HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS THIS ESSAY

I’ve never seen anything like it.

A thread.

https://lithub.com/how-does-garth-greenwell-make-such-wonderful-sentences/ @lithub @xiankiefer

“Greenwell is a brilliant writer & the tools he makes use of in Cleanness are myriad, but among the most important of these is his use of specific kinds of grammar, re-informing or re-grammaring the text in ways that point to specific kinds of meaning-making.”

RE-GRAMMARING

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“We’ll get to the semicolon in this sentence soon enough, but first let’s turn an ear toward the syllabic content.”

THIS IS SCANSION

HE IS SCANNING MY PROSE

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“...creating a kind of sonic undulation, pausing and pausing like end-stopped lines of poetry by pushing the stressed beats against the ends of the prepositional phrases.”

!!!!!

Can you imagine someone writing about prose WITH THIS KIND OF EAR can you imagine

Omg these two sentences are so hot.

I mean the fact that this analysis is so granular a single sentence is presented in full THREE TIMES & then read in a different light each time, each time profoundly, Lord have mercy.

“BUT AS A VOLTA”

READ ME CHRISTIAN KIEFER

“Prescriptive grammarians might be aghast at all of this, and yet, as before, Greenwell is employing specific grammar here as a prime vehicle of meaning-making.”

Yes, this exactly, thank you, yes.

PROSE ENJAMBMENT

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“MEANING IS CONSTRUCTED BY WASHING AWAY ANY EASY READING OF MEANING-MAKING”

This is so profoundly true of so much of the art I love, I am so moved to see it said of my own work.

And summarized in a single (extremely beautiful) sentence.

“It is language about the failure of language to adequately convey experience, and the grammar used is reflective and responsive to this experience.”

Jesus.

I’m so moved by this essay; it’s like my dream reader—but smarter than that reader, who is limited by my dreams—has seen something that I hoped was in my sentences but could never articulate.

Art-making, sentence-making is so much about feel, about working & reworking until something feels right. You hope your apparatus is so constituted (by long apprenticeship, by praxis) that this “feeling right” is a meaningful form of knowledge.

That’s why I feel such immense gratitude & relief reading this essay: its suggestion of a meaning in the sentences that I hoped was there but that is deeper than my intention.

Who gets to be read like this? I am so grateful to have @xiankiefer as a reader, & so lucky that he lavished his brilliant expertise on my work in this profoundly generous way.

In sum: this is one of the best pieces of criticism & prose close-reading I have ever seen. What an honor & a thrill to have CLEANNESS read this way.

/END (for now) (maybe)