Theatreland: Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Daniel Barbiero
April 2025

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
Theatreland
ē· rā/ tiō editions 2024

Let me start from the beginning, with the opening lines from “History,” the first poem in Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s collection Theatreland:

to wish to pause
and planning, planning to return

are of the page, to reflect
is to reflect, of our own say

and welcome, are key, are enough
or,

are unexpected, are at hand
or sudden

The passage above is exemplary. All of the poems in Theatreland share the same basic structure that we find in “History”: they’re composed of strings of brief phrases arranged in couplets. At the local level, the phrases often are grammatically well-formed. But when we take in a larger view we see that the syntax doesn’t add up. We get accumulations of phrases but more often than not without the end-stop of a period to divide them into digestible semantic units. Also lacking is a discernible, subject-based hierarchy in relation to which the phrases can be ordered. In fact the subjects of the phrases – and of the poems themselves – often seem to be missing or at least obscured. We get the feeling that something is being alluded to, but what that something is never emerges directly. We can ask questions, though. Is history something we “wish to pause”? Something recurrent that’s “planning to return”? Is it something recorded (“of the page”) for us to reflect on? Is the poem ultimately about history at all?

Take another example, the opening lines of “Sills”:

may be conceits
spoken of and into play

the merits
they neither sought of

nor were
a source remote

or,
not strictly

it is called
falls or sills or recent

The first line follows from the title in a way that raises our expectation that we’re being told something about sills. (A sill is either the horizontal surface at the bottom of a window, or a horizontal layer of rock dividing rock layers above and below it.) St. Thomasino may be suggesting that they are clever tropes in spoken wordplay: the sills here may only be metaphors, but for what? Immediately after this the sense seems to break down into a change of subject or a way of speaking of sills in an opaquely indirect manner until we do return explicitly to the name “sills,” which the poem offers as one possible name – along with “falls” or “recent” — for a mysterious “it” about which we know nothing else. Sills reappear at the end of the poem, this time in the singular, where the concluding line draws a new equivalence between “falls and sill and ticket.”

As with “History” and indeed all of the other poems in Theatreland, “Sills” eschews direct communication. More than that, it lacks anything we can identify as a speaker. The voice here – as in every other poem in the book — is entirely impersonal; language seems to speak itself. At no point is there an “I” addressing itself to the reader in order to tell of its actions, sensations, or experiences. Outside of the “our” in “History,” I only counted a few other appearances of the first person pronoun, in all cases plural and as with the “our” in “History,” in none of them functioning as speaker or agent. “Donation Street” provides the one exception to the poems’ voicelessness; its opening line is addressed to a “you” (“to see, is upon you, my love”) but after this brief apostrophe, the addressee vanishes to become a pregnant absence.

By a similar token, where we would expect to find a noun or verb we often find an absence. In the opening lines of “Labor Day,” for instance:

is for
and louder than our own

among and above all the steps
in order to

are needed, see
or

We can supply “Labor Day” as the subject of “is for,” but the phrase wants to take an object, which is lacking: Labor Day is for something, but for what? That variable is left open. “Our own” seems to want to a noun (our own what?), just as “in order to” needs a verb and on top of that, we don’t know what entities “are needed” or for what. And the “or” standing by itself—it brings us to the next couplet (“in that fashion/ to part company”) as if to give us an alternative to what the first five lines set out.

Meaning seems to be elusive here – not only in “Labor Day,” but throughout the book. Reading these poems, we seem to find comments that have no topics, and actions that have no agents. How are we to understand Theatreland then?

The poems to all appearances embody the principles St. Thomasino has elucidated under the name of “logoclastics,” a statement or manifesto for which appears in The Wet Motorcycle: A Selected. Briefly, logoclastics is a poetics of indeterminacy in which a text’s discursive meaning is dislocated in such a way as to allow the reader broad interpretive discretion in putting it in order. The logoclastic text is in effect an open-form composition – “indeterminacy,” St. Thomasino notes, means being without exact limits rather than being uncertain – requiring the active participation of the reader-as-interpreter for the elucidation of its meaning. This allows the text a certain semi-independence from the author’s intention; there is something at work here that Umberto Eco has called an intentio operis – an intention belonging to the text. The text means more than its author means by virtue of the meanings its language can suggest on its own. St. Thomasino seems to acknowledge the poem’s semi-autonomy with the second stanza of “Tops,” where he writes:

a poem, in simple measure
can say the name of surrogate places

can count the change in a blind man’s cup
a day, in folds, moves, asking leave to come and go

The poem’s agency – its capacity to “act” on its own, to intervene in the world as it creates its own world of meaning — is depicted whimsically: speaking names, counting change, asking to come and go. In its world the names of places, as surrogates for those places, carry a suggestive power that may make them appear more real than the actual places themselves.

As with any kind of open-form composition, the final shape a logoclastic text will take depends on the collaboration of author and reader. This general observation doesn’t tell us how to interpret the poems of Theatreland in their specifics, but it does give us an idea of how meaning operates within them: it is as a horizon of possibility, a horizon whose limits aren’t fixed in advance. In Theatreland this horizon is defined by St. Thomasino’s handling of language through the techniques of impersonality, syntactic discontinuity, and the withholding of words from key positions within a phrase. Impersonality – the poems’ voiceless voice – removes the limit imposed by hints of the author’s intention and allows the reader to confront the language more directly. Syntactic discontinuity and the absence of words from key positions work together to remove limits imposed by narrative linearity and referential specificity.

To my eye, the phrase-based, fragmentary structure of Theatreland’s poems makes for a certain semantic modularity. Each phrase reads as a semi-independent, discrete entity that can be combined with adjacent phrases to produce larger language units, the cumulative effect of which is to suggest a broader meaning. And yet how to group these modular phrases into larger units, and how large any unit can sustain itself, is a matter of interpretive choice and not something to be settled once and for all. The boundaries between phrases are weak and lay themselves open to being changed with each new reading. I would point in this connection to the frequent occurrence throughout these poems of the disjunctive “or.” It’s a word whose function is to indicate alternative possibilities and hence operates as a sign that an occasion of choice has come up: that we have encountered a fork in the road of meaning, and must choose which way to proceed going forward. The upshot of all this is that the alliances between words and phrases, and with them the semantic aggregations, that emerge from the groupings one chooses aren’t in principle permanent, but instead are easily broken over the course of subsequent readings. Modules can change partners quickly and without regrets.

To paraphrase something Eco said about a different kind of text, a poem is a machine for generating interpretations. This is true of any kind of poem, or text for that matter, but with his principle of indeterminacy, St. Thomasino allows the machine to generate an almost unlimited number of interpretations whose range is a function of the range of the reader’s imagination. The reader’s imagination – in the guise of questions, associations, speculation – just is the fuel that allows the machine to run. St. Thomasino’s poems are in effect complex machines whose workings are half-hidden. If these workings are half-hidden it’s because what’s at stake is meaning, and if meaning is at stake, it’s because it has to reveal itself through the choices the reader has to make in order to realize his or her interpretive engagement. Theatreland, in the end, is about that engagement.

Here is the pdf for Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Theatreland →

For more info on Theatreland and other books by St. Thomasino →

Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).

Link to Daniel Barbiero’s,  As Within, so Without →

Daniel Barbiero’s other essays & reviews on Arteidolia →

Daniel Barbiero’s website →