Paris: Les editions ouvriéres, 1965]), Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s
classic 1952 study of urban social anthropology. The map registered “le trace de tous
les parcours effectués en une année par une étudiante de XVIe arrondissement;
ces parcours dessinent un triangle de dimension réduite, sans échappées” (every
movement made over the space of one year by a student living in the Sixteenth
Arrondissement; her itinerary describes a small triangle with no significant devia-
tions) (“Théorie de la derive,” Les Lèvres Nues 9 [November 1956]: 6–10; reprinted
in Internationale Situationniste 2 [December 1958]: 51–55).
The ideology encapsulated by the big-box store depends on encouraging pre-
cisely such itineraries, as well as on strategies of replication, regularity, conformity,
familiarity, and guided movement. In a poem that recalls Fitterman’s catalog, John
Ashbery, not coincidentally, pairs sites of social regulation with corporate names
(The Vermont Notebook [Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975]):

Bridge clubs, Elks, Kiwanis, Rotary, AAA, PTA, lodges, Sunday school, band
rehearsal, study hall, book clubs, annual picnics, banquets, parades, brunches,
library teas, slide lectures, seances, concerts, community sings.

218
 Gulf Oil, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Xerox, Eastman Kodak, ITT, Marriott,
Sonesta, Crédit Mobilier, Sperry Rand, Curtis Publishing, Colgate, Motorola,
Chrysler, General Motors, Anaconda, Crédit Lyonnais, Chase Manhattan,
Continental Can, Time-Life, McGraw Hill, CBS, ABC, NBC.

Like the Vermont of Ashbery’s notebook, the America of “Metropolis 16” consti-
tutes a sort of dark georgic: the fields and forests that once surrounded civic centers
developed into sites of labor, including the dutiful labor of consuming, the continu-
ation of employment by other means. Et in Arcadia . . .

McDonald’s
Burger King
Taco Bell
Home Depot
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
KFC
J. Crew
Home Depot
Staples
Sunglass Hut
Wendy’s
Kmart
Wal*Mart

McDonald’s
Wal*Mart
Sunglass Hut
Kmart
Wendy’s
Taco Bell
J. Crew
Staples
Home Depot
Gap
KFC
Dunkin’ Donuts

Robert Fitterman 219

Dunkin’ Donuts
Taco Bell
Kmart
Home Depot
Sunglass Hut
Staples
Wal*Mart
Gap
McDonald’s
J. Crew
KFC

Taco Bell
Staples
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
Wal*Mart
KFC
J. Crew
Kmart
Sunglass Hut
McDonald’s

Taco Bell
Staples
Kmart
Gap
J. Crew
McDonald’s
KFC
Wendy’s

Taco Bell
J. Crew
KFC
Staples
Gap
Dunkin’ Donuts
Kmart

220 AGAINST EXPRESSION

Kmart
Taco Bell
Gap
J. Crew
Staples
KFC
Dunkin’ Donuts

Taco Bell
Staples
KFC
J. Crew
Dunkin’ Donuts
Kmart

Kmart
Taco Bell
KFC
Staples
J. Crew

Kmart
KFC
Kmart
Taco Bell

Kmart
KFC
Kmart

Robert Fitterman 221

 from The Sun Also Also Rises

Robert Fitterman here performs a grammatical analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The

Sun Also Rises, eliminating all sentences that do not begin with the first person singu-
lar pronoun. The result reads very much like Ron Silliman’s “Berkeley” (This 5 [Win-
ter 1974]: n.p.). One might compare Fitterman’s grammatical excavation with the
narrative mining of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four by Carolyn Thompson in
Winston and Julia: A Love Story (2003). Thompson removed most of Orwell’s text,
leaving only the scenes of romance between her title characters. Thompson’s After
Easton Ellis, similarly, trimmed to the size of the Picador edition of Ellis’s American
Psycho, eliminates everything but the brand names from the original novel. With a
kind of reverse censorship, Janet Zweig published the descriptively titled collection
The 336 Lines Currently Expurgated from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in Ninth-Grade
Textbooks (Long Island City, N.Y.: Sheherezade, 1989).
A related booklet in the trilogy (Calgary: No Press, 2008) translates the sen-
tences from The Sun Also Also Rises into Fitterman’s own experience as a young
writer moving to New York City in the early 1980s and recalls a methodology honed
by Ben Friedlander, who has, for example, rewritten Edgar Allan Poe’s “Literati of
New York City” in reference to San Francisco poets. For example, Poe writes:

Mr. Duycknick is one of the most influential of the New York littérateurs, and has
done a great deal for the interests of American letters. Not the least important
service rendered by him was the projection and editorship of Wiley and Put-
nam’s “Library of Choice Reading,” a series which brought to public notice many
valuable foreign works which had been suffering under neglect in this country,
and at the same time afforded unwonted encouragement to native authors by
publishing their books, in good style and in good company, without trouble or
risk to the authors themselves, and in the very teeth of the disadvantages arising
from the want of an international copyright law.

Friedlander revises:

Mr. Silliman is one of the most influential of the San Francisco littérateurs, and has
done a great deal for the interests of American letters. Not the least important
service tendered by him was the conception and editorship of In the American
Tree, published after some few years delay by the National Poetry Foundation.
This heft collection of language poetry brought to public notice many valuable

222 AGAINST EXPRESSION