David Antin skirts the line between poetry and prose in “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto.” His form is so bizarre that I think he hits “postmodernism” dead on. (Someone once told me, “you don’t just get postmodernism. It was the most conceited thing I’ve ever heard.) Antin doesn’t use punctuation, but there’s blank space so we know where to pause and slow down, and he tells us straight out when someone is speaking. He doesn’t capitalize any names or proper nouns, but we can infer. Most of his ‘sentences’ are short, quick, quips. He sort of repeats himself. Not in an obnoxious way, like your close-talking friend who never shuts up and repeats the same story over and over again, but in a way that works with his story (because his wife sounds like she needs repeating). The whole thing sounds as if he’s speaking to us. Which is good, because he does spoken word.

All those little nuances, though, were brought up in Jonathn Kern’s “Writing for Broadcast.” He says that we listen to radio broadcasts, podcasts, and such in real time—so we don’t have the option to go back and re-read, like we do with essays and other printed material. The writer has to write for broadcast by choosing “bite-sized chunks” to get his point across. Antin is familiar in his writing—another one of Kern’s points. It sounds like Antin is chatting with us. He’s telling the story of how he and his wife got their new mattress, but it’s more than that, he’s still exploring something. He’s still coming to come realization. At one point, when he’s talking about mattresses, he says on page 119 that “you learn to live with its defects,” and I realized that he’s bees talking about his wife all along (especially because of the way he’s been portraying her). They’re not shopping for a mattress, they’re in marriage counseling. Antin has learned to carefully navigate Elly’s trenches and valleys, to understand her idiosyncrasies, but she still has her issues. In the end, they come out better than before, but it still isn’t perfect. I still don’t get postmodernism, but I do think I know a little more about romance and mattress hunting.