Boundary 2, 'American Poetry After 1975' (Vol 36 No 3, Fall 2009)

In Memoriam

Masao Miyoshi1928–2009

The academics’ work in this marketized world, then, is to learn and watch problems in as many sites as they can keep track of, not in any specific areas, nations, races, ages, genders, or cultures, but in all areas, nations, races, ages, genders, and cultures. . . . What we need now is this powerfully reintegrated concept of society, where diversity does not mean a rivalry of minorities and factions, and resultant isolation. . . . To right the situation, to null the transaction and be just to all on earth, we may have to relearn the sense of the world, the totality, that includes all peoples in every race, class, and gender.

—“Ivory Tower in Escrow”

Contents

Charles Bernstein / American Poetry After 1975: Editor’s Note / 1

Jim Rosenberg / Bios / The Logosphere / The Finite-Made Evolver Space / 3

Peter Gizzi / Eclogues / 9

Christian Bök / Two Dots Over a Vowel / 11

Lytle Shaw / Docents of Discourse: The Logic of Dispersed Sites / 25

Tracie Morris / Rakim’s Performativity / 49

Jennifer Scappettone / Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin’s Ambient Poetics / 63

Craig Dworkin / Hypermnesia / 77

Jonathan Skinner / Poetry Animal / 97

Herman Rapaport / A Liquid Hand Blossoms / 105

Kenneth Goldsmith / In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry / 121

Joyelle McSweeney / Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner / 123

Brian Reed / Grammar Trouble / 133

Juliana Spahr / The ’90s / 159

Al Filreis / The Stevens Wars / 183

Nada Gordon / Not Ideas about the Bling but the Bling Itself / 203

Marjorie Perloff / “The Rattle of Statistical Traffic”: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight / 205

Elizabeth Willis / Lyric Dissent / 229

Tan Lin / SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS) / 235

Benjamin Friedlander / After Petrarch (In the Rigging) / 241

Books Received / 243

Contributors / 247

American Poetry After 1975: Editor’s Note

Charles Bernstein

I have had the pleasure of editing two previous special issues of boundary 2—“43 Poets (1984)” (vol. 14, no. 1/2 [Autumn 1985/Winter 1986]), and “99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium” (vol. 26, no. 1 [Spring 1999])—as well as a cluster, “Swedish Poetry and Poetics: A Gathering” (vol. 29, no. 1 [Spring 2002]). A “dossier” on my work (poems and interviews) was published in the fall issue of 1996 (vol. 23, no. 3). For this special issue on American poetry after 1975, I have gathered work from a set of literary scholars who are redefining the field, focusing mostly on those who have published their first book in the last decade. I have also included a few older hands along with a few poems. My focus here is on new directions, an old-time cliché but I trust justified by the works pre-sented. While many of the essays are traditional in form, I encouraged all the participants to move beyond the constraints of professional writing if and as possible or necessary. For this reason, I have asked that the original style of each essay be left as is and that the documentation formats not be standardized. But then I have always had a weakness for eccentricity. In this issue, Jennifer Scappettone writes on ambience and “junk

boundary 2 36:3 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-014 © 2009 by Duke University Press

2 boundary 2 / Fall 2009

space” with special reference to the work of Tan Lin; Christian Bök provides a typology of intention; Lytle Shaw extends the poetics of place into “field” work and site specificity; Craig Dworkin addresses radical poetry and the digital archive; Marjorie Perloff illuminates Susan Howe’s The Midnight ; Jonathan Skinner writes on ecopoetics; Joyelle McSweeney takes on the poetics of disability, with special reference to Hannah Weiner; Al Filreis sur-veys Wallace Stevens’s post-’75 shadows; Jim Rosenberg assesses digital spaces; Elizabeth Willis addresses the sociality of the lyric as a means to encounter her own generation’s poetics practices; Brian Reed also takes on his generation’s poetics, considering trends and resistance to inno-vative poetry practice, with special reference to Craig Dworkin; Herman Rapaport goes against the grain in taking on the aesthetics of sentimental poetry and sweet nothings; Tracie Morris writes on hip-hop and J. L. Austin, with special reference to Rakim; and Juliana Spahr extends the “Poetry and Other Englishes” cluster she edited with David Buuck in boundary 2 (vol. 33, no. 2 [Summer 2006]) with her essay on multilingual poetry. The issue also includes short poems by Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nada Gordon, and Benjamin Friedlander. I would have liked space for more. But this collection will spill over into the next issue of the journal. In particular, Scott Pound’s slated contribution, a panegyric for the poetics of sophism, an essay central to the concerns of this collection and also to the larger, long-term project of poetics in boundary 2, will appear in volume 37, no. 1 (Spring 2010). This issue is dedicated, with gratitude, to William Spanos and Paul Bové. Under their guidance, boundary 2 has had a long and singular com-mitment to dialectical poetry and dialogic poetics. As Robert Creeley would say, Onward!

Bios / The Logosphere / The Finite-Made Evolver Space

Jim Rosenberg

Bios — as in biosphere, the universe, the totality of living things, the breath-scape. The evolved: a generational, incremental one-to-the-next change. Contribution, frequency, probability: slow morphing of the gravity of the rules of survival. Diversity: the multiplicity of beings in the same space by happenstance. Not designed, but not undesigned: feedback. The happen-stance has a reaction, self-reaction, selves reacting. It is folded in its own echoes.

Digital: the realm inside a membrane of fixed possibilities. Fixed as in the fixed number of possible bits (two) or letters of the alphabet. Or words, more or less — less because this too can evolve, does evolve. The words are there before we get there, though we can cement pieces at hand together, neologos. But we don’t invent all the words, or even most of the words. At best we make a few. Mostly we choose. Selection from the fixed prior set. Finite. The dictionary fits on a CD-ROM with room to spare. The dictionary, even by the standards of the size of the operating system on a computer, is a tiny amount of data.

boundary 2 36:3 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-015 © 2009 by Jim Rosenberg


A subset. A selection of that infinitude of possible human experiences. From only one, or maybe a handful, of all the languages of the earth. Logosphere but specific sphere. A minds-inflated small-point universe. A set. A small set by the standards of databases, but large for the mind: one can’t hold the whole language in mind at once. Robert Duncan told us — over and over — about keeping the numbers small. He insisted he could not count beyond five. Of course he was speaking about prosody, about how many choices he could keep in his mind at once. Small sets. Tiny sets.

Logosphere the model. What if we make the word set as small as pos-sible. Not the whole dictionary but a few hundred words. Words sliced from phrases raised as domestic animals and then offered up as metabolism material, cut up, as food. Logosphere as biosphere: the energy to be word-eaten, processed, an evolutionary catalysis space. A word mass set out as the energy source for the next generation of phrase making: prompt-sheets. A glance source. And the process cycles: a next generation of phrases written from the prompt-sheets, and then cut up, permuted, eaten, metabolized: composition by evolution.

Metabolism: as in chemistry: to liberate energy you break the bonds. Cut the phrases up to get reactivity. Composition in advance just to make raw material: precomposition. To make the phrase-bonds just so they can be broken. Free association is OK as metabolism meat: When associating from A to B, keep A, keep B, don’t keep the link from A to B.

On paper it is hard to see how this is achieved. You write A, you write B, they are there together on the paper. If you write them on the screen, they are there together also, but you can break the link: cut the phrase between A and B, scramble it by random permutation. A and B are flung apart by the laws of chance. The bond is not valuable, but the journey got you A and got you B. They settle into place, where they may or may not get eaten. And then, dance-wise, settle into a new place each time the permutation is rerun.

So the cycle: start with phrases, written by hand, the old way. They don’t need to have meaning, they only need to have energy. Cut them up. (They are made to be cut up.) Cut them in fact exactly where they mean, leaving the boundary raw, the energy pulsing out. Now take the fragments and permute them, by chance. Pour the result into a single pages-long solid

Rosenberg / Bios 5

paragraph: the word set. The prompt-sheet for the next phase in the cycle. A source. Possibly a strict source for all the words of the next phase, but not necessarily strict. You don’t insist that every word for the next phase come from the set, but striving for that is an amazement: so often something at hand is right there in the available prompt-sheet, a combination that works exactly in the right slot.

Extraction from a miniature totality. A multitude of topics but then cut and scrambled, thus embodying the model space, an ocean, a full range for years of work at a time. A subset language but is it so sub-: a model. An experi-ment. A place where the energy mingles are staged. A catalysis scaffold.

The poem starts not from an empty page, but from a full one: the prompt-sheet, the source rattle, the extraction space. Its own small universe. Not read, literally, but eye-dance-scanned at random, seeking the leap-out. Words that are there in advance of making the poem as an evolved / evolver space, a logosphere, a word space formed partly by chance and partly by building.

So where, exactly, is the digital world so different from the physical world at this business of making logospheres? We can make a logosphere physi-cally. With no computer at all. Words as real physical objects, each on its own space (an idea I stole quite blatantly many years ago from the painter Mary Jean Kenton). Objecthood is not an issue: you hold the words in your fingers. Stick them to the walls, the floor, lay them loose, let them loose in the world. Let them float on water. Connect them up with drafting tape. Or as Catherine Marshall did, put them on the spheres of molecular models: word molecules. Shade them. Hide them in piles. The page becomes any possible physical space.

As physical objects the words have weight, have friction, reproducing the word means manufacture: it costs. The space even with no words: it costs. The cost occurs again for each space of words. Cost dedicated to that specificity of word. Cost not for tools or equipment but for bare raw materi-als of the word space.

Friction, the resistance, the difficulty of motion. In the digital world we can reproduce the words, the word space, with no friction: there is no manufac-ture. Propagation of the word is free, the reader can do this.


But we pay: the viewport is tiny. Poets can’t afford a monitor the size of a wall. Thus the paradox: our virtual page is theoretically unbounded yet often physically smaller than the real page. So there is this motion problem: motion of the viewport through the text. A retina that is way too obtrusive.

Nonspecificity: the word set, the reservoir is not specific but was made from what once was specific. Specificities accumulated, generality by having lots of them, and then the specificity is intentionally broken up, the pieces scat-tered, mingled. A kind of specificity in the word-gene not the word experi-ence: specificity is in where the word was, not where the word is. But the word space cut for the scrambling is not cut at every word boundary. There are shards of the specificity left.

Inclusion: logosphere as a miniature universe needs to include as much as possible. But Shannon tells us: the information measure is based on how much is excluded: if everything is there, nothing means. The Shan-non measure of information is based on the probability of the codon occur-ring in the code: if it’s always going to be there, there are zero bits. Thus Shannon measures by exclusion: information measured by how much is not there. A high number of bits comes from a low probability. A paradox: one wants to maximize the number and kinds of energy transaction that can happen: to include them. But Shannon tells us that for information we have to exclude.

The specificity, the Shannon exclusion, is time shifted. It happens in the future, in the mind of the reader. It happens in the past: the word materials evolved from pieces that had some specificity but the pieces were then metabolized: getting at the logos as a precompositional evolution move-ment. Logos as an event horizon with a past as evolution meat and a future as the reader’s energy transaction but absolutely no present. There is no present. There is only a moving blade between that specificity of the past when logos was encased in a rigid body and that specificity of the future where the energy transaction happens. The present is a phase-change boundary. Word-energies flip. Logos not as the code but as the channel. This is how we evade the Shannon Paradox. The text is not the code, it is the channel. We turn Shannon inside out.

There is no mapping between precompositional time and compositional time: The chance of a mapping is destroyed, cut up and permuted out of

Rosenberg / Bios 7

existence. We are familiar with earlier forms of poetics which are real-time poetics — e.g., projective verse time sequences acting as the image of the poet’s breath-time at the moment of composition. Or Allen Ginsberg’s Improvised Poetics: the poem composed live into a tape recorder as an improvisational act, the whole act of composition being a real-time phe-nomenon. But why should the poet’s time matter? Why not the reader’s time?

Logosphere as process: the evolver space. The codes create channels which create codes which create channels: a self-sustaining energy matrix. Wittgenstein taught us about language games, but every word is a game, word is nothing but game. It flips, like the duck-rabbit. Channel / code / channel / code: there is no real identity as channel or code, it is both, it is the oscillation. It is the whole uncollapsed possibility space, as in quantum mechanics. The word as cloud of possible arrivals.

The logosphere is a biosphere: logos / bios: they are all the same. The word as a being. It behaves. Its fate is to be eaten.

Eclogues

Peter Gizzi

When moments worded hopeful fall blithely across the brow.

When tomorrow terrors itself into view, yesterday calls.

But today it’s lost incipience, lost moment lost to shavers, recycling blue.

Will, the tense suggests, will we regain what ever now? That now.

This bell entitled, simply, my life, clanks at irregular intervals so loud there isn’t room for a boy.

A few celebrate the incipience inside the chirp

others merely repeat fog. The unhappening of day. The sudden storm over the house, the sudden

houses revealed in cloud-cover rolling by on rails. Snow upon the land.

This land untitled so much for soldiers, untitled so far from swans.

Sing. Flag. Boy. Idyll. Gong.



Fate disrupts the open field into housing starts. Into futurities neglected corners and mites. This again,

the emptied anthem, dusty antlers, pilsner flattened.

To do the work, undo the word for whom?

Bells swinging back and forth. The head rings no. No. The space inside is vast.

The prayer between electrons proportionately vast.

The ancestry between air and everything is alive and all is alpha everywhere

atoms stirring, nesting, dying out and reforged elsewhere, the genealogist said.

A chromosome has 26 letters and a gene just 4. One is a nation. The other a poem.

Two Dots Over a Vowel

Christian Bök

1. The Intentional in Conceptual Literature

Modern, social trends in computing (as seen, for example, in digi-tized sampling and networked exchange) have so thoroughly ensconced piracy and parody as sovereign, aesthetic values that not only do the eco-nomic edifices of copyright seem ready to collapse, but so also do the romantic bastions of both sublime creativity and eminent authorship seem ready to dissolve into a morass of protoplasmic textualities, all manufac-tured at a prodigious, industrial scale by means of plagiaristic appropriation and computerized recombination. Varied pupils of the avant-garde at the Listserv UbuWeb (including, among others, such poets as Caroline Berg-vall, Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Simon Morris, Darren Wershler-Henry, and I) have all striven to respond to these trends by conceiving of an innovative literature that, for lack of an apter title, critics have seen fit to dub “conceptual.” Such poets disavow the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion in order to explore the ready-made poten-tial of uncreative literature. They resort to a diverse variety of antiexpres-sive, antidiscursive strategies (including the use of forced rules, random



words, copied texts, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools), doing so in order to erase any artistic evidence of “lyric style.” Works by members of UbuWeb have often confronted the intention-ality, if not the expressiveness, of such lyric style by offering alternatives to this normative condition of writing—alternatives inspired by such varie-gated precedents as the formalist writing of Georges Perec, the aleatoric writing of John Cage, the ready-made artwork of Andy Warhol, and the axiomatic artwork of Sol LeWitt, among the work of many other writers and artists, all of whom have suppressed their subjective experience on behalf of, otherwise, demeaned concepts of literary activity. Poets who write conceptual literature often parody the principles of sublime egotism. Such writers might observe the self and examine the self, but they do so with such exactitude and with such detachment that the act of reportage itself borders upon a kind of fanatical obsession.� Such writers might in turn generate unscripted recordings of the self, speaking, verbatim, in a kind of stream-of-consciousness, improvising without editorial revisions.� Such writers might also go so far as to generate exhaustive structures for the self, pushing the fulfillment of formal rigor to the most athletic extremes.� Such writers might even delegate their creativity to a diverse variety of prosthe-ses, all of which might compose work without intervention from the self at all.� Works of conceptual literature have primarily responded to the his-torical precedents set by two disparate movements in the avant-garde: first, the systematic writing of Oulipian pataphysicians (like Raymond Que-

1. Fidget, by Kenneth Goldsmith (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000), for example, item-izes every single physical movement enacted by the author on Bloomsday, June 16, 1997. The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2000), by Darren Wershler-Henry, item-izes every unused, artistic proposal imagined by the author from 1990 to 2000.2. Soliloquy, by Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Granary Books, 2001), for example, tran-scribes, unexpurgated, every utterance made by the author during one week, April 15–21, in 1996. Fig, by Caroline Bergvall (Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2005), features verbal scores that accent many of the performative difficulties arising from a polyglot fracture of speech.3. Eunoia, by Christian Bök (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001), for example, features five prolonged lipograms, each of which tells a story, using only one of the five vowels. Parse, by Craig Dworkin (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 2008), describes the structure of every sentence in a grammatical enchiridion, using the parsing systems of the manual itself.4. Re-Writing Freud, by Simon Morris (York, UK: Information as Material, 2005), for example, randomizes the sequence of words found in The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud. Apostrophe, by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry (Toronto: ECW Press, 2006), uses homespun software both to collect and to collate any online clause that begins with the phrase “You are . . .”

Bök / Two Dots Over a Vowel 13

neau, Jacques Roubaud, among others); second, the procedural artwork of American conceptualists (like Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, among others)—precedents that, in both cases, reduce creativity to a tautologi-cal array of preconceived rules, whose logic culminates not in the manda-tory creation of a concrete object but in the potential argument for some abstract schema. Ideas that we conceive for works now become systemic “axioms,” and the works that we generate from these ideas now become elective “proofs.” The concept for the artwork now absorbs the quality of the artwork itself. The idea for a work supplants the work. The idea renders the genesis of the work optional, if not needless.� For the proponents of con-ceptual literature, a writer no longer cultivates any subjective readerships by writing a text to be read, so much as the writer cultivates a collective “thinkership”�—an audience that no longer even has to read the text itself in order to appreciate the importance of its innovation. The text no longer begs to be read clearly for the quality of its content, but rather begs to be seen blankly for the novelty of its concept. Works of conceptual literature constitute what Dworkin might call “the writing of the new new formalism,”� insofar as such literature imposes arbitrary, but axiomatic, dicta upon the writing process, doing so in order to extract an otherwise unthought potential from this structural constraint. The self-conscious attention paid by a lyrical poet to the life of the self now gives way to the self-reflexive attention paid by a radical text to the form of its idea. All aspects of both intentionality and expressiveness now find themselves governed not by the whim of a poet but by the rule of a game—a “language-game,” like the kind discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argues that, when playing such a game, “we look to the rule for instruction and do something, without appealing to anything else for guidance.”� The

5. Exponents of conceptual literature do not argue that writing itself must be “imma-terial,” disengaged from any embodiment in either a medium or an object (like a book, for example); instead, the necessity to vouchsafe the “concept” by embodying it in some “example” becomes only one of many ways to “rethink” the concept of writing itself.6. Kenneth Goldsmith has remarked that “conceptual writing is [. . .] interested in a thinkership rather than a readership,” and for him, “[c]onceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts.” Avail-able at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2007.01.22.html (accessed March 5, 2009).7. Craig Dworkin, “The UbuWeb:: Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” available at http://www.ubu.com/concept (accessed March 5, 2009).8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Mott, 1974), 86e, 228.


poet subordinates all subjectivity to this rule, replacing an act of volitive expression with an act of negative capability. The poet constrains the cog-nitive functions of the self on behalf of other aesthetic functions in the text (be these functions automatic, mannerist, or aleatoric in their conceptual-ization). The poet thereby expands the concept of writing beyond the formal limits of any expressive intentions, doing so in order to conceive of, hitherto, inconceivable preconditions for writing itself. Since the reign of the New Critics (like W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, for example), the values of both intentionality and expressive-ness have come to represent recurrent “fallacies”� of aesthetic judgment—fallacies that have served to ignore the traits of the poem itself in order to attach the merits of the work to the genius of a self. When judging a work, based upon its intentionality, the critic evaluates the emotional “origins” of the work in the mind of the writer, doing so by asking: “How successful are the lyrical motives of the poem—and does the poet exert an authentic control over the self?” When judging a work for its expressiveness, how-ever, the critic evaluates the emotional “results” in the mind of the reader, doing so by asking: “How persuasive are the lyrical effects of the poem—and does the poet voice an authentic message from the self?” No poem can easily answer such questions on its own—and thus critics have since sought to detach the merits of the text from the genius of the self, doing so in order to account not only for the work’s autotelic coherence but also for the work’s technical innovation. No longer is the author an actual person who might precede a text and certify its aims so much as the author has now become a “function”�0—operant, as a concept, through each reading of the text.

9. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley discuss the “intentional fallacy” in the dis-course of literature by arguing that “intention of the author is neither available nor desir-able as a standard for judging the success of a work,” because “[t]he poem [. . .] is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it” (“The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954], 3, 5). Likewise, Hal Foster studies the “expressive fallacy” in the discourse of aesthetics by arguing that, “even as expression-ism insists on the [. . .] interior self, it reveals that this self is never anterior to its traces,” and thus “‘the artist’ is less the originator of his expression than its effect”—a condition that such expression both reveals and rejects (“The Expressive Fallacy,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics [Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1985], 62).10. Michel Foucault notes that, among its many traits, the “‘author-function’ [. . .] does not refer, purely and simply, to an [. . .] individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a [. . .] series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy”—


Poets who have produced conceptual literature have replaced the expressive intentions of such a self with a whole array of, apparently impos-sible, poetic values, arguing for the viability of work that skeptics might dismiss as uncreative, unoriginal, unengaging, unreadable, uninspired, uneventful. . . . Even though a poet like Goldsmith, for example, might describe his own acts of poetic tedium as nothing more than a banal brand of data management or word processing,�� in which the poet becomes a kind of monk, doomed to recopy only the most leaden genres of boring speech in some nightmarish scriptorium, such work, nevertheless, still creates surprise and engages interest. Lest we dismiss these tactics of Goldsmith as nothing more than the mere symptoms of a creeping, lit-erary necrosis, occasioned by the murder of the author at the hands of such postmodern theorizers as Roland Barthes, for example, or perhaps Michel Foucault��—let us consider that conceptual literature might strive to accent the disjunction between intentionality (what we mean to mean) and expressiveness (what we seem to mean). If the lyric voice, for the sake of an authentic sincerity, yearns to repair this breach between what we intend to say and what we appear to say—then conceptual literature, by contrast, accentuates this discrepancy.

2. The Expressible in Conceptual Literature

Allow me to illustrate the authorial attitudes of conceptual literature by digressing long enough to read “William Tell: A Novel”��—one of the limit-

and in fact, “[w]e can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” (“What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977], 131, 138).11. Kenneth Goldsmith notes, “I am a word processor [. . .]. The simple act of moving infor-mation from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act” (“A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation,” in The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poet-ics, ed. Craig Dworkin [New York: Roof Books, 2008], 143–44).12. Roland Barthes notes that “[t]he removal of the Author [. . .] utterly transforms the modern text (or—which is the same thing—the text is henceforth [. . .] read so that the author absents himself from it at every level” (“The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986], 51–52). Foucault also notes that “to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing” (“What Is an Author?” 117).13. Steve McCaffery, “William Tell: A Novel,” in Seven Pages Missing Volume 2: Selected Ungathered Work (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002), 66.


cases of avant-garde narrative by the avant-garde theorizer, Steve McCaf-fery. While this work of visual poetry is not, strictly speaking, a case of con-ceptual literature (like the kind written by members of UbuWeb), the literary premises of this “novel” nevertheless address the issues of both intention-ality and expressiveness in a manner that UbuWeb might extoll. The image consists of a lowercase depiction of the letter I, enlarged to reveal that it is dotted on top not with a point but with a colon—a pair of dots, one above the other, like two tittles. The emblem, of course, evokes the stick-image of a figure, standing upraised at attention, with an apple upon its skull. The title tells us to treat the image as a novel—but such a novel must strain our credulity about the qualities of the genre, insofar as this story does not comprise thousands of sentences but consists of nothing more than a single letter. A novel that lacks even words themselves might force us to rethink the minimal amounts of text that can qualify for such a form—particularly when we might easily peruse this letter with the same kind of scholarly apparatus otherwise dedicated to a lengthier chronicle. While McCaffery has written a work that might, at first, seem too cryptic for any extended, literary analysis, such a “novel” does at least refer to the famed story of Tell, the medieval marksman from the village of Alt-dorf. Tell (in the apocryphal recounting) flouts the edicts of his Austrian overlord, Gessler—a Vogt who, in 1307, orders that all locals must bow before his hat, which sits atop a pole in the square of the hamlet. When Tell defies this decree, he gets arrested, and as a punishment for his insolence, he must prove his marksmanship by firing a crossbow at an apple, set up as a target, upon the head of his son, Walter—or else both the man and the boy must suffer immediate execution. Tell passes this awful trial, but nevertheless earns his incarceration after acknowledging that he has come to the test with two shots in his quiver, reserving one for the Vogt in case the child dies after the first salvo. Tell (bound and forced to board a ferry) gets taken to the keep of Gessler in Küssnacht, but during a tempest in transit on Lake Lucerne, Tell escapes from the hold of the ship and thus travels by land to the keep, where, with one shot from his crossbow, he obtains his revenge, murdering the Vogt, thereby fomenting a rebellion that leads to the confederation of the Swiss state. While McCaffery alludes to this mythic legend, his abbreviation of it constitutes a kind of metafictional autobiography—a tale told in the first per-son from the perspective of Walter, the lowercase “character,” who occu-pies the position of the double-dotted letter on the page. We, the readers, play the role of the hero, and thus we fulfill the rising action of the story,


since our gaze, when we read, becomes the arrow that we use to knock the added apple—the top dot—from the crown of the miniscule i, thereby reinstating the normal letter. We do not simply peruse this novel so much as we impart action to it. We participate in a humorous allegory about the death of the author, insofar as we must defy his hold over us. He is a kind of poetic despot who, in this case, has forced a cruel trial of comprehen-sion upon his readership, vandalizing the appearance of the miniscule i by adding an extraneous supplement to its meaning. By closely reading his otherwise illegible narrative—by interpreting it—we pass his vile test, and thus we return the disrupted “character” (the I of our subjective experience) to its normal status as one of the standard bearers for the lyric voice. If the author must consign the self to a state of jeopardy, then the critic, like a heroic reader, must restore this self to a state of security. While McCaffery might lampoon the lyric genre of autobiography (by assigning the symbolic position of Walter to the letter I itself, so that

“William Tell: A Novel,” by Steve McCaffery (Courtesy of Steve McCaffery)


the reader, in turn, acts like the father in the legend), the function of this double-dotted I is perhaps more ambiguous than such an initial reading might at first suggest. Who, for example, speaks on behalf of this letter I? Who embodies the pronoun at the instant of its enunciation? Who, in effect, gets to play the part of the child with an apple on his crown? Is the pronoun a placeholder for the author who utters the letter when writing the novel? (If so, he thus oscillates between two roles—both the boyish victim and the unjust tyrant.) Or is the pronoun a placeholder for the reader who utters the letter when parsing the story? (If so, we also intershift between two roles—both the boyish victim and the heroic father.) Do not the author and the reader thus take turns, standing in for each other, whenever they enun-ciate this I—thereby speaking with a lyric voice that, in this case, marks the position of a target, of a victim, at whom someone (like a critic) might take a potshot. Or does this I, in fact, have no referent, except for itself—so that the letter speaks on its own behalf, acting as an emblem for some crucial meaning, over which the author and the reader might struggle?�� Given the avant-garde pedigree of an innovator like McCaffery, we might even augment these queries by arguing that such a queer novel, made from a single letter, justifiably constitutes an avant-garde allusion to the biography of William S. Burroughs—an addict who becomes an author only after shooting his wife dead, at a Mexican barroom in 1951, during a drunken version of the game “William Tell.” In contrast to the heroic figure from Altdorf, the outlaw junkie of Tangier misses the target, thereby author-

14. Gary Barwin has responded to my reading with a whimsical criticism, arguing that, contrary to my exegesis, “[t]he double-dotted i is an icon, an idol for intentionality,” and he suggests that “[i]f one really wants to make a point over the i, to create an i whose tittlation [sic] tells of [a] lack of intent,” then the ordinary i, without the pair of dots, already does so, because we cannot tell if the apple has yet been placed upon the head or has yet been felled from the head, so that consequently, we do not know offhand whether or not we have arrived upon the scene of the text before the event or after the event (“i before or after William Tell,” June 16, 2008, available at http://serifofnottingham.blogspot .com/search?q=William+Tell). I might suggest that such a riposte does little more than ensconce the timeless sanctity of the lyrical subject, thereby preserving the already eternal status of the I as an icon. I might suggest an even more whimsical criticism in response, by arguing that, instead of showing the I before or after the game played by William of Altdorf, we might show the I only after the game played by William of Tangier, with the icon in one of its fallen states. If the I falls to the left, the image might call to mind the dot-dot-dit of the letter U in Morse code (• •—), but if the I falls to the right, the image might call to mind the dit-dot-dot of the letter D in Morse code (—• •). I leave the symbolic exegesis of these codes to other pataphysicians.


ing, without expressive intention, the murder of his wife, Joan: “the death of Joan [has] manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”�� He too spends a brief stint in jail (much like his medieval namesake), but after bribing the prosecuting bureaucrats, he ensures his release on bail. He goes on to write his first novel while awaiting an evermore deferred trial—but despite tampering with witnesses through further bribery, he concludes that his attorneys cannot win the case, and so he flees the country. In his absence, the court finds him guilty of homicide, for which he receives a sentence of two years, afterward sus-pended. He is, thus, an antihero—a “William” from one of the alternate universes, where the medieval marksman fails. While the archhero “William” saves the targeted I, by hitting the mark, and thus, like a hit man, he must defend justice, the antihero “William” kills the targeted I, by missing his mark, and thus, like a con man, he must escape justice. Even though Burroughs might insist that “there is one Mark [that] you cannot beat: The Mark Inside,”�� his writing does, nevertheless, strive to negate the intentionality, if not the expressiveness, of this Mark, this self, doing so through a combination of chemical drug use and literary mashups. If McCaffery goes on to transform a double-dotted I into an epic tale of pataphysical hermeneutics—might we not argue that he is simply trying to con all of us “marks” into believing that a few of his “marks” are, in fact, a novel? Or might he be asking us to consider the degree to which every instance of comprehension might constitute an allegory of assassina-tion? If Tell must kill the Vogt, so also must the reader challenge the author, almost as if in fulfillment of the premise by Barthes, who remarks that “the birth of the [R]eader must be requited by the death of the Author”��—and in this way, does not McCaffery highlight the disparity that always exists

15. William S. Burroughs, “Introduction,” in Queer (New York: Viking, 1985), xxiii. His admission, of course, lends itself to a perhaps obvious feminist critique, in which the game of “William Tell” becomes a kind of allegory about authorship under patriarchy. The creativity of males demands the sacrifices of women, for which the act of resultant author-ship becomes an act of perpetual atonement. We might see an analogous narrative in the story of the Ancient Mariner, who shoots an albatross with his crossbow and thus must recount the outcome of his crime to anyone who might listen. A female author must, therefore, have to find a way to avoid being the target in order to take up her own bow, like Artemis, and become the agent of her own story about willing and telling.16. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 11.17. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 55.


between authorial intentionality and authorial expressiveness, between the “willing” of the story and the “telling” of the story?

3. The Conceivable in Conceptual Literature

Poets who write conceptual literature might take delight in the fact that this “novel” by McCaffery constitutes an allegory, in which the triumvi-rate of the author, the reader, and the letter might parallel the triumvirate of the tyrant, the savior, and the victim, except that the use of the pro-noun I in this account causes the positions of these actants to become interchangeable with each other, depending upon the enunciator of such a shifty marker.�� What are the expressive intentions of this “novel,” if not to highlight the fragility of the self that enunciates the I? What if both inten-tionality and expressiveness do not represent “fallacies” of formalist criti-cism, but instead represent the vectors for specific concepts of writing? The lyric style, for example, might thus be what I call “cognitive” in its aesthet-ics, insofar as it demands that the author be both self-conscious and self-assertive at the same time—but other relationships between intentionality and expressiveness might also be conceivable, and the poet who must “think” up novel modes of conceptual literature does so by rethinking other less studied, if not less exalted, relationships between self-consciousness and self-assertiveness.�� We must imagine modes beyond the cognitive—modes that I might call automatic, mannerist, or aleatoric.

18. My reading of Steve McCaffery derives much of its impetus from the writing of Emile Benveniste, who argues that “the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered,” and hence, “[t]here is [. . .] a combined double instance in this process: the instance of I as referent and the instance of [. . .] I as referee.” He concludes that “[t]his sign is thus linked to the exercise of language and announces the speaker as speaker” (“The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek [Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971], 218, 220). The pronoun marks the position of the “subject” in discourse, and any discrepancy between what this subject might will and what this subject might tell intervenes in the space between the I that now enunciates and the I that is now enunciated.19. We wish to emphasize, of course, that despite the professed attitudes of any author about being either self-conscious or self-assertive during the process of writing, authors can never exert perfect control over what they will and what they tell—and indeed, crit-ics nowadays spend much of their time “deconstructing” the disparity between what the author means to say and what the author seems to say, showing the degree to which the self reveals more about itself than it might otherwise claim to show or deign to hide. We do not wish to repeat “fallacies” of either intentionality or expressiveness in our own dis-


A. Cognitive Writing Works that embody, as values, both intentionality and expressive-ness I might describe as “cognitive.” These works aspire to be both self-conscious and self-assertive. Their authors profess to exert control over both what they “will” in the text and what they “tell” in the text. They do so in order to minimize any discrepancy between what the self might intend and what the text might convey. Such authors embrace both voluntary self-control and voluntary self-exhibit. We might, of course, recognize this “cog-nitive” impulse, for example, in the tradition of Romantic lyricism, which has come to represent the style of writing aligned with autobiographic investi-gations, like the kind seen in The Prelude by William Wordsworth. We see this impulse at work in poetic genres as diverse as the imagistic poetry of William Carlos Williams and the divulgate poetry of Robert Lowell—poets who strive to articulate themselves in a plainer, sincere form, equal to the tranquil emotions of retrospection. An author adopts a lyrical persona to represent the subjective experience of the self, and the reader, in turn, judges this persona for the mimetic realism of both its originary being and its authentic voice. We witness the self thinking to itself, alone and aloud, about itself, bearing witness to the intimacy, if not to the quietude, of its own thoughtful confession.

B. Automatic Writing Works that embody, as values, less intentionality and more expres-siveness I might describe as “automatic.” These works aspire not to be self-conscious but to be self-assertive. Their authors profess to exert con-trol not over what they “will” in the text but only over what they “tell” in the text. They do so in order to maximize what the text might convey at the expense of what the self might intend. Such authors forfeit voluntary self-control but embrace potential self-exhibit. We might recognize this “auto-matic” impulse, for example, in the kind of Surrealist outpouring, which has come to represent the style of writing aligned with graphomaniacal psycho-neurosis, like the kind seen in The Immaculate Conception by André Breton and Paul Eluard. We see this impulse at work in poetic genres as diverse as the rhapsodic liturgies of Kurt Schwitters and the rapturous diatribes of

cussion, but we do want to show that, during the process of writing, authors can only ever choose from among a limited variety of vantages about their own self-consciousness and their own self-assertiveness—and in turn, these vantages make available to the author only a limited variety of possible concepts about the very process of writing itself.


Allen Ginsberg—poets who strive to articulate themselves in a complex, baroque form, equal to the ecstatic feelings of deliriousness. An author avoids conscious, editorial censorship of the self in order to give vent to an unexpurgated stream of consciousness, and the reader merely judges the quality of vertigo in this flow. We witness the self speaking to itself without thinking about itself, bearing witness to the outburst of its own irrational exuberance.

C. Mannerist Writing Works that embody, as values, more intentionality and less expres-siveness I might describe as “mannerist.” These works aspire to be self-conscious but not to be self-assertive. Their authors profess to exert control over what they “will” in the text, but not over what they “tell” in the text. They do so in order to maximize what the self might intend at the expense of what the text might convey. Such authors embrace potential self-control, but for-feit voluntary self-exhibit. We might recognize this “mannerist” impulse, for example, in the kind of Oulipian elegance, which has come to represent the style of writing aligned with formalistic constraints, like the kind seen in 100,000,000,000,000 Poems by Raymond Queneau. We see this impulse at work in poetic genres as diverse as the programmatic alexandrines of Raymond Roussel and the anagrammatic translations of Unica Zürn—poets who strive to articulate structures in a precise, orderly form, equal to the rational precepts of scientificity. An author willfully enslaves the self to a rule in order to excavate a newfound liberty from such a test of will, and the reader merely judges the quality of triumph in these results. We witness the self as it subordinates its own subjectivity to a rigorous procedure, thereby bearing witness to the outcome of a formalized experiment.

D. Aleatoric Writing Works that embody, as values, no intentionality and no expressive-ness I might describe as “aleatoric.” These works are neither self-conscious nor self-assertive. Their authors profess to forfeit control, both over what they “will” in the text and over what they “tell” in the text, doing so in order to maximize the discrepancy between what the self might intend and what the text might convey. Such authors forfeit both voluntary self-control and voluntary self-exhibit. We might recognize this “aleatoric” impulse, for example, in the kind of Dadaist anarchy, which has come to represent the legacy of Tristan Tzara and his poésie découpé. We see this impulse at work in poetic genres as diverse as the “mesostics” by John Cage and


the “asymmetries” by Jackson Mac Low—poets who strive to articulate structures in an uncanny, ergodic form, equal to the oracular surprise of synchronicity. An author delegates authorship to the otherness of chance (often doing so through the replicated pretexts of ready-made poetry, the randomized cuttings of respliced poetry, or the programmed machines of Googlized poetry), and a reader, in turn, judges the uncanniness of these results. We witness the self as it subordinates its subjectivity to an arbi-trary procedure, thereby bearing witness to the outcome of a stochastic experiment.

Cognitive, automatic, mannerist, aleatoric—this “quadrivium” of lit-erature exhausts every means of permuting the relationship between inten-tionality and expressiveness. Each relationship constitutes a “language-game,” subject to its own rules of engagement—and hence we might consider the degree to which these “games” might in fact conform to the celebrated categories first conceived by the poet Roger Caillois, who clas-sifies games according to four sets: mimesis (games of mimicry); ilinx (games of vertigo); agon (games of combat); and alea (games of chance).�0 Cognitive writing (with its demand for a realistic depiction of subjective experience) might thus be a game of mimesis; automatic writing (with its demand for a delirious depiction of subjective experience) might thus be a game of ilinx ; mannerist writing (with its demand for a virtuosic overthrow of a procedural constraint) might thus be a game of agon; and aleatoric writ-ing (with its demand for a receptive deference to all stochastic exigencies) might thus be a game of alea. If conceptual literature has already explored each concept of writing beyond the “cognitive,” perhaps, such literature must now imagine unthought varieties of writing beyond these four cate-gories in order to imagine a new way of playing “William Tell.”

20. Roger Caillois notes, “I am proposing a division into four main rubrics, depending upon whether, in the games under consideration, the role of competition, chance, simu-lation, or vertigo is dominant,” and hence, “I call these agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx, respectively.” Caillois goes so far as to suggest that mimesis and ilinx combine to form a social matrix of vertiginous theatrics, like the kind seen in more “primitive” cultures, while agon and alea combine to form a social matrix of competitive accidents, like the kind seen in more “civilized” cultures (Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958], 12, 87). I might even go on to suggest in turn that if writing is itself a kind of “game,” not unlike the game of “William Tell,” then mimesis and agon combine to form a poetic matrix that lets us play this game while sober (as exemplified by William of Altdorf), whereas ilinx and alea combine to form a poetic matrix that lets us play this game while drunk (as exemplified by William of Tangier).


TABLE OF CONCEPTS FOR WRITING��

CoGNITIVE MANNERISTintentional intentional

expressive non-expressive

(poetic game of mimicry) (poetic game of combat)

AUToMATIC ALEAToRICnon-intentional non-intentional

expressive non-expressive

(poetic game of vertigo) (poetic game of chance)

21. Foucault notes that “[w]riting unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind” (“What Is an Author?” 116). The Table of Con-cepts for Writing itemizes all ways of permuting intentionality and expressiveness. The two left quadrants (“cognitive” and “automatic”) constitute the domain of what I might call a “Wordsworthian subjectivity,” concerned with the sublime affirmation of a self on behalf of some poetic “identity,” whereas the two right quadrants (“mannerist” and “aleatoric”) constitute the domain of what I might call a “Keatsian subjectivity,” concerned with the extreme sublimation of a self on behalf of some poetic “alterity.” The avant-garde has typi-cally colonized three of these four quadrants (the “automatic,” the “mannerist,” and the “aleatoric”)—and while any poet might traverse all four quadrants with ease, playing with multiple concepts of writing, switching from one to another, perhaps even doing so within the same work, no poet can play in more than one quadrant at the same time. I suggest that poets who write conceptual literature must now begin to probe the limit-cases of this “quadrivium” in the hope of imagining more neoteric concepts of writing, situated else-where, far beyond the quadrants of such a playfield.

Docents of Discourse: The Logic of Dispersed Sites

Lytle Shaw

Anyone who claims purely and simply to have inverted speculative philosophy (to derive, for example, materialism) can never be more than philosophy’s . . . unconscious prisoner.—Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination”

The supersession of art is the “Northwest Passage” of the geog-raphy of real life, so often sought for more than a century, a search beginning especially in self-destroying modern poetry.—Guy Debord, Mémories

In artworks like Mark Dion’s New England Digs (2001), with its cabi-nets of curiosity filled with plastic combs, buttons, marbles, and soiled toothbrushes unearthed at unremarkable locations, and Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk office (1992), an information kiosk that presents a Ger-man expert on hip-hop as an object of ethnographic scrutiny, something fundamental seems to have changed in site-specific art.� While the items

1. On Dion’s project, see Flora Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology: Mark Dion and His Dig Projects,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 2 (June 2007): 199–223. For Green’s



in New England Digs certainly depend on their relation to specific sites in New England, the work as a whole is in stark contrast to influential post-war works of poetry and art that have mobilized the concept of digging or unearthing. Unlike William Carlos Williams’s soil sample in Paterson, or Charles Olson’s inventory of the provisions needed for the fourteen men who spent the first winter in Gloucester in The Maximus Poems, or even Robert Smithson’s droning mantra, in his essay on the Spiral Jetty, of the limited landscape features surrounding the jetty, Dion digs into the ground of a specific site not so much to challenge dominant versions of American history as to anatomize and unsettle the authority of the disciplines (like archaeology) used to interpret sites in the first place. Responding neither to topographical landscape features like the Earthworks artists, nor to white museum cubes like artists involved in Institutional Critique, Dion, Green and other recent artists have been understood by critics like Miwon Kwon and James Meyer as engaging, instead, the “discursive” or “functional” sites of archaeology and ethnography.� This new kind of site is, as Meyer puts it, “a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above all). It is an informational site, a palimpsest of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places, and things.”� Whether functional or dis-cursive (and I will use the term discursive from here on because it has had wider currency), these new definitions of site immediately beg the question of how such sites are constituted and what marks work as truly “specific” to them? What, moreover, is the scale or boundary of a discourse, what gives it legibility or establishes it as a definitive interpretive context? In this essay, I offer a critique and revision of the theory of the discur-sive site, first, by reading the theory’s central examples (Dion and Green) back against its claims, especially Kwon’s arguments that site-specific art: (1) can be framed in relation to a single discourse; (2) relativizes artistic practice as just another form of cultural work; (3) renders art historical con-cerns secondary. But rather than just disprove these claims, I hope to show instead how they point to larger and as yet unresolved dilemmas about

meta-ethnography, see Russell Ferguson, ed., World Tour (Los Angeles: Museum of Con-temporary Art, 1993).2. Miwon Kwon develops this reading in one Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).3. James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25.

Shaw / Docents of Discourse 27

how we tell the history of art history since the 1960s, since the idea of site, that is, began to organize not only literal sculptural objects but the notion of an artistic context (both synchronic and diachronic) more generally. Then, in the second part of the essay, I’ll turn outside art history to contempo-rary poetry and look at recent site-specific poetic practices, arguing that strategies of appropriation known as Flarf as well as new forms of experi-mental urbanism allow us usefully, if paradoxically, to stage the problem of what might count as the raw materials, scales, and intertextual logic or coherence of a discursive site—as well as how one claims such a site as a context. That is, rather than merely assert such sites as stable frames of reference for a project, contemporary poetry tends, often perversely and playfully, to make the project itself an anatomy of the legibility of these very frames. This turn to poetry will therefore, I hope, underline the problems both of isolating a discourse and of performatively asserting that discourse as a frame for one’s work, of bounding a site, and claiming it as that toward which art or writing might have a “specific” relationship. Long before writing could be seen as specific to a discourse, it could of course be understood as specific to Gloucester or Paterson—to literal locations, to places. These links between a poetic field researcher, an author agent, and the bounded space of a town, a place, were under-stood to ground writing in its location, and thus establish one crucial facet of its authority. Such a field researcher as subject might be taken as one kind of challenge to the more familiar image of cosmopolitan modernism, which Michael Davidson describes as involving personas and characters, like those of Poe, Baudelaire, Henry James, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, who are “citizens of the world, unmoored from a single place (provincial-ism) or national identity (nativism).”� Davidson’s schematization helps us understand how a more limited concept of place served negatively as an engine for various responses, including cosmopolitanism. Modernist epics of place, however, tend not to fit into the symptomatic models of provincial-ism or nativism that would be cosmopolitanism’s opposite: Olson’s complex historiography and ethnography of place were directed, famously and oddly, at the pursuit of the global through the local. Even if we agree that Wil-liams’s ultimate frame is the nation, his “nativism” is less a form of jingoistic celebration than a plea for another America, an as-yet-unrealized America

4. Michael Davidson, “On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA” (paper delivered at the Diasporic Avant-Gardes Conference, University of California, Irvine, November 2004).


of contact that would be predicated on a different relation to a national past, or rather, a relation to a different national past. And yet these more reflexive and contestatory dimensions of place-based inquiry have often dropped out of its history, especially as the practice has been consolidated into more conservative forms. One of the reasons the poetics of place could be converted into ver-sions of regionalism or identity politics, however, was that even for most of the New American poets who followed Williams, the authority to establish oneself as a docent of place was most frequently based on equations of identity between author-figures and places.� While this logic was at work (to various extents and in different ways) in the receptions of Olson, Gary Snyder, and Amiri Baraka, their work nonetheless generated a rich array of critical terms that transcended their own specific places. This tended not to be the case with much place-based poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, which, rather than engaging in a self-reflexive investigation of writing’s possible relations to the category of place, simply went about either rep-resenting more places or presenting poets as exemplars of familiar and secure regional identities.� Under this model, which we might call pluralist, the poetics of place becomes a self-evident category: Three Contemporary Poets of New England, Three Pacific Northwest Poets, and so on.� The

5. Throughout Paterson, for instance, we find carefully placed indices of Williams the local doctor, writer, and New Jersey resident—from quotations beginning “Say doc” to the letters to the older luminary poet from the young and “local” Allen Ginsberg and Marcia Nardi. Beyond identifying the poem’s speaker as a resident of and authority on Paterson, these references also point indexically to his presence, bringing the poem’s “I” out into a kind of object status within the world it observes.6. This is of course not to foreclose the possibilities of critical regionalisms, which have emerged with all the more urgency among poets who have been involved in a kind of spa-tial turn at various scales. In addition to Lisa Robertson (whom I discuss below), see for instance Jeff Derksen, Downtime (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990) and Dwell (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993); C. S. Giscombe, Giscome Road (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1998); my own Cable Factory 20 (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 1999); Juliana Spahr, Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Marcella Durand, Western Capital Rhapsodies (Boston: Faux, 2001); Rodrigo Toscano, The Disparities (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002); Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum (Minneapo-lis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2003); Taylor Brady, occupational Treatment (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 2006); Linh Dinh, Borderless Bodies (Ottawa, Ill: Factory School, 2005); and Heriberto Yepez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers (Ottawa, Ill.: Factory School, 2007).7. The first book, by Guy Rotella, treats William Meredith, Philip Booth, and Peter David-son; the second, by Sanford Pinsker, treats William Stafford, Richard Hugo, and David Wagoner.


assumptions embedded in these monograph titles suggest why the term poetics of place often has a pejorative connotation today. The very term site, by contrast, implies a not-yet-domesticated location. As “place” in poetry was largely consolidated into a workshop pluralism of infinite locales whose representation depended upon a kind of reactive anticosmopolitanism, site specificity in art practice emerged, by contrast, as a concern that has generated, at once, some of the most inventive and reflexive art of the last forty years and a response to the his-toriographic dilemmas posed by the implosion of the narratives of modern-ist painting and sculpture in the late 1960s. I will return to site specificity’s novel intervention in the larger domain of art historiography. Let me begin at a smaller scale with the special brand of revisionism that has character-ized this art’s recent history: site-specific artists respond to predecessors not just by engaging new sites or models of connection but by establishing what has been taken as increasingly specific relations to sites. Understood in this way, “site” becomes not just a context but another name for the real. Not just a matter of kind, then, site specificity became instead a matter of degree—so that varying this degree was one way to perceive change (even development) in the 1960s art world: first, Minimalism’s attention to the gallery as a specific phenomenological arena rather than a neutral frame; subsequently, Earthwork artists’ attempt to denaturalize this arena further by putting it in dialog with external locations, thereby inserting the viewing subject in a chain of site-nonsite dynamics that relativizes each context. If Minimalism granted viewers bodies and Earthworks set these corporeal subjects free to peer beyond the walls that normally framed artistic percep-tion, Institutional Critique sought, in turn, to look more closely at the would-be constitutive features of these bodies—to “ground” them within frame-works of class and gender, as in the work of Merle Laderman Ukeles and Hans Haacke. From here, performance artists like Vito Acconci could call what was understood as even more specific attention to the bodies both of viewers and of artists, so that these might become art’s very sites and agents. And so on. Turning the screw of interpretation, greater specificity to “site” in this narrative seems always to promise greater, more immediate grounding of art practice in the real. Nested in the history of site specificity, then, is, as in the earlier history of the poetics of place, a kind of continuous and constitutive revisionism that casts each new practitioner not just as a shifter of paradigms but as an uncoverer of the authentic, would-be ground zero of method, which is also a disclosure of the real. This same logic might seem to explain a turn, in avant-garde poetry


of the 1970s and 1980s, away from empirical sites toward the idea of lan-guage itself as a site, so that the real would now become the linguistic (and therefore also the social and philosophical) preconditions for representa-tion. Language writing, for instance, responded to the proposals of place-based poet archivists like Williams and Olson not simply by abandoning the category of place but rather by insisting on, and indeed finding forms to explore and thematize, the linguistic mediation that structures any depic-tion of place. Self-reflexive moments—which of course we find often in Wil-liams and Olson—could no longer be separated from a would-be neutral process of accumulating material. Ron Silliman’s Tjanting could be taken as the paradigmatic text here. In this book, published in 1981, what might plausibly be read as descriptive sentences about quotidian life in San Fran-cisco are deformed and rewritten according to an expanding pattern (struc-tured on the Fibonacci number series) in which the number of sentences in each paragraph is the sum of the previous two, and alternating paragraphs revise each other in an expanding series.� What is reflexive in Silliman’s work is thus not just that several self-referential and metalinguistic currents operate on a thematic par with the seemingly quotidian, but instead that because of its structure, descriptive components are continually revised and reframed, pressurized in such a way as to undercut their self-evidence, so that the very “basis for continuity in the work” becomes, as Barrett Wat-ten says, “a criticism of the adequacy of statement.”� But what, precisely, does it mean to say that language itself, in the form of mutating metadescriptive statements or otherwise, is the “site” of Tjanting or of any other work by a Language writer? In its broadest sense, this claim has been taken to mean that the works site themselves as inquiries into the linguistic basis of consciousness, and from there into the various philosophical, psychoanalytic, social logics by which subjects are fabricated out of this would-be “material” substratum. Such an interpretive framework is useful in reading individual works by Language writers. But the very fact that it comes into play in so many other writers suggests that we need another line of inquiry. Alan Golding offers a promising one when he proposes that we understand the movement as “an institutional critique of contemporary writing and reading habits.”�0 The totality of these habits

8. I offer an extended reading of Tjanting in “The Labor of Repetition: Silliman’s Quips and the Politics of Intertextuality,” Quarry West 34 (1998).9. Barrett Watten, Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 110.10. This allows Golding to replace the specious claim that the practices of Language


may still present an impossibly extensive frame. And yet Golding’s proposal has the benefit of positioning the movement in relation to an interpretive, and even a disciplinary, discourse that is a somewhat more discrete and workable context than that of “language itself.”�� Such a reading also makes it easier to discern the terms of a range of post-Language writers, who have been far more explicit in foregrounding their writing’s relation to both discursive and literal “sites.” In this sense, the turn toward site specificity in poetry can be seen not simply as a renewed engagement with empirical space or “place” (though it sometimes is this, too) but as a larger inquiry into how writing positions itself in relation to the discourses that both insure its legibility and underwrite its authority.�� For-going the identity between self and locale, blurring the distinction between literal and virtual sites, often treating the Internet as site, and following “dis-courses” to their ultimate quasi-illegible extremes—this newer poetry is not easily linked to the older poetics of place. It seems closer, in fact, to the account of site specificity articulated by art historian Miwon Kwon, to which I now turn. Kwon’s 1995 essay “One Place After Another,” expanded in her 2002 book (of the same title), nar-rates the history of site-specific art since the mid-1960s as a matter of three successive models: phenomenological, institutional, and discursive. Her history thus runs from the rural sites of Earthworks artists in the phe-nomenological model to the largely urban sites of museums and galleries in

writing are inherently subversive with a more persuasive claim about their contextual sub-versiveness within the framework of institutions of literature. “To focus on the institutional matrix of Language writing’s production and reception . . . enables us to defer dubious claims for the poetry’s ‘inherently subversive’ nature in favor of more tenable claims for its contextual subversiveness” (From outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry [Madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995], 158). Such a suggestion works, to my mind, not to quarantine the movement within the specific institution of the university but rather to help us conceptualize literature itself as a constellation of institutional practices more broadly, at a variety of scales.11. Still, Language writers themselves were generally reluctant to frame their work in rela-tion to a privileged “site.” Arguably, such framing becomes possible only after the theory of site specificity in art history.12. This has also involved a shift of scale: from the clause and idiolect to the sentence or paragraph as a marker of tone. I discuss this shift in “From Bad Historiography to Dandy Urbanism,” in Story Lines: Mapping Narrative Spaces in Contemporary Literature (Orlé-ans: Presses Universitaires d’Orléans, forthcoming, 2010) and in the introductions to Dan Farrell and Lisa Robertson in Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, ed. Lytle Shaw (New York: Roof Books/Drawing Center, 2007).


the model to Institutional Critique to the dispersed and pluralized sites like natural history, ethnography, or border politics in the “discursive” mode.�� For Kwon, “discursive” site specificity in the work of artists like Dion and Green addresses not the “cultural confinement of art (and artists) via its institutions” but rather “the pursuit of a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life—a critique of culture that is inclusive of nonart spaces, nonart institutions, and nonart issues.” Here Kwon expands Hal Foster’s notion of “the artist as ethnographer” into a vast inventory of roles and contexts in which artists can operate. “Concerned to integrate art more directly into the realm of the social, either in order to redress (in an activist sense) urgent social problems such as the ecological crises, homelessness, AIDS, homophobia, racism, sexism, or more generally in order to relativize art as one among many forms of cultural work, current manifestations of site specificity,” Kwon claims, “tend to treat aesthetic and art historical concerns as secondary issues.”�� For Kwon, art’s ability to perform “cultural work” hinges on its refusal to channel, transform, or contest the authority of other disciplines. Only a “relativized” art that remains paradoxically autonomous at a disciplinary level can avoid the colonizing logic of the historic avant-garde. In ver-sions of this history as otherwise disparate as Peter Bürger’s and Clement Greenberg’s, art operates dialectically in relation to nonart materials�� (and

13. Some artists—like Smithson—disrupt this sequence by addressing all three of these models almost simultaneously.14. Quotations are from Kwon, one Place After Another, 26. It may be useful to consider the relation between Kwon’s accounts of site specificity and Institutional Critique and what is undoubtedly the most influential institution of Institutional Critique in the United States, the Whitney Independent Studio Program—a yearlong intensively theoretical pro-gram in New York City for curators, critics, and artists. Most of the artists Kwon discusses (including Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, and Renée Green) have been closely associated over the last twenty years with this program. This is worth considering, to my mind, not through the model of co-option, for instance, whereby one might see the ISP as the art world’s blue chip institution of Institutional Critique. Instead, the ISP is significant para-doxically because its interest in co-option forecloses other avenues of analysis: focusing on the ways that museums in effect vaccinate themselves by inviting critical shufflings of their collections by artists, the ISP seems to have taught its artists and critics, including Kwon, to think of the dynamic between critique and containment in spatial rather than temporal terms. I want to look instead at the versions of diachronic history site specificity calls upon.15. In fact, we see this understanding as early as Victor Shklovsky’s The Third Factory (1926): “But to stay alive, art must have new raw materials. Infusions of the peripheral” (trans. Richard Sheldon [Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2003], 53).


by extension discourses), appropriating aspects of them, feeding on a tem-porary tension between the artistic and the nonartistic, eventually digest-ing them smoothly into its domain, and then moving in search of other, as yet nonartistic and therefore still resistant discourses.�� For Greenberg, for instance, successive avant-gardes up through Minimalism “appear . . . to have realized that the most original and furthest-out art of the last hundred years always arrived looking at first as though it had parted company with everything previously known as art.”�� Kwon’s challenge to this model sug-gests the desire for a new kind of interdisciplinary politics, one that would allow contemporary site-specific art for the first time to arrest or reverse this process—engaging nonartistic discourses without appropriating or recoding them, and thus taking up its humble position as “one among many forms of cultural work.” When Kwon claims that for such work “aesthetic and art historical concerns” remain “secondary issues,” she presumably means that various uses of “informational” strategies are designed to dis-tance works from the “aesthetic” concerns of art history proper. And yet reliance on an informational aesthetic has undoubtedly become a dominant way of situating works in a postconceptual art historical lineage. What is also inescapably art historical about such work is the very narrative Kwon has told about its disciplinary politics: its triumph of finally relativizing art, of avoiding previous avant-gardes’ practice of colonizing nonartistic practices into “the aesthetic.” Beyond this problem at the level of macro-scale art historical nar-rative, Kwon’s model is also hard pressed to account for individual artistic practices: the cultural work achieved by an artist like Dion, for instance, depends not upon a neutral and relativized concept of art operating in an equivalent relationship to ecological activism but rather on an odd conjunc-tion of the two that deforms both discourses.�� In Dion’s invented bureau-cracies, such as The Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of New York (Chinatown Division) (1992), the conventions of Enlightenment-

16. This is what Peter Bürger sees as the “failure” of the avant-garde. See Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 57.17. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 252.18. Dion’s vitrines, cabinets, and tableaux may not have looked like much other contem-porary art when they were first exhibited in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But they did unquestionably look like rarified museum objects—if perhaps from museums of natural history, archaeology, or history.


era scientific representation are humorously transposed into a present tense and urban location: performing the role of urban naturalist, Dion buys fish from Chinatown fish markets and identifies, preserves, and eventually displays them in storage cabinets evoking early museums or cabinets of curiosity. The “site” of this piece is therefore as much the visual trappings of authority that inhere in such classificatory processes and display proce-dures as it is any feature of New York City. In fact, Manhattan operates here as a “site” primarily to cast into greater relief the effects of anachronism and spatial displacement that arise from a “naturalist” setting forth on its streets to classify its various fishes and aquatic creatures.�� Renée Green’s work has been similarly understood as paradigmatic of discursive site specificity; it, too, however, deforms the discourses it takes up, especially anthropology and “exotic” exploration, treating its sub-jects—artist explorers such as George Catlin (who visited Venezuela and Brazil) and Frederick Church (who produced some of his most dramatic work after traveling to Colombia)—as objects.�0 In Idyll Pleasures, Green does not so much document these journeys as explore the constitutive literary and aesthetic forms (from the travel log, to the array of field gear necessary for making paintings in the wild) that make both the trips and their results legible as part of a discourse of travel. The result is reciprocal pressure between the categories of art and anthropology, between literary conventions and social relations. In fact, what such site-specific work maps is not just literal spaces but the new models of disciplinary contact and deformation it proposes—this and the recent history of site-based art in relation to which each new significant work would situate itself. These are inescapably art historical concerns. Let me give two brief examples to concretize this point—the first, I hope, showing that even institutional site-specific work depends on a dis-cursive frame that can situate the work in art history; the second suggest-ing that, whatever its claims to have relativized art among other cultural practices, art based on discursive site specificity still relies on an art his-

19. Dion also creates installations that depict the tropical outposts or work desks of fig-ures like the nineteenth-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Such works tend to present complex, overlapping temporalities and to undercut Edenic ecological rheto-rics of a return to Nature. See Dion’s interview with Miwon Kwon in Mark Dion (London: Phaidon Press, 1997).20. Green’s undergraduate thesis was on Carl Van Vechten’s trips to Harlem in the 1920s; this is the first of many of her projects that reverse the relationship between subject and object in anthropology.


torical frame. First, consider, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Hartford Wash (her 1973 performance of scrubbing the floors at the Wadsworth Atheneum) in relation to Mel Bochner’s Measurement: Room (his 1969 installation that consisted, solely, of a stripped white gallery room with the dimensions of its portals and surfaces marked out with black tape and Letraset on its walls). If Ukeles appeared (as she did to many critics) to be adding a critique of gender and class relations to Institutional Critique, such a move was legible only if the practice of Institutional Critique took on a history, so that Bochner’s gesture, for instance, of demystifying the supposed “neutrality” of the gallery or museum as a perceptual frame could become only a pre-liminary step toward a more thoroughgoing demystification that also took into account the gender and class dynamics that produce the would-be “neutral” effect of such spaces.�� In reading her work this way (as many of Ukeles’s critics do), the history of Institutional Critique becomes a condition of legibility for Ukeles’s work, an inescapable discursive frame. Similarly, if Dion’s Urban Wildlife Observation Unit (a rustic interpre-tive center placed in Madison Square Park in New York City in 2002, com-plete with nature guide books, specimens, and a full-time docent who spe-cialized in local natural history) seemed both to operate outside familiar art world structures (galleries, museums) and to engage a public more directly, if playfully, about questions of ecology, such a movement could only be seen within the next phase of Institutional Critique (after Ukeles) in which the drive to move from more mediated spaces—such as the Wadsworth Atheneum—toward the porous space of Madison Square Park becomes a measure of a work’s criticality and success. As with Ukeles, then, the his-tory of the concept of site within Institutional Critique becomes an explicit part of the context of Dion’s work, an explicit part, in fact, of its site. Put differently, the spatialization of discourse implicit in the idea of a discursive site allows for a synthesis between the lure of the real and a

21. Kwon explicitly puts Ukeles and Bochner into such a sequence. Similarly, Helen Molesworth suggests that feminist art can “expand our notion of Institutional Critique, precisely because the feminist critique differs so markedly from the paradigmatic works of figures such as Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, or Hans Haacke”; this expansion is that feminist art can “critique the conditions of everyday life as well as art” (“House Work and Art Work,” october 92 [Spring 2000]: 82). My point here is not to disagree that previous artists associated with Institutional Critique provide one kind of context for the concerns of an artist like Ukeles; it is rather to suggest that inasmuch as this is the case, Ukeles—like Dion, Green, and the others—does not, as Kwon claims, “treat . . . art his-torical concerns as secondary issues.”


need to frame that real historically.�� In fact, we might say that site became the covert avant-garde category, the organizer of fields (and even the secret bestower of value) after the collapse of modernist narratives of art in the late 1960s. In the hands of institutionally critical artists since the early 1970s, site has become not only the network of practices and power relations that made ecology or anthropology legible as a discourse, but also the interartis-tic, intertextual, or (now) interdiscursive network that a piece of art claims as its contexts—so that the reading of this context, and the redescription of its problems and possibilities, becomes the primary measure of its success. Though it may sound perverse, site thus operates in much the same way as Michael Fried’s key term of avant-garde history, the “recent past.” Consider Fried’s sketch of this concept in his 1965 catalog essay, “Three American Painters”: “Once a painter who accepts the basic premises of modernism becomes aware of a particular problem thrown up by the art of the recent past, his action is no longer gratuitous but imposed. He may be mistaken in his assessment of the situation. But as long as he believes such a problem exists and is important, he is confronted by a situation he cannot pass by, but must, in some way or other, pass through, and the result of that forced passage will be his art.”�� Performance art, installation, Earthworks, even photography and video—as each of these practices challenged (and gradu-ally displaced) the centrality of painting and sculpture within a narrative of late modernism like Fried’s, what conferred legibility to these practices as fields (beyond a simplistic rhetoric that each was part of a general nega-tion of discipline specificity) was a version of the modernist narrative each claimed to transcend, now granted to each emerging artistic practice so that each began to have its own “recent past.” And what counted as such a past, more importantly, moved beyond artworks themselves and became, also, theoretical and social contexts. It was part of the burden of the con-cept of “site specificity,” then, to present such new contexts as integral to this new artwork—to ease a transition from an understanding of context as a matter, always, of paintings and sculpture to a model in which context at once strayed beyond the two master mediums at the same time it strayed beyond the empirical and the artistic. All of the implicit art historiographical

22. Kwon writes, “Corresponding to the pattern of movement in electronic spaces of the Internet and cyberspace, which are likewise structured to be experienced transitively, one thing after another, and not as synchronic simultaneity, this transformation of the site textualizes spaces and spatializes discourse” (one Place After Another, 46).23. Michael Fried, Art and objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1998), 219.


work enacted by the turn to site specificity becomes clear, however, only with the full emergence of discursive site specificity. For in passing beyond any literal or spatial concept of site, discursive site specificity argues for site not just as a network of social practices, conventions, and consequent power relations but also as a genealogy of artistic precedents that can allow for contextualization and even evaluation.�� One final point about discursive site specificity in art. Our ability to say that Dion’s work, for instance, finds its site within something as gen-eralized and yet seemingly unified as the “discourse of natural history” is roughly proportionate to our distance from the details of his individual projects.�� The closer we look, however, the more questions we have to ask about which discourses we mean within natural history. Though Dion’s work spans all these references, it matters a great deal whether we are talking about enlightenment theories of classification or the post-Cousteau and Wes Anderson image-repertoire of the field explorer; about corporate pollution or cabinets of curiosity; about the packaged itineraries of con-temporary ecotourists or the dangerous specimen-gathering journeys of Victorian gentleman naturalists. Similarly, the further we get into any one piece, the more points of contact we discover with discourses other than natural history proper: there is also architecture, high theory, urbanism, the history of travel and exploration, colonialism, museum display, tourism,

24. Consider how evaluation works in the dominant model of site specificity I have been describing. When art practices fail for Kwon (as for James Meyer), this is most commonly because they invoke key terms in current site-specific work—like travel or ethnography—without a historical and critical understanding. Even if these terms did not begin in art history, their current asserted centrality undermines Kwon’s claim that “art historical con-cerns” remain secondary in contemporary site-specific art. When work succeeds, on the other hand, when it’s seen to “integrate itself more directly into the realm of the social,” this is largely because it has built a context for itself through a critical reading of contem-porary theory. And yet the brief summaries of the “content” of successful site-specific work often make its sound as if the work’s reading of theory occurred outside of time. In his article “Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art,” Meyer, for instance, sees Renée Green’s Vista Vision—Landscape of Desire (a work on the African trophy busts of Theodore Roosevelt) as suggesting that “Western taxonomic practice often accompa-nied imperialist expansionism; the naming of species could sometimes occur in tandem with their destruction” (Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, ed. Alex Coles [London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000], 21). From the point of view of theory, if not practice, the pure rejection (rather than recoding) of taxonomy would, by the 1990s, be a retrograde mode. I take this to be more of a problem with Meyer’s description than with Green’s work.25. I elaborate on this point in a review of Dion’s traveling 2007 retrospective (Artforum XLV, no. 10 [Summer 2007]: 490–91).


and enlightenment aesthetics, to name but a few. To describe Dion’s work more effectively, then, would be to take on not just the multiple and often contradictory frames offered under the rubric of natural history (or archae-ology), but also the work’s inevitable staging outside that discipline, across an array of complexly interrelated discourses. But having discussed Dion’s work at some length already, I want to pursue these problems of the coher-ence and unity of the discursive site instead by turning to three examples in contemporary poetry.

• • • •

My final two poetry case studies will couple the analysis of dis-courses with that of empirical places. Let me begin, however, with a prac-tice, Flarf, in which the exploration of such places has almost entirely dis-appeared. And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, something does seem to be mapped by the Flarfists, whose precarious unity and short history might require a brief contextualization. The Flarfist Collective (which includes Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, K. Silem Mohammad, Katie Degentesh, and Mike Magee, among others) is often traced to Sullivan’s 2000 entry in a Poetry.com poetry “contest.” While it pretends to offer an evaluation complete with an acceptance letter, Poetry.com is in fact a vanity press that will, for a fee, publish whatever is given to them. Sullivan’s self-consciously terrible poem “Mm-Hmm”—which included the lines “uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah / hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! Get / off the paddy field and git / me some chocolate Quik”—was thus, at one level, a kind of Institutional Critique that, through its very ridiculousness, makes palpable the economic rather than aesthetic frame that drives the kind of Web site with which many aspiring if clueless poets interface, think-ing that they are entering the world of professional poetry.�� But since the initial audience of this poem was a group of experimental poets who could not possibly have taken a Web site like Poetry.com seriously, we might want to see its terribleness performing additional functions in this specific con-text. The early descriptions of Flarf, even before it was associated primarily with Google searches, suggested one such function at the level of tone: “A

26. This poem, along with other documents about the movement, can be found at “The Flarf Files,” available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html; see also the Flarf Feature in Jacket 30 (July 2006), available at http://jacketmagazine .com/30/fl-intro.html.


kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’”�� What is not okay in poetry in one decade, or even in one year, tends to become so by the next. We might say, for instance, that while the branch of Language (and post-Language) writing that works primarily at the level of the idiolect can still on occasion find phrases that touch nerves, its larger method of collaging small units of symptomatic speech had become, by the late 1990s, too familiar. Breaks in scale and tone were needed in order to step outside of what had become authenticated as experimental poetry. An initial way to understand Flarf in relation both to this specific problem in the history of poetry (and in relation to my previous discussion of the history of the avant-garde) would be to note that, like artists who push art into a kind of defamiliarizing contact with what are for it comparatively new arenas like ethnography and natural history, Flarfists were simply able to roughen and energize poetry by remaking it within the arrays of heterogeneous language materials offered by Google. What is new about this operation is obviously not its aleatory nature (there is of course a long history of this in poetic practice) but rather the social and philosophical codings of these new Net idiolects and tonalities—the bizarre worlds they create in poems that often pretend only to map or organize these phrases. This roughening may in time be the main reason those who accept or even celebrate Flarf do. But I would go a step further—toward the questions I have been addressing under the rubric of the discursive site. Much recent Flarf has been generated by punching phrases like “chicks dig war” into Google and organizing the results. Clearly such a phrase is going to put one into contact with some sexist and militaristic views, but do such views constitute anything like a discourse? If we’re tempted to answer no, then we might also want to remember the radical heterogeneity that lurks under the surface of what most viewers are pre-pared to accept as the secure frame of the “discourse of natural history” in Dion’s case. The point, I think, is not to police the boundaries of what is or is not a discourse (as in previous, usually conservative, debates about what is or is not poetry or art), but rather to ask what happens when one reads

27. I’m interested here only in this later manifestation—since inappropriate tone really doesn’t mark this group as different from any number of other movements. And in fact, many of the poets were doing more traditional work before they began using Google—which generally made their work more interesting but not necessarily for the reasons they claim.


intertextual networks like these as discourses. For one thing, Flarf gives us a new way to imagine site specificity’s prized Foucaultian model of discourse as “a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.”�� Flarf may be one way to concretize this, to literalize discourse’s exteriority as a collection of search headings, or paradigmatic phrases, which are in turn embodied through the syntagmatic residue each drags along with it—the words that surround a phrase like “chicks dig war.” For Flarfists, then, one does not point to discourses apart from their concrete manifesta-tions—a stance related to that of Smithson’s. Quotations are the bait with which Flarfists troll for more. In K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation, this happens by running searches not just for “terrorism,” “republican,” and “Muslim,” but also for “disembodied head,” “honking,” “spooky,” “kittens,” and “deer head”—a phrase that filters through all the contexts of the book. Consider the poem “Alligator,” whose last section is called “There’s a War Going on out There” and seems to be a function of that search:

. . . 3:46pm

. . . a volume of verses

. . . in the shape of hands

. . . began to drill into his skull

. . . a required text at the national war

. . . c. 1800, cherry, square molded top

. . . “Animals Medley”

. . . “Freebird”

. . . a short, blunt muzzle

. . . fed, full, and bored

. . . into the sockets he beat his skull��

In the context of this essay, then, I’m curious not so much about how these references reinforce each other, what they do, in the typical context of dis-junctive poetry, but rather about the simple fact of how such a poem can

28. Imagine an oED that organizes language not around the most pristine and polished literary examples, indexed at the level of the word, but according to the most quotidian and often debased usages, grouped according to phrase. Such ambitions are of course not foreign even to literature since the Enlightenment—with its infinite anthologies of folk literature and its handbooks of sayings. But Flarf changes the scale of this enterprise, just as it changes the role of the mediator, collector, taxonomist. Or it can, when Flarfists turn their attention to the larger architecture of their results.29. K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation (Oakland, Calif.: Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), 36.


frame the heterogeneity seeming to lurk under the heading of a single dis-course of nationalism: Antique American furniture (presumably collected with nationalist impulses); torture; canons of war literature; Lynyrd Sky-nyrd’s anti–civil rights anthem, and so on. Now consider a more continuous and argumentative passage from Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War:”

The pacifist wanders through life in a stateof psychic castration,his heart scarred by the talons of female avariceand flawed psychology. He is a poor fool who haslistened too literallyto women who lie and say that what they wantfrom men is adoration and understanding.What they want is war.�0

In hearing the disjointed and overlapping circuits of rant that characterize not just these poems but many others associated with Flarf, something else also happens to our idea of discourse: the Boolean grid of public/private that would call it into relief becomes increasingly murky. The longer one spends in the infinite, interweaving cul-de-sacs of intertextuality that characterize not merely Flarf but Web chat rooms, blogs, and comment boxes more generally, the quainter the old-fashioned divisions become between interior and exterior, subject and object, public and private.�� Rather than earnest examples of symptomatic language, actually overheard and then carefully inventoried, these works are, in part, a parody of the idea that there is such a thing as a stable and rational public sphere of discourse. Circulating in an amalgam of blurts, confessions, surprisingly detailed treatises, rants, and sales pitches running the spectrum of tonalities, we have infinite archives of frozen spontaneity, temporary enthusiasm, and seemingly real-time drifts of attention.�� To suggest that we need a new descriptive language for this,

30. Drew Gardner, Petroleum Hat (New York: Roof Books, 2005), 21.31. Though more literature than is acknowledged escapes from its supposed sphere of audience, and some genres announce this escape explicitly, like the open letter, this comes with framing gestures—rhetorical gestures of introducing and concluding—deemed unnecessary by those chiming in to supposedly ongoing conversations every few seconds; moreover, the paths and reception contexts, and speed through which it can make its way through these, are incomparable to the older problems of citation.32. Similarly, from the commercial end, we have new iterable intimacy effects—peppy phatic gestures that seek to hold our attention with simulacras of singular personality. We have commercially administered privacies of almost infinite flavors and scales.


beyond the ancient Habermasianism, is not to claim that the Net’s blurring of these categories is simply liberatory.�� Remember that rational subjects were a prerequisite for this hal-lowed public sphere.�� Picking up on their absence in Gardner’s work, John Ashbery, in a blurb for the book Petroleum Hat, notes, “Unlike the old model of protest poetry, Drew Gardner isn’t interested in earnest appeals to reason and compassion. He’ll match the political spectacle absurdity for absurdity.”�� Part of what is irrational and absurd about this and other Flarfist works is their literal-minded way of composing poems as enact-ments of discourses of nationalism, sadism, war fluffing or misogyny, their patience at making elaborate patterns out of crude blurts. But fascinating irrationality is also apparent in their willingness to drift away from the would-be core of these blurts, exploring the seam between the search nugget and the contingent linguistic world in which we encounter it, between the “theme” and its context, between nationalist slogans and “Freebird” or fed-eralist furniture.�� Funny and disturbing, it can also become the bad infinity of intertextuality.�� Which is why, in turning to my second example, Rob Fitterman’s ongoing project Metropolis, I want to pose a distinction between disjunctive and conceptual Flarf, between paratactically arranged search results cob-bled into poems, and larger displays of Net language that are unpoetic not as a result of cutting and splicing but by being left alone—simply reframed.

33. The late ’90s rhetoric of the Web as a space of pure liberation is now one of the most glaring of these. But that only makes the problem of describing what’s really happening on the Web all the more pressing—since obviously it isn’t going away.34. It is owing to a similar misconception that so many contemporary artists have come to value the interview, believing that it bears publicity and genuine dialogism inside its very form.35. Ashbery continues, “and in the case of the funny and chilling ‘Chicks Dig War,’ I’m struck by how thoroughly he understands the logic of our times.”36. Gary Sullivan writes, “Flarf has been described as the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing. The act of writing flarf has been described as collaborating with the culture via the Web, as an imperialist or colonialist gesture, as an unexamined projection of self into others, as the conscious erasure of self or ego. Indi-vidual members have been described as brilliant, lazy, and smug, as satirists, fakes, and late-blooming Dadaists” (Jacket 30, http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html).37. In posing itself as a corrective (which in fact corrects nothing), K. Silem Mohammad’s “Chicks don’t actually dig war” makes the dialog among the Flarfists themselves a fur-ther parody of public discourse. Mohammad’s poems also choose as their core concepts things like swans, vomit, and the phrase “slobbering anus.”


Mundanity, not rant, here provokes. And yet this mundanity is arranged conceptually, so that the work’s claims occur through its larger architec-ture. The very title of the serial work, Metropolis, suggests an older form of urbanism from Baudelaire to Benjamin to Frank O’Hara. But in fact the city as a legible entity—with psychic eruptions, file-card categories of material inquiry, or charged proper names of buildings and objects of desire—has ceased to exist. In a sense, the spectacle has won and shopping has pre-vailed over strolling. At the same time, there has been a retreat, spatially, from the particular array of handicrafts and ambient effects we associate with the older urbanist model of the quartier or neighborhood to the uniform fluorescent lighting and warehouse sprawl of the convention trade show booth. A section of Metropolis XXX simply breaks down into an inventory of such booths:

ACC Craftfair BaltimoreACC Craftfair ColumbusACC Craftfair San FranciscoAccessories-The ShowAccessories-The Show-Holiday ResortACCI International Craft ExpoACCI International Craft ExpoACE Hardware Spring Convention & ExhibitACE/Annual Claims Exposition & ConferenceACESS EXPO��

But while the convention still promises some (however Prozac’ed and casual Friday’ed) concept of literal space and face-to-face social inter-action, in fact this section points to a further mediation, a further remove from literal space: from the physically embodied Javits Center or Hilton Plaza to the endless digital trade show that is the vast metropolis of the Internet—a digital metropolis, however, continually seeking to deliver the effects of intimacy we associate with the quartier, and the effects of encounter we associate with the city more generally. This is the case in Metropolis XXX, because the trade show passage above is less a description of such a show than a small instance of one—a modular section of a larger book that, through Web-based appropriations,

38. Robert Fitterman, Metropolis XXX (Washington, D.C.: Edge, 2004), 21. Previous sec-tions of this project were published as follows: Metropolis 1–15 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 2000); Metropolis 16–29 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002).


offers itself as a kind of digital trade show. The guiding analogy motivating these appropriations in Metropolis XXX is that the imperial post-9/11 United States, especially New York, has been collapsed onto Gibbon’s account of the decline of Rome, with the elements in Gibbon’s inventory (Roman transportation, art, architecture, and threats like the Goths) mistranslated (or Flarfed) as Internet searches structured around bubble wrap, airbrush-ing, cinema multiplex ads for stadium seating, and teen Goth chat rooms. The absurdity, excess, and humor should, however, focus rather than distract one from the fact that this is also a way of imagining a seem-ingly unpicturable imperial reality—forcing it through ridiculous constraints to touch down as a form. And this form emerges, as I’ve said, through an urbanist analogy: what structures the path of the digital flaneur is a kind of grand tour of contemporary mistranslations of the greatest hits of Roman imperial culture. Inside this itinerary, one is arrested, hailed, sat down, and lectured to as one enters guest books, customer service pits, product help sites, breathy sales arenas, brassy teen talk zones. These encounters—sometimes third person, sometimes second—operate as a kind of ghostly afterlife of previous urban interactions—Baudelaire’s irruptions now as the contact effect, the phatic function by which Web vendors keep our atten-tion. Fitterman’s version of conceptual Flarf, too, could be said to treat dis-courses (especially consumerist and imperialist ones) as unstable sites. But this occurs not because of entertaining disjunctions between search headings and their results, but rather because continuous, readable Net-speech instances have been arranged into a larger structure that offers itself as a bizarrely symptomatic social space, though one that we in fact already inhabit. Let me now close by briefly considering the work of Lisa Robertson, another writer whose site specificity exceeds the literal or phenomenologi-cal and enters the discursive domain—though so far without much Net-based appropriation.�� But Robertson, unlike Fitterman, does not see the concerns of urbanism as having migrated onto the Net. Cities are there, but their being there is not simply spatial. Engaging them instead requires an experimental model of historicism, an aphoristic version of present-tense philosophizing, and a commitment to description—not as a would-be exact mimesis but as inescapable appropriation. “The truly utopian act is to mani-

39. Essays on Robertson’s work by Benjamin Friedlander, Joshua Clover, Jennifer Scap-pettone, and others can be found in the spring 2006 special issue of the Chicago Review. See also Christopher Nealon’s “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 579–602.


fest current conditions and dialects. Practice description. Description is mystical. It is afterlife because it is life’s reflection in reverse.”�0 This is from occasional Work and Seven Walks from the office for Soft Architecture, a book Robertson wrote by incorporating herself into a description machine, or as the architects on whom she models herself call it, a studio. Two fur-ther gestures are fundamental to this machine’s programming: first, though much of the work is on Vancouver, the office seeks not to become a singu-lar representative of the city but rather a locus of analysis and archiving that does not so much deny representativity as expand it into infinity (more on this below); second, in turning to the discourses by which the writer estab-lishes her descriptive authority (natural history, architectural history, soci-ology, et cetera), Robertson treats each of these less as an authoritative interpretive model that gives traction to a docent’s account of a particular location than as a discursive site that must itself be explored archaeologi-cally. And it is in part this particular mode of reflexivity that allows her to overcode the discourse, to turn its categories and procedures into mon-strous and compelling conclusions, such as this one from “Arts and Crafts in Burnaby: A Congenial Soil”: “If the spatial chronicle of the house and garden can be considered as the gradual discorporation of the propriety and boundary or wall, perhaps the transient and beribboned rhetoric of the picnic is the most modern of architectures” (112). Emphasis on the provisional, temporary, mobile occurs through-out the office’s texts—on scaffolding, blackberries, shacks, pigment, foun-tains.�� One function of this emphasis is to challenge the traditional, gen-dered opposition between structure and surface.�� When the office sees, we have not a taxonomic eye discerning immutable rules and forms below a chaos of superficial detail, but rather a carefully staged refusal of this oppo-sition that extends the infinity of surface as an immersive utopian experi-ence. “The Office of Soft Architecture finds the chaos of variation beauti-ful. We believe that structure or fundament itself, in its inert eternity, has

40. Lisa Robertson, occasional Work and Seven Walks from the office for Soft Architec-ture (Astoria, Ore.: Clear Cut Press, 2003), 16. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number. For a late eighteenth-century parallel, see Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Le Tableau de Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).41. Robertson writes, for instance, in “Doubt and The History of Scaffolding”: “The deep structure of the skin is intricate. It disproves the wrongheaded and habitual opposition of ornament and concept” (164).42. In her article “Rubus Aemeniacus,” Robertson quotes Cuvier to this effect: “We see the same skeleton repeating itself continuously but with innumerable variations” (128).


already been adequately documented—the same skeleton repeating itself continuously. We are grateful for these memorial documents. But the chaos of surfaces compels us towards new states of happiness” (128). There is a link between this counterprinciple and the selection prac-tice of the office itself, inasmuch as the objects that might make them-selves available for description seem implicitly endless. In fact, this prob-lem becomes explicit: “We are Naturalists of the inessential. Our work will never end” (130). And yet this potential for infinite extension is what gives the work its exemplary, participatory character. “The work of the SA para-doxically recompiles the metaphysics of surface, performing an horizontal research which greets shreds of fibre, pigment flakes, the bleaching of light, proofs of lint, ink, spore, liquid and pixilation, the strange, frail, leaky cloths and sketchings and gestures which we are. The work of the SA, simulta-neously strong and weak, makes new description on the warp of former events” (17). New descriptions emerge in Robertson’s work, then, not merely from specific sites but also from the history of those discourses that have framed and contextualized such sites. “We too,” she writes in an essay on the history of scaffolding, “want something that’s neither inside nor outside, neither a space nor a site. In an inhabitable surface that recognizes us, we’d like to gently sway” (166). It is not, then, as Kwon says of site specificity, that the discourses of Enlightenment natural history, right-wing nationalism, or corporate Web commerce remain totally distinct from poetry, remain entirely themselves while poetry remains itself, but rather that they are brought into an awk-ward contact that remaps both—and the compellingness of this remapping is one measure of the work’s “specificity.” The recent past that is variously recoded by these poets might be understood, moreover, as a model of Institutional Critique in literature that bears important relation to the series of precedents by which Ukeles, Dion, Green, and other artists have con-tinued site-based work. Qualifying Kwon’s history so that it becomes a his-tory, and not a fantasy of immediate access to the real, may then give us a useful frame for contemporary poetic practice in which writers have devel-oped a new kind of discursiveness, one that evokes the tonalities of a range of genres—historiography, travel writing, architecture history, documen-tary journalism, anthropology—in order at once to conjure and displace the authority of each. Such discursiveness might be characterized less by the tendency to sample freely among a wide array of discourses—the way that Language writers frequently did—than by pressuring one long enough


to establish (and then anatomize or displace) its paradigmatic tone and authority. This discussion of poetry puts me in position, I hope, to conclude with a few more words about the authority of the concept of site specificity more generally. First, it is not just a concept that moves through a series of empirical locations, from county access roads, to museum cubes, to rain-forests or temporary urban kiosks—not merely a literal context for artistic production, be it bounded or dispersed. It has also involved, at each of these stages and locations, a rhetorical act of framing the link between site and poetry or art. But for these acts of framing to be persuasive, syn-chronic contextualization has needed to be complimented by acts of larger-scale, diachronic framing within a discipline’s history, so that site-specific art itself, for instance, can be seen within a historical continuum, with its relevant pasts and imagined futures. Site specificity enters art history in the 1960s, then, not just as a breath of fresh country air, a welcome alternative to the claustrophobic world of museums and galleries. It was also, more importantly, a way to think beyond both the narrow history of painting and sculpture asserted by late modernists like Greenberg and Fried, and its would-be alternative, the infinite array of expressivist art endorsed by plu-ralists. But in seeking to distinguish it from pluralism, critics of site-specific art (like those of the poetics of place) have denied the work’s contingent relationship to its interpretive frameworks and seen it, too, as escaping the prison house of art history in order to enter the would-be real world of social relations. But site-specific work’s social implications emerge not by transcending the categories of art and poetry but rather by bringing them into awkward contact with other discourses, where the authority of fields and fieldworkers can both come under scrutiny. To highlight the inescapably rhetorical component of site-specific poetry and art, and their central positions within these disciplines’ recent histories (rather than beyond the sphere of the aesthetic, relativized in rela-tion to other forms of cultural work), is not to suggest that the concept has been simply co-opted or contained. Instead, if we want to imagine dis-courses as sites, then we should go further with this literalization—pictur-ing their would-be objectivity and discreteness as it really seems to be, always about to collapse into the abyssal intertextuality of Flarf. Sites are framed, not merely discovered. That we have discovered this framing as art makes us all, increasingly, soft architects.

Rakim’s Performativity

Tracie Morris

Field (post-Holla) Shout (out): Scratchy Casio cassette from a boom box in the park recording a sweat box jam’s battle from the Pink Houses. A low-fidelity mic rock from Skeeter’s party. The bass-heavy light post linked DJ table’s input microphone caught the crowd roar and, in the back, in the static, hands in the air. Ecstatic trans-like life. Trans-formation. The situation in which a guy could say “Ho”—the ladies scream fake-orgasmically without showering with post-utterance sucka punches. Remnants of what you may not have been invited to/didn’t go because the Jollystompers may have shown up . . . body references, ghosts: Swayze yo.

In this journey you’re the journal, I’m the journalistAm I eternal or on an eternal list?I’m about to flow long as I can possibly goKeep ya movin’ ’cause the crowd said so

Sitting in England at the British Library writing about Rakim in the home base of J. L. Austin forces—thoughts of performativity on. Mobile



African American aesthetics, culturally, critically, historically—Moorish/morris movement through: buildings, thoughts, guidelines, rule/rules. More than anything, I guess, this essay reminds me where things turned. (I heard that! as we used to say.) There is an aesthetic normalcy that affects how Hip Hop has influenced global sensibilities the way that other large cultural movements have. This commentary is about a song. This song and the MC I emphasize here were the hinge upon which “the joints, the jams” swung.

1. Follow Him into the Flow

J. L. Austin and Rakim (full stage name Rakim Allah, a.k.a. William Michael Griffin Jr.) seem to be as far away as two people can be and still be people. Obvious distinctions aside, though (one dead, one alive; one elite White Britisher, another nonelite Black rapper from one of the earliest colonial escapees), they are of a pair in presenting performativity aspects of innovative performative thinking. In considering new ways to appreciate Austin, to see how many ways his philosophy could be true, I thought about Hip Hop in general but Rakim in particular, at its apex. Both changed my way of seeing/hearing, thinking. The book How to Do Things with Words and the recording “Follow the Leader” are my two emblematic representations of how words work in contemporary culture and complements.� Both explore language’s perfor-mativity in society. While Austin is presenting the organization of utterances in societal contexts generally (and law specifically), Rakim underscores particular community dynamics and contextualizes them in the cultural affirmation of Black studies, jazz, and aspects of post–Malcolm X Black religiosity. What happened between around 1975, the underground swelling of something in the air and that thing on wax, that radio sound that engraved the end of the decade? Those scratches that evoke old school reel-to-reel (first wheels of steel)/78 record fidelity? The yokels who knew that sound from block parties, improvised ciphers and boom boxes on the stoop or the bleachers of school, heard that sound go up, up away. Would our friends on the corners be our Capistrano birds, the synchronized pigeons on tenement

1. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number only. Eric B and Rakim, Follow the Leader, audio CD, MCA Records, 1990; subsequent lyrics are from the single “Follow the Leader.”

Morris / Rakim’s Performativity 51

roofs, would those sounds come back to us, not as echo, but to roost? We sensed something syn(c)/aesthetically was going on, expanding. “Blowing up.” Our secret or, if now a decoded ring, a precious, special thing . . .

Follow me into a soloGet in the flowAnd you could pitch it like a photoMusic makes mellow, maintains to makeMelodies for M.C.s motivates the breaksI’m everlastin’I can go on for days and daysWith rhyme displays that engrave deep as X-rays

Rapper’s Delight, its production and distribution, was important but as a single disc had the impact of a party record, even a novelty recording on par with Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” released about ten years earlier, Lightnin’ Rod’s Hustler’s Convention� (a.k.a. Jalal Nuriddin of the Last Poets), the Last Poets’ Chastisement, and Nikki Giovanni and the New York Community Choir’s Truth Is on Its Way, released earlier in that decade. A one-off boutique recording you humored yourself to, or attended to for the undertone of an impending uprising—RCA-like ear cocked to the needle on the record. Rapper’s Delight ’s flights of fancy, from romantic braggadocio, a dinner party gone horribly wrong, and references to a superhero, introduced the genre and was followed by more established, contemplative recordings from other artists such as Melle Mel’s “The Message.” Blondie’s “Rapture” also engaged in this novelty recording approach and is why, in some ways, it was rejected by the core rap constituency even as it made important waves in the club scene and popular culture—seminal in some communities but not in others, and pioneering cross-cultural collaborations. The ethos of Hip Hop’s energy beyond novelty occurred in the main-stream in forums such as the annual New Music Seminar conference. Eric B and Rakim’s recording Follow the Leader matured the genre. This is, of course, subjective, and others would argue that the duo’s Paid in Full, their debut album, was the critical introduction to the group. Follow the Leader, however, is more metaphorically apt, in my view, as it not only concretized the overall scope of the performative utterances of Hip Hop (as well as the

2. Jefferson Morley, “Rap Music as American History,” introduction to Rap the Lyrics: The Words to Rap’s Greatest Hits, ed. Lawrence A. Stanley (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), xvi.


cultivation of explicitly dissonant sonic elements into the genre) organizing the sound, but, less than a decade after the first massively produced rap record, began to lead the entire music industry. Much has been made of Rakim’s introduction of internal rhyme into Hip Hop recording vernacular use, but there are other prosodic and codi-fied references in the work. There’s more to say on this. I will focus on the album’s eponymous track for closer reading/listening. While Hip Hop in general is noted for its popularity and is established as an influential genre for performative utterance and play around the world, it is valuable to consider its seminal developments. Those of us with great affection for the genre, particularly those of us who came of age during the music’s coming of age (immediately before and during its mass commercial recording production in the late 1970s), noted the initial application of con-ventional poetic form that relied heavily on end-rhyme use, punning, and topical wordplay. A substantive shift occurred, however, in 1987, when the duo Eric B and Rakim presented their first of four collaborative albums, Paid in Full. The next year, this debut was followed by the recording I’m consider-ing here. A progression of the prosodic effects of the first album, there are connections to be made between Rakim’s presentation of self and lyrical vibrancy as a way to think about how Hip Hop affect informs contemporary Austinian performativity.

I can take a phrase that’s rarely heardFlip it, now it’s a daily word [. . .]

The duo’s debut album and track Paid in Full demonstrates Rakim’s planting himself in the conventions of Hip Hop. His stylistic innovations are rooted in the genre, particularly the affirmation that this is a com-munal, accessible experience. Reflecting a post-’70s, romanticized pimp aesthetic, the performers’ outward appearance, the album’s cover shows their bling-ed out Catherine Ponder/Father Divine-Reverend Ike right-to-transcendental wealth aesthetic. They’re holding money; enlarged graphics of bills serve as drywall/paper for the background. On the second album, you see Eric B and Rakim looking off into the distance, beginning to see the future (“it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”). Their faces obscured by the back-shot of the camera, the community-based source of the material is in the presentation of the Five Percent Nation seal. But . . . something else is presented here: they have placed themselves not in the position to assert their belonging in their world and the larger world (the horizon) but to observe it. The observation


indicates the same sort of “detached” authority of any leader from those “of the manor born” to an outright monarch, to what Rakim would describe as God. They are not asserting that the/this Black man is God—here they assume it. The agency is presented in the cover of this album. The song “Follow the Leader” goes further. It presents the leadership overtly in two ways: the title (you’re following me) and the skill (you can’t keep up with my words).

Keep comin’ but you came too late but I waitSo back up, re-group, get a grip, come equippedYou’re the next contestant, clap your hands, you wanna tripThe price is right, don’t make a deal too soonHow many notes? Could ya name this tune?Follow the leader is a title theme taskNow ya know, you don’t have to askRap is rhythm and poetryCuts create sound effectsYa might catch up if ya follow the records he wrecksUntil then, keep eatin’ and swallowin’Ya better take a deep breath and keep followin’The leader

2. Austinian Performativity

More seemingly pedestrian schema can be applied to Rakim’s omni-verse through Austinian diagrammatic framing. If Austin’s analyses of con-stative and performative utterances lead to a triumvirate of forces, how could/does Rakim’s song offer us insight into the intersection of forces with this multivalent performance? Austin starts with duality and ends with a rough outline of tripar-tite forces (the locutions), and similarly Rakim demonstrates convention with couples/couplets (aabb / the Nation of Gods and Earths / Eric B and Rakim) and cultivates a tripartite presentation with end-rhyme couplets and internal rhyme: Eric B, Rakim, and the “sucka MCs”; the Five Per-centers (with more indications of their philosophy), the 10 percent, and the 85 percent constructing the universe.� A trio identifying “the super superb” Supremes.

3. See the official Web site of the Nation of Gods and Earths, available at www.allahsnation .net.


Like Heidegger’s concept of worlding (perceiving the world by con-sidering what’s in it), Rakim’s application of Pound’s delineations of logo, phano, and melo/mellow poetics constructs a specified world that emerged from a culturally specific place. Originally a reflection of, then a refraction of, the Nation of Islam, itself a response to Father Divine being guided by Moses-Garvey via the Black Star Line, The Nation of Gods and Earths/Five Percent Nation of Islam was established in 1964 by Clarence 13X (formerly Clarence Jowars Smith) and is the belief system Rakim and several other rappers practice.� Rakim’s grounding emerges in the “knowledge of self.” In his book with the almost supernaturally apt title Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Vincent Vycinas inter-prets an aspect of Heidegger’s thinking in this way: “Man is the only being who has an understanding of Being, therefore, only for man can Being be present. Man is the place of the presence of Being; he is this presence. Man is Dasein. Dasein is not identical with empirical man, but is rather his essence.”� How this essence of man is reframed in Rakim’s presentation is both metaphorical (“Man” with a capital M ) and literal (this particular man’s relationship with being and time):

Brothers tried and others die to get the formula. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I came to overcome before I’m goneBy showin’ improvin’ and lettin’ knowledge be bornThen after that I’ll live forever, you disagree?You say, “Never?” Then follow meFrom century to century, you’ll remember meIn history not a mystery or a memory

Rakim’s Dasein struggled against the parochialism of his grounding origins, and the reality that is worlding supernovaed atomically out of his ’hood through his phonetic applications. The beginning shall be the end and internal:

Since you was tricked, I had to raise yaFrom the cradle to the graveBut remember, you’re not a slave’Cause we was put here to be much more than that

4. Ted Swedenburg, “Islam in the Mix: Lessons of the Five Percent” (1997), available at http://comp.uark.edu/~tsweden/5per.html.5. Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heideg-ger (New York: Springer, 1969), 25.


But we concede because our mind was trappedBut I’m here to break away the chains, take away the pains,Remake the brains, rebuild my nameI guess nobody told you a little knowledge was dangerousIt can’t be mixed, diluted, it can’t be changed or switched

While Austin’s fundamentally democratic and egalitarian ethos places a question at the center of his forces, his nonjudgment presented in his oft-reference “I have purposely not embroiled the general theory with philo-sophical problems . . . this should not be taken to mean that I am unaware of them . . . I leave to my readers the real fun of applying it in philosophy” (164). Rakim leaves no question for a centrality that he does not question, that he is, in fact, asserting. It is a democratization, like Austin’s of shifting loci from neutral/given/Anglophilic to spacial/racial/democratic/diverse.

The old distinction . . . between primary and explicit will survive the sea-change from the performative/constative distinction to the theory of speech-acts quite successfully. . . . What will not survive the transition, unless perhaps as a marginal limiting case, and hardly surprisingly because it gave trouble from the start, is the notion of purity of performatives: this was essentially based upon a belief in the dichotomy of performatives and constatives, which we see has to be abandoned in favour of more general families of related and over-lapping speech acts, which are just what we have now to attempt to classify. (150; emphases in original)

Austin’s efforts, in his meticulous undermining of cultural supremacy through/as language (so thoroughly embedded in his sentiments that he goes to great lengths to undermine his own presumptive agency as author), ask us, through the use of everyday speech, to consider how our engage-ment with each other through this activity undermines hard-and-fast duali-ties and divisions. The use of internal rhyme in Rakim’s work reframes the concept of resolution through the duality of the couplet. Melle Mel’s famous lines “it’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder / how I keep from going under” or even “what you hear is not a test, I’m rapping to the beat / and me, the crew and my friends are gonna try to move / your feet” from Rapper’s Delight, although different in tone and meaning, don’t vary much schemati-cally. Both examples, one a meditation on the hardships of everyday life, the other a party song, give off what they give (to reference Erving Goff-man’s delineations in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life). Rakim


gives more than he gives off by amplifying the content through the form. His lines tend to resolve in couplets and quatrains, but he undermines his perspicuity through the use of the internal rhyme. Rakim is saying that he is “more complex from one rhyme to the next,” but also that Hip Hop is, that the self-actualized Black man is (5 per-cent of the 100 percent). When he says “we were put here to be much more than that,” he means not America, not the planet Earth. He sees himself, his position, as more:

So follow me or were you thinking you were firstLet’s travel at magnificent speeds around the universeWhat could ya say as the earth gets further and further awayPlanets as small as balls of clayAstray into the Milky WayWorld’s outta sightFar as the eye can see, not even a satelliteNow stop and turn around and lookAs ya stand in darkness, your knowledge is tookSo keep starin’, soon ya suddenly see a star, ya better follow it’Cause it’s the R

While standing in darkness the Black man sees a star. You better fol-low it . . . sounds Sirius. The Five Percenters and cultural nationalists, Father Divine, Reverend Ike, Catherine Ponder, et cetera, often frame their affir-mations not as novel but as a recapturing of previous knowledge—where we were. The “stasis” of the Black man is not “natural” state. The darkness (from this loss of knowledge? The posttraumatic stress residue from the bottom of a hold?) is impossible to navigate blindly. Irrespective of condi-tions on earth or at sea, the flatness of bidirectional, two-dimensionality, one can correct one’s path by triangulating with the firmament—eyes heav-enward and beyond “white heaven.” As a child who grew up in the ’70s, Rakim would likely have been exposed not only to the Black nationalist movements inspired by Malcolm X, such as the Five Percent Nation, but also the work of Black liberationist ideology that was reflected in academic and grassroots Black studies programming. Black folks say space is the place for them, not “too” but first. Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Dogon of Mali (who identified the hidden star Sirius B) claim that ultimate black territory. When Rakim says to follow the star-based letter, as a God, he purviews the universe and finds it Black, wholly.


3. Wor(l)d Up/WordPlay

Rakim, as part of the Hip Hop aesthetic, also presents the time-honored African American tradition of playing “the dozens,” even as a solo-ist. Call and response may not be presented in the “woof ticket sellin’” way, but Rakim presents his half of the chest-thumping oral percussion: “You’re just a rent-a-rap, your rhymes are minute-made / I’ll be here when they fade, and watch you flip like a Renegade.” In “Follow the Leader,” Rakim alludes to being a soldier: “I can get iller than all my killin’ barb,” “a fiend of the microphone murdering MCs” and other ruffians. The unease by which rap is presented as either facile party music or an introductory salvo to physical violence replays other entrenched racial assumptions. And, while any disagreement publicly uttered has the potential to result in an attack of some sort, Rakim’s presentations could be framed as “talking nonsense” in an Austinian way, as an unverifiable statement. In “Follow the Leader,” the Austinian distinction between nonsense and statement is a valuable way to break down Rakim’s lyrics. The bravado against other MCs that establish his leadership is, technically speaking, unverifiable:

Dance, cuts rip your pantsEric B. on the blades, bleedin’ to deathCall the ambulancePull at my weapon and start to squeezeA magnum as a microphone, murderin’ M.C.sLet’s quote a rhyme from a record I wrote“Follow the leader”Yeah, dope’Cause every time I stop it seems ya stuckSoon as ya try to step off, ya self-destruct

Other lyrics are part of “lessons” of the “divine mathematics” of the Five Percent Nation:

Call by nature, mind raised in AsiaSince you was tricked, I have to raise yaFrom the cradle to the graveBut remember, you’re not a slave’Cause we was put here to be much more than thatBut we concede because our mind was trappedBut I’m here to break away the chains, take away the painsRemake the brains, rebuild my name


I guess nobody told you a little knowledge was dangerousIt can’t be mixed, diluted, it can’t be changed or switchedHere’s a lesson if it gets into borrowin’Hurry hurry step right up and keep followin’The leader

This “non-nonsensical” motivation behind these lyrics is not to prove himself as an MC but to use the forum as an opportunity to present his Afrocentric logic. Just as Austin’s investigation into his assertion of per-formative and constative was presented in contrast to previous assertions (namely, that words were primarily used to be descriptive/factual, whereas Austin said words do that but are also—even primarily—performative), Rakim is also contrasting the relatively mundane bragging rights of the top MC with his “higher knowledge” of “self.” In other words, he’s alternating foci between the assertions of the Black Man as God and being the best MC over anyone (and at the time, this would have been almost exclusively the purview of other Black men as competing MCs). Rakim and Austin differ in the presentation of authority to assert their philosophies, one understating it and the other affirming it:

In conclusion, we see that in order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever that is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech-act—if we are to see the parallel between statements and performa-tive utterances, and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases: and thus we are assimilating the sup-posed constative utterance to the performative. (52)

To great effect, Rakim also highlights the contrast between constative and performative utterances within this recording by applying metaphors to the beef between himself and other “lesser” rappers:

Pull at my weapon and start to squeezeA magnum as a microphone, murderin’ M.C.s . . .

You’re just a rent-a-rap, and your rhymes are minute-madeI’ll be here when they fade to watch ya flip like a Renegade . . .

And follow and follow because the tempo’s a trailThe stage is a cageThe mike is a third rail . . .


There’s one R in the alphabetIt’s a one letter word and it’s about to getMore complex from one rhyme to the next . . .

I been from state to stateFollowers tailgateKeep comin’ but ya came too late but I wait

The voluminous attacks throughout the years on Hip Hop lyrics that describe violent acts carry with them this misinterpretation of performative utterances for constative ones. Or, as Tracy Morrow (also known as rapper/actor Ice-T) stated when the former president of the National Order of Police Chiefs responded to his controversial song Cop Killer, “If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut . . .” (in reference to Bowie’s song “Space Oddity”). With Rakim there is no such ambiguity, as he seamlessly and more explicitly uses refined metaphorical language. (Rakim would also not be classified as a “gangsta” rapper, as Ice-T was. Rakim’s work preceded that genre. It is also important to note, however, that the distinction between gangsta and non-gangsta rap was often not made in forums in which these concerns about “violent lyrics” were raised.)

4. Locutions, Supreme

So, if Rakim is able to successfully present the Austinian distinctions between constative and performative, what does he offer to Austin’s further refinement between locutions—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocution-ary speech acts? To briefly reiterate Austin’s distinctions:

We first distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to “meaning” in the traditional sense. Second, we said that we also per-form illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, under-taking, &c., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. Thirdly, we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuad-ing, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading. (109)

Rakim constructed an innovative relationship with locutionary force when he incorporated alliterative internal rhyme into his end-rhyme cou-plets. For that time, he reacquainted the hearer with sounds that were not


solely basing text on vocabularic meaning. The new sounds that Eric B contributed to this collaboration supported Rakim’s technique. In other words, in order to get closer to new meaning, Rakim sonically got closer to Austin’s “void” (an utterance devoid of locutionary substance) through Eric B’s “nonsense” sound (or, to use a poetic reference, “nonce” sound) to affect the cause and effect of his illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. As online music critic Dayo Akinwande (a.k.a. Balogun, also a.k.a. The Hip Hop Warlord) states,

A little-mentioned fact about him is that he was a saxophonist, and he was a pretty good one, too. With time, as he started rhyming, he began to model the sound of his instrument as he heard it in jazz songs. Rather than confine his flow in a meter, he decided to go beyond it, couplets pouring over from one bar to the next . . . And instead of having just one syllable rhyme within couplet endings, he increased it to two or three, thus inventing the art of multi-syllabic rhyming . . . Thus not only was he the inventor of the flow, as we call and know it today in hip-hop; he was also the founder of multi-syllabic rhyming. But no, he didn’t stop there. He now began to rhyme within couplets, too . . . thus becoming the inventor of internal rhyming. And he began to speed up his rhyming in a machine gun–like style, setting the precedent for the Rap Golden Age when rappers from that era spat relatively faster than any period before and after . . . And whereas his predecessors or his peers rarely, if ever, did so, he began to mess with figures of speech extensively, sharing credit with [Big Daddy] Kane as a pioneer of the trend. His use of metaphors, similes, puns, alliteration and personification is now legendary—in fact, he still remains the best-rounded rapper ever in this regard.�

Rakim affected the speed at which people heard text in Hip Hop. The innovations Akinwande describes above, at the time, required a reorienta-tion on the part of the listener. Austin provides an “out” for Rakim’s “transgressive” sound experi-mentation in the 1980s: “. . . [P]recision in language makes it clearer what is being said—its meaning: explicitness, in our sense, makes clearer the force of the utterances, or ‘how . . . it is to be taken’” (72–73, emphases in original).

6. Dayo Akinwande, a.k.a. Balogun (blogger pseudonym), blog available at http://www .epinions.com/user-balogun (last accessed 9/28/08).


The jazzlike precision of Rakim’s intent and presentation clarifies the meaning of the art as he reshapes it. In order to move forward with the performative aspects of his utterances, it required a temporary retreat from the locutionary. Once the listeners (including other rappers) caught up, he would proceed:

Stop buggin’ a brother said, “Dig ’em” I never dug ’emHe couldn’t follow the leader long enough so I drug ’emInto danger zone, he should arrange his ownFace into space, it could erase a change of tone

The final truthful statement type is the presupposition. Austin’s example of “John’s children are all bald” presupposes that “John has chil-dren” (149). There are many presuppositions regarding Hip Hop cultural affect that many presuppose indicates behavior. The storytelling elements of Hip Hop, to many, are a recitation of urban life and past activity. Rappers frequently encourage these presuppositions as a way of giving them legiti-macy in the marketplace. Rakim’s illocutionary act, to “erase a change of tone” (reorienting the normativity of the sources of his speech acts through the elaboration of sounds and descriptive language), has had the effect of what he explicitly presents in the title of the song, that is, to declare himself the leader in Hip Hop (or as Akinwande declares, and I agree, the G.O.A.T. rapper, “greatest of all time”). Rakim’s recurrent track is the fulcrum of a wheel that steered this crafting of performative utterances re:turned the lever/is the leader.

Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin’s Ambient Poetics

Jennifer Scappettone

Ambient music enjoys a certain circulation in today’s aesthetic dis-course and cultural criticism as well as our malls; coined by Brian Eno in the mid-1970s, contextualized by prominent precursors in the compositions of Erik Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage, the phrase already vaunts historical authority. But what might the term ambient as applied to poetry and poetics designate? Reverberation of those sonic trends within the trap-pings of lines and stanzas? An ekphrastic phenomenon, belated? Or some-thing more literal, involving verbal assumption of or diffusion into abounding space? In an innovative scholarly trajectory contemporaneous with the emergence of such points of curiosity in this reader’s experience of current poetry and performance, Timothy Morton has evolved a theory of “ambient poetics” out of his work on Romantic ecological verse. Morton’s materialist strategy for reading “how texts encode the literal space of their inscription” moves beyond traditional ecocriticism in its counternostalgic treatment of place, pointing to a subset of Romantic poetry that models a form of “portable localism”; it expands the field of inquiry regarding “environmen-



tal” art, defining such poems as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as ambi-ent because they bear minimal signification, possessing a phatic quality likened to the soothing envelopment of a mother’s voice.� Such poetry offers Morton an occasion for deconstructing the Romantic opposition between personhood and environment, or figure and ground: ambience, in his initial definition, denotes “a poetic enactment of a state of nondual awareness that collapses the subject-object division, upon which depends the aggressive territorialization that precipitates ecological destruction.”� Aimed against conservative concepts of ecology that buttress the ideol-ogy of a transcendental “nature,” this species of ecocritique issues from a highly utopian order. In this excerpt from a longer study, I will focus on a more recent poetic phenomenon with decidedly postutopian objectives and effects. Do I mean, then, to invoke the lyric equivalent of Muzak’s “Audio Architecture: The integration of music, voice and sound to create experiences designed specifically for your business” conjured by prompts such as “What does your business sound like? / A bikini and coconut oil. Or an oil change and a new set of tires”—or “our Voice On Hold and Voice In Store messaging solutions” designed because “the world spoke and we listened”?� Or am I referring to “a small but versatile catalogue of environmental [poetry] suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres,” intended not to grease the purse but “to induce calm and a space to think,” verse “as ignorable as it is interesting”?� Do I want the term ambient to index a poetry of comfort that replaces justice?� Not ultimately. Rather than identifying an ambient poetic that naïvely mimes the designs of ambient music and the consumer atmo-spherics that both preceded and co-opted them, I hope to plumb contem-porary poetry’s reaction to the dampening of sociohistorical contradictions

1. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3; and Timothy Morton, “‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of a Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Romanticism & Ecology, ed. James McKusick, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, November 2001 (College Park, Md.: University of Maryland Press, 2001), para. 3, available at http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html.2. Timothy Morton, “Why Ambient Poetics? Outline for a Depthless Ecology,” Wordsworth Circle 33, no.1 (Winter 2002): 52.3. “Muzak—Creating Experiences with Music, Voice, and Sound Systems,” http://www .muzak.com, site accessed September 1, 2007.4. Adapted from Brian Eno, “Ambient Music,” liner notes for Music for Airports/Ambient 1 (Editions EG, 1978).5. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” october 100 (Spring 2002): 183.

Scappettone / Versus Seamlessness 65

effected through this sort of climate control—to test its interference in such ambiance. An undercurrent of textual experimentation in the wake of the last-ditch strains of 1970s utopianism has been addressing itself to that mount-ing state of absentmindedness in which a public information-assailed and anesthetized is bound to absorb language. These works may be said to aspire less to musicality than to the condition of architecture, a medium Walter Benjamin identified in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technologi-cal Reproducibility” (1936) as “the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective”—with a difference.� The texts in question are being wrought in the “age” of digital reproduction, in which that state of distraction becomes amplified exponentially by ubiqui-tous ports of exit and entry.� As architecture, these works are more per-formatively domestic than their modernist ancestors were, striving toward forms of decoration rather than monumentality. They are “softer,” more ethereal and absorptive, than their postmodern precursors in Language and adjoining poetries as well.� John Cayley, the poet/programmer whose use of the term “Ambient Time-Based Poetics” in 2004 (borrowing an atti-tude from Brian Kim Stefans) helped define a field of digital poetry, char-acterizes his QuickTime rendering of William Bradford’s Mayflower jour-nals, “Overboard,” as an installation, “a dynamic linguistic ‘wall-hanging,’ an ever-moving ‘language painting.’”�

6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings: Volume 3 (1935–1938), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 119–20.7. William J. Mitchell has cited 1989 as the year in which digital recording and processing began to supersede photography in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 20; most of the texts I will treat were authored over the course of the last decade.8. I take the term soft from Lisa Robertson’s faux-corporate author function, the “Office for Soft Architecture,” figuring most prominently in occasional Work and Seven Walks from the office for Soft Architecture (Astoria, Ore.: Clear Cut Press, 2003). Robertson herself seems to have lifted the term from the writing and architectural practice of Yona Friedman; see, for example, his discussions of the term in Hans Ulrich and Yona Fried-man Obrist, Yona Friedman, The Conversation Series (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhand-lung Walther König, 2007), and in Yona Friedman et al., Yona Friedman (Milan: Charta/Fondazione Antonio Ratti, 2009).9. John Cayley, “‘Overboard’: An Example of Ambient Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art,” Dichtung Digital (2004), available at http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/ 2004/2/Cayley/index.htm. Cayley lifts the term ambient from Brian Kim Stefans, who was in turn responding to Lin’s manuscript, “Ambient Stylistics”; see Stefans’s discussion in


Such parallels of letters to painting and wallpaper echo the ten-dencies of author/artist/cultural critic Tan Lin—whose work determines, however, a more pointed, more morbid, banality. Works drawn from and designed as background phenomena index a set of read/writing practices that flout the meditative state traditionally assumed to be the site of poetry’s conjuring: Lin’s 2006 performance of sorts at ambientreading.blogspot.com set out to register everything he read for a year, from fiction to eBay listings to ticket stubs and “cruise ship Aruba drug and murder blogs, books about babies, etc.,” recording as well where each item was read (the subway, home office, bed, etc.), for how long, and how thoroughly or superficially (scanned, skimmed, read/underlined). Lin characterizes this work of tran-scription as “a stopwatch of various off-hand, inefficient, and fragmentary reading practices, really the dated, after-effects of reading,” redefining the “memoir” as “a working diary, a genre of forgetfulness, general laziness and protracted impatience.”�0 The whole, as democratically accessible and user-friendly as an Amazon.com listing, holds a repellent mirror to (aging contemporary) culture—and begs the question of its reception. What are we meant to do with these dregs of our cultivated inattention, effluvia of reading’s decay? In heaping up touchstones surrounding the turning (back) of mod-ern and contemporary poetry from page to environing space, this study pursues an answer by showing how alert authors’ variously referring lines deliver us into, and out of, the purchasable lull and narcissistic presentism of ambiance. In spite of their own aphorisms, these texts countervail such lull with the weather of where and when we are—immersing and alarming by turns. Unlike the anodyne atmospheres of aromatherapy and Muzak 2.0, which cosset as they bill the consumer, such poetry works up a climate that engrosses, then discomposes.

• • • •

To speak of the poetic line is to speak of architecture. But what is to become of poetic architecture in a landscape of gaining virtuality and acoordination? How does poetic structure “hold up” in the throes of print’s obsolescence, through expiration of the quaint material asylum it provided

Gary Sullivan and Brian Kim Stefans, “Brian Kim Stefans / Interview,” Read Me, no. 3 (2000), available at http://home.jps.net/~nada/bks.htm.10. Tan Lin, Weblog at http://ambientreading.blogspot.com/; prose quoted is from the first entry, on January 12, 2006.


from abounding “space” and its aesthetic correlative, the dematerializing work of art?�� What purchase can the twentieth century’s poetic bids for radical discontinuity have on a landscape in which irruption may become indistinguishable from delectation in the total smorgasbord of mediated, administered diversions—in the derive or “drift” of channel changing? In writing about Lin’s 2003 book BlipSoak01, Brian Kim Stefans observes that its smooth remixing of the myriad streams arriving out of cable, the Web, electronic mail, and so on relishes “the ability to change channels, to con-trol and sample the thousand broadcasts—to accessorize one’s conscious-ness.”�� This brilliant conflation doesn’t gloss its own diagnosis of rather chilling developments: BlipSoak01 presents an environment of difference logoed and climate controlled, whose scattered numerical tagging is far less likely to indicate years than update versions or a leakage of code:

this is another logo 04of boredom and the multi-national

sea, air-conditionedlike Antarctica

sometimesDior

SometimesBebe or Miss Sixty 05��

In this book’s production of homogenizing space, oceanic nondifferen-tiation has morphed into a washed parody of particularity in the form of multinational branding. Such textual climates provide unflappable poetic analogies, even site reports, for developments (or entropies) architect Rem Koolhaas theorizes in a rather more melancholic tract on “Junkspace,” pub-lished in a 2002 issue of october devoted to obsolescence. Koolhaas fol-lows Henri Lefebvre’s call to “analyse not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it,” but with

11. I refer to the phenomenon most saliently articulated in Six Years: The Dematerializa-tion of the Art object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries . . . , edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard (New York: Praeger, 1973).12. Brian Kim Stefans, “Streaming Poetry,” Boston Review 29, no. 5 (October/November 2004).13. Tan Lin, BlipSoak01 (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 2003), 70.


a necessarily grotesque twist.�� Shifting architectural discourse away from the built environment, his essay scrutinizes the space that clogs and sutures the social contradictions inherent to its production: “The built . . . product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. . . . the prod-uct of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock.” Stupefying interventionist aims, Junkspace buoys us amid channels impervious to irruption: “Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it . . . deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain. . . . Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned Petri dish: it cancels distinc-tions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. . . . A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently dis-jointed.”�� Imperial deterritorialization . . . a surface fusion of permanently fractured species of places shields this space from censure or even analy-sis. Can the poetic line make any mark within this bad ambiance of fused figures and grounds? Tan Lin’s urbane investigation of the poetics of virtuality may con-stitute the next logical step away from architectonics (and activist shock tactics) as we have known them. In a 1999 issue of Boston Review, Charles Bernstein introduced a sample from Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and obituary: 2004, a manuscript titled Ambient Stylistics at the time, by calling attention to the younger poet’s sense of language as “‘forever . . . subject to change, cancellation, decay,’” of “language’s harrowing, or is it hallowing, ‘failure to specify anything in the here and now.’”�� Whereas the reverse deixes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tended to point every which way but loose, Lin’s experiments in ambient textuality aim to loose readers into a “relaxing,” distracting, semi-mesmerizing, boring linguistic climate. Lin’s constrained vocabularies—derived from the object identification systems developed to classify museum objects across languages and institutional platforms—utter in vexatious deviance from current experimental pos-

14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 90.15. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 175–76.16. Charles Bernstein, “Poet’s Sampler: Tan Lin,” Boston Review 24, no. 2 (April/May 1999).


tures that “[t]he best reading experiences have been silenced or whited out like a machine/diagram for the production of white noise.”�� Lines at large sampled and reprocessed, released at seemingly random intervals beyond the work’s prose blocks, amalgamate a medium mixed for your reading pleasure or mild irritation—to be soaked up, stared at, ignored, and hopefully forgotten: as noticed or unnoticed as the work of a thermostat “regulat[ing] the room’s energies” (“Painting,” SCV, 18).�� Lin’s critical study of Eliot led him provocatively to consider The Waste Land “a very ambient work”—meaning, one presumes, that it draws upon the material of its envi-rons, themselves resembling more and more a massive trash heap.�� But Eliot’s modernist fractures and monumental shoring efforts are nowhere to be located in the sutured rhetoric of this generically vague or metamor-phic “container” of text, which samples thought from Satie, Cage, and Eno alongside dictates of ambiguous sources, roving without warning between ventriloquism and acidic analysis of the Wal-Mart and Muzak anti-chambers of late inhabitation. The text itself posits that because “[t]he problem with most poetry, like design and architecture, is that it is a little too bourgeois,” it “should never be turned off”—so that, instead of affirming “cogito” like all subjects in the Franco-American novel, it will continually erase itself (SCV, 18). Poetry itself ought to vaporize, “ought to be replaced by the walls that surround it and doors that lead into empty rooms, kitchens and hypno-sis,” insists Lin’s hybrid or morphing “Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Theory Film Photo Hallucination Landscape” (SCV, 18). This verse’s course is bound off the page, to take stealthier, more ubiquitous, annullable forms beyond the cover of the book. A preface program to Lin’s deliberately amateurish motile poem or “Reading Module,” “Dub Version V.01,” wrought with Macromedia Director, utilizes standard text-to-speech technology to voice a tract of Seven Con-trolled Vocabularies. The prologue, a hyperbolic manifesto of questionable

17. Tan Lin, “Architecture,” in Seven Controlled Vocabularies and obituary (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). The quotation comes from page 64 of an earlier manuscript titled “Seven Controlled Vocabularies: Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Theory Film Photo Hallucination Landscape.” Hereafter, this work is cited paren-thetically as SCV. Subsequent page numbers cited refer to the earlier manuscript.18. See also the preface to “Dub Version V.01.”19. Tan Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation with Charles Bernstein,” Art Radio WPS1.org., archived on PennSound, 2005, available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin .html. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Conversation. The Eliot study was Lin’s dissertation filed through Columbia University and remains otherwise unpublished.


genesis, appears along the bottom of a blue screen sentence by sentence, presided over by a timer that tallies the number of seconds each sentence endures, a rapid-fire appearance and evaporation of individual words, and an agitated line of frequency as the female-gendered voice-effect sounds out each syllable robotically. Titled “ELEVEN MINUTE PAINTING,” the piece begins, “A side. What are the forms of non-reading and what are the forms a reading might take? Poetry equals wallpaper. Novel equals design object. Text as ambient soundtrack? Dew-champ wanted to create works of art that were non-retinal. It would be nice to create works of lit-erature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats. The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading.”�0 From Lin’s rigorously contemporary perspective, the book embodies a “very old technology for the storing and processing of infor-mation” (Conversation); like well-bought PCs, his books and multimedia works, (pseudo-?) capacious, incorporate and offer up feeds as patterns of absorption—linguistic, imagistic, ideological, and otherwise—without programming particular responses as “original” and “difficult” precursors might. He hopes in this way to “blu[r] the line between production and con-sumption,” in a mode that Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” could have cele-brated, to the modernist’s chagrin (Conversation).�� Lin’s animated Web works “Echo 1” and “The Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn” housed at UbuWeb began to reorganize the line in space and to temper the pace of immersive reading, compelling surfers to recog-nize their own “lazy tired reproachful” attempts to scan and soak up messages in the process.�� The PowerPoint poetic of “Dub Version V.01”

20. Tan Lin, “Eleven Minute Painting: Reading Module v. 0.1 (dub ver.),” available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin-Video.html.21. The question of distraction constitutes an intriguing point of difference between the thought of Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. As the latter wrote in his 1936 response to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”: “in spite of its star-tling seductiveness, I cannot find your theory of ‘distraction’ at all convincing—if only for the simple reason that in a communist society, work would be organized in such a way that human beings would no longer be so exhausted or so stupefied as to require such distraction”—or, as Adorno proposed during the development of his radio work, “music which is listened to by no one spells disaster. . . . I rather believe that the relationship between music and time . . . plays a role here” (Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], 130, 236).22. Tan Lin, “‘Echo 1’ and ‘the Edge of Summer Cleans Autumn,’” UbuWeb, available at http://www.ubu.com/contemp/lin/lin2.html.


(a file already obsolete—much, I’d wager, to its architect’s theoretical sat-isfaction) extends this scheme. It applies Stein’s treatment of language as a medium comprising units of equal weight and volume to the projection of three-term sets that appear, word by word, at seven-second intervals before fading to black and pastel backdrops that then accommodate the next triad, and so on. The content of one such series tests the coolness of its delivery:

one plane enters

one of the

towers in snow

I am hurt��

Lin proposes to create a work at once object, novel, and movie, treating the genre itself as a container as generic as possible, in a patent echo of the economic trend of containerization. This container has been formulated to empty rather than filling, however, leaving spectators faced with lack.�� “Dub Version V.01” samples a deliberate fusion of high and base texts, from the Bergdorf Goodman swimsuit catalog:

plunging v-neck halter

dress in black

. . . . . . . .

Sizes 2–12 $1095

to Ed Ruscha, to Dickinson:

598 Three times

— we parted

— Breath —

and I —

23. Tan Lin, “Dub Version V.01” (Macromedia Director Program), CD-ROM.24. Jameson distinguishes containerization, a development in the streamlining of global commodity transport of commodities, as one of the prominent features of late capitalism in his introduction to Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), xix.


Repacing the traditional poetic line in real time, Lin slows, speeds, evens out its absorption by a reader/watcher rendered aware of his or her drive to connect disparate terms.

Behold a Thing

Where Human faces

— be —

Though the “Operating Manual” for “Dub Version V.01” asserts that this work should be “very very easy, deeply relaxing, and ambient,” a watcher may equally find herself awash in an unsettling stupor of meaning-making as text flickers and passes by; for the evenness of “Dub’s” tri-delivery recalls Koolhaas’s diagnosis of distracted hermeneutics under late capi-talism: “Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, have now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing—no sequence is too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting.”�� Lin’s rendezvous with new media may incite a critique, however implicit, of Junk-space’s soothing seamlessness. Lin’s 2003 BlipSoak01 translates many of “Dub’s” diffusing aims into a book form highly aware of its own material seam, even as it seeks to exceed its own status as static, temporally suspended inscription by mark-ing off sporadically the presumable period of time that each section would take to register. Its preface begins without warning on the right-hand page, continues on the verso, and moves back to the recto as it describes the dis-appearance of the poems “[of our era]” into stylistic “devices,” itself enacting anything but enervation as it deflects the habits of the book-reading eye.

Duration (11:03)

The poems [of our era] [are designed to disappear. [and disappear] continually into the stylistic devices that have been sampled and diluted from the merely temporal language . . . of the day. As such they might resemble a pattern uninteresting and enervating in its depths but relaxing on its surface. Such a surface would [continue] to divorce itself

Here the text continues on the verso—

[from a kind]

25. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 188.


—and shifts back to the recto—

of lateral movement across the page. As a mistake created by the visible, such a divorce is the product of various mediums which linger and soothe, including disco, optical illusions, IDM,�� late night television, photography, and the various ‘non-designs’ of P. Starck and his disciples.��

Against the difficulty pursued by modernist experimentation (most point-edly that of Eliot and Pound) as well as the postmodernist “non-absorptive” poetry of Bernstein and other Language writers, which strives to obstruct signals between sender and receiver, Lin claims to offer up a page across which prevailing “irritants and relaxants” merge, so as to “transform the book into a piece of . . . very low-level durational energy” analogous to that of the streaming media soaking us lately (Conversation). This sampled opus, more attuned to disco or dub than to montage, forges a rapport of pseudocomplicity with the increasingly total mediation and administration of space as it maneuvers to transform the book into “a non-branded read-ing environment” (Conversation).�� This is why the modular forthcoming “novel,” Seven Controlled Vocabularies, hopes to form as generic an archi-tecture as possible; Lin aims to “reduce [the novel] to its lowest common denominator so that it could be easily confused with—you know, an airport, lounge music . . .” (Conversation). The lines of the long poem making up BlipSoak01 materialize as a more ambivalent response to spatial nondifferentiation than Lin relates discursively. The splices that at apparent random extend the book’s prose clots and an ensuing train of couplets work against as well as with the nar-rator’s performative hypnotic high jinks: “[T]he surface of the ambient poem you are gazing towards is highly distracting, filled with imprecisions, typos and forms of the hypnotic, which function backwards, just as boredom itself does. . . . The most beautiful page makes you look away accidentally from what you were reading.”�� The experience of being engrossed is more trou-bling than this. The surface obliges reading to flicker, sending eyes skittishly back and forth, as if they were engaged as sweepers in search of refuse to

26. The acronym stands for Intelligent Dance Music.27. Lin, BlipSoak01, 11–10; brackets in original.28. See also Tan Lin and Danielle Aubert, Disco Eats Itself (Broken Disco Parameter) (2007), Flash video, now available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin-Video .html.29. Lin, BlipSoak01, recto text on 11; 13.


eradicate. BlipSoak ’s line attempts ostensibly to “permute off the page,” to make the seam of the book disappear by writing across it, erasing historical traces in the process.�0 Wherefore? The first and last narrative sections of Seven Controlled Vocabular-ies and obituary (“A Field Guide to American Painting” and “A Field Guide to American Cinema”) conclude with a near-matching set of assertions, subject only to the subtlest, but critical, modifications. The first ends,

Like the Pantone Color chart, the beautiful book is a diagram of “historical inexactitude” which reflects (by turning) something “not there.” A very beautiful painting should have its pages turned end-lessly and without thought. What is “not there” is opposed to what appears in a poem or building or painting. It should never be neces-sary to turn a page when reading.

The page should turn before you got there. This is known as history. (SCV, 36)

The last section replaces “poem or building or painting” with “mirror” and eliminates the paragraph break, accentuating across pages the yoking of these genres to bourgeois crystallizations and fractures of subjectivity, and implying that the present withdrawal into metadata clears access to the liminal content that narcissistic aesthetic programs efface (SCV, 211). Such passages emerge suddenly as rather more concerned with what is gone than one gleans at first from Lin’s ostensible avowals. A poem that is “just a space that is showing up somewhere else” that “should be ahistorical” would appear to elude the “false arc of the historical” by reflecting what is “‘not [citationally] there’” in a traditional poem, building, or painting (SCV, 36). The poem that obliges no turning of pages releases traces of what is missing from the sentencing of the historical artifact; it exudes effluvia of the forgotten as if passively—though we cannot be sure whether Lin’s ulti-mate, echoing sentences accord with an exposure of historical powerless-ness, an escapist fantasy, or a posthistorical verdict. They and the “Obitu-ary” tacked onto the title in a late-breaking development posit in all cases, rather portentously, that history is just behind us.��

30. Conversation with Jennifer Scappettone, December 18, 2005.31. An appropriately subterranean archaeology of dodgy pasts too rich to examine under current constraints pervades Lin’s works. Memory of a lying father and memorialization of a generic ethnic heritage haunts Ambience Is a Novel with a Logo (Cambridge, Mass.: Katalanché Press, 2007), an excerpt from a longer project which closes on assertions


As anodyne of angst as it may seem, Lin’s “soothing” is effectively indistinguishable from that of manipulation. Therein lies the subversive irony of his project: this self-styled “new-age” approach to literature mimics the way the culture industry performs today so that viewers of it can glean, however vaguely or inadvertently, some recognition of what’s happening (and what’s not) in other sectors of cultural dissemination (Conversation).

[verso] [recto]that I am sewing sky and outline of migraineand they are same ///

b t wn the tire fix join& you, and velvet was anaphoric

unstructured palliative /// [impL:q.] 04and foaming

humhmm ///from manholesoutside______________________��

The breach between prose blocks or couplet march and data fragments formed by the spine of the book (indicated by “///” in the quotation above) tends, versus itself, to highlight the book’s status as a persisting, material artifact, and to counteract any complacent absorption of this “casual” text on the part of the reader. One’s inattention, however efficacious in a mall or cyberscape, is here historically subject—must witness itself falling short or adrift of the dictates of outmoded form, from the vantage point of some more knowing, controlling ether. Alain Badiou has as recently as 2006 claimed that it is impossible to resist capitalism, because it has become so natural-ized and neutralizing that it exists only as a kind of murmur or background sound.�� But in the broken architecture manifest here and there “b t wn”

that “forgetting, not remembering, ought to be memorialized with works of art” (n.p.). Lin’s collaboration with his sister, Maya, on a garden for the Cleveland Public Library in their childhood state (Reading a Garden, Cleveland, Ohio, 1996–98) and on an earth-work installation for Bicentennial Park (a “map of memories” called Input, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, 2004), continues to toe the line between memorialization of past experi-ence and its release.32. Lin, BlipSoak01, citation of page spread on 42–43.33. See, for example, Badiou’s analysis of the stupefying neutrality of “atonal” worlds that


the sewn, in the foaming “hmm” available, availing “from manholes / out-side,” don’t we detect the volatile fallout of annihilated figures and grounds? Could such poetry pose an answer to Koolhaas’s question, “What if space started looking at mankind?”��

nullify revelatory tensions “[u]nder the guise of a program of historiless familial bliss, of indefinite consumption and euthanasia by way of soft music,” in Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 442–45 (translated with the help of Nathalie Stephens).34. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 189.

Hypermnesia

Craig Dworkin

Can one imagine an archive without foundation, without substrate, without substance, without subjectile? And if it were impossible, what of the history of substrates?—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

production/distribution

For the last few years I have curated Eclipse, an online archive of some of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century, presented as both facsimile image files and text documents. Additionally, the site also publishes carefully selected new works of book-length concep-tual unity. In the admittedly lurid terms of the index page, the site features “exemplars of the new trobar clus, adventures in diminished reference, lost classics of modernism, écriture actuelle, hard-core composition, ephem-eral memos filed by the Research Division of the Bureau of Resistance, and a series of sacrifices in which the victims are words.”�

1. Available at http://english.utah.edu/eclipse.



The archive was created as a response to three realizations about the state of poetry in America around the turn of the twenty-first century. First, that poetry had reached an impasse of Malthusian proportions: the amount of poetry being written was increasing geometrically, while the amount of poetry that anyone could read soon hit an arithmetic limit.� With a staggering volume of poetry published every year, the primary concern for the genre had shifted from production to distribution. The problem was not how to publish more books, but how to get the many good ones, already long published, to the right audience. The Internet seemed to offer an obvi-ous solution. At the time, the Internet’s potential to create new distributive paradigms, such as the peer-to-peer networking of digital music files, was just becoming apparent. Second, from the reader’s point of view, that the overwhelming pro-duction of poetry—the fact that there was far more poetry being published than any person could physically read—meant that the tools for efficiently filtering the mass of recent poetic texts became a matter of readerly neces-sity rather than mere convenience. Unfortunately, the peak in the overpro-duction of poetry happened to coincide with changes in publishing which made the contours of the poetic landscape and the affiliations between books much more difficult to sort. For decades, the system of postwar lit-erary publishing in America had been so inflexibly partisan that one could confidently know, with a quick look at the bibliographic paratexts—the blurb writers, the masthead of editorial board members, the acknowledgments or patron lists, catalogs of publisher backlists, the distributor, or most simply the publisher (a glance at the device on the spine would do)—whether a book of poetry could be discounted out of hand or handily counted on. But suddenly, it seemed, a new paradigm had reconfigured the entire field.� To begin with, many of the writers who had pioneered the radically asemantic and nonreferential poetry of the 1970s and 1980s had shifted their atten-tion by the early 1990s to more discursive, grammatically complete, and idiomatic forms. Subsequently, moreover, the techniques of the avant-

2. I explore the implications of this fact in the introduction to The Consequence of Innova-tion: 21st Century Poetics (New York: Roof, 2008).3. For a far more detailed account of both the ancien régime of poetry publishing and its new configuration, see, respectively, Jed Rasula’s exceptionally clear-eyed views in The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996) and “Innovation and ‘Improbable Evidence,’” in Syncopa-tions: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).

Dworkin / Hypermnesia 79

garde (such as paratactic disjunction, for example) were put in the ser-vice of poetry that was otherwise antithetical to the avant-garde; on the surface, this new poetry might look like the texts of poststructural textual experiment, but behind the fragmented phrases were poems of mystical presence and the confessions of coherent subjects grounded in fixed and familiar identities. Symptoms of these changes broke out in seemingly unrelated organs of the body poetic. Some of the writers associated with Edward Foster’s generously eclectic Talisman House Publishers, for instance, betrayed an almost druidic animism in lyrics that could not be easily assimilated into either Romantic traditions of nature writing or conventional devotional verse; the numinous poems of Gustaf Sobin, for one example, were rooted in a linguistic facture and a play of materiality more legible to readers of Louis Zukofsky than of W. S. Merwin. At the same time, West Coast writers such as Ivan Argüelles and Will Alexander wrote ecstatically surrealist poems—what one might term a poetry of speculative spiritualism—which achieved their hallucinated effects by deploying specialist vocabulary as a device of disorientation and estrangement.� More widespread and widely read, how-ever, were a number of writers—Jorie Graham, Anne Carson, C. D. Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido, Alice Fulton, among the most prominent—unashamed to flaunt intelligence (or in some cases merely a pseudo-intellectualism) at a time when most poetry of whatever stripe, bound to ethoi of either emo-tional authenticity or bald sentiment, was proudly antitheoretical and anti-intellectual. But, and here is the catch, unlike the theoretically informed and intellectually driven Language poets, these writers were not willing to relin-quish the traditions and establishments (Iowa via the Ivy League) of poetry and publishing. Idiosyncratic and nonconformist without being revolution-ary, they were eager to rattle conventions without risking the foundations of the most classic, conservative, and established institutions of poetry. Pro-moting such writing as the next big thing from “the most exciting younger poets,” Stephen Burt christened it “elliptical poetry.”� As Burt character-ized them: “Elliptical Poets are always hinting, punning or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory; they are easier to process in parts than in wholes. Elliptics seek the authority of the rebellious; they want to

4. For related tendencies in more mainstream writing, see Roger Gilbert, “Awash with Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 2 (Sum-mer 2001): 238–69. The poetic trajectory of Donald Revell or Hank Lazer would provide another perspective on this turn.5. Stephen Burt, “Shearing Away,” Poetry Review 88, no. 1 (1998): 4–7.


challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals.”� In the context of such syncreticism, with its attempt to render avant-garde techniques subservient to “traditional lyric goals,” Eclipse was meant to feel intransigent, a repudiation of the secret peace treaty seemingly signed between “the lyric tradition” and “language poetry.”� As I hope to show below, even the most minor formal techniques, such as ellipses, are never mere stylistic ornaments simply interchangeable with some other sur-face veneer (free surface effects, after all, are what lead to capsize). Rather, formal devices constitute part of the deep structure of a text, inseparable—in every case—from any consideration of thematic content. To imply that they could be capriciously taken up or exchanged at will masks ideologies rather than laying them bare, and it ignores the historical dimensions of linguistic forms—including the forms of eclecticism, incoherence, and rhe-torical collage. Whatever choices may be available to writers who employ one formal device rather than another, those choices carry consequences which the Ellipsists seem to ignore. By bringing together a critical mass of texts which clearly considered the implications of their forms, and which deployed those forms without regard to traditional lyric goals, Eclipse was meant as a counterexample to the new rapprochement. At the very least, I hoped it would provide a proving ground for any claims—pace Burt—of poetic “difficulty,” “challenge,” or “rebellion.” Following these formal indiscretions, publishers had also become markedly more promiscuous: university and trade presses that could once be trusted to publish only conservative workshop verse were now publishing

6. Burt, “Shearing Away.” Burt’s description echoes in Andrew Zawacki’s characterization of Gustaf Sobin, whom I mention above: “Sobin’s poetry dances on a wire between largely traditional aims and an innovative style which, while emergent from Duncan, Olson, and Char and embraced by experimental writers, is as internally consistent and recognizable as Hopkins or Heraclitus” (Andrew Zawacki, untitled review, Boston Review 24, no. 6 [December 1999/January 2000]). In his essay, Burt does not mention Carson, but he does name Liam Rector, Karen Volkman, and Susan Wheeler (among others). The space of an overtly intellectual lyric, one should note, has also been staked by poets whom I would not want tarred by the broad brush of the elliptical, above all the extraordinary poetry of Susan Howe, Forrest Gander, and Cole Swensen.7. I take the terms from the title of a conference in April 1999 convened at Barnard Col-lege by Allison Cummings and Claudia Rankine: “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women.”


the coterie poets of the small-press avant-garde. At the same time, many of the journals that had once published that small-press avant-garde had folded, and those that took their place were generally much more eclec-tic. Moreover, the small presses that had developed around the tightly knit avant-garde communities of the 1970s were also branching out, in large part because they had slowly begun to include a younger generation of writers. Douglas Messerli’s Sun & Moon Press—one of the premier pub-lishers of Language Poetry in the 1980s—seemed especially symptomatic, forced by economic exigencies to dilute its once proudly hardcore list with out-of-copyright translations of nineteenth-century French and Scandina-vian novels. Worse yet, books announced as forthcoming from Sun & Moon were years behind schedule, and the press had effectively ceased opera-tions long before officially folding in 2004. It seemed like a symbolic sign of the times. So much so, in fact, that the name Eclipse is an explicit homage to Sun & Moon, a mark of the archive’s aspiration to document the moment of its predecessor’s apogee and to carry on the early mission of presses like Messerli’s, even after the disappearance of those illustrious celestial bodies. The hope was that the spirit of the small-press revolution—the do-it-yourself ethos of stapled mimeographs and chapbooks printed on a proof press in someone’s garage—could be reengineered for the Web. That goal may well be hubristic, or wrongheaded, or simply overly ambitious, but I want to underscore the essentially arrière-garde nature of the impulse: an old-believer defense of the true cause first advanced by the avant-garde before its flagging, attenuation, sabotage, or defeat. Indeed, the third realization provoking Eclipse was that the literary history of Language poetry was starting to be told in a way that ignored or elided its early definitional phases. “Language poetry” was beginning to stand for some works from the late ’80s or early ’90s, with no mention of the quite different poetics that had given rise to the name a decade earlier. Furthermore, some critical accounts of Language poetry were being writ-ten by people who had never so much as seen most of the primary docu-ments.� I distinctly remember a discussion following a conference panel,

8. Beyond the obvious reasons, access to primary materials is uniquely necessary for the literary historian of Language poetry, since the early critical literature on the sub-ject frequently defined the poetry in terms of its publishing venues; “Language poetry,” in short, became simply whatever was published by a handful of specific presses and journals. Those early essays included tantalizing—and seemingly de rigueur—catalogs of fugitive titles: “Tottel’s, Hills, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, A Hundred Posters, This, Roof,


where a participant—apparently angling for some street cred—claimed he thought he remembered originally reading the poem under discussion in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ; had he ever seen an issue, he would have known that the journal published only articles rather than poems. At the time, “Language poetry” was especially divisive, and partisans heatedly cham-pioned or dismissed it with equal fervor and equal inscience. With Eclipse, I wanted to help raise the level of the debate by making unknown material readily available to both the detractors and champions. As someone with old-fashioned views about the duties of literary history, I found the critical climate outrageous and unconscionable; it was as though scholars of the Renaissance were writing histories of Cavalier poetry without ever having read Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Possible, and not unimaginable, but hardly the diligent assiduity one expects of scholars. Similarly, I wanted profes-sors to be able to teach classes on contemporary poetry that included these works, a task made nearly impossible when the books—published in editions of only a few hundred copies—were already out of print within years of their debuts. Moreover, since they had been published by non-commercial presses and distributed by alternative networks, these books were represented in only a very few libraries, often sequestered in special collections.

The Difficulties, and Poetics Journal” (Douglas Messerli, “Introduction,” in “Language” Poetries: An Anthology [New York: New Directions, 1987], 8); “to Messerli’s list I would add the magazines Temblor, Lucy and Jimmy’s House of ‘K’, and ottotole and the small presses Tuumba, Roof, The Figures, Sun & Moon, and Burning Deck as all being impor-tant in sustaining and developing Language writing” (Hank Lazer, “Opposing Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 30, no. 1 [1989]: 144); “poetry magazines such as This, Tottel’s, Roof Hills, Miam, Qu, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, The Difficulties, A Hundred Posters, and more recently (though not as the predominant group) Sulfur, Temblor, Sink, and Tramen” (George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets [Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 1989], xi); “This, Hills, Roof, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Tottel’s, Miam, The Difficulties, A Hundred Posters and Qu” (Ron Silliman, “Language, Realism, Poetry,” in In the American Tree [Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986], xx); “Tottel’s, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of ‘K’, Poetics Journal, Roof, and The Difficulties” (Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media [Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1991], 174). I am guilty of it myself: “Joglars, Tottel’s, This, Hills, A Hundred Posters, Roof, and Miam [. . .] L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ; The Difficulties; Paper Air; Temblor ; Poetics Journal ; and Jimmy & Lucy’s House of ‘K’ ” (Craig Dworkin, “Language Poetry,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry [2005]). For anyone who wanted to pursue these talismanic publications, the situation was frustrating; the “little magazines” of modernism—a century old—were easier to find in libraries than any of these journals which had been published only a few years earlier.


The compass of Eclipse extends well beyond Language poetry, which is certainly not its only concern, but for all of the diverse works included in the archive the hope is the same: that they might stay the disappearance of furtive and fugitive traditions, trouble familiar histories, disrupt smooth genealogies, generally “thicken the plot” of canonical literature, and remind us in unshakably palpable ways that something else can always—indeed has always, already—been done. This more general lesson is ultimately, I would wager, more important than the access the archive provides to any particular text. Crude effigies of mythical figures more whispered of than ever actually seen, the digital files that constitute the archive—that consti-tute any digital archive—are a set of little fetishes against forgetting.

reproduction/distribution

Two contradictory and competing desires have defined the early history of digital media, and their contest is legible in the Eclipse archive. On the one hand, digital media offer the dream of lossless reproduction: easily generated copies, identical from generation to generation. Unlike the decades-old mimeograph that might be represented on Eclipse—each copy inked slightly differently and each unique object slowly burning in the oxygen of its environment: the staples of its binding rusting and leaching into the jaundice of the acidifying paper—the numerical sequence that con-stitutes the scanned image of that mimeo does not fade, or chip, or tear, no matter how many times it is read or reproduced (and indeed, each time the image is summoned by a Web browser to be read the file is copied and reassembled). On the other hand, the utility of a Web-based repository (as opposed to a traditional library, even if it digitally duplicated its holdings) is predi-cated on radically reducing the information of its contents. The efficient distribution of database files to networked machines—the imperative of the Internet that data be effectively transferable—depends on the compres-sion of data into reproductions that intentionally contain far less information than the original. Indeed, for many formats, such as MP3 and standard JPEG, the files retrieved by the user not only contain less data, but data that are in fact different from the original (though close enough to still be usable). Accordingly, the aim of the initial document scanning for Eclipse is to acquire as much data as possible, regardless of the resulting file size; documents are scanned in color resolved at 300 pixels per inch, without fil-tering, and stored as uncompressed lossless TIFF documents. Conversely,


the aim for the JPEG files made available to the archive’s users on the Web site is to include as little information as necessary. The characteristics of digital media generate a continual dynamic between fidelity and degrada-tion, accurate facsimile and serviceable impersonation. One can see the same distinction in the different ways that “digi-tal literature” has been understood in its brief history. The design tools that initially captured the imagination of scholars such as George Landow appealed because they permitted users to control the precise look of docu-ments; with the click of a button one could change the typographic appear-ance of a document (font, spacing, margins) in ways and to degrees that had formerly been available only to patient professional printers. Although these tools were the origin of the markup languages that have defined the Web, literature on the Internet has developed quite differently. In contrast to the typographic prescriptions of word processing and desktop publish-ing, which allow users to specify precisely how a text will appear, HTML and the related markup languages used to shape the look of text on the Web are only ever suggestions. The tags of HTML are general structural descriptions; by its very nature, the end result of markup is impossible to fix precisely: the compatibility and interpretation of different browsers cannot always be accounted for; their future protocols cannot be predicted; users can always override embedded instructions; and screen sizes, resolution, and color settings vary widely from device to device. Once again, the twin impulses of the digital archive—to preserve and to present, to reproduce and to distribute—are at fundamental odds with one another. Titles archived on Eclipse are therefore available in two formats. Raked-light photographs, presented as image files, show each page or opening (the facing pages of a codex) and display as much unmediated bib-liographic data about the original document as possible (proportion, type-face, color, et cetera). Reset text, presented as a low file size PDF, allows greater accessibility (such as the ability to display texts in Braille readers) and the freedom to excerpt and modify texts. This same tension between fixity and fluidity is manifested not only at the local, tactical level of choices about file format but also at the more abstractly strategic level of the con-cept of the digital archive itself. The ambition of any archive is to preserve and conserve, but to archive inked paper as digital media is a curiously paradoxical attempt to stay the ephemerality of one medium through media that are even more tenuous, mutable, and prone to the sheer unrecoverabil-ity of technical obsolescence. Some of the earliest Eclipse files are stored on zip drives (remember those?); the first incarnation of the site displayed


those files in a Multiresolution Seamless Image Database [MrSID] format, which was supposed to soon replace PDFs (don’t hold your breath); during the hundreds of hours spent carefully reducing file sizes because 1MB was considered far too ridiculously large to download with any practicality, com-puting speeds, bandwidth, and digital storage capacity have increased by an order of magnitude. The archive wagers that the current range of media employed on Eclipse (CD, XHTML, JPEG, PDF) are all sufficiently standard and widespread to ensure that any future technologies will have to account for relatively easy migration. The only safe bet, however, is that the current technology will be superseded—and that the current state of the archive will soon be unreadable. The archive of the archive, in short, will be too diffi-cult to emulate. Which is a serious problem from the point of view of bibliog-raphy, a perpetual loop from which the literary object can no longer escape. By archiving books, the archive itself adds to their bibliographic information, and the digital archive produces entirely new editions. As Jacques Derrida puts it: “the archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out onto the future.”�

facsimile/translation

Part of what the archive seeks to conserve with its insistence on rep-resenting the pagination and typography of the originals is precisely what a digital archive necessarily loses: the facture and material specificity of the book or printed document as an object. In the context of “new media,” this focus on the “old(-fashioned) media” of the page and the book may seem quaint or retrograde, but those attachments are not, in fact, romantically nostalgic. They are coldly semiotic. Every material aspect of a text—layout, typeface and font, binding, ink, et cetera—produces a full semantic charge. As decades of commu-nications theory and textual editing have reiterated, media and physical support are not incidental to the meaning of a text; rather, they are—in themselves—an inextricable part of that meaning. To take a minor, and seemingly incidental, number as an example: “0146–2083.” The numerals are printed on the copyright page of Lyn Hejinian’s 1978 book Gesualdo, which appeared as “Tuumba 15” from her own Tuumba Press. Like all the

9. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 68. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as AF.


early Tuumba books (and unlike the occasional volumes that have appeared under that imprint since the press’s resurrection in 1999), it carries an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), rather than an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), a fact likely to be lost in most transcriptions of the book’s “content,” but one that a facsimile captures. The distinction indicates the status of the early Tuumba books as volumes of a serial publication, classifying them with journals or magazines rather than books. That cate-gorization underscores the connection of individual volumes to others in the series, and it explains their sequential numbering, calling attention to the division of the early Tuumba catalog into two series of twenty-five num-bers each. Furthermore, the ISSN number suggests some of the broader contexts in which Gesualdo might be read: the economic and political his-tory of postal rates, arts funding, and global standardization; the commu-nity of readers established by subscription; the rhythm and spontaneity of periodical publication—the pamphlet, broadside, newsletter, or journal—in contrast to book publication. Similarly, as codexical objects, one of the striking aspects of the early Tuumba Press books is the discrepancy between their printing—carefully hand-set type printed with a Chandler and Price platen press on relatively heavy, high-quality grades of elegantly textured stock—and their saddle binding, which Hejinian has referred to as “roughly stapled.”�0 These objects, originally priced between one and three dollars, thus ges-ture toward both a fine-press tradition of luxury bookmaking and the do-it-yourself spirit of hastily assembled and nominally priced publications from the ’60s avant-garde. With their combination of a reverent attention typical of fine-press printing and the affront to that tradition by rough staple bind-ing, the Tuumba publications simultaneously index the antiquarian and the modern, specialized craft and anonymous commercial practice, the codex and the pamphlet. That discrepancy has a great deal to say about the eco-nomic conditions of publication during the period, a time when letterpress machines were available to individuals from outside the established book-making tradition because second-hand presses, more plentiful and afford-able than ever before, were being abandoned by small businesses and commercial print shops in response to improvements and dramatic cost

10. Hejinian explains: “Part of the things I liked about Tuumba Press was that it was letterpress on beautiful paper—and then roughly stapled. And they only cost a couple of dollars” (Lyn Hejinian and Craig Dworkin, “Roughly Stapled: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian,” Idiom #3 [Berkeley, 1995], available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/roughly.html).


drops in technologies like offset and photostat. But the tension also enters into the semantic economy of the poetry published by Tuumba Press. Consider, once again, Hejinian’s own Gesualdo; after a brief intro-duction, the first section opens:

Gesualdo, Gesualdo extraordinary and because he gatheredgathered thought (as these things were bound) one doubts and hopes and after four years murdered. Ges- ualdo had time around even in these days appeared. Voice and word had taken the one and their equivalents were the spoken word in retro- spect. Gesualdo and died there a modernist using purposes that went like Melchizedilc, ‘without father and mother,’ of no progeny born and died there. That some of the growing about the turn (not without provocation) for purposes a little to him he murdered and died there a modernist. [. . .]

Through a vocabulary drawn from bookbinding—“gathered, “bound,” “the turn”—the character of Gesualdo and the eponymous book are conflated with a careful indeterminacy. Later in the poem, “opening” and “set” simi-larly evoke the form and format of the printed book (its “extension”):

[. . .] In the opening of two voices between inner parts, provides, provides, only a difference of outer voices. We hope to set the lengthy self complete, longer, alert, savouring through extension.

That lexicon draws attention to the bibliographic details of Gesualdo, which, unlike all of the other Tuumba books, is not stapled but neatly and tidily hand-sewn. A discrepancy within a series of discrepancies, Gesualdo—as a book—is more aligned with the old-fashioned legacy of fine-press printing than any of the other “roughly stapled” titles published by Hejinian’s press.�� The design of the text, including a liberal use of elegant decorative devices,

11. The binding and physical details of Gesualdo also place it in marked contrast to the poem’s reprinting as part of a collection of Hejinian’s early books, The Cold of Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994), 63–80, a perfect-bound book with glossy-coated covers printed offset on heavily bleached, untextured stock that is trimmed to a squatter format with narrower margins.


furthers that alignment; apparently written as sections of prose, the text is set in a narrow block with italic marginal glosses that specifically recall the revised 1817 version of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and, more generally, the ostentatious extravagance of wastefully wide margins in certain examples of fine-press printing, including the neomedieval tradi-tion of Arts and Crafts printers such as William Morris. Corroborating these associations, Gesualdo is set in Caslon, an early eighteenth-century typeface. Before becoming so ubiquitous as to be a default choice for modern job printers, Caslon had been revived by the printers of the Arts and Crafts movement as an antique face with old-fashioned connotations, first through Charles Whittingham’s Chiswick Press and later with the Essex House Press (part of the Guild of Handi-craft). Despite what he saw as some “great shortcomings,” William Morris repeatedly praised the “clear and neat and fairly well designed” Caslon as a balm to soothe the offense caused by his bête noire, “the sweltering hid-eousness of the [modern] Bodoni letter.”�� The design of Gesualdo is thus neatly recursive, evoking an earlier tradition of evoking earlier traditions. By not drawing attention to the discordant histories of printing and binding on display in all the other Tuumba books, Gesualdo allows the text’s rhetorical tensions between old-fashioned subject and postmodern agrammaticality to come to the fore, shifting the attention away from Hejinian’s heretical binding practice and toward the collage technique of her poetic composi-tion. Ultimately, this emphasis on the dissonance between form and con-tent, between the presentation of the poem and its subject, is perfectly congruent with Hejinian’s ostensible theme: a late Renaissance composer known for his strikingly “modernist” chromatic dissonances. These are far from isolated instances. The staples absent from Gesualdo, for example, play a pointed role in Lorenzo Thomas’s Dracula, published by Angel Hair Books in 1973. In the context of the famous vam-pire of Thomas’s title, the twin puncture wounds of the staples—now rusting into the low-grade commercial paper with an evocatively brown-red stain—align form and content in a way that encourages the reader to consider the textual status of the vampire himself. Which is precisely what Thomas asks the reader to do more directly; the second section of the poem opens:

Start the thing over again:DRACULA is not a myth but

12. William Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book, ed. William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).


Just another cheap novelWritten in the boring 18th19th century made into theWorst film of 1932 1958 andUnless we get wise to our-Selves next year over againThen what is all this

In the “19th century” mode of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the bite of the vam-pire’s teeth and the analogue bite of the primitive typewriter into the paper used by Mina Harker is one key to the story, and Thomas’s book is also filled with puncture as printing: the blood-drawing needles of a “remark-able” “tattoo”; the “duplication designs” of a “bus ticket” awaiting the bite of the driver’s ticket punch; and an illustration (by Britton Wilkie) of a medieval scribe sitting at his writing desk and contemplating the bloody punctures of the nails affixing Christ to the cross.�� The poem asks “what is all this[?]” and the material text answers: a textual vampire in which form and con-tent implicate one another and must be taken together (“all this”). Mimeo-graphed from typewritten stencils in a method that echoes the punch of the ticket taker and the purple bruise of the tattoo—and which “bleeds” through the paper, to use the printing term—the ghost of Thomas’s mode of production haunts the facsimile of his book in a way that the sterilizing reprint of the poem in The Angel Hair Anthology, reset in a new face and cleanly printed, safely exorcises.�� In contrast, the haunting of production, the revenant of material, is what the digital archive attempts to record. “The structure of the archive,” as Derrida realizes, “is spectral” (AF, 84). Reading the details of bibliography back into the narrative of Thomas’s poem, I should emphasize, need not distract from the social nar-rative of its trenchant critique, where vampirism is figured as a racialized influence on America, with both myth and history turning on the rhetoric of “blood.” The counterculture production of the original Angel Hair publica-tion and the counterculture printing of the tattoo, for instance, enter equally into narratives of standardization and “monotonous” social regimentation,

13. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 356 passim; John M. Picker, “The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice,” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 769–86; and Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Tech-nology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 215–18.14. Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, eds., The Angel Hair Anthology (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 404–10.


with their equally insistent demands for homogeneity. As Friedrich Kittler remarks, with an insight that applies equally to Thomas’s poem, “Stoker’s Dracula is no vampire novel, but rather the written account of our bureau-cratization. Anyone is free to call this a horror novel as well.”�� The standard typewriter face of Thomas’s Dracula and the rough-edged imperfections recorded by the mimeograph are, accordingly, profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, they evoke both the individual and idiosyncratic directness of a typed page, free from the intervening procedures of commercial printing and registering both the unique wear of a particular typewriter’s letterforms as well as the erratic force behind each keystroke. On the other hand, the typewriter and the desktop duplicator themselves, of course, were the epitome of everyday small-business drudgery and the emblem of bureau-cracy: paperwork. Where the typography and technique of Dracula are thus ambiva-lently positioned with regard to the poem’s topic, and those of Gesualdo are at productive odds, the avant-garde procedural technique of Tina Darragh’s disjunctively collaged and abstract book on the corner to off the corner is clearly announced by the typography on every page; her poem is set in a typeface named, appropriately, Avant Garde. A landmark design of the 1960s, Avant Garde was originally designed by Herb Lubalin for the logo-gram of Ralph Ginzburg’s eponymous magazine, a short-lived, hardcover showcase of Pop sensibility and design. Tightly fitting, strikingly slanted, and strangely ligatured, the geometrically rigid sans serif with an extraordi-narily large x-height was intended as a display face and was initially drawn in only an all-caps uppercase. In 1970, however, the International Typeface Corporation designed a version of Avant Garde that included lowercase letters which, though obviously derived from Lubalin’s original, have a very different effect: unligatured, rigidly uniform, tidily clean, predictably spaced, and giving a predominantly rounded appearance to the page due to the wide interiors of the perfect circles described by its curved characters’ counter shapes. The discrepancy between the upper- and lowercase letter-forms of Avant Garde underscores and perhaps in fact explains the lower-case form of the book’s title, as well as the irony of its cover design: a set of gridded instructions for drawing an uppercase alphabet: roman on the front cover, italic on the back, but both unremarkably plain and neither with the striking distinction of Lubalin’s uppercase Avant Garde, even though these

15. Friedrich A. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), 74.


alphabets are printed in the one place—a title design—that his typeface would have been most appropriate. Examples could be multiplied, but I want to consider just one final instance of the bibliographic information recorded by the archival scanning protocols for Eclipse, which scans pages even when they are ostensibly blank (such as the verso sheets of Thomas’s Dracula, which record the bleed of the ink). Containing some of his earliest published poetry, Charles Bernstein’s collection Disfrutes has gone through several editions: one hundred copies published by Peter Ganick in 1979 and distributed hors commerce; three hundred copies as the second title from the first series of chapbooks issued by Ganick’s Potes and Poets Press (Needham, Massa-chussets) in 1981; a reprint from Potes and Poets (Elmwood, Connecticut) in 1999; and an online HTML version in 2005 (http://epc.buffalo.edu).�� Only the 1981 edition was bound into self-wraps (paper cover wrappers that mime the folds of a dust jacket with vestigial flaps). The back interior flap lists the other pamphlets in the series, as well as pricing information and the address of the publisher, but the front flap is unprinted—simply a 2.75-inch pleat in the cover stock. The flap bears no text and serves no purpose, but its mechanism foregrounds two elements of the book which remain unmarked in all of the other editions. The first element hailed by the self-wraps is the book’s title, the second-person singular present subjunctive conjugation of the Spanish verb disfrutar (to enjoy), which derives etymologically from the pleasure of separating something, like the segments of an orange or the ripe fruit from its branch (dis [to separate] + fructus [fruit]). The word is thus linked to the kind of aesthetic tactile activity the pliant wrapper flaps invite: a sepa-rating and unfolding, a prying and repleating that can only be pursued for the physical satisfaction of handling the surprisingly thick card stock. The flaps serve no purpose and have no function (they are not “fruitful” in any sense of productive activity); accordingly, the language of the book, as the title implies, is surely meant to be manipulated for aesthetic rather than utilitarian ends. As Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it: “do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information is not used in the

16. On the publication chronology of Bernstein’s manuscripts, see Loss Pequeño Glazier (“An Autobiographical Interview with Charles Bernstein,” boundary 2 23, no. 3 [Fall 1996]: 38). Glazier indicates elsewhere that Disfrutes was also privately printed in an edition just prior to the first Potes and Poets edition, although I can find no other record; see Joseph Conte, ed., American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, Dictionary of Literary Biog-raphy, vol. 169 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1996).


language-game of giving information.”�� And indeed, the radically fractured and abstract poems contained in Disfrutes seem motivated more by spa-tial composition and the microphonemic affinities of internal rhyme than by reference, much less “giving information.” Moreover, the etymology of disfrutar is necessarily metaphoric, a figural proposition that contrasts with the aggressively metonymic and material play of Bernstein’s poems. One of those poems illustrates the point, and provides the second element put into play by the play of the self-wraps’ ply:

can and why(who stares a clair-ol boundaryi madeitaall bound-ary

With “boundary” folded across the boundary of the line break to bring out the word bound, the poetics (“i made / it”) of the text replicates the folds with which the book is bound in turn. Like the title, the folded word does not quite refer to the design of the book’s binding, or even intentionally name it, but the two material events—one textual and one bibliographic—mime one another, enacting and reenacting a quiet little drama in which the same idea or concept can be tested against several of the varied material forms it might inhabit. A reading that attends to material specificity does not imply a material necessity, however. As the other editions of Disfrutes attest, Bern-stein’s poem (which predates its binding into any particular edition) obvi-ously works perfectly well on its own, without the self-wraps of the 1981 edition. In all of the cases I have examined, the material conditions of each text could, of course, be different; my point is simply that they are not. Nor am I arguing that the resonance between book and poem is of monumental significance; substrates cast a hazy shadow over the texts they bear, shad-ing some words and highlighting others in the chiaroscuro of material form, but it is only ever a minor change of emphasis—comparable perhaps to the kind of attention given to the title poem in a collection, or the placement of

17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), §160.


a first or last poem in a volume—a subtle waver of the hermeneutic seis-mograph available to be read by those attentive to the tremors of textual context. But then again, it’s just a small blank flap to begin with.

avant/arrière

By focusing on the minute particulars of bibliography I do not mean to privilege first editions or suggest that earlier versions of a work have more or better information (whatever that might mean). Media obey a law of conservation, and their information is gained and lost at precisely equal and inverse rates. This law applies to digital media as well, and while cer-tain information is lost in the translation from print to screen (most obvi-ously a range of haptic and tactile sensation, from the texture of paper to its pliability, the heft or buoyancy of the book in the hands; the angles at which it can be tilted), other information accrues. Despite a tendency to consider more durable and palpable media as somehow more “material,” digital texts are not dematerialized but rather rematerialized (as anyone with dry eyes or strained tendons from sitting too long at a computer knows). Any work we encounter—at the moment of its encounter—is materially specific. Jacques Derrida has diagnosed this dynamic as both the founda-tional mode and fatal malady of the archive: “[. . .] the archive always holds a problem for translation. With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduc-tion” (AF, 90). The cancellations that follow from the translating activity of the archive—texts simultaneously offered and withdrawn, displayed and obscured—are precisely why the idea of an “avant-garde archive” is so paradoxical, and why Eclipse is fundamentally an act of the arrière-garde—not simply retrograde, but a kind of belated prolepsis: looking unblinkingly backward to the forward-looking view of the preceding first wave. The con-tent of Eclipse, however, only exacerbates what would be the paradox of any archival endeavor; “every archive,” as Derrida notes, “is at once institu-tive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. An eco-nomic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatu-ral fashion, that is to say in making the law [nomos] or in making people respect the law” (AF, 7). The act of archiving is inherently conservative—the point of the archive is to conserve something of the objects it contains. This is true even when the dream of the archive is to preserve the radi-


cality of its materials, not as museum pieces of the past but as forgotten provocations that still possess the capacity to operate as an avant-garde. The paradox of the “avant-garde archive” highlights the Janus-faced logic of all archives, which look in two directions as they realize their own posi-tion: they conservatively index the past, and they index the future with a wagered risk (or revolutionary delusion), anticipating some user and some use, some moment for which the archived material is being saved.�� So although Eclipse may look, at first glance, like a mausoleum focused on the past—a necrophilic obsession with the out of print—the concern of the archive is in fact the amnesiac present, and a future that the archive believes will still be in need of the avant-garde lessons which previous gen-erations never fully learned. “It is the future that is at issue here, and the archive as an irreducible experience of the future” (AF, 68). Or, as Louis Zukofsky might put it, the archive preserves “the must of an ever.”�� Conservative and revolutionary, simultaneously generating and obliterating bibliographic information, Eclipse is “an eco-nomic archive in this double sense” as well: as a repository, “it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves,” but it also destroys with an irreversible expenditure. To properly scan the books included in the archive, staples must be removed and sheets unbound, or at least severely creased and folded; other bindings must be hyperextended—leaving them broken and deformed, with individual pages separating from the brittle glue of their misnamed perfect binding. As much as it assembles a collection, Eclipse also constitutes the destruction of a library. In the economy of rare books, the procedures of archivization ruthlessly depreciate its holdings. Additionally, although Eclipse has always been hosted on servers at my university employers (first at Princeton and now at the University of Utah), the archive has little value for an academic career because it is electronic and Web-based, a mode of publication that if

18. For Derrida, the archive also points to the present in a transformative way because “archivable meaning is [. . .] codetermined by the structure that archives.” As he explains, “archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event. [. . .] To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (AF, 18). Or, as Kenneth Goldsmith has insisted on several occa-sions, “if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist.” See, for instance, A. S. Bessa, “Exchanging Email with Kenneth Goldsmith: An Interview,” ZingMagazine 11 (Winter 2000), available at http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing11/bessa/index.html; and Marjorie Perloff, “A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith,” Jacket 21 (February 2003), available at http://jacketmagazine.com/21/perl-gold-iv.html.19. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 268.


no longer seen as detrimental to a CV is still not recognized as constituting a legitimate contribution to scholarship. Professionally, the relation of time and reward with respect to the digital archive is directly inverse. Moreover, one of the founding principles of the project, and one I have had to insist on when negotiating with university administrators, is that it must be available entirely free of charge, and to anyone. Eclipse, in short, operates as part of a gift economy. Labor intensive—the site is coded and tagged by hand, with each of the thousands of pages scanned and proofed and processed in time stolen from sleep—and unremunerated, Eclipse accrues no interest and makes no investments. The archive is a depository of loss, a crypt of expenditures which can never be accessed or deaccessioned. Derrida recognizes that gift economy as part of the general archival logic that removes objects from use, but he also locates it in the specific case of the Freudian archive, which returns us to the dynamic of arrière and avant, conservation and revolution, the passé and the novel: “Freud can only justify the apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and typo-graphic printing, in other words, the laborious investment in the archive, by putting forward the novelty of his discovery, the very one which provokes so much resistance, and first of all in himself, and precisely because its silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite amnesia, thus refuting the eco-nomic principle of the archive, aiming to ruin the archive as accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place” (AF, 12). With the substitution of a few words, the sentence might describe Eclipse and its literature of novelty and resistance, the symptomatic pro-jection of my own fears and desires about literary history, and the futile endgame of attempting to escape the laws of media by moving from the regime of print to the substrate of digital media. As a gift, the archive cannot be acknowledged; to function as a gift it must go out to unknown recipients who cannot repay or even accredit the receipt of its offerings. There can be no remit of the archive’s facture. It remains a destructive accumulation, a bibliographic potlatch in which the survival of books—books and not merely their “content”—can only be guaranteed by their destruction.

Poetry Animal

Jonathan Skinner

Magnolia Warbler �hear through you to menieff, schlepp, tlep, tzekblack-saddled mistercalls about Newarkand egg farms, a broadcentral band white-edgedfanning of redstartsthick streaked necklaceyellow as yellow flowersa-thread on saliva spits

1. Migratory “warblers” traffic across the borders of the Americas: “Magnolia Warbler” quotes poetry by Lisa Jarnot and Tamara Kamenszain, “Northern Parula” quotes poetry by Benjamin Friedlander and Gonzalo Rojas, and “Myrtle Warbler” quotes poetry by Peter Gizzi and Antonio Jose Ponte. Previous versions of these poems were published by Bill Sylvester in Buffalo Vortex (2007).



pez witchew, o-ringsflicks tails of ox townsin magnolia trees netsone Alexander flukecaribou and terns linedwith fine black rootletsfidgety individual’sdark cheeks of Tepic’scurlies, curls of curlewsthrough moist spruce singssweeter sweeter SWEETEST

To say that poetry is a “small (or large) machine made of words” is to endorse the metaphor of the “avant-garde,” and to suggest that writ-ing “is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field. . . . Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.”�

Inspect the glass machinery of Dewdney’s recombinant Permugene-sis. Poems of camouflage, interference texts that both elucidate and obfuscate, written back through themselves in a lunar world of eels and dreams, removing and replacing their parts with “corresponding and interlocking absences.” �

The arts, and specifically poetry, do not turn away from the war, in fact they “live and breathe by” this war, in the very process of attend-ing to the invention of their “intimate form,” resembling machines.� The war is the human war on other species.

Animals—as form, as function, as affect, as intensity—are saturating our media-machine environment. They are images, they are sounds, they are rhythms and textures, they are tastes and odors, models and products.

observe Moore’s glacier “picking periwinkles, spider fashion,” an octopus harvesting textual ice.�

2. William Carlos Williams, author’s introduction to The Wedge, in The Collected Poems of Willliam Carlos Williams, Volume II, 1939–1962 (New York: New Directions, 1988), 54–55.3. Christopher Dewdney, The Natural History (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002), 4.4. Williams, The Collected Poems, 55.5. Marianne Moore, “An Octopus,” in Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1994), 71. Thanks to Benjamin Friedlander for drawing my attention to this poem.

Skinner / Poetry Animal 99

They are structures of feeling, structuring our feeling, or lack thereof, for other humans, not to speak of the animals themselves—struc-tures that distort or subvert our uses of them.�

Admire Ponge’s “Louvre of reading,” to be inhabited by a few mon-keys, some bird, or higher species, the way a crab displaces a snail in the cast-off shell.�

The crisis of climate change obfuscates the crisis of species extinc-tion. Climate change certainly exacerbates losses, but envisaged resolutions barely address the ongoing biocide.�

Above and beyond continual evolutionary processes, the crisis is a sixth “extinction event” punctuating Earth’s history, this time induced not by cataclysmic meteorological or volcanic events, but by count-less stories of human success.

“Let the metaphysical take care of itself,” Williams urged.�

Northern ParulaO Guadeloupe harelipsummer’s enough nowwrong head threwn aboutnot withholding thoughtsthe tundra dream’s plosivelit beneath wonderpuffed, fluffed throngsmidst coastal fog beltsprobing flowering catkinsand scrubby thicketswearing a yellow-greentunic lichen, boots ofSpanish moss drivingslow-moving shortstacksbetter be least gaunt

6. For “structures of feeling,” see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto, 1961), 64.7. Francis Ponge, “Notes pour un coquillage,” in Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Galli-mard, 1942), 77; my translation.8. Eileen Crist, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos 4 (Winter 2007): 29–55.9. Williams, The Collected Poems, 54.


climbs and drops a noteenrabiado the martialkid’s id said, treetopsbe hanging from twigs

Submit to the infra-human sounds of Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids, exploring somatic perception (so different from vision), cel-lular consciousness, and carnal indeterminacy. The body as swarm, colony, program. A coherence more than object, emerging from vec-tors of attraction and repulsion.�0

Procedural writing can initiate a system of feedback loops between constraint and the poem-in-process, a system that might involve multiple authors, and that models an organism’s relationship to envi-ronment. Just as constraints limit and challenge authorial agency, a procedure allows a site to determine the writing in ways less filtered through the subject, inviting more distributed agency.

Emily Dickinson directly wrote her “rush of cochineal.”��

Listen to Dickinson’s hummingbird machine, whose phonemes revolve around a lone “coch” at the center of the poem, the turning axle of the mailman’s truck:

route rev res rush scence nance evan evolv ever wheel nealmail ald head ride coch rush bush adjusts tum tun every easy

“What is mesmerized in us,” Alphonso Lingis writes, “are the inhuman movements and intensities in us. . . . Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its teleology and continues as a periodicity with a force . . . of inner intensity.”��

Use your binoculars to study Johnson’s Latin-feathered, symmetri-cally nested bird Spires woven with field guides.��

10. Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-orchids (New York: Belladonna, 2007).11. Emily Dickinson, “A Route of Evanescence,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 559.12. Alphonso Lingis, “Animal Bodies, Inhuman Face,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 167–68.13. Ronald Johnson, “ARK 37, Spire Called Prospero’s Songs to Ariel (Constructed in the Form of a Quilt from Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds),” in ARK (Albuquerque, N.M.: Living Batch Press, 1996), n.p.


Poem as machine, animal, human made of words.

(Thanks to the electron microscope, writes Michael McClure, “THE BODY IS A FAIRYLAND—or, more correctly, is made up of congeries of FAIRYLANDS and ELFLANDS.”)��

Attention to “intimate form” invites a volatile agency into language, realizing the magic of its machinery. “The volatile truth of our words,” writes Thoreau, “should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated ; its literal monu-ment alone remains.”��

A poem, says Cecilia Vicuña, “is an animal, sinking its mouth in the spring.” “El poema es el animal / Hundiendo la boca / En el manantial.” ��

Listen to Artaud cry for “an in-depth / CoRPoRAL / change,” and invite “man / To Go oUT / WITH / his body.” ��

Myrtle Warblerloose change twisting the faderthe volume rises or dropstrills another nice day itsgregarious as junco sidles

not too tightly wound the clockmasked general sits up lowersa yellow spot rising svitin its pine tree arabesque

floats an inverted U midspecks of troubadour pollenarriving early leaves latebayberries myrtle poison

14. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 145.15. Henry David Thoreau, conclusion to Walden, in A Week on the Concord and Merri-mack Rivers; Walden, or Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod (New York: Library of America, 1985), 580–81.16. Cecilia Vicuña, “El poema es el animal,” in Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1992), 78–79.17. Antonin Artaud to Wladimir Porché, 4 February 1948, in oeuvres complètes, vol. 13 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 130–32.


ivy’s accurate hawthorneswallows the still marsh surfacelifting squadrons loops of lightsidl seedl seedl husks

Poetic language structures acoustic signals before they are orga-nized as coded meaning. (In motion capture the organization of creaturely rhythms exceeds the sum of its digital inscriptions.) Are there poetry systems? Autopoetic systems?

Do these systems maintain an organic relationship among parts and processes even as the structure of their assemblage changes, in response to a changing climate? (See Maturana and Varela.)�� This is the key to survival.

In the meandering pitches of o’Sullivan’s “ochre harled” starlings, undergo kinship with animals as breath, tongue and lips perform “Dulthie pods.” Listen by saying, sing “gin’s note.” �� o’Sullivan’s poetry animals are “plundering, blundering, sounding” over the cast-off letters, in electric dialects.�0

See Reuven Tsur’s theory of a “nonspeech” mode, contributing to the expressiveness of poetic sound patterns: “we hear it as if we heard music sounds or natural noises. We attend away from over-tone structure to tone color.”��

Listen to Niedecker’s “thoughts on things,” Mergansers’ fans that “fold unfold / above the river beds.” ��

The cultural work our age of extinction calls for is not to promote habitat preservation, but—as Ellen Crist forcefully puts it—to our-selves become island preserves of animality.��

18. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Riedel, 1980).19. Maggie O’Sullivan, In the House of the Shaman (London: Reality Street Editions, 1993), 41. Charles Bernstein, “Colliderings: Maggie O’Sullivan’s Medleyed Verse,” eco-poetics 04/05 (2005): 157–60.20. Maggie O’Sullivan, “Riverrunning (Realisations),” in Palace of Reptiles (Willowdale, ON: The GIG, 2003), 62.21. Reuven Tsur, What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 18.22. Lorine Niedecker, “Mergansers” (from North Central ), in Collected Works, ed. Jenny Lynn Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 246.23. Eileen Crist, comment during Q&A after “Gaia@2007 I: Theoretics” panel, at the 21st


To attend to “language’s animalady . . . when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound.”��

Poetry animals allow foreign organizations into the sphere of our nervous system. Whether as Artaud’s parasites, as Burroughs’s virus, as Sabina’s mushrooms, or as other forms of possession or “becoming.”

When they speak, let us listen as animals; when animals enter our writing, they do so humanly, when we become machines for reading and writing.

Deconstruct the singular “animal”—that criminal “confounding of all non-human beings under the common and general category of the animal.” As a protest, Derrida’s Ecce animot lodges the human-ist’s cogito acoustically, between animals (“animaux”) and word (“mot”).��

Even on this virtual horizon, which might be the very fabric of their extinction, animals trace the affect that cannot be subsumed to human purpose.

Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), in Port-land, Maine, November 3, 2007.24. Charles Bernstein, introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22.25. Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006), 73–74; my translation.

A Liquid Hand Blossoms

Herman Rapaport

What follows are two extracts from a book in progress composed of sections that “core sample” a wide range of poets and poetries in order to get some sense of the vast whole that makes up poetry in both America and the United Kingdom over the past hundred years or so. The two sec-tions are mainly about referentiality. One of the new critical assumptions that is still built into the teaching of poetry is that a poem worthy of study ought to construct its referent rather than merely depict it. What makes a poem like Milton’s Lycidas high art, according to the new criticism, is the fact that it doesn’t literally depict a transcendental referent, Edward King, given that Milton hardly knew him, but made up (or artificially con-structed) King’s reputation by means of crafting what are, in fact, implau-sible metaphors, allegorical parallels, if not classical and biblical allusions that are convincing, nevertheless. Admirable to a new critical approach is that Lycidas makes a strong emotional and intellectual impression upon the reader despite (if not, because of) the fact that readers probably have no a priori knowledge of, or attachment to, its ostensible referent, which never-theless serves as the occasion for the poem’s composition.



As it happens, the first part of my essay concerns cases in which a poem absolutely depends upon a priori emotional attachments to tran-scendental referents; that is, I will be interested in poems that require us to have a preestablished relationship to content. The idea that such poetry is bad by definition may, in fact, be more unreasonable and prejudicial than we were taught to imagine. Moreover, dismissing poetry that presupposes a preestablished emotional connection with a referent because that makes it sentimental does manage to exclude a rather large body of works that would include poetry written by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez, just to cite three African American poets that many English professors these days might not want to exclude from their course offer-ings. But how can one justify a poetry of the a priori in relation to, say, poets like William Carlos Williams or George Oppen, who constitute referents a posteriori by the ineffable mechanics of verbal juxtaposition? How would we compare, say, Milton writing about Edward King to Sanchez writing about Martin Luther King Jr.? That is the sort of question whose answer I am laying the groundwork for. Part 2 looks at reference from the somewhat opposite perspec-tive, beginning with the clever turn of phrase in a poem that purports to be addressing a concrete referent but isn’t. For example, everyone would be agreed that Ezra Pound was addressing a concrete referent at the Paris Metro when he formulated his well-known phrase “faces on a wet black bough.”� But what are we to make of Marjorie Welish’s “jars spilling wilder-ness” or her reference to “genitals suspended on a string”�? In Welish’s poetry, the cleverness of turning a phrase takes on a life of its own, the referents being either ordinary (“my tired breath / of ruined evening” means simply that the ruined evening exhausted her) or the referents not being locatable (we can’t know what genitals suspended on a string means). In such cases, readers may feel cheated, because the verbal design appears to lack function. It’s merely a “sweet nothing,” a bit of pretty nonsense, a sort of poetic fool’s gold. Yet can poetry be purified of these sweet noth-ings? And isn’t the sweet nothing rather essential to poetry? Consider Milton’s “his oozy locks he lave” in Lycidas. We can make sense of it, but clearly Milton was overplaying his poetical hand for no good reason, unless

1. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 2003), 287.2. Marjorie Welish, The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems (Minneapolis, Minn.: Cof-fee House Press, 2000), 64–65. The phrases are taken from “Michelangelesque” and “Scalpel in Hand,” respectively.

Rapaport / A Liquid Hand Blossoms 107

you’d allow the argument that having fun with words, or displaying verbal dexterity for the sake of doing so, is reason enough. Here again we come up against one of those taboos of the new critics, namely, the idea that form has to have function, that all the details have to perform a specific job relevant to maintaining the structure of the whole, as if a poem were subject to a division of labor principle. But what if someone wrote a poem and the metaphors were goofing off? What if you came across a poem in which the title didn’t have a particularly useful function, for example, John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” which is largely an art history spoof quite unrelated to the poem that follows it?

Dear John Coltrane

It’s a foregone conclusion that booksellers and librarians assume we’re all supposed to have a soft spot for poetry. Hence the perennial popu-larity of E. E. Cummings.

in Just-spring when the world is mud-luscious the littlelame balloonman

whistles far and wee�

You can’t deny that this poem captures memories of childhood experiences that are direct, innocent, and filled with wonder about things that, to an adult, are merely ordinary. Puddles are a nuisance to adults, but not to chil-dren. Mud is never taboo when you’re small. “Chansons Innocentes,” from which this poem comes, is a cross between Blake and Apollinaire. It’s also a sort of projective verse; notice the function of hyphenation in line 2. There’s sound and sense in the last line quoted above, but the typo-graphical separating of the words adds a dimension of sight and sense, too. I’m not sure why spacing the words makes them feel so far away, as if I’m in a big park, but it does. Less mysterious is why the following lines capture the running of children:

and eddieandbill comerunning from marbles and

3. E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904–1962, ed. G. J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1973), 27.


piracies and it’sspring.�

This line is the binary opposition to what just came before and, of course, what we will quickly discover is that the charm of the poem lies in its speed-ing up and slowing down, as well as in its refrain, which comes from the ballad tradition, but which also belongs to the world of nursery rhyme. To top it all off, the merriment of the running is to be contrasted to the little lame balloonman, who is a bit triste, but who characterizes a strangeness that has the function of an ambiguous poignancy, if not status. After all, he might well be Pan. Then, too, there’s the ambiguity of the typography. On the one hand, we get the sense that perhaps a child had typed the poem and had made a few mistakes (for example, eddieandbill, balloonman), but, on the other hand, we get the sense that elements of the poem are not so far removed from the objectivist poetry of William Carlos Williams. The following would not be atypical in a poem by Williams:

it’sspringand

None of this rescues Cummings from sentimentalism, and it’s therefore easy to hold Cummings up to Williams as the example of what not to write like, if you’re a poet. But discrediting poetry because it’s touching most everyone’s soft spot could be viewed as a psychological defense against psychic pain, a refusal to deal with a priori referents that come preloaded with excessive feelings we tend to keep bottled up. The loss of those inno-cent childhood states (for those who can remember them) is, after all, men-tally painful, given the distance there is between who we are now and what we were then. In fact, anyone who has children relives these experiences through their eyes, and though we know that mud and puddles means we’re going to be doing another load of wash, we also know that maybe the immediacy that a four-year-old child experiences in the mud is a connection with the things themselves that we’ll never experience again and that we’re all the worse for it. In fact, isn’t adult life an attempt often to recover these experiences? Isn’t that what Proust is all about, to some extent? To see Gilberte as a girl once more holding her trowel, the very same Gilberte that

4. Cummings, Complete Poems, 27.


Madame de Guermantes will one day bad-mouth for having driven Robert de Saint-Loup to distraction? I’m not sure that all the long sentences and incredible appositions, classically staid and wonderfully delicate as they are in Proust, could be considered in essence to be so far removed from Cum-mings’s day in the park, for what we’re dealing with here is nostalgia for the loss of something whose emotional attachments are not alien to us. I suppose the reason we hate “cheap sentimentality” is that we resent it that someone can push our buttons so easily and with such little justification. (I hate the musical oklahoma! ) Aristotle, recall, had a big prob-lem with works like oklahoma! because he wanted the emotional effects to be earned by way of some critical (or intellectual) development so that we wouldn’t just be thrown into a world of gush that leaves us feeling miserable and desperate, or manic and high, without any closure. To him that was like repeatedly hitting a beehive with a stick, us being the beehive and us being the ones who get stung by our own bees. The problem is that although we want poetry to push our buttons—at least sometimes—we don’t want poetry to do only that. Nor do we want poetry to do none of that. I take it that the latter idea would be controver-sial in the context of language writing, which strikes me in the main as rather unsympathetic to mudlusciousness. Obviously, all poets have to take a position on this issue (you can’t write a poem and not do this, de facto), and I suspect this is what has caused some acrimony in recent decades with respect to the so-called voice poetry/language poetry distinction, given that the voice poets can’t accept the sort of purism that would, in their view, entirely erase any shred of heartfelt sentiment on account of an ideology of language that would insist upon banishing subjectivity. Reductively speak-ing, we could say the language approach has been (rightly or wrongly) identified with a “foreclosure of the soft spot,” which is something Williams was already addressing in the prose of Spring and All when he spoke of the attacks on him for being an unfeeling poet. But, of course, Williams was just following in an avant-garde tradition that has been quite keen on foreclos-ing sentiment. Note, for example, the work of Alexander Rodchenko, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Nicolas de Stael, Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, and so on. Whereas T. S. Eliot allowed for sentiment in The Waste Land, the more avant-gardist Pound was on his guard about that sort of thing. His hard-nosed attitude with respect to the soft spot is what characterizes the objectivist tendency, though The Cantos is not without its own sentimental haunts. “Zagreus! Zagreus!” Williams’s


interest in young women, which turns up in several of his poems, is also not entirely unsentimental. And in Louis Zukofsky and Oppen, I would caution that the numinous often stands in for what in Cummings would have been rank sentiment. The numinous is the trait or trace of sentiment, one that like a cinder is purified of all that can be burned away. The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, was published in 1991 by University of Indiana Press and for me is a favorite poetry anthology insofar as it addresses something I care strongly about: the memory of John Coltrane. It makes a difference that I have a background in music performance—and jazz—and that for me Coltrane is as significant as Jackson Pollock or Mozart. Clearly, this is a subjective assessment that you might not share or even comprehend. How-ever, that’s not important, because my topic is reading poems about things that matter to us a priori, because this is the couch upon which sentiment lies down. These referents could be Greek myths, love, war, nature—what-ever. What matters is that a poem can push some buttons (elicit automatic responses) because the referent is already so emotionally charged. So that for me (though maybe not for you) when Michael S. Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” begins with

a love supreme, a love supremea love supreme, a love supreme �

I hear the music with much intensity because I’ve listened to that piece maybe hundreds of times (or played with it on my own tenor or alto or soprano saxophones) and now it’s a part of me. Ditto for “Naima.”

So sickyou couldn’t play Naima,so flat we achedfor song you’d concealedwith your own blood,your diseased liver gaveout its purity,the inflated heart

5. Michael S. Harper, “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, ed. Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Kommunyakaa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 77–78. The quote appears at the beginning of the poem and is an epigraph, really, as the words are John Coltrane’s.


pumps out, the tenor kiss,tenor love:a love supreme, a love supreme—a love supreme, a love supreme—�

“Tenor love” is a good phrase, by the way, because most listeners might not imagine that Coltrane’s “sheets of sound,” as they’ve been called, might have anything to do with love. However, in the live recordings at the Half Note we may come to the realization that Coltrane played for hours on end with an intensity and flow that could only be equated with an outpouring of love to be identified with agape—with some outpouring of love from the godhead. Because Harper feels this, too, this poem hits a soft spot with me, a point of emotional contact that works because of the fact that the poet and the reader share something in common that validates what otherwise could be taken as mere fantasy. On the basis of that commonality, I can cross the bridge to:

why you so black?cause I amwhy you so sweet?cause I amwhy you so black?cause I ama love supreme, a love supreme:

Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” is another poem that if you don’t love its referent, Billie Holiday—well, there’s something that won’t be communicated.

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking ofleaning on the john door in the 5 SPOTwhile she whispered a song along the keyboardto Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing�

En passant, let me say that I think Lady Day is more relevant to O’Hara than Paris Dada, but the experts can have it their way. In that poem, a lot of seemingly random and disconnected things happen as part of a day

6. Harper, “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” 77–78.7. Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” in The Selected Poems of Frank o’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Vintage, 1974), 146.


O’Hara is living in Manhattan, but remarkably everything seems wrapped up by Billie Holiday’s whisper, though leaning on the john door may be offering its own pleasure. To understand that bit about how everyone stops breathing depends upon us having a prior love for the woman who sang beneath the radar of female abjection, because long after she died she still rings in our ears. And O’Hara, unlike us, witnessed her live! So when he says that he stopped breathing, we not only believe it but also can imagine why. Again, there’s the importance of shared perception (call it “intersub-jectivity”), given that it confirms the sentiments we have by giving them both a credence and reality that they don’t quite have in the absence of another person countersigning them for us. In fact, it’s easy to forget that a poem grounds and valorizes sentiments in a verbal structure and thereby objectifies them, makes them more concrete and real than they otherwise might be. When Whitman wrote his elegy upon the death of Abraham Lin-coln, he was countersigning widely held sentiments by means of making a verbal construct that objectively expressed these feelings. Similarly, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Here’s Sonia Sanchez writing about Coltrane:

screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHSCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHHHHHHscreeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHSCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHHHHBRING IN THE WITE/LIBERALS ON THE SOLOSOUND OF YO/FIGHT IS MY FIGHT SAXOPHONE TORTURE.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .da-dum. da. da. da. this is a part of myfavorite things.�

If you don’t know the albums Coltrane recorded in the last few years of his life, you’ll not be able to hear what Sanchez is referring to, nor will you real-ize that what you’re reading is more of a musical score than it might at first

8. Sonia Sanchez, “a/coltrane/poem,” in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 183–86; see 185 for quotations.


appear. In other words, if you don’t know your Coltrane the way some critics know their Gertrude Stein, forget it. Oddly, most poetry criticism ignores the power of the referent to pre-interpret. Certainly, structuralist accounts of language insist that the refer-ent is an “effect of signification” when, in fact, the referent may well exist a priori not only as a stand-alone object but as a phenomenon in which the reader has a considerable emotional investment. O’Hara’s NYC works like this, and it’s what makes O’Hara’s poetry more accessible to sentimental elaboration than Williams’s Paterson. Zukofsky’s interest in G. F. Handel must have functioned this way for him, as well, and I can’t imagine anyone could get very far with “A” in the absence of a deep appreciation for baroque music. Of course, Zukofsky isn’t memorializing Handel in “A”-24 the way that some contemporary poets have memorialized John Coltrane, but my point about the referent still stands. It’s the interpretant without which the poem cannot succeed. Lastly, here’s Jack Spicer invoking Charlie Parker, the other most amazing jazz saxophonist that ever lived, in “Song for Bird and Myself.” Notable in this poem is that it’s not clear how the referent of Parker is to function as the interpretant, though I get the sense that the poem as a whole is an improvisation even if it doesn’t imitate anything Bird ever did. After all, no poetry can. Here’s a short excerpt:

Have you ever wrestled with a bird,You idiotic reader?Jacob wrestled with an angel.(I remind you of the image)Or a butterflyHave you ever wrestled with a single butterfly?Sex is no longer important.Colors take the form of wings. WordsHave got to be said,A butterfly,A birdPlanted at the heart of being afraid of dying.Blow,Bird,Blow,Be,Neo-classical.


Let the wings sayWhat the wings meanTerrible and pure.�

Of course, the notable quality in Spicer’s poem is its restraint on sentimen-tality, something he invokes in terms of a neoclassicism. What I suspect Spicer hears when he’s listening to jazz is an improvisatory structure that cuts loose from the emotionalism of its blue notes. And Spicer is right: there is that in Parker’s playing. In the cut of “Lover Man,” which Parker made something like an hour before trying to commit suicide, you hear only a very erratic and disturbing structural dislocation whose intensity is to be found in its compositional decompositions, not in rank sentimentality. But, again, we could never know this if we hadn’t listened to hours and hours of Parker, and hadn’t tried transcribing his solos on turntables you have to slow down in order to catch the nuance. You can’t know this without struggling to find just the right mouthpiece for the Selmer Alto Sax, Mark VI, the one I had to hunt down in Montreal on a cold winter’s day so that I could get precisely that sound and no other. “Be, / Neo-classical.” And then set the apartment on fire just the way Bird did.

Sweet Nothings

There are any number of anthologies and poetry magazines we could pick up that would be filled with what I call the sweet nothing: gratu-itous clever turns of phrase that sound good but are conceptually empty. They are verbal ornaments that often pose as if they are some form of condensation in the Freudian sense, in which elements of a dream are estranged and reassembled in all sorts of strange and miraculous ways. The nature of the sweet nothing is that it is by definition an attention grab-ber that always means less than what it says. But as objective correlative, the sweet nothing is but a sham, a gewgaw without any explanatory force, and is generally experienced as a cheat, a species of “gotcha” or “made ya look.” We may suspect upon coming across sweet nothings that they are symptomatic of poets taken in by their own verbal ingenuity, and, of course, this happens. When Anne Sexton writes in “Mother and Jack and the Rain”

9. Jack Spicer, “Song for Bird and Myself,” in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 203–6; see 205 for quotation.


that “Rain drops down like worms / from the trees,” the simile “like worms” is just thrown in for psychological effect: to give us the creeps.�0 Similarly, “Rain is a finger on my eyeball” has no function in the poem other than making us recoil at the idea of a finger in the eye. We know this because the poem is a string of mixed metaphors that don’t add up, each one of them intended merely to shock if not traumatize the reader by way of psycho-logical contamination. “Fish swim from the eyes of God. Let them pass” are lines that work less well, because they’re merely weird and lack suffi-cient traumatic affect. But what they reveal is the gratuitousness of throw-ing things at the reader to get him or her to pay attention to what is, after all, the poet’s psychic pain. For me what is most odd about “Mother and Jack and the Rain” is that for all the terrible things I could say about it, this poem is rather good, largely because it is so unpredictably disturbing and mixed up. In fact, the poem’s mess is motivated and reflects the dysfunction of the speaker’s situation, which seems to be a failed sexual relation at age sixteen that ends in humiliation. Hence rain like worms, et cetera. If not too much makes sense in this poem, it’s because the speaker is too psycho-logically distressed to make any sense. She can only throw bits and pieces of rage and regret at us, as if we’re the problem. This is akin to Antigone berating the Chorus and not Creon. Alternatively, Sexton’s persona with-draws into private language. “The fog horn flattened the sea into leather.” This is all sweet nothing: there’s no parsing it. And yet, doesn’t it have to be there in the poem? Isn’t it, in fact, a rather great line? A poet quite unlike Sexton who is also a practitioner of the sweet nothing is Laynie Browne. Notice these lines from “Roseate, Points of Gold”:

She turns, light reflecting her eyes constructed of light a liquid hand (of) blossomsThe scent red, bower of red—May��

The “liquid hand” is typical of the sweet nothing in that it is a pretty turn of phrase that doesn’t do anything other than sparkle. Why would blossoms be equated to a liquid hand? Is the liquid hand that of the woman known to us only as “she”? I also have practical problems with the synesthesia of the

10. Anne Sexton, “Mother and Jack and the Rain,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 109–11.11. Laynie Browne, “Roseate, Points of Gold,” Conjunctions 35 (2000): 151–55.


red scent which is so much about smell and not sight. After all, why make such a fuss over the light if it isn’t going to be carried over? Presumably the poet liked that “scent red, bower of red” phrase for its own sake and thought it could hold its own. Well, it can, sort of. Some other examples in Browne’s poem of sweet nothings include, “From fields of now”; “the surface ripple recants”; “a basket of light”; “a mirage lovingly drowns”; “counting the night in measures of water”; and, an archetypal example of this species of poetic discourse, “diagrams of crimson.” Evidently the sweet nothing here is a figure of speech that is sup-posed to have the function of metaphor in the absence of making any meta-phorical sense. There is no such thing as a “diagram of crimson,” though it’s a delicious phrase in and of itself. Lines like “from fields of now, which gathered gold” are similar in that they have a luster of false allegory. As does “basket of light.” Are these just counterfeit poetry? The handing out of fakes? Alle-gories that go nowhere? Broken pieces of myth that don’t coalesce? Is this post–Waste Land fallout? Western civilization in ruins? Or is this just someone thinking up pretty arabesques and let the reader beware. But if we’re willing to take poems like Ron Silliman’s Tjanting or Barrett Watten’s Progress seriously, why not this?

Diagrams of crimsonAn echoing glass shell,A glass dream with wooden breakersEmerald sight stutteredA child held in streamers wideBegins, skeleton repeated from previous bodies

I wonder if what’s so annoying about this poem is that it is made up of beautifully crafted elements that belong to a genre of poetry that ought to be interpretable when, in fact, this is some sort of Language poem that traffics in signifiers that purposely are meant to lead us astray and up blind alleys. The poem, as I’ve hinted, is a false allegory in which nothing really corresponds; the metaphors are sumptuous but are akin to dead links on an Internet Web page. When you click on them, nothing happens. The frustration, of course, is that Browne’s poem would be so wonderful if the elements did hook up and the beauty of the phrases actually served some purpose. But that’s the trap that I suspect Browne has carefully set up for readers like me: that what I want, at the end of the day, is a poem closer to Yeats’s “Byzantium” than to what Browne has written, which is a poem


that intentionally frustrates that desire. This is because in Browne surrealist abandon (gratuitousness) is the point. Yet, isn’t her economy of style and clarity of phrase not without some mystical intensity? Is “Roseate, Points of Gold” not closer to, say, a poem by Jorie Graham than I have been imag-ining? For in Browne a mystical revelation of sorts also occurs among the uninterpretable shards.

Blue of exceeding darknessreveals a person seen within sunwhose eyes, and lips goldgold of exceeding eye

Of course, a well-known variant of the sweet nothing is the use of recondite vocabulary for effect. When Ashbery speaks of “lucastrine cities,” he’s taking advantage of the vocabulary in order to throw in a jewel.�� But here are some words in Clark Coolidge’s The Maintains: arsenate, mump, fermendable, octa-hawser, scopey, brimmage, uraninite, cloots, indwell, tufa, vimmer, diatom, laves, pinnish.�� Clearly, an unabridged English dic-tionary would be required if someone wanted to seriously read this poem, if only to ascertain what words are, in fact, part of the English language. Con-sider lines like, “fermendable belong” (46) and “ore oboe pinnish” (59).�� It’s clear that Coolidge is after some sort of musical effect. Say pinnish out loud and the point becomes obvious. Fermendable belong has a softer word membrane, as I’d like to call it, given that it’s so labial. octa-hawser predi-cate (46) is back of the throat/front of the mouth. If Ring reed (47) reminds me of a ride cymbal, it’s because the mouth is being used as some sort of drum kit with the tongue as the mallet. I once suggested that Coolidge’s poem is akin to the prepared piano pieces composed by Cage in the 1940s, and I still hold to that, too, as a useful analogy. Essentially Coolidge is using the words as if they were things that had their own timbre. Not know-ing what the words mean helps quite a lot in distancing us from the usual model of communication, in which the message matters more than the sound of its transmission. Coolidge cares about the percussive possibility of words, what they sound like when you bang on them in the mouth the way

12. John Ashbery, “These Lucastrine Cities,” in Rivers and Mountains (New York: Ecco Press, 1977).13. Clark Coolidge, The Maintains (San Francisco: This Press, 1974), 1–98. Hereafter, page numbers for references to this work are cited parenthetically.14. The online oED and Webster’s don’t recognize femendable and pinnish as legitimate words in English and offer fermentable and punish as substitutes.


some people bang on a can in places like Trinidad. Notice, for example, how panicles (74) resonates, or try out brain pike (75). Whether this is poetry or sound art is probably up for grabs in many people’s minds, and I can imagine Mary Kinzie, the prosodist, telling us that in Coolidge there’s much sound but not very much sense and what’s the good of that? What Kinzie probably wouldn’t allow for is a poetry that would insist upon the divorce of sound and sense as an anti-Aristotelian assumption, if not the idea that perhaps what I’ve been calling the sweet nothing is itself the ground of poetry—“capping phlox as in alphabet pinks” (23). After all, the demand that I’ve been making on the poem to make sense in a functional, utilitarian manner is precisely what you could expect from a critic who is under the impression that poetry is supposed to be a form of philosophizing. Hence Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” could be taken as exem-plary for what poetry is supposed to be. But this would be wrong. In fact, it’s the writing down of sweet nothings that is the bedrock of poetry, which, if you don’t believe me, has been amply demonstrated by Shakespeare in his plays. Sweet nothings are all over Mother Goose, too, and in huge drifts of Finnegans Wake. Though also see Jackson Mac Low: “BABOONS VIOLATE BANANAS IN VIOLET / TREES” or “PEOPLE SCREAM WHILE GREEN TOADS VIOLATE / PARROTS.”�� Overtly playing with the sweet nothing (of poetry that sounds too much like poetry in the prettified sense) is Charles Bernstein, who over-does what people consider to be poetic language in order to call attention to how silly certain devices are. In “Besotted Desquamation,” we encounter more alliteration and assonance than we might ever want to hear. It’s as if the speaker gets stuck in a rut and can’t get out of a certain letter of the alphabet for quite some time before getting into another rut immediately.

tattered tarped torrid tumescenttangled, tongues trip tendentiouslyToggle torrents in twisted tides’tempestuous torment tagging tipsytouch, tucked tapes, tossedTips: tugging turning tiltingvaulting vexing vying vergingVenomous verdure visible vibration of

15. Jackson Mac Low, “Printout from ‘South,’” in Representative Works (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 212–13.


Voracious velocity, viscous valueVoiced in vane volumes . . .��

This reminds me of something that was repeated to us in the U.S. Army when we went on sick call and were deemed to be ill: “no creeping, crawling, standing, stooping, sitting, walking, etc.” Somehow these lists are presided over by some law of the alphabet that alphabetizes everything we say, which is what Bernstein is doing, of course, when he bins words in alphabetical sequences, never mind that he violates the strict order, much as the Army directive did. Bernstein’s talent in “Besotted Desquamation” is that he’s sensitive to a certain law of the alphabet that (1) organizes lan-guage in such a way that words roll off the tongue, hence making it easier to use language (to speak), and (2) in so doing disorients us by means of a linguistic vertigo, if not tongue twisting (speech impediment). “Named Nimble Nester Nascent,” if carried out far enough, has the effect of making us dizzy because it simulates spinning or turning, something that amuses little children no end and that preserves this sort of fun. Plus, such lists will eventually impede pronunciation. But how does the alphabet do that to language? Why is it that alliteration and assonance have such an effect on the mind—by what phenomenology does this happen? Of course, there is the matter of cognitive dissonance. The brain can’t quite keep up with the work of identifying the word vis-à-vis similar-sounding words next to it. In other words, this is much like Op Art, a problem having to do with pattern recognition. But isn’t it odd that we both need the pattern to speak more glibly but can’t keep up with it, either? Here is a bit of the logos/antilogos problem associated with Gilles Deleuze’s Proust et les signes—that there’s always something counterproductive at work in productivity. Is this because language is so good at what it does that we can’t cope? In the case of Bernstein’s poem, the sweet nothing has to do with too much of a good thing (poetry), with there being too much gratuitous alliteration and assonance, never mind that it is motivated by some law of language that says we can speak more fluently if we go with the flow of repeating initial letters. “Jellied joyance jams journey.” Obviously, Bernstein is bringing out a certain craziness in the law of the alphabet that is taken for granted in official verse culture, as he calls it. Notice, for example, the open-ing lines to Elizabeth Bishop’s “Exchanging Hats”: “Unfunny uncles who

16. Charles Bernstein, “Besotted Desquamation,” in With Strings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 87. Subsequent quotations come from this page.


insist / in trying on a lady’s hat.” This is almost immediately followed by: “we share your slight transvestite twist.”�� I suppose we might not notice how strange these lines are until we’ve been put through the paces of alpha-betization by Bernstein. First came the U ’s and then the T ’s, as if we were going in reverse order of the alphabet. All this playing with language is, of course, about sweet noth-ings, the sounds that gratuitously (arbitrarily) pattern language, so that it appears to us as if it were pretty, expressive, humorous, et cetera, all of this being “effect” and not motivation. No doubt, Bishop’s “unfunny uncles” was intended, but upon reading Bernstein, we might realize that “unfunny uncles” is also an accident of alphabetic farce that goes beyond authorial intention, too, by forcing its hand the way the alphabet forces our hand when we slip into a rut, that rut being the slippery path of less resistance, of the phrase that sounds so good that even though it means next to noth-ing, we keep it in the poem anyway. “The fog horn flattened the sea into leather.”

17. Elizabeth Bishop, “Exchanging Hats,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), 200–201.

In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry

Kenneth Goldsmith

The inevitability of Barry Bonds serves notice to all poets invested in the Humanist tradition: your tenure is doomed. Bonds is not only the future of athletics, but he’s also emblematic of the future of poetry. More machine than man, chemically enhanced, Bonds is our first mainstream posthuman public figure. Moving awkwardly, robotlike, festooned with machines—a barrage of cameras following his every move and enormous noise-canceling headphones to silence the jeers—he’s a media-made technologically supplemented Frankenstein. We dismiss him as a fraud, but we know in our hearts that his way is the way of the future; regardless, we cheer his accomplishment. We disdain his posthumanism, but we shall soon come to realize that we created the phenomenon of Barry Bonds. We demand our athletes to be superhuman, and superhuman they shall be. Bonds just points to the fact that being human has ceased to be enough: we demand the precision and complexity of machines, in athletes, in politi-cians, in business, and in the arts. And what we demand, we now have. Barry Bonds has become the embodiment of posthuman: “the hypo-thetical future present being whose basic capacities so radically exceed

boundary 2 36:3 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-024 © 2009 by Kenneth Goldsmith


those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards.” We react in kind: we deny Bonds his humanness (“He is either unfazed by negativity or internalizes every hostile remark,” one newsman recalls) and call him cold, unresponsive, selfish (“I take care of me,” Bonds tells reporters). Futurism made flesh, Bonds is a lovechild of William S. Burroughs (“We ourselves are machines”) and Andy Warhol (“I want to be a machine”). Bonds’s milestone signifies an end to the humanist discourse. In the classic sense of Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra,” the idea of Barry Bonds has long preceded the actual event, hence predetermining the outcome. And the outcome is obvious. Bonds is being crucified for the inevitable; he is a martyr for the future. And in the future, just as our chil-dren will reminisce about when human beings still played baseball, we shall reminisce about the time when human beings still wrote poetry for other humans.

Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner

Joyelle McSweeney

1. In our “Manifesto of the Disabled Text,” published in the Spring 2008 edition of Catherine Taylor’s Nor, Johannes Göransson and I argue in favor of disabled texts, texts which reject the “compulsory able-bodiedness”� of contemporary text culture. Our primary examples of disabled texts were translations:

Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from mono-lingual textual expectations, and are thus deviant. They threaten

1. The term compulsory able-bodiedness was coined by Robert McRuer in the article “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” published in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002). McRuer’s term is itself an adaptation of the queer studies notion of compulsory heterosexuality developed in the essay of that title by Adrienne Rich. McRuer’s use of this term signals not only an indebtedness to but also an alliance with the feminist and queer studies paradigms, and our adoption of his term to speak of translations and other disabled texts is also meant to suggest both a borrowing of his rubric and an alliance with his program.



to blur, and thus undermine, organizing binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gen-der/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). “Compulsory able-bodiedness” requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual function and appearance.�

We also argue in favor of publishing practices which promote the threat of disabled texts to work their dismantling energies on language, image, and text culture, and beyond.

2. Just as the disabled body disrupts societal norms and repressive sta-bilities, the disabled text has a disabling (disarming!) effect on hierarchies of reading and scholarship, inviting the reader, scholar, even the translator to move into a space where there may be no mastery, where fluency itself is a proximate and contingent affair. This effect is perfectly evident at liter-ary translation conferences, where one may hear translator after translator bemoaning the “untranslatability” of works to which he or she has dedi-cated a lifetime of creative engagement. Poets from Frost to Pound have made a fulcrum of such petulance, and yet in Pound’s case we can see how much textual effulgence was to be gained by making a practice of aberrant and errorful translation.

3. The profitably disabling practice of translation may even lead translators to doubt the prioritized fact of their own birth—if one does not have mastery over a language, may one be said to be a “native speaker”? And if one is not a native speaker of any language, what kind of speaker is one?

4. Perhaps a nonspeaker? A silent speaker? A clairvoyant?

5. The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA (Dada Excites Every-thing, 1921).�

6. Hannah Weiner presents us with a model of clairvoyance as bricolage. Clairvoyance brings to mind most readily the Surrealists, who brought clair-

2. See Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, “Manifesto of the Disabled Text,” Nor 3 (Spring 2008): 94–98. In this passage we are riffing on a quote from Kim Q. Hall’s “Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment,” NWSA Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 132.3. “Dada Excites Everything” (1921), trans. Lucy R. Lippard, reprinted in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 290.

McSweeney / Hannah Weiner 125

voyance to mind to bring things to mind (do you want to hear the great voice of the oracle?—Surrealist Game, 1942�), but I’m thinking more of the Dadaists (the poem will resemble you—“Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,” c. 1920�). In the case of Weiner’s clairvoyant writing, she collected language that was both to mind and to hand. After beginning to see real-time calligrammes appear on people’s foreheads, on her own body and clothing, on her walls and other surfaces of her living space (most calligrammatically, trailing the pull cord on a light), she manipulated the capacities of her new electronic typewriter to create the distinctive typogra-phy/tectonics of her clairvoyant journals and other texts, a visual technique for which she coined the term “clair style”:

I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words (I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals, or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored, or couldn’t cope with in the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, under-lined capitals) so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS the words that appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines (italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own words in regular upper and lower case.�

7. TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Take a newspaper.Take some scissors.Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make

your poem.Cut out the article.Next carefully cut out each of the words which make up this article

and put them all in a bag.

4. “Surrealist Game” (1942), trans. Mary Ann Caws, in Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 461.5. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” (1920), trans. Barbara Wright, reprinted in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Mod-ern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 1, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude, ed. Jerome Rothen-berg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 302.6. From “Mostly About the Sentence,” as reprinted in Hannah Weiner’s open House, ed. Patrick F. Durgin (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2007), 127.


Shake gently.Next take out each cutting one after the other.Copy conscientiously in the order they left the bag.The poem will resemble you.And there you are—an infinitely original poet of charming

sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.�

8. In her “conscientious” “copying” of the words that appeared around her, Weiner remakes mysticism as a species of Dadaist bricolage, a “clair style” deriving from a mostly exterior cache of possible words, rather than mimetic of an interior locus of experience. In an interview for Charles Bernstein’s LINEbreak in 1993, Weiner insists, “Charles, I bought a typewriter. And I looked at the words all over the place and said, you have three choices: caps, italics, and regular type. And that settled it. That’s all. The words settled down to three voices.”� In this account, the “regular type” asso-ciated with Weiner’s “own voice” is just one more set of words. This voice derives not from a privileged interior district, but may simply be found “all over the place,” akin to Tristan Tzara’s deliberately exteriorized sourcing of words.

9. In nearly all her published books from the inception of “clair style” on, Weiner included an opening note which insisted on her clairvoyance:

I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIRon other people on the typewriter on thepage These appear in the text in CAPITALSor italics �

BEST SEE WORS

I SEE

WORS

B E S T I S E E W O R D S�0

7. “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,” 302.8. Interview for Charles Bernstein’s LINEbreak radio show, available at PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/LINEbreak.html.9. Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journal (New York: Angel Hair Press, 1978).10. Hannah Weiner, Little Books/Indians (New York: Roof Books, 1980).


A S S E E N I W O R D S��

CLAIR STYLE ALL WORDS SEEN OR HEARDYER BETTER SAY YOU SEE ASTRAL��

In these cases, Weiner’s foreword becomes a kind of concrete glyph the reader must pass through as initiation into the “clair-style” works within. The reader learns to read this glyph first, and can thereafter perceive the spatial logic of what follows.

10. The Angel Hair edition of Clairvoyant Journals features as a cover image the photograph of a grinning Weiner with the phrase “I SEE WORDS” writ-ten across her forehead. In this photograph, Weiner herself is a concrete poem. The text that follows does not re-create, as some would have it, her experience of clairvoyance (that is, some arguable interiority reconstructed on the page) but resembles and is continuous with her exteriority, itself covered and in contact with language.��

11. The text resembles Weiner, but is not exclusive to her. Any three voices may voice it (and do, most extraordinarily, in three versions that may be listened to at PennSound��). The text recognizes no difference or priority between, say, appearing on Weiner’s forehead or being sited by her on a page, since the phrases “STOP TH SENTENC”�� or “I DONST FINISH THIS PAGE,”�� which appear to refer to the pages on which they are found in the Clairvoyant Journals, were first read by Weiner on her own head. This doubleness is inherent in a favorite trope of the clair-style writings, the apostrophe, which, yes, suggests the kind of acute high-flown vatic address typical of conventional mysticism, but is also textual and homely, suggesting the opening of a letter or the exterior of an envelope.

11. Hannah Weiner, Sixteen (Windsor, Vt.: Awede Press, 1983).12. Hannah Weiner, silent teachers remembered sequel (Providence, R.I.: Tender But-tons, 1993).13. For an interesting comparison, consider this image against the 1920 photo of a smirk-ing Francis Picabia with the words Viva Papa graffitied across his forehead and chin, reprinted in The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 338.14. See Weiner’s PennSound page, available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Weiner.html.15. April 17, p. 2, entry in the unpaginated Clairvoyant Journals.16. Monday, May 11, entry in Clairvoyant Journal.


12. By way of comparison: My schizophrenic painter uncle Timothy McSwee-ney wrote all over the outside of envelopes and mailed them to lots of folks selected to receive them by occult or at least arcane logic. One recipient was Dave Eggers’s mother. My uncle was forwarding addresses, or, rather, forwarding address itself. Oddly, the result of this graphomania was that his own written name detached from the site of his person and attached to Eggers’s obscure publishing venture, McSweeney’s Quarterly.

13. The poem didn’t just resemble Timothy McSweeney; it discarded him. It re-placed itself, and replaced him.

14. Even more pertinently, in the case of Weiner and her typewriter and the astral entities she referred to as “silent teachers,” the apostrophe suggests that high-off-the-line punctuation mark that truncates words, pulls them together, precisely annotates vernacular imprecision, and signals posses-sion. The apostrophe as a mark thus allegorizes “clair style” as a process, a signal, and a mark of (psychic) possession. It is in these typographical senses that apostrophizing could be another name for Weiner’s species of bricolage.

15. The critic A. S. Bessa has proposed the category of bricoleur as a possible critical location for the category-frustrating Öyvind Fahlström, a Scandinavian-Brazilian poet and fabricator who made art in a range of forms across his career, from concrete poems and manifestos to films, hap-penings, parades, room-sized game-environments. Bessa contextualizes Fahlström within a century of Brazilian art which swung between the two poles Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed in The Savage Mind: the engineer and the bricoleur.

16. The difference between the engineer and the bricoleur, as Lévi-Strauss proposes and as Bessa paraphrases, is that the engineer works “by means of concepts,” the bricoleur “by means of signs.”�� This already would seem to describe Weiner, whose “silent teaching,” as she eventually deemed her clairvoyance, took the form exclusively of “signs,” words themselves rather than some species of paraphrased or paraphrasable revelation.

17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 20. As quoted in Antonio Sergio Bessa’s Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008), xv.


17. Lévi-Strauss further declaims that the bricoleur makes his structures from whatever is to hand; material isn’t conceived of in regard to a certain project but “is a contingent result of all the occasions there have been to enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”�� This calls up Weiner, closed in her apartment, building her clair-style writings like a textual version of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau; the available material keeps denoting the type of project which may be undertaken.

18. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss seems to be writing (clairvoyantly?) of Weiner’s pre-clairvoyant Code Poems, based on the (nautical) International Code of Signals, performed with lights and flags in Central Park and published as a book in ’68, when he further holds, “Both the scientist and ‘brico-leur’ might therefore be said to be constantly on the lookout for messages. Those which the ‘bricoleur’ collects are, however, ones which have in some sense been transmitted in advance—like the commercial codes which are summaries of the past experience of the trade and so allow any new experi-ence to be met economically, provided that it belongs to the same class as an earlier one.”�� Working within a preestablished code of signals had appeal to Weiner even before the advent of “silent teaching,” and prefigures her departure from conventional models of mysticism—she prioritizes silent teaching (the code itself), rather than silent teachings. This tendency is evident in the pre-clairvoyant “Fashion Show Poetry Event Essay,” in which she presents “fashion language” as a kind of code and makes idiosyncratic use of the word style, which will later resurface in the neologistic appellation “clair style”: “We use the phrase ‘write the style’ rather than the more usual ‘write in the style’ because the latter indicates that one is using a style to serve a certain content, but here we are writing a certain style using a cer-tain content as a pretext to write this style.”�0 Writing is style—a system of signs, not of signifieds. This orientation further places Weiner in the cate-gory of bricoleur, who is distinguished in working “by means of signs.”

19. In The Fast and in other texts, Weiner makes remarkably acute tallies of the material things she buys, eats, and has to be rid of, an accruing list

18. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 17.19. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind (1973), 20.20. Hannah Weiner’s open House, 58.


which provides a physical allegory to her continual categorizing and log-ging of the language presented to her so materially and so imperatively. Weiner and her texts were both bound in their own discourse, unable (or declining) to bring in new variables or contexts. Jacques Derrida suggests when he writes of bricolage, “The only weakness of bricolage—but, seen as a weakness is it not irremediable?—is a total inability to justify itself in its own discourse. The already-there-ness of instruments and of concepts cannot be undone or reinvented. In that sense, the passage from desire to discourse always loses itself in bricolage, it builds its castles with debris.”�� This disparaging or deprivileging of bricolage is already present in Lévi-Strauss’s depiction: “in our own time the term ‘bricoleur’ is still used to refer to someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared with those of a craftsman.”�� The bricoleur is not a craftsman. Nor is she an artist, for an artist is supposed to be halfway between the bricoleur and the engineer; an artist who made all her art in the category of “bricolage” would, by definition, be making ill-made, unjustifiable, irremediably weak, non-able-bodied art.

20. Disabled art.

21. Of Fahlström-the-bricoleur Bessa writes: “Our main task then will consist of exploring how Fahlström’s bricolage ‘[justifies] itself in its own discourse.’ To be able to address this question, we must leave aside any expectation of closure and, as in ‘A Writing Lesson,’ simply follow his discourse and surrender to the disjointedness of his text.”�� Here Bessa describes the way in which a disabled and irremediably weak text in turn requires a disabled reading practice which jettisons expectation of a stable, closed textual form. This is the type of disabled practice required by Weiner’s text. Time and again Weiner deliberately resists attempts by well-meaning friends and critics to normalize her experience or separate her aesthetics from her clairvoyance (often in order to assign her political bona fides). When, in the LINEbreak program, Bernstein invites Weiner to identify her filiations with feminism, she answers with an exasperated non sequitur: the taglike description of her clair-style process quoted in section eight, above. When

21. Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139; Bessa, Öyvind Fahlström, xv–xvi.22. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind (1973), 16–17.23. Bessa, Öyvind Fahlström, xvii.


he asks her how she evaluates books by other authors, she answers that she judges books by their authors’ auras. Finally, when he suggests that all writers “see words,” she refuses to allow her clairvoyance to be normalized on a spectrum of conventional authorship.��

22. “Clair style” has no recourse, no inner resources, no justification except its own discourse, and yet this discourse is unjustifiable, not “convincing” even to Weiner’s compassionate, patient, and loyal friend Bernstein, who, in his eulogy for Weiner, both distances himself from “her more heterodox beliefs” and tries once again to recuperate her as a conventional author, even as he acknowledges the instrumental place of her clairvoyance in her life:

In any case, Hannah Weiner’s work is not a product of her illness but an heroic triumph in the face of it. Her personal courage in refusing to succumb to what often must have been unbearable fear induced by her illness, her persistence in writing in spite of her disabilities, is one of the legacies of her work. And if her schizophrenia gave her insight into language, into human consciousness, into the nature of how everyday life can be presented rather than represented in writ-ing—well, we all have to start from where we are. While Hannah’s last few years weren’t easy, she continued to pro-duce amazing writing, pushing her own poetry and the possibilities for poetry into new zones of perception. What else are poets for?��

Bernstein thus proposes a version of Weiner as part of “we poets,” as a craftswoman first, diligent “in the face of” mental illness. But it is pre-cisely some “what else,” something which cannot even be mentioned here except as part of an already-foreclosed rhetorical question, that Weiner’s work amounts to. We may fashion at least one hypothetical answer out of the debris of her own discourse: Q: What else are poets for? A: Silent teaching.

24. This last instance was pointed out in the “Beginning with the End” section of Maria Damon’s Hannah Weiner Beside Herself: Clairvoyance After Shock or the Nice Jewish Girl Who Knew Too Much, first published by Faux Press, vol. 9 (n.d.), available at http://www.fauxpress.com/t8/damon/a.htm.25. Charles Bernstein, “Hannah Weiner,” Jacket 12 (July 2000), available at http:// jacketmagazine.com/12/wein-bern.html. First published in the Poetry Project Newsletter in 1997.


23. Bernstein’s compassionate insistence that Weiner wrote “in spite of her disabilities,” that Weiner’s work is “not a product of her illness” but a “triumph in the face of it,” seems like special pleading. Weiner’s work is her clairvoyance. Her aesthetic process is indistinguishable from the fact that she “sees words,” a fact she insists on graphically both on the page and in the front matter of every published “clair-style” work. She is not a conventional artistic hero; she does not survive the crisis of her art or her life with her subjecthood intact but lives for twenty-five years after the inception of her clairvoyance without arriving at the closure we associate with epiphany.�� Her bricolage, to work with Derrida’s terms, bears an irre-medial weakness, as compared to conventional, closed, well-crafted, able-bodied texts. It is for just this reason that her texts disable conventional reading practices and categories, even extremely avant-garde categories and extremely radical political stances. When Bernstein asks the ques-tion “What else are poets for?” the fluent, able reader recognizes this as a rhetorical question which expects no answer; the implied answer is “noth-ing.” But if we can allow ourselves to be disarmed and disabled by Hannah Weiner and approach this open-ended body of work as a disabled text, we might just find the rhetoricalness of Bernstein’s query itself disabled—his remark “What else are poets for?” re-marked as an open question.

26. For the ableist heteronormativity of literary epiphany, see Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2003): 85–89.

Grammar Trouble

Brian Reed

In a May 2007 review of three volumes published by Atelos Press, Eric Keenaghan suggests that the U.S. poetic avant-garde is kaput. The issue is not quality. The books in question—Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta (2006), Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity (2006), and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation (2007)—are all well worth reading insofar as they “cri-tique the imperatives of identification and categorization constituting our social, cultural, and political lives.” The problem is their packaging. Despite being held up as the latest offerings from the avant-garde, they show no signs of allegiance to a “coherent political and intellectual program,” nor do they engage in “combative and territorial posturing.” Moreover, judged by the standards of an older generation, they backpedal. “Unlike their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forebears, Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr insist that language is referential, that the sentence be combined syllogistically into narrative units, and even that the poetic personhood be recuperated.” This retreat from the barricades, Keenaghan argues, is laudable. By for-going the “security” of an avant-garde “identity,” these poets avoid mis-taking “an oppositional identitarian attitude for a resistive politics.” They



rediscover, too, that “narrative” can serve “as a device for constructing . . . forms of commonality and for beginning the work of redefining personhood and humanity.”� Keenaghan’s review reflects what one might call an emergent critical consensus. Over the last decade, in the wake of such essays as Stephen Burt’s “The Elliptical Poets” (1999) and Susan Wheeler’s “What Outside?” (1998–1999), it has become increasingly common for professors and poets alike to declare obsolete the late twentieth-century fractious divide between “mainstream” and “oppositional” poetries.� Indeed, there will soon be a Norton anthology—American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John—awarding this thesis a pedagogical imprimatur. Accord-ing to Amazon.com, American Hybrid will demonstrate that “the long-acknowledged ‘fundamental division’ between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration.” The Hegelian logic here is seductive. Back in the 1950s, an ossified establishment spawned its antithesis, a spunky countercultural rival. A period of conflict ensued, but at last we have entered an era of synthesis that preserves and perfects the best aspects of the writing from both camps. Inessentials, too, have fallen away: passé are both the egocentric iconoclasm of the vanguardists and the narrowness and nostalgia of the traditionalists. Does this story line fit the facts? One can invoke it to make sense of a large swath of current U.S. poetry, ranging from high-profile works by established names—Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia (2001), Heather McHugh’s Eyeshot (2003), and John Yau’s Paradiso Diaspora (2006), for example—to impressive volumes by younger figures—among them Terrance Hayes’s

1. Eric Keenaghan, “Performance and Politics in Contemporary Poetics: Three Recent Titles from Atelos Press,” Postmodern Culture 17, no. 3 (May 2007): n.p.2. See Stephen Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters and Commentary 11 (1999): 45–55, and Susan Wheeler, “What Outside?” Talisman 19 (Winter 1998–1999): 192–95. For more recent examples, see, for example, Jennifer Ashton, “Our Bodies, Our Poems,” American Literary History 19, no. 1 (2007): 218–20; “Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond: An E-mail Assisted Discussion,” Boston Comment 2003, available at http://www .bostoncomment.com/debate.html, esp. the first contributions by Alan Golding and Kent Johnson; David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–8; and Reginald Shepherd, “Defining ‘Post-Avant-Garde’ Poetry,” Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, February 29, 2008, available at http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2008/02/defining-post-avant-garde-poetry.html. For an early critique of this tendency, see Steve Evans, “The Resistible Rise of Fence Enter-prises,” Third Factory, January 2001, available at http://www.thirdfactory.net/resistible .html.

Reed / Grammar Trouble 135

Wind in a Box (2006), D. A. Powell’s Cocktails (2004), and Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers (2006). In the case of Atelos, however, the idea of a grand synthesis is a harder sell. The press is coedited by Lyn Hejinian, a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area branch of Language Poetry. Two of her previous ventures, Tuumba Press and the Poetics Journal (coedited with Barrett Watten), were instrumental in shaping, defining, and publicizing that movement. Keenaghan’s review implies that Hejinian is presiding over the dissolution of the very cause that she did so much to advance in the past. But what if, under Hejinian’s experienced eye, Atelos truly is helping to usher in a new phase in the historical unfolding of the avant-garde? Admit-tedly, the contemporary poetic avant-garde might no longer much resemble the phenomenon analyzed last century by such influential thinkers as Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, and Fredric Jameson—and hence might not be recognizable qua vanguard by many of today’s academics—but why should today’s formally adventurous utopian poets write in the same way or toward the same ends as their counterparts in the 1910s, 1950s, or 1980s? To defend this thesis one could turn to any of the poets in Kee-naghan’s review. Robert Kaufman has elucidated Laura Moriarty’s innova-tive “Adornian poetics”; Saidenberg has strong ties to the queer-inflected New Narrative movement; and Spahr has advocated a feminist poetics inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramović, Shigeko Kubota, and Carolee Schneeman.� This article pursues a different but complementary approach. After exploring more in depth what today’s “hybrid” verse looks like, it discusses a newer Atelos publication, Craig Dworkin’s Parse (2008), because its principal concern—the relationship between grammar, poetics, and politics—enables an especially clear comparison between West Coast Language writing and certain present-day avant-garde compositional prac-tices. While, as Spahr observes in The Transformation, today’s vanguard-ists do not always employ the “fragmentation . . . disruption, disjunction, and agrammatical syntax” characteristic of 1970s and 1980s Language writing, Parse illustrates that changes in outward style cannot automatically be read as a repudiation of an earlier generation’s insights.� In an age when Language Poetry’s disjunctive devices have become so commonplace that

3. For Moriarty’s “Adornian poetics,” see Robert Kaufman, “Everybody Hates Kant: Blak-ean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 142–54. For New Narrative’s connections to queer activism, see Robert Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative,” Narrativity, no. 1 (n.d.): n.p., available at http://www .sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/. For Spahr on feminist performance art, see Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “Foulipo,” Drunken Boat, no. 8 (Fall 2006): n.p.4. Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 2007), 181.


they can “relax” listeners and induce “pleasant boredom,” which is the pre-ferred option: to celebrate the mainstreaming of formerly “radical” modes of writing, or to seek, like visionary poets from Dickinson to Hejinian, to Make It New?�

Set the Wayback Machine

One should not opt prematurely for either of these options. There is no guarantee that a given body of avant-garde verse will in the long run prove aesthetically superior, more instructive, or more politically efficacious than less brash alternatives dating from the same period. If one wishes to have a closer look at “new consensus” verse—the serious, ambitious variety of lyricism against which this decade’s avant-garde provocations are likely to be measured—Reginald Shepherd’s anthology Lyric Postmod-ernisms (2008) is a good place to begin. It features a diverse group of writers who smoothly integrate influences ranging from modernists such as H. D., Langston Hughes, and Wallace Stevens to late-century masters such as John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Susan Howe. A representative lyric from this collection, Martha Ronk’s “THE MOON OVER LA,” can con-cisely illustrate why Swensen and St. John might choose the label “hybrid” to describe this variety of writing. It borrows freely and unapologetically from both sides of the longstanding experimental/mainstream divide:

The moon moreover spills over ontothe paving stone once under foot.Plants it there one in front.She is no more than any other except her shoulders forever.Keep riding she says vacant as the face of.Pull over and give us a kiss.When it hangs over the interchangeshe and she and she. A monument to going nowhere,a piece of work unmade by man. O moon,rise up and give us ourselves awash and weary—we’ve seen it all and don’t mind.�

In certain respects, Ronk’s poem is quite traditional. She deploys ambi-guities, contrasts in tone, artful rhetorical gestures, and other predictable

5. Spahr, The Transformation, 188.6. See Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (Denver, Colo.: Counterpath Press, 2008), 187.


aspects of the well-made lyric. She apostrophizes the moon and beseeches it to transfigure a landscape with its eerie cool light and thereby elevate it (and those who populate it) out of the mundane into the magical. The obvious irony, however, is that this inflated rhetorical gesture occurs in the middle of Southern California, which appears here in its most stereotypi-cal guise, as a soulless wasteland. The underlying story line—echoing innumerable hard-boiled fictions and film noirs—involves a “vacant” but beautiful woman (what “shoulders”!), a seduction attempt (“give us a kiss”), and a ride in an automobile. How could anyone ever salvage such a cliché (“we’ve seen it all”)? Archaic literary devices, Ronk hints, are insufficient. The foreor-dained failure of the speaker’s apostrophe—in other words, the implied incapacity of the poetic imagination to redeem Los Angeles and los ange-lenos—is cinched via an allusion that, à la T. S. Eliot, highlights how far the world has fallen since the grand ole days. Ronk’s statement “A monument to going nowhere, / a piece of work unmade by man” revises the open-ing line of Aleksandr Pushkin’s poem “Monument” (1837), “ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi” (I have built myself a monument not made by human hands).� In that lyric, “monument” turns out to be a metaphor for Pushkin’s whole body of writing, which he claims will grant him perpetual fame. He labels this “monument” nerukotvornyi, “not-hand-made,” because he believes that his divinely inspired verse, as ineffable voice, escapes the mundane material world, whereas earthbound monuments such as the Alexander Column in Saint Petersburg are fated to remain mere mute prod-ucts of handicraft. In “THE MOON OVER LA,” while it might be unclear whether “monument” refers to the moon, the woman, the poem itself, or possibly even a traffic sign (“hangs over the interchange”), one can be cer-tain that the word is used sarcastically. In this landscape, monuments are not erected but “unmade by man,” that is, disassembled or deconstructed. “We,” the poem’s plural speaker, are left, at the last, without the possibility of transcendence, exhibiting a mix of stoic resignation and superficial cheer (we “don’t mind” that we are “going nowhere”). What makes Ronk’s lyric feel contemporary are a series of estrang-ing formal devices, most of them grammatical and/or rhetorical solecisms. For instance, the poem’s first line rather bizarrely contains the transition “moreover.” Has something prior been omitted? Are we joining a story already in progress? There are also sentence fragments, pronouns with undefined antecedents, and intrusive repetition (“she and she and she”).

7. Aleksandr Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1962), 340.


These oddities serve the purpose of what the Russian Formalists called zatrudnenie, a “making-difficult” that enlivens a text by throwing readers off-kilter and encouraging them to puzzle over its mysteries. Ideally, the result is a prolonged encounter with a lyric that leaves a deeper impression than customary. Zatrudnenie is not always effective. People have varying thresholds for it, and what one poetry lover might consider an attractive roughening of a poem’s surface another reader, equally educated and equally committed to the art form, might conclude to be unforgivable violations of the Queen’s English. Anyone, however, who has read widely in post–World War II poetry, especially in the poetries of the last decade, is likely to find Ronk’s syntactical and logical aberrations, if not a positive feature of the poem, then certainly an explicable component of it. There are precedents galore. Ashbery, for one, habitually begins poems in medias res. Also Ashberian is Ronk’s oscillation in diction between high romantic (“O moon”) and low demotic (“we don’t mind”). A phrase such as “she and she and she” recalls Gertrude Stein in her G.M.P. phase (1909–1912), and the incomplete simile “vacant as the face of” could have been lifted from any of the interruption-rife prose sections of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923). The thudding monosyllabic line “Plants it there one in front” sounds uncan-nily like a quotation from Robert Creeley’s Words (1967) or Pieces (1968). Like Creeley, Ronk prods readers to think about a series of slippery words whose precise meaning is elusive. What “it”? Where is “there”? “[I]n front” of what? Who “[p]lants” what, the moonlight? Finally, the recurrent jolts as one moves from statement to skewed statement in “THE MOON OVER LA” are a toned-down but recognizable variant on the disjunctions between sentences that were a distinctive feature of much San Francisco Bay Area Language writing in the 1970s and 1980s. Classic works from that milieu such as Bob Perelman’s a.k.a. (1979) likewise jump between viewpoints, abandon trains of thought midsentence, and repeatedly commit grammati-cal errors:

Studiously ignoring the dust in his dreams, he wondered at the tracts of houses. He grew a tail, but repented. I turned off the radio, turned the light on, and assumed my proper size as the sights bounced back. Stones and ice circle Saturn. The mind can be healed by me. Alive, and thus it can die. The hard part fought to a standstill. A chance to say exactly what I. Convinced along the entire length, which has two ends. The dog could be any-where, within reason.


The weather continues fair, the car corners easily. He reflected the preceding centuries. The future will not remember itself.�

In short, “THE MOON OVER LA” might use defamiliarizing language, but it does so in a very familiar fashion. Such writing signals its participation in what one might call an achieved tradition. It borrows from, and works within the parameters set by, accomplished precursors. And just as Elizabethan poets such as Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare perfected a form—the sonnet—originally pioneered by Henrician antecedents such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, so too today’s writers, as they look back on the whole of the twentieth century, have an opportunity not only to imitate but to surpass their formal models. This process of polishing does have a downside. The thrill of the original innovations wears off. Readers of Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), the first print-based anthology in English, would have encountered Surrey’s and Wyatt’s sonnets freshly, as representatives of a strange new verse form, via an equally unprecedented means of publication. Richard Tottel, the collection’s eponymous printer, justifiably feared that people would react poorly to such a sharp break with business as usual.� A generation later, by the time of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), audiences had learned what to expect. They were prepared to evaluate a given sonnet against the backdrop of numerous comparable texts. Accordingly, in his preface to Astrophel, Thomas Nashe spends most of his time ground-clearing by bad-mouthing Sidney’s rivals.�0 Why linger over these sixteenth-century literary developments in an essay about contemporary verse? The San Francisco Bay Area Lan-guage poet Ron Silliman edited a little magazine named Tottel’s Magazine from 1970 to 1981. By connecting his publication to the Tudor past, Silliman drew a parallel between the 1970s and a historical moment when the print-ing press was spurring rapid changes in interpersonal communication (as well as playing a major role in the Reformation). He also indicated that he wanted to unsettle his readers and to transform the literary landscape by introducing drastically new formal possibilities. In place of sonnets, in his version of Tottel’s one will find (among much else) prose poems employing

8. Bob Perelman, a.k.a. (Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba, 1979), n.p.9. See Richard Tottel, “The Printer to the Reader,” in Tottel’s Miscellany: Songes and Sonnettes, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster, UK: Constable, 1903), 2.10. See Thomas Nashe, “Somewhat to reade for them that list,” preface to Sidney’s Astro-phel and Stella, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, vol. 3 (London: Bullen, 1905), 327–33.


throughout non sequitur sentences in the manner of a.k.a—a compositional mode that he famously christened “the New Sentence” in a 1980 essay.�� There are also works such as Hejinian’s “Chronic Texts” (1978) that make occasional use of the New Sentence but feel no obligation to stick with it:

A prilling infant drawn from a human distance madefierced. My say her face. I took it without. I am hung from it. The habit is here. Warm are the walls and doganimal hug and lunch. The plate on the cheek remember The kitchen in the old house subject to The warm and cold breeze The laundry line squeak all at The same time The ink on my pleasure is close. We execute theturn and come closer with each idea. I wanted to weighthe ideas rather than pronounce on them.��

This passage might begin and end with disjunctive prose sentences that recall Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), but in the middle Hejinian experiments with lineation and orthography in an idiosyncratic manner. The repeated capitalization of “The” either as the first or second word is disorienting, especially in the absence of punctuation marks such as a period. A mar-ginal annotation labels this section of “Chronic Texts” “the article”; perhaps she intends to draw attention to the word The, which a grammarian, after all, would categorize as an “article.”�� But why do so? Because the rudi-ments of writing and print, even “ink,” yield “pleasure”? As with many little magazines, there might have been something of a shared program, but consistency and clarity were secondary to the chief goal: épatez-vous la bourgeoisie! Printed in Tottel’s alongside “Chronic Texts,” a poem such as “THE MOON OVER LA” would have looked too controlled, too legible, in short, insufficiently committed to rattling cages. Ronk has other goals. In her essay “Poetics of Failure,” she explains that she is “constantly drawn to the fra-gility of all things in the face of time,” and she accounts for her departures

11. See Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” Hills, nos. 6–7 (1980): 190–217.12. Lyn Hejinian, “Chronic Texts,” Tottel’s Magazine, no. 17 (1978): 17.13. Hejinian, “Chronic Texts,” 17.


from normative English syntax as “joinery” that “allows items to glance by one another, to relate by tangential or even detached images.” The lan-guage, she hopes, is “operating even as memory operates, catching hold” of traces, images, and possibilities, yet ultimately “failing.”�� The subtleties of interior life did not much concern Silliman back when he was publishing Tottel’s. He saw himself as participating in events of world-historical significance. His essay “The Disappearance of the Word, the Appearance of the World” (1977) purports to explain the entirety of lit-erary history from the medieval period to present.�� To summarize: At the beginning of the modern era, poets such as John Skelton (c. 1460–1529) still permitted “physical characteristics” to predominate in and provide order for their verse. Words had yet to be wholly rationalized, that is, made sub-servient to the inexorable logic of commodification. But then, as “language move[d] toward and passe[d] into a capitalist stage of development,” the consequence was “an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangi-bility of the word, with corresponding increases in its descriptive and narra-tive capacities.” Words “disappeared” as sensuous playthings and became no more than tools to be employed instrumentally. Once that happened, the stage was set for “the invention of ‘realism,’” that is, “the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought.” And realism, as represented by the English-language novelistic and cinematic traditions, only rarely acknowledges alternatives to wage labor and the capitalist marketplace. Seduced into believing that these “realistic” representations of the world are objectively true, people lose access to a deeper, more meaningful reality, namely, the “world of natural and self-created objects.” If, however, “in the context of class struggle,” people manage to learn “the historic nature and structure of referentiality” by placing “language” at the “center” of their attention, they can overcome reification’s baleful effects on their consciousness. They acquire the cognitive tools required to appreciate the real economic basis of society.��

14. Martha Ronk, “Poetics of Failure,” in Lyric Postmodernisms, 182.15. Silliman’s essay, “The Disappearance of the Word, the Appearance of the World,” has a complex publication history. It first appeared in 1977 as the fourteenth issue of a project titled A Hundred Posters in Boston, Massachusetts. It was quickly reprinted in two California-based journals. See Art Contemporary 2, nos. 2–3 (1977): 10–11 and 50–53, and The Dumb ox, no. 5 (1977): 27–30. Four years later, it appeared in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, suppl. no. 3 (Oct. 1981): n.p. Subsequently, it was collected in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-sity Press, 1984): 121–32.16. Silliman, “The Disappearance of the Word” (1981), n.p.


Although Silliman’s argument is well known (and oft critiqued), it is worth reprising for several reasons. First, one should remember his insis-tence that “class struggle” must constitute the horizon within which one reexamines language. Removed from this context, he argues, such inquiry cannot achieve socially transformative ends. Second, he does not enjoin a generalized use of “fragmentation . . . disruption, disjunction, and agram-matical syntax.” He prescribes an overall plan of action but leaves open the specific means of implementing it. Finally, he does not claim that scrutiniz-ing the “historic nature and structure of referentiality” will trigger a revolu-tion, armed or otherwise. He more modestly argues that attention to the relationship between capital and language will enable people to compre-hend the economic rules that govern their lives. He leaves undefined how such an awakening might translate into an applied politics. These aspects of his essay are important to recall because the strate-gies and mannerisms associated with Language Poetry quickly became reified. Already in 1985 one finds Marjorie Perloff, in her book The Dance of the Intellect, questioning whether the assorted shock tactics associated with Language writing were successfully serving any ends other than aes-thetic.�� Once Language Poetry was thinkable as a style instead of a uto-pian insurgency, it became possible for both ensconced and novice writers to borrow selectively from its formal arsenal without committing themselves to a sociopolitical agenda. Ronk’s “Poetics of Failure,” for example, illus-trates how easily “fragmentation . . . disruption, disjunction, and agramma-tical syntax” can be incorporated into an old-school lyricism that laments sic transit mundi, plumbs psychological depths, and mulls the insuperable gap between signifier and signified. It is a truism that one generation’s defiant innovations often end up as default devices in the next generation’s repertoire. As Jameson observes, however, such popularization mutes or conceals—not invalidates—the potent creative energies associated with the original moment of inven-tion, the “libidinal charge” and “intellectual excitement” that accompany an author’s or artist’s sense of having made a sharp break with the past.�� Hejinian’s recent book-length poem The Fatalist (2003) reminisces about the 1981 appearance of Silliman’s “The Disappearance of the Word, the Appearance of the World” in the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and makes astute comments along precisely these lines:

17. Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradi-tion (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 233–34.18. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 34.


It was the “word” or the “world” in 1981when we undertook to talk about the phrase“once in a while” once in a whilenoting the vagueness then named “a while” and how “once” the

phraserecurs and therefore means more than oncethe “while” is defined. We too are in “a while”and when “once” next occurs, if the basic design suitsyou, we will need a bit of modestly biographical contextualizationfor November.��

At first, Hejinian engages in the subtle wordplay that is one of her hall-marks. She recalls discussions about the odd phrase once in a while, which would seem to suggest a unique event—something that only hap-pens “once”—but which idiomatically refers to a repeated event, one that recurs every time another “while” comes around. She also slyly enacts verbally what she describes, having the phrase once in a while appear twice in a single line—first within quotation marks, which indicate that the phrase should be construed as a noun, and second as an adver-bial phrase modifying the verb undertook. As often happens in Hejinian’s writing, this grammar-gaming grounds a complex argument, in this case concerning repetition and rupture. An event can appear so special that it can occur only “once.” But specialness—that is, a perceiver’s sense that a given event is unique—is repeatable. Every interval of time (every “while”) can possess unrepeatability in the guise of its own “once,” its own differently unique event. More than two decades ago, when the Language Poets were placing both word and world in scare quotes—back, that is, when they were calling into question the meaning, interrelation, and value of these terms—they were caught up in an irrecoverable “once,” a moment that was also a movement, a suspension in the ordinary course of the “while” in which they lived. But, Hejinian counters, now, too, the year 2002, is a “while,” and she will welcome another “once” whenever it arrives. Consistent with her publications, from the second edition of My Life (1987) to The Beginner (2002), in making this prediction she refrains from adopting an apocalyptic tone or resorting to self-aggrandizement. She engages in gentle self-parody, informing the reader that if “you” like the “basic design” of the impending breakthrough, “you” are free to join the new movement, provided “you” send a short author’s bio, “a bit

19. Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2003), 43.


of modestly biographical contextualization,” before the next publication deadline (“November”). These deflationary gestures do not vitiate her overall argument. She concedes that the last marquee literary avant-garde in the United States, Language writing, might now be a thing of the past, that is, a “once” that belongs to a previous “while.” That fact, though, hardly prevents the erup-tion of a vibrant new avant-garde in the twenty-first century. Moreover—and this is the clincher—she claims that back in 1981 they already knew that literary history works in this manner. Minute attention to the specifics of vernacular language taught them to understand that the inédit inevitably eventually punctuates everydayness, albeit at unpredictable intervals. The Fatalist is an example of what one might call “mature Hejinian.” It is deft, witty, and wise. In comparison, “Chronic Texts” is “early Hejinian,” an exploratory fecund mishmash.�0 In the quarter century between, she, like the movement in which she participated, regularized and reified cer-tain verbal strategies that gelled into a signature style. Nevertheless, she remains acutely aware that language is a chronic problem. The necessary response is still the same, too. A turn of phrase can lead one via the word back to the world.

Back to the Future II

In 2008, Dworkin published Parse in Hejinian’s (and Travis Ortiz’s) Atelos series. It is twenty-eighth out of a projected fifty volumes, and it begins with two quotations that seem calculated to place Parse in dialogue with San Francisco Bay Area Language writing. The first is from Stend-hal’s The Red and the Black and the second from Michel de Montaigne’s Essays:

Le comte Altamira me racontait que, la veille de sa mort, Danton disait avec sa grosse voix: “C’est singulier, le verbe guillotiner ne peut pas se conjuguer dans tous ses temps, on peut bien dire: ‘Je serai guillotiné, tu seras guillotiné, mais on ne dit pas: J’ai été guillotiné’.”

La plupart des occasions des troubles du monde sont grammairiennes.

20. For an overview of “Chronic Texts” that emphasizes its status as a “transitional” work, see Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 242–45.


Just as Hejinian looks to Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (1796) to provide a model for her Fatalist, so too Dworkin finds precedents in French belles lettres, first the arch-revolutionary Danton and, second, a sixteenth-century skeptical philosopher. Their sound-byte teachings? Danton: Power deforms and dictates grammar (for instance, which tenses can be used with a given verb). Montaigne: By being good grammarians, one can strike back, resolving confusions and averting the spats (“occasions des troubles”) into which people otherwise unavoidably fall. So far so good. Primed for the nonlinear verse of a Hejinian manqué, a reader turns the page and encounters, center-justified and in all caps, a strange set of grammatical terms:

ADVERB PREPOSITION OF THEINFINITIVE ACTIVE INDEFINITE PRESENT

TENSE TRANSITIVE VERB INFINITIVEMOOD OBJECT AND SUBJECT IMPLIED

USED AS A NOUN PERIOD��

No persona is present, however shifty or misleading. There is no imagery, no setting, and no plot. The word PERIoD signals closure, but otherwise there is no way of knowing why this string of gabble starts or tails off. The next few pages continue to offer similar short spews of grammar-speak variously sculpted by indentation, font size, and capitalization. Eventually, one realizes that Dworkin seems to be imitating the layout of the front mat-ter of a typical book:

PROPER PLACE NAME COLON

PROPER NAME USED AS AN ADJECTIVE PLURALNOUN PERIOD

ARABIC NUMERAL ARABIC NUMERAL ARABICNUMERAL ARABIC NUMERAL AS PART OF A NOUN

PERIOD (P, 15)

One could fill in the gaps here to create a typical bibliographic formula such as “NEW YORK: WASHINGTON BROTHERS. 1978.” Finally, on page 17, the “book” proper appears to begin, after a series of what appears to be three titles of descending importance. Reaching the main text, though, offers no new purchase on Dworkin’s intentions. Indeed, the word-sculpting

21. Craig Dworkin, Parse (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 2008), 11. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as P.


that simulates titles, headings, footnotes, and so forth, becomes far rarer, and one endures long stretches of what appear to be minutely parsed gram-matical descriptions of an unnamed text: “Adjective of Number Plural Noun relative pronoun active present tense verb indefinite article object modal auxiliary appositional verb participle used subjectively as an appositional adjective preposition adjective prepositional object comma alternative dis-junctive coordinate conjunction implied definite article preposition indefinite article prepositional object” (P, 17). What is the point to such a deluge of abstraction? Works such as Perelman’s a.k.a. might resist integration into a consistent narrative, but in compensation they offer an array of possible story lines to contemplate. A reader will find herself asking question after question: Is this sentence returning to an earlier topic? In what way? How might this new iteration complicate or displace what was said earlier? In passages such as the above, Dworkin makes a comparably pleasurable close textual engagement nearly impossible. There are simply too many unknowns. When bored by a book, what does one do? Flip through the remain-der and go directly to the end. After all, that is where crises are usually resolved and arguments concluded. Sure enough, after rapidly skimming more than two hundred fifty pages of syntax description, one will discover a concluding “Note” that appears to explain the method behind Parse’s madness:

Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. First published in 1874, the book played a leading role in the pedagogic debates about whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin, and thousands of copies were printed as textbooks. . . . When I first came across the book I was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.” And so, of course, I parsed Abbott’s book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis. (P, 289)

This note is superficially satisfying. Dworkin explains how he generated Parse—by exhaustively parsing an old textbook—and he cites a canonical writer, Gertrude Stein, to lend his project weight. But the logic here is curi-ous. Because he was “reminded” of Stein, he “of course” had to subject Abbott’s text to its own system? What about Stein renders such an activity a necessity? The fact that she considers “diagramming sentences” to be


terribly “exciting”? Why would anyone seeking excitement commit to such a lengthy repetitive task? Examining the original context for the Stein quotation can provide some bearings. Stein brings up sentence diagramming during her 1935 lecture “Poetry and Grammar.” She says,

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming [sic ] sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming [sic ] sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing something and inciden-tally one’s self.��

Based on the sentence that Dworkin quotes, one might think that Stein likes diagramming sentences because she enjoys solving complex word puzzles. Now one can see that she has something grander in mind, a dra-matic reconfiguration of the relation between agency, identity, and dis-course. She draws on the rhetoric of the romantic sublime (“completely completing,” “completely possessing”), and she portrays herself phoenixlike metamorphosing into an impersonal transcendental “one” who witnesses language pursuing its own ends (“sentences diagramming themselves”) in a temporality other than human (“everlasting”). She comes to possess—and is possessed by—the total system that is language in general, that is, what Ferdinand de Saussure calls la langue. While she does not entirely lose herself and become one with this totality, her personal identity (“one’s self”) does receive demotion to an “incidental,” that is, an afterthought or aftereffect, in short, not something to worry much over. To put it differently, diagramming sentences gives Stein a seri-ous power trip. She feels like she has direct access to forces that pre-cede and exceed human mastery, and she leaves behind the particulars (female, bourgeois, Jewish, lesbian, et cetera) that otherwise delimit her ability to take action. Crucially, this ecstasy occurs within a particular frame,

22. See Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1909–1945 (London: Penguin, 1967), 126.


the classroom. The U.S. educational system promotes a dizzying affec-tive experience of release into universality and eternity. This “completely exciting” high is the reward for having become so proficient in a canon of rules that she applies them almost automatically. One could call this dynamic the bureaucratic sublime, a feeling of omnipotence brought on by avid identification with an institution imagined to exist outside the messy contingencies of human history.�� Phrased in this manner, Stein’s love of diagramming sentences can sound vaguely authoritarian. Soon after she declares her infatuation in “Poetry and Grammar,” however, she makes a statement that puts a crucially different spin on her relationship to schooling: “it is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make.”�� She has in view the myriad ways in which other parts of speech can relate to verbs, that is, as subjects, objects, adverbs, and so forth. Verbs, too, can be passive or active, simple or compound, and singular or plural. Finally, there are tricky rules govern-ing tense and mood. While writing, these syntactical intricacies grant Stein innumerable opportunities to commit “errors” that catch people up short and encourage them to think carefully about the course and character of the sentences that they are reading. One of the poems that she quotes in her lecture can demonstrate this dynamic. In part 12 of Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friend-ship Faded (1931), a sentence begins with an old-fashioned but conven-tional construction, an exclamatory infinitive—“Oh no not to be thirsty with the thirst of hunger”—but then the syntax goes awry—“not alone to know that they plainly and ate or wishes.”�� The conjunctions and and or are con-fusing here. Has Stein omitted verbs? Or is she somehow treating plainly and wishes as verbs? Wishes could be a verb, true, but it disagrees in number with they. . . . It is as if, having partly diagrammed Stein’s sentence, one has to scrap the sketch and try out a series of disquieting alternatives. Learning to diagram sentences might have been “exciting” when Stein was a young girl, but as an adult she employs her knowledge of norma-tive grammar disruptively, so as to block movement toward a transcenden-tal remove. She saw through the devil’s bargain that the U.S. educational system offered—whoever you are, you can master the skills that the state

23. For the term bureaucratic sublime, see Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 11–13.24. Stein, Writings and Lectures, 126.25. Quoted in Stein, Writings and Lectures, 146.


and the economy require, and you can then blissfully join in furthering their aims—and she created an antipedagogy. It should now be clearer why discovering a copy of Abbott’s How to Parse might have inspired Dworkin to subject the textbook to its own meth-ods of analysis. A central doctrine of 1970s and 1980s Language Poetry—one shared by poststructuralist philosophy—was a rejection of the pre-sumed naturalness of the act of writing. Pace Sidney’s Muse, “Looke in thy heart, and write” is good advice if and only if thou hast already spent many hours studying how to put words together in more and less successful com-binations.�� And even if a portion of such learning is self-directed, a hefty percentage, especially early on, occurs under the watchful eye of the state or state-accredited surrogates. After all, U.S. citizens must by law attend school (or be homeschooled) until at least the age of sixteen. It is hard to imagine a contemporary autochthonous poet popping up who has never wrestled with spelling tests, vocabulary lists, or reading-comprehension exercises. Stein provided Dworkin with a model for contesting the nation-state’s ubiquitous official means for transforming children into a labor pool with the literacy skills required for entry-level positions in a capitalist economy. That model had to be updated, naturally. The service-oriented U.S. economy of 2008 is not the same as its heavy industry-dominated 1930s antecedent. Dworkin does not present himself, as Stein did, as a genius, that is, as an exceptional outlier who proves that the arts cannot be ade-quately described using the rhetoric of aggregates and statistical norms. Such an outsider position is no longer tenable, given the ever more thorough colonization of all spheres of human endeavor by the logic of the market in the post–World War II period.�� Dworkin styles himself as just another content provider. A few keystrokes on the Google Books Web site will call up a 1902 edition of Abbott’s How to Parse, and one quickly discovers that the task Dworkin set for himself is as dreary as data entry. He begins with lifeless schematic prose: “In each of the three examples above, if you ask the question ‘Who or what failed?’ the answer, being the subject of our statement, is called the Subject of the Verb.”�� He then replaces each word

26. Sir Philip Sidney, The Complete Poems, vol. 1 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1877), 6.27. See Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 14–25; and Branden W. Joseph, Random order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), esp. 18–23.28. Edwin A. Abbott, How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to


with a description of its syntactical function, preserving the capitalization and emphasis of that word. In is replaced by Locative Preposition, each by adjective of number, subject by appositional noun used objectively, and so forth. Punctuation marks are spelled out. The end result is a passage of the kind we have seen before: “Locative Preposition adjective of number genitive preposition definite article adjective plural noun locative preposi-tion comma conditional conjunction second person singular pronoun active present tense active verb . . .” (P, 18). Although poets nowadays are desig-nated “creative writers”—presumably to differentiate their labor from “tech-nical,” “commercial,” and “critical” writing—Dworkin presents his work as manifestly uncreative, that is, generated in a rote manner.�� He hints that poetry is at base just another commodity mechanically produced by the infotainment industry to satisfy a niche market. Parse would be a depressing work if one had to end analysis here. Despite his best efforts, however, Dworkin proves unable to word process mindlessly endlessly. After fifty pages or so of unvarying grammar-babble, errors begin to creep in, and if readers strenuously resist urges to skim and skip, Parse turns out to be intermittently fascinating, even at times laugh-out-loud funny. Short passages find their way into Parse unaltered: “For example, you cannot ask ‘Who or what killing?’ but you can ask ‘killing whom or what?’” (HTP, 13; P, 54). Some of these snippets are wink-wink nudge-nudge self-reflexive: “‘Lo what shall a man in these days now write’ adds the puzzled printer” (HTP, 64; P, 170). Occasionally there are glim-mers of poetries past: “A gipsy was wandering across the heath” (HTP, 48; P, 140). Most often these slipups concern acts of violence:

When you hear a person say “I struck—,” you are led to ask “struck whom?” (HTP, 45; P, 126)

the person or thing represented by the Noun suffers the action denoted by the Verb; e.g. in “a wounded man” (HTP, 49; P, 142)

in “I say his body, thrown on one side and frightfully mangled,” the meaning might be, either “when it was being thrown” or “after it had been thrown,” and you cannot tell which is meant without carefully looking at the whole of the passage (HTP, 53; P, 149)

English Grammar (London: Seeley and Co., Ltd., 1902), 1. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as HTP.29. For a defense of “uncreative writing,” see Kenneth Goldsmith, “Paragraphs on Con-ceptual Writing,” open Letter, no. 7 (Fall 2005): 98–101.


In the same way, when stating the Object of “didst thou leave,” you need not write down “thy cruel master,” but only the Noun part, “master” (HTP, 64; P, 168)

Like a disgruntled cubicle drone selectively “forgetting” to shred incriminat-ing documents, Dworkin reprocesses his source materials incompletely and unevenly. He thereby enables readers to encounter—straight, no chaser—the sadism informing the original enterprise. Parse features a second kind of breakdown, lapses in faithful objec-tive parsing. Sometimes Dworkin seems to tire of the required rigor, and we get half-hearted substitutes: “subject predicate predicate subject predi-cate subject predicate,” for instance, or “Word word word word word word word hyphen word Word word word Word word” (P, 125, 168). Other times Dworkin pokes fun at Abbott. He proves unable to keep using his source’s arcane lingo—“Adverb of Logical Future Exfoliation,” “adverb of suspension and counterintuitive consequence,” “Condensed Parenthetical Infinitive with Adverbial Emphatic”—and maintain a straight face (P, 120, 137, 178). He begins using his own baroque locutions to comment on the bad writing and bad thinking in a book that dares present itself as a dispassionate work of scholarship. Choice examples include: “plural present tense third person verb in a puckered british spelling,” “Rhetorically Frumpy Conjunction,” and “adverb betraying a theological position that can only imagine its deity as an anthropomorphized patriarch” (P, 201, 205, 208). Near the end of Parse, this boredom-motivated play intensifies. High jinks give way to character assassination: “Conjunction of Corrective Disagreement singular deictic promoted to noun third person singular transitive present tense indicative verb adverb of delicate squeamishness period Plural First Person Subjec-tive Case Pronoun In The Sweep Of Royal Demesne transitive first per-son plural indicative mood present tense verb meant to mask brute power behind decorous sentiment” (P, 213). At such moments, Dworkin’s fervent desire that the “Exhausted Author Be Exempted From The Task Of Further Arduous Labor” becomes palpable (P, 215). Parse is not a showcase for virtuosity. It emphasizes incapacity. Its generative constraint—to transcribe a textbook’s syntax—proves impos-sible for a fallible human to carry out punctiliously. Dworkin shows that the information age has not somehow magically dispelled alienation’s negative effects. Content providers, “creative” or not, must try to fulfill the excruciat-ing demand that they become teratological organisms, that is, monstrously overdeveloped in certain respects and impoverished in others. Worse, they


discover that honestly tenaciously pursuing their occupation actually lowers their chances of creating worthwhile art. Purposeless play—the Ursprung of all aesthetic expression, as Friedrich Schiller long ago taught—is by defi-nition inefficient. Dworkin suggests that nowadays authentic artistry can only occur when a worker is distracted from or fails at an assigned task. Is Parse poetry? It might distantly echo a long poem such as A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)—which also explores the relationship between tedium, intellectual labor, and the scene of writing—but Parse lacks lineation. Its grammar-slurry does not much resemble prose poetry either, even such extreme examples as Steve McCaffery’s The Black Debt (1989) or Caroline Bergvall’s “In Situ” (1996). Its effects are dependent on creating long expanses of monotony only seldom interrupted by missteps, doodles, libels, and jokes. Altogether missing is the sustained emphasis on the sensuous aspects of language—its look and its sound—that characterizes most canonical twentieth-century poetry. Late in Parse, Dworkin tips his hand and informs readers where he stands on the “is it poetry” question. He is in the midst of blasting Abbott for his patriarchal assumptions when he makes an odd word choice: “defi-nite article totalitarian adjective totalitarian adjective noun verb ordinal of unminced complaint.” Unminced? He could mean something like “undi-vided” or “unadulterated,” or perhaps “not delivered in a mincing manner,” that is, “spoken like a butch hetero male.” A little further along, this curi-ous “unminced” has an echo: “relative pronoun marks of quotation noun marks of quotation verb comma adverb and noun taken as an adverbial phrase passive participle split from its verb by inframince qualification” (P, 214). Huh? Inframince is a word coined by the visual artist Marcel Duchamp that is usually translated into English as “infrathin.” In 21st-century Mod-ernism (2002), Perloff discusses the significance of this neologism. “The infrathin,” she explains, “is the most minute of intervals or the slightest of differences.” Why notice such distinctions? Global corporations typically seek to level cultural and regional differences in order to promote a wider, smoother distribution of goods and services. And when every town has a McDonalds and a Wal-Mart, “[i]t is the role of the artist” to remind folk that perfect “sameness” is in fact an impossibility. Even two casts from the same mold will fail to be 100 percent identical. “In aesthetic terms . . . the infrathin spells the refusal of metaphor—the figure of similarity, of analogy, of likeness—in favor of . . . the radical difference at the core of the most


interesting art works and poetries since the 1960s.”�0 Good art of this kind restores the world to us in its particularity and multiplicity; it thus resists or delays the reduction of things, images, and ideas to readily tradable commodities. Dworkin’s invocation of inframince in Parse serves two ends. On one level, he takes a stand that is both aesthetic and political. Abbott’s peda-gogy is “unminced,” that is, dependent on exact replication. Students must learn to do precisely what he shows them how to do. Dworkin endorses the opposite, namely, the thesis that true value resides in accidental swerves away from perfect imitation. He celebrates the “inframince” variations from a template that are the fortuitous consequence of a limited attention span and other human weaknesses. On another level, by alluding to Duchamp, Dworkin invites readers to stop asking “is it poetry?” As Thierry de Duve has argued, in the wake of the initial art world reception of such Duchamp readymades as Bottle Rack (1914) and Fountain (1917), the question “is it art?” ceased to be useful. The definitional issue was forever settled. Anything labeled “art” is art. When-ever an artist affixes the label “art” to things, events, texts, or concepts never before singled out for such attention, people should ask themselves: now that this, too, has become art, how does it fit within—or cause me to rearrange or rethink—my preexisting list of “what counts as art”?�� The back matter of Parse states that, like all Atelos publications, the book appears “under the sign of poetry” yet also “challenges the conven-tional definitions of poetry” (P, 292). This is not empty rhetoric. Instead of producing anything remotely like today’s hybrid verse, Dworkin delivers a lesson about incompetence as a tactical response to the institutions that dictate how, when, and why people write. He preempts the complaint “this isn’t poetry” by asking whether people in fact truly understand the nature and function of the art form at the present time. Is it—can it be—more than a respectable pastime for a subset of the technical-managerial class? What would poetry look like that puts at its center the vexed relationship between alienation and authorial labor? Would it talk over the issue? Or would it enact what it preaches, a challenge to the commercial and pedagogical institutions on which the poetry world depends? Once Parse is poetry, a lot of contemporary writing touted as innovative or edgy begins to look main-

30. Marjorie Perloff, 21st-century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 115–17.31. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 3–86.


line traditional, that is, like well-wrought verse destined to delight connois-seurs. Critics must learn to argue for the significance of such work based on more than echoes of subversions past.

The Q Continuum

Parse is not sui generis. Dworkin belongs to a small international circle of poets that includes Christian Bök, Rob Fitterman, Kenny Gold-smith, and Darren Wershler-Henry. The phrase conceptual poetics has been used to designate their collective program, which involves repeti-tive labor, the manipulation of large text and data sets, and a shift from localized attention to sound and wordplay toward experimentation with language at higher orders of organization.�� Representative works include Goldsmith’s The Weather (2005), which records verbatim a year’s worth of radio weather reports, and Bök’s The Xenotext Experiment (ongoing), which involves the translation of a poetic text into a sequence of proteins within a bacterium’s DNA. Conceptual poetics is not, of course, the only possible paradigm for a twenty-first century avant-garde. Flarf, a movement associated both with New York City and the imaginative use of Internet search engines, is fre-quently cited as a parallel or competitor.�� Atelos Press, though, concen-trates primarily on West Coast writers, and it has not yet included Flarfists in its planned series of fifty volumes. In keeping with this article’s focus, then, it is appropriate to wrap things up by briefly spotlighting another alter-native. Saidenberg’s Negativity (2006), as mentioned in this essay’s open-ing pages, is indebted less to Language writing than to a rival San Fran-cisco Bay Area aesthetic, New Narrative, that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, and is associated with figures such as Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, and Camille Roy. Saidenberg, like Dworkin, finds inspiration in Stein. She delights in late works such as Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1948), Ida (1941), and Wars I Have Seen (1945), which anarchically decon-struct paraliterary genres such as the thriller, romance, and memoir:

32. See Goldsmith, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing,” 98–101, for a concise account of “conceptual poetics.” See also The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. Craig Dworkin, available at http://www.ubu.com/concept/.33. For introductions to Flarf, see Gary Sullivan, “My Problem with Flarf,” in The Conse-quence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008), 193–97; and Michael Gottlieb, “Googling Flarf,” in The Consequence of Innovation, 199–203.


Dora Doll loves Max, but Max only thinks of retirement. . . . Dora Doll has other plans. She’s not interested in an aging hitman, the hitman’s bags under his eyes or double chin. Dora wants the thick-ness of reality, for she has understood the wars she has seen; she knows their hunger. Max loves his friend Porcupine with the painted mustache. Max will do anything for him. Really anything. Even give up his nest egg for retirement. Even kill. Max loves Porcupine, Por-cupine loves Dora, and Dora has other plans, loving the mermaid and Max and even Porcupine.��

Saidenberg is also an attentive reader of Samuel Beckett. Pieces such as “The Residue” have a choppy, self-interrupting delivery reminiscent of Cascando (1963): “Figures approach or are they standing—no—still—no—I am sure they are walking toward me—the figures and being unified—it is of this place and of this time—the figures—group—one falls—is held—fall-ing the figures turn their back on falling—falling is held and shapes falling” (N, 73). Of course, these days Stein and Beckett are as untroubled in their canonicity as George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. What distinguishes Saiden-berg’s writing from today’s “new consensus” verse? At her best, as in “In This Country,” a collaboration with Glück, Saidenberg engages in rhetorical moves comparable to—yet intriguingly divergent from—Dworkin’s. “In This Country,” like Parse, presents readers with a definitional puzzle. It consists of five pages of prose that lacks the heightened linguistic self-awareness, the productively wayward syntax, and the subtle sound play that distinguish much U.S. prose poetry, from Ash-bery’s Three Poems (1972) to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple (2006). Instead, one encounters the back-and-forth inanities and clumsy locutions of the undergraduate compare-and-contrast essay:

In this country, we take our identity from how it feels when we come. When we come we are only that. In that country they take their identity from what they need to do to get sex—that is, to sur-vive. They have to be a certain way to be recognized, and there is disgust and fear. In this country we recognize fullness. In that country they despise the body because it gets you sex but more often it doesn’t, it just controls you sends you to words. (N, 49)

34. Jocelyn Saidenberg, Negativity (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 2006), 78. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as N.


The grammatical errors here, such as the run-on sentences, do not result in rich indeterminacy. They mimic the tendency of beginning writers to stick as closely as possible to the rhythms and sense-units of everyday speech. If Dworkin critiques the disciplinary mechanisms that produce literate sub-jects, Saidenberg and Glück explore a different tack on the same issue by suggesting a writer who is actively grappling with institutional demands to produce an expository essay. What makes this poetry? As with Parse, the question is better asked in a post-Duchampian manner: assuming this is poetry, what does it tell us? It reveals, for instance, an uncomfortable proximity between anaphora, a device beloved of vatic poets from William Blake to Anne Waldman, and the structural devices that one masters en route to basic literacy (“In this country . . . In that country . . . In that country . . . In this country”). It more broadly suggests that (in the United States at least) learning a set of formal strategies is frequently bound up with the dissemination of national-ist discourses as well as attendant assumptions about sex and gender (for example, “compare/contrast women’s lives in the USA and Saudi Arabia”). If so, what kinds of unexamined suppositions might accompany the teach-ing of abecedaries, ghazals, villanelles, and pantoums—forms positively plaguelike in their popularity since 9/11? Similarly, what do aspirant experi-mentalists adopt along with “fragmentation . . . disruption, disjunction, and agrammatical syntax”? “In This Country” ponders intimate ties between language as a set of competencies and language as a tool for ordering and maintaining social hierarchy. Saidenberg and Glück also demonstrate the ability of the writing to intervene in disciplinary processes through strategic incompetence. At one point, for example, their faux-essay attempts to summarize the Islamic doc-trine of the unrepresentable transcendence of God: “In that country god is beyond nature, won’t have colleagues or rivals, doesn’t shit eat fuck, and there’s no story about him” (N, 50). While technically true, these statements reveal only a partial grasp of the orthodox Christianity that implicitly moti-vates the comparison in the first place. What theologically minded instruc-tor wants the Incarnation to be reduced to the ability to “shit eat fuck,” or to have the Gospels referred to as a “story,” or to have the Trinity conceived as “colleagues or rivals”? The occasion of writing an expository essay unin-tentionally permits the implied author to put blasphemous thoughts into words. And once written down, don’t they partake of the authority of author-ship? Why not repeat them elsewhere with greater force? Finally, “In This Country,” while not exactly endorsing Duchamp’s


idea of the inframince, does demonstrate the power of the poet to seize hold of a distinction and strike out into new terrain. As the poem progresses, the “this” versus “that” distinction breaks down, becoming a framework for improvisation. Savviest is the moment when the essay engages in a tactic beloved of writing instructors, an elegant literary allusion: “In that country a beautiful race of humans write topic sentences in a green para-dise, and a stunted race trapped below the ground writes the development and occasionally eats a few of the godly humans” (N, 52). The intertext is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), more specifically, the Traveler’s trip to A.D. 802,701, where he discovers the peaceful gorgeous Eloi living on earth’s surface and the hideous Morlocks living below it. The joke, of course, is that the Eloi—the descendants of the Victorian upper class—are herbivorous idiots with no role in life except to be eaten by the rapacious heirs of their one-time subordinates. In their rewrite of Wells, Saidenberg and Glück compare universities to a “green paradise” where contempo-rary Eloi, good students and professors, dupe themselves into thinking that penning “topic sentences” is meaningful labor. Meanwhile, the “stunted race” exiled from “green paradise” remains illiterate, prone to grammatical errors such as “writes the development.” Is this a sad fate? The Philistines are top dog: they have the power to eat the “beautiful race.” Under such circumstances, bad grammar could in fact be deemed a marker of privi-lege. In contrast, mastery of proper syntax would brand a person as vulner-able prey. The implied author of “In This Country” has done the assigned reading for ENGL 101, but she has drawn her own eccentric oppositional conclusions. What constitutes the twenty-first century avant-garde? This essay has proposed one possible constellation of traits. A poet attacks the tools of the grammar-police because they are responsible for producing the citizen-subjects on which the contemporary knowledge economy depends. She does so partly by challenging how categorization operates. Readers are invited to suspend their internalized definitions of “poetry” and contem-plate the interpretive consequences of provisionally accepting this or that peculiar text under the heading. Genres cease to be defined by disciplinary rules of inclusion or exclusion; they become jumbled archives of examples and habits of reading that are much more labile than most survey classes allow. By promoting lapses and breakdowns in conventional writing instruc-tion, such an avant-gardist implicitly defines her work against today’s hybrid poetries. Hybrid verse tends to be so skillful, so erudite, that it reads like


the prized outcome of the very educational system whose disciplinary logic she seeks to undermine. In distancing herself from such formally accom-plished poetry, however, her goal is not to reject contemporary society tout ensemble. From her standpoint, the outsider-idolatry common among Beats, spoken word artists, and other cold war–era bohemian poetry circles was a wrong turn that deprived them of valuable critical tools. One must be able to burrow into existing institutions and expose the aporias and oppor-tunities already present within them yet concealed from ordinary view. What does all this amount to? A critique of language and literary form in the context of class struggle that aspires to bring readers to con-sciousness of their place in that conflict. The poetic avant-garde, as Silli-man defined it in 1977, is alive and well. Will it succeed? There are few signs that it advocates a violent revolution à la 1917, 1949, or 1959. Instead, it enjoins perpetual vigilance concerning the relationship between power, knowledge, and language. It does not hold out promise of once-and-for-all success, just success once in a while. Will it produce art for the ages? Tune in tomorrow. But “tomorrow” could prove to be a different “while,” in thrall to another “once,” and yet another avant-garde, vibrating once more with the energy of a perceived rupture, could preempt the show.

The ’90s

Juliana Spahr

At a certain moment, a moment that extends from the late ’80s to the turn of the twenty-first century (a moment I am going to shorthand as “the ’90s”), something interesting happens within literature in English: some of the more provocative literatures in English from various literary schools and various national traditions blatantly turn away from standard English in order to say something about English, often something about its expansionist tendencies, something about what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the unequal distribution of language capital.”� Much of this literature investi-gates what it means to be writing in standard English. Much, although not all, of this literature claims to be anti-imperial. And almost all of it takes seriously the aesthetic possibilities of works composed of altered and dis-rupted Englishes. My assertions in this article are in part empirical. I argue that litera-

Thank you to David Buuck, Bill Luoma, Charles Weigl, Rob Wilson, Stephanie Young, and the audience at the Center for Cultural Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz.1. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 57.

boundary 2 36:3 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-027 © 2009 by Juliana Spahr


ture in English in the ’90s is distinctive for the number of works that turn away from standard English by including other languages, or are written mainly in the pidgins or creoles that resulted from English-language colo-nialism, or both. In this respect, the ’90s is unique for how writers of dispa-rate aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns, writers from disparate ethnic and national backgrounds, writers with disparate relationships to imperialism and to the English language turn away from standard English.� However, I am not just talking about mere numbers; I also think that these are the more aesthetically interesting, and I might even say defining, works of the ’90s.�

2. I am not making an argument about the “new” or about “innovation.” And none of the gestures or forms these writers of the ’90s use are “new” to the ’90s. The first literary book in Pidgin might be 1972’s Chalookyu Eensai: Three Poems in Pidgin English (Hono-lulu: Sandwich Islands Publishing, Inc., 1972), by “Bradajo” (Jozuf Hadley). The first liter-ary book in the Caribbean Creole might be Claude McKay’s two 1912 collections, Songs of Jamaica (London: Jamaica Agency, 1912) and Constab Ballads (London: Watts, 1912). Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first collection of poems in dialect, oak and Ivy (Dayton, Ohio: Press of United Brethren Publishing House, 1893), was published in 1893. James Whit-comb Riley began publishing his poems in what some call “Indiana dialect” in the 1870s. The turn to multilingualism in times of linguistic or cultural change is an old story with many different intents and alliances. Dante is one obvious possible beginning in the West. Yet as Michael Lee Warner notes in “One-Man Minorities: Multilingual Dante, the Mod-ernists, and a Mookse,” “Dante had precedents. The Romans invented multilingualism as a Western literary tradition for two reasons: literary homage and political expedience” (Lectura Dantis 12 [Spring 1993]: 102).3. My use of the phrase literature in English is intentionally unwieldy. My range of reference is to the literatures of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. I do not talk much about African and Indian literatures in English. It is impossible to say anything about contemporary U.S. literature and only reference literature written by U.S. citizens or residents. This is something that is true of most art forms in most periods, as artistic influ-ence rarely maintains national boundaries. But this moment in which the United States plays a dominant role in economic globalization has meant that it is both culturally expan-sionist and unusually under the influence of other cultures. Many of the writers I discuss cannot be located as part of any one national tradition. Rosmarie Waldrop moved to the United States from Germany as an adult and writes mainly, but not exclusively, in English, and publishes mainly, but not exclusively, in the United States. Kamau Brathwaite, who was born in Barbados (and much of his writing is about the Caribbean and written in what he calls “Nation Language”), has worked in the United States for many years and regu-larly publishes with U.S. presses and in U.S. journals. Anne Tardos grew up in Paris and moved twice in her youth, once to Budapest, where she learned Hungarian, and then to Vienna, where she learned German but attended a French high school; in 1966, she moved to the United States, where most of her work has been published. M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and has resided in Canada since the late 1960s; she publishes

Spahr / The ’90s 161

I want to begin this story of the literature of the ’90s by telling it in several different ways. In the Pacific, Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s 1993 Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre—a book that is often seen as the first book in Pidgin to receive national attention�—is written in a Pidgin that at moments mimics and mocks standard English. One poem has a Pidgin-speaking female teenage narrator who talks about how she exaggerates her stan-dard English when wanting to seduce a boy:

Richard wen’ call me around 9:05 last nightNah, I talk real nice to him.Tink I talk to him the way I talk to you?You cannot let boys know your true self.Here, this how I talk.Hello, Richard. How are you? �

Haunani-Kay Trask, in 1994’s Light in the Crevice Never Seen—a book that claims to be “the first book by an indigenous Hawaiian to be published in North America”—and in 2002’s Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, writes a dis-tinctly anticolonial poetry in an English that liberally mixes with Hawaiian. Each book ends with a five-page glossary that, as Benedict Anderson notes about early indigenous language dictionaries, functions as a sort of “how-to” of political resistance.� The glossary at the back of Night Is a Sharkskin Drum goes like this:

‘āina Land, earth‘āina aloha Beloved land‘āina hānau The land of one’s birth�

frequently in both the United States and in Canada. Teresia Teiwa is a writer of African American and Kirabati descent, with multiple Pacific affiliations, who is currently writing in Aotearoa/New Zealand; her first book was published in Fiji.4. For those not familiar with Hawai‘i’s complicated language politics, Pidgin is the word commonly used for what linguists call Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE), a language that was created by linguistically separated plantation workers in Hawai‘i so they could communi-cate with each other. It includes languages and syntaxes from English, Korean, Hawaiian, Chinese, and other languages.5. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993), 41.6. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso Books, 1998), 32. Many works of the ’90s, especially in the Pacific, end with a glossary.7. Haunani-Kay Trask, Night Is a Sharkskin Drum (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 63.


On the North American continent in 1991, Charles Bernstein writes “A Defence of Poetry,” a poem about the impossibility of there being “non-sense” that is written in a sort of error-ridden approximation of English. The poem begins,

My problem with deploying a term lieknonelenin these cases is actually similar toyourcritique of the term ideopigical�

Also on the continent, Rosmarie Waldrop and James Thomas Stevens both write lyric poems in English in the last half of the ’90s that incorporate Narragansett by using Roger Williams’s 1643 A Key into the Language of America as a source.� Waldrop gives her book the same title as Williams’s and writes of how she is “a parallel to the European settlers/colonists of Roger Williams’s time.”�0 In Tokinish, Stevens, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, puts Williams’s Narragansett dictionary next to Donne’s poetics of conquest, refusing in his poem to make one frame—English or Narragansett, love or culture, European or indigenous American—primary.�� What interests me most about their work is that while neither Stevens nor Waldrop is fluent in Narragansett, both include it in their work. In 1988, M. NourbeSe Philip, a poet who lives in Canada but was born and grew up in Tobago, publishes the poem “Universal Grammar” in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. In this poem, she takes a single clichéd sentence about a tall, blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned man and presents it in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, and English, the languages of nineteenth-century European colonialism:

O homem alto, louro de olhos azuis esta a dispararEl blanco, rubio, alto de ojos azules está disparandoDe lange, blanke, blonde man, met der blauw ogen, is aan het

schieten

8. Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1.9. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1936).10. Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America (New York: New Directions, 1997), xix.11. James Thomas Stevens, Tokinish (Staten Island, N.Y.: First Intensity/Shuffaloff, 1994).


Le grand home blanc et blond aux yeux bleus tire surDer grosser weisse mann, blonde mit bleuen augen hat

geschossenThe tall blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned man is shooting��

By grouping Yamanaka, Trask, Bernstein, Waldrop, Stevens, and Philip together, I am attempting to demonstrate by provocative example a wide range of poetry’s uses, or misuses, of English in the ’90s. These works, like much of the more interesting literature of the last half of the twentieth century, are written under the influence of, or about, those vari-ous remnants of imperialism that continue to define contemporary thinking: identity politics, decolonization movements (including the anti–Vietnam War movement), and the increase in mobility and immigration that accompanies globalization. This writing also addresses the very prominent debates from the 1960s about what it means to write in English in decolonizing nations.�� But, most obviously and most directly, much of this work is a continuation of the concerns with heritage languages and/or with more recent languages such as pidgins and creoles that so define and distinguish the literatures of identity that develop out of the ’70s and that remain one of today’s sev-eral dominant U.S. literary traditions. A lot of these literatures of identity move between English and the languages associated with the author’s identity. Gloria Anzaldúa sums up this position in 1987 in Borderlands with her rallying cry that “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.”�� Hawai‘i’s Pidgin writer Darrell H. Y. Lum notes similarly: “The persistence of Pidgin in the islands despite widespread assimilation

12. M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (London: Women’s Press, 1993), 67. This book has a complicated publishing history. It was origi-nally published in 1988 in Cuba by Casa de las Americas, then was republished in 1993 in North America by Ragweed Press (now Stoddart Press) and in the UK by the Women’s Press. It is currently published by Philip’s own publishing house, Poui Publications.13. The politics of literary languages is a big subject of the debate in Nigerian literature from the 1960s onward. See Obiajunwa Wali’s “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (September 1963): 14; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986); and Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992). See also Salman Rushdie’s “‘Com-monwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 61–70; and Chinua Achebe’s “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), 55–62.14. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera = The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 81.


of American culture and the concerted efforts of educators to stamp it out, suggests that it is less a matter of Pidgin speakers being unable to speak standard English but their choosing it as a symbol of local identity.”�� Even Bernstein, despite the rumor that language writing is “against” identity or poetic voice, acknowledges “as long as social relations are skewed, who speaks in poetry will never be a neutral matter.”�� My original assumption going into this project was that there is a sort of contemporary writing that is mainly about the representation and preservation of cultural identity in which the author writes a bi- or multilin-gual work in an English mixed with a language they associate with their identity.�� Or in the case of what often gets called “experimental,” the author tears into English-language conventions and writes in an altered English. But what I have come to see is that, by the end of the century, while many writers continue to bring other languages into their English, they do this less to talk about their personal identity and more to talk about English and its histories. So, while many of these writers could easily be included under the category of “multicultural literature,” what happens in these distinctive works of the ’90s is quite different than “I am my language.” While some of these ’90s writers do write in their heritage languages, many pointedly do not. And while some of these writers might be fluent in the other languages they include, many are not. Instead of saying “I am my language,” these writers are saying something about language itself, often something about the ties between language and imperialism. Myung Mi Kim, for example, begins publishing in the ’90s a series of works that explore the disquieting linguistic disorientation of immigration.

15. Darrell H. Y. Lum, “Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” in Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawai‘i, ed. Eric Chock et al. (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1998), 13; emphasis in original.16. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5.17. I use baroque circumlocutions such as “literature in English that includes languages other than English” so as to avoid the terms multilingual and bilingual literature. This is not out of a lack of interest in the critical work being done on bilingual literatures. I have been very much influenced by, for instance, Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of Felipe Gua-man Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno as a contact zone in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). And by Doris Sommer’s suggestion that readers should Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), as she argues that multilingualism is one among several “tropes of particularism” that are “invitations to engage, to delay and possibly redirect our hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and fuse horizons” (xv).


But rather than suggest that Korean (Kim was born in Seoul and came to the United States when she was nine) or English is constitutive of any sort of identity, her work returns again and again to the unnaturalness of lan-guages, to how all languages are learned, not innate or natural. Language lessons show up in several different books. Under Flag (1991) asks, “Can you read and write English? Yes _____. No _____.”�� In Dura (1998), “Cos-mography” includes a section that looks like the short-answer part of a language quiz, where the definitions are in English and the answers that fill in the blank are in Hangul. “Hummingbird,” also in Dura, begins with what looks like a quiz, a somewhat difficult and impossible-to-imagine quiz but still one that begins with the request for a name.�� In a passage from “Pollen Fossil Record” in Commons (2002), Kim sums up the concerns of much of her and others’ work of the ’90s:

These rehearsals, not as description, but as activation—actively investigating how legibility is constructed and maintained, how “English” is made and disseminated.

What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecologi-cal degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? How can the diction(s), register(s), inflection(s) as well as varying affective stances that have and will continue to filter into “English” be taken into account? What are the implications of writ-ing at this moment, in precisely this “America”? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken—grammars, syntaxes, textures, intonations . . .�0

Anne Tardos is another poet who begins publishing in the ’90s and, like Kim, explores the linguistic pyrotechnics induced by migrations. Few poets have so directly taken up the linguistic multiplicity that comes out of personal migration histories than Tardos. Uxudo (1999) moves relentlessly between Hungarian, German, French, and English, the languages that Tar-dos learned in a childhood spent with French Resistance parents who were constantly moving to avoid anti-Semitism. Uxudo is organized in a series of two-page spreads. On the right side of the book are words and images (the images are of Tardos’s family and friends); on the left side is something that resembles translation (here it seems assumed that the reader knows

18. Myung Mi Kim, Under Flag (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey Street Press, 1991), 29.19. Myung Mi Kim, Dura (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998).20. Myung Mi Kim, Commons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 110.


English). So from the spread of pages that begins the book, on the right side is this:

Panic in theStrassen keinviszivilág.Watery armoryhip-hop Gefäs.

And then parallel, on the left side, is a translation of sorts:

viszivilág = [vee–see–vee–lahg ] = viszi = carries off / nimmt mit sich / emporte (világ = world / Welt / monde)��

Or another way to put this: languages are mixed and joined on the right side, and then the left side respectfully sorts through the mix with multilingual translations sprinkled with equal signs. Uxudo mixes the famil-iar and individual (the family photographs; the particular mix of languages) with the culture (the languages themselves and the translations from one to the other) so as to point to how the familiar is at every moment shaped by the violent histories of various nations. Another example: Walter Lew, in Excerpts from Δikth / 딕테/딕티 /DIKTE for DICTEE (1982) (1992), a book that is about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (a book that was first published in 1982, but does not really enter any canon—Asian American or “experimental”—until the ’90s), echoes the multilingualism of DICTEE (written in French and English with some Korean, Chinese, and Greek) by doing a sort of associative recovery of its possible influences.�� And yet another: Edwin Torres, as his work moves between Span-ish and English, might be seen as one more writer who uses heritage lan-guages to say something about immigrant identity (Torres is of Puerto Rican descent). But his work is one among many interesting examples of bilingual Spanish-English writers who question the untroubled representa-tion of Spanish as marginal and as a crucial marker of anyone’s identity in the Americas in the ’90s. Torres, for instance, like many Chicano writers of

21. Anne Tardos, Uxudo (Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba Press; Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 1999), 19, 18.22. Walter K. Lew and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Excerpts from Δikth / 딕테 /딕티 /DIKTE for DICTEE (1982) (Seoul, Korea: Yeul Eum Publishing Company, 1992). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, DICTEE (Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1995).


the ’70s, writes a manifesto that is in part about language and identity. But his is called “A Nuyo Futurist Manifestiny,” and it is full of a complicated I: “I yo NEO-why KNOW who say NO you say ME I see WHY Know NUYO know YOU . . .”�� Another way to see how relentlessly literature in English turns away from English is to look at the changes in the writing of a number of writers whose careers span the ’80s and ’90s. Harryette Mullen’s work, for instance, is one of many examples of work that moves from “I am my lan-guage” to “know NUYO know you.” Her career begins in the ’80s. Her first book, 1981’s Tree Tall Woman, is an almost classic example of the literature of U.S. identity politics. It is written in a slightly colloquial English, but not so colloquial that one would call it Black English; some Spanish shows up as an accent, and most of the poems in it have a singular African American narrator. Here, for example, is the poem “Heritage” (a joke on Countee Cullen’s poem of the same title):

In the third grade, I looked like a little dark Olive Oylwith my pigtail and my navy blue Buster brown shirtand skirt with white piping near the hem.Then one day I looked behind me and discoveredI’d inherited my grandmother’s big butt after all.��

This singular narrator disappears, more or less for good, in 1991’s Trim-mings, a book that talks back to avant-garde modernism and riffs off of the work of Stein. The English in this book is a standard English complicated by an avant-garde-style fragmentation, one self-aware, as one might expect from a work in the ’90s, of what it is doing to language: “Clothes opening, revealing dress, as French comes into English. Suggestively, a cleavage in language.”�� But it is 1995’s Muse & Drudge that I am most interested in. Muse & Drudge is one long poem, written in quatrains, that celebrates again and again language’s variances. One quatrain, for instance:

mutter patter simper blubbermurmur prattle smatter blathermumble chatter whisper bubblemumbo-jumbo palaver gibber blunder

23. Edwin Torres, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (New York: Roof Books, 2001), 109.24. Harryette Mullen, Tree Tall Woman (Galveston, Tex.: Energy Earth Communications, 1981), 3.25. Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (New York: Tender Buttons, 1991), 54.


Here, words used to demean other, nonstandard forms of speaking are gathered into a moment of alliance. At other points, Spanish shows up and takes over various stanzas, no longer limited to accent:

mulatos en el moleme gusta mi posolehijita del pueblo Morenoya baila la conquista��

It isn’t just Mullen’s work that moves from just happening to be in English in the ’80s to investigating what it means to be writing in English in the ’90s. John Yau’s poem “Ing Grish” is about what it means to know English.�� Diane Glancy uses Cherokee words or grammatical structures from the beginning in her works but intensifies it in her books from the ’90s, such as Lone Dog’s Winter Count (1991; see especially “Death Cry for the Lan-guage”) and The Voice That Was in Travel (1999).�� Juan Felipe Herrera includes Spanish in his work in English from the very beginning of his pub-lishing career but pointedly intensifies it by publishing Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos (2000) in both Spanish and English.�� Even Kamau Brathwaite, who begins writing in Nation Language in the ’70s, intensifies his questioning of the naturalness of English most obviously with his use of his “Sycorax video style” font, which becomes the compositional font for 1993’s Zea Mexican Diary and 1994’s Trench Town Rock.�0 Even more distinctive to the ’90s is the large amount of literature in English that includes the languages that are at risk or even lost because of colonialism. In addition to Waldrop, Stevens, and Glancy, I would point to Robert Sullivan, who includes Maori in Star Waka (1999) and Tere-sia Kieuea Teaiwa, who includes Gilbertese in parts of Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa (1995).�� There is also Alfred Arteaga’s Cantos (1991), which

26. Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995), 57, 67.27. John Yau, “Ing Grish,” in Ing Grish, by John Yau, Thomas Nozkowski, and Barry Schwabsky (Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2005), 62–65.28. Diane Glancy, Lone Dog’s Winter Count (Albuquerque, N.M.: West End Press, 1991); The Voice That Was in Travel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).29. Juan Felipe Herrera, Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos (Tucson: University of Ari-zona Press, 2000).30. Kamau Brathwaite, The Zea Mexican Diary, 7 Sept 1926–7 Sept 1986 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Trench Town Rock (Providence: Lost Roads Pub-lishers, 1994).31. Robert Sullivan, Star Waka (Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 1999); Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa (Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications, 1995).


includes Spanish and Nahuatl.�� And Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Warrior for Gringostroika (1993), a collection of essays, poems, and performance works that includes Spanish and the occasional word or phrase in Nahuatl.�� In addition to Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos, Herrera’s Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America (1997) incorporates Mayan.�� Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992) includes passages from Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s seventeenth-century treatist Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentilicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España in Spanish and incantations in Nahuatl.�� At the same time, work by several poets who write in Span-ish but include other, indigenous languages in their work, such as Cecilia Vicuña and Andrés Ajens, start to show up in translation in U.S. literary scenes. A slightly more in-depth example: certain large-scale changes in the use of the Hawaiian language in Hawaiian literature are illustrative of this ’90s intensification. While one of the concerns of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the ’70s is protecting and cultivating the Hawaiian language, most of the work published in the anthologies that begin to show up in the ’80s—such as Anthology Hawaii (1979), Mālama, Hawaiian Land and Water (1985), and Ho‘omānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (1989)—features work that is mainly in English with at most a sprinkling of Hawaiian words.�� By the ’90s, however, a very different picture of Hawaiian literature develops. And a quick glance at the Native Hawaiian journal ‘Ōiwi, which begins publication in 1999, shows how dramatic the change has been: English-only poems are the rare exception. A number of works published in the ’90s, such as Alani Apio’s two plays, Kāmau (written and produced in 1994; published in 1998) and Kāmau A‘e (written and produced in 1997; published in 1998), and Trask’s two books of poetry, Light in the Crevice Never Seen and Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, include Hawaiian and Pid-

32. Alfred Arteago, Cantos (San Jose, Calif.: Chusma House Publications, 1991).33. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993).34. Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America (Phila-delphia: Temple University Press, 1997).35. Francisco X. Alarcón, Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992).36. Dana Naone Hall, ed., Mālama, Hawaiian Land and Water (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1985); Richard Hamasaki, ed., Anthology Hawaii, Seaweeds and Constructions Series, no. 6 (Honolulu: R. Hamasaki, 1979); Joseph P. Balaz, Ho‘omānoa: An Anthology of Con-temporary Hawaiian Literature (Honolulu: Ku Pa‘a Inc., 1989).


gin.�� John Kneubuhl’s trilogy of plays Think of a Garden (most produced in the ’90s; published in 1997) includes Samoan and Hawaiian, and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s plays (most produced in the late ’80s and into the ’90s; collected in Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays in 2002) include Hawaiian.�� At the same time that Hawaiian literature turns more and more to the Hawaiian language, there is a parallel renaissance of literature in Pid-gin in Hawai‘i. While the first literary book in Pidgin might be 1972’s Cha-lookyu Eensai by “Bradajo” (Jozuf Hadley), literature in Pidgin does not really gather much momentum until the ’90s. In many works prior to the ’90s, if Pidgin shows up, it tends to be limited to accent or local color in works with a standard-English omniscient voice. For instance, the first issue of Bamboo Ridge, the journal and press that has done the most to argue for Pidgin as an important literary language, has only one work that obviously includes Pidgin (Philip K. Ige’s “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” a short story with a Pidgin voice embedded in a standard-English omniscient narrative).�� And, while 1978’s Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers is often mentioned as the beginnings of the local and Pidgin liter-ary renaissance, most of the Pidgin in this anthology, and there is not a whole lot of it, is also embedded in a standard-English frame.�0 But, in the ’90s, Bamboo Ridge Press publishes a number of works in which Pidgin is a compositional language for entire poems and stories, sometimes even entire books, such as Eric Chock’s Last Days Here (1990), Lum’s Pass on, No Pass Back! (1990; although it is worth nothing that Lum’s first collection in Pidgin, Sun: Short Stories and Drama, is published in 1980), Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993), and Lee Tonouchi’s Da Word (2001).�� And a quick look through back issues of the journal Bamboo Ridge

37. Alani Apio, Kāmau (Kailua, Hawaii: privately published, 1994); and Kāmau A‘e (Kailua, Hawaii: privately published, 1998). Kāmau A‘e is explicitly about the politics of speaking Hawaiian and opens with the main character learning Hawaiian while in jail.38. John Kneubuhl, Think of a Garden and other Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997); Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002).39. Philip K. Ige, “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer’s Quar-terly 1 (December 1978): 56–59.40. Eric Chock, Darrell H. Y. Lum, Gail Miyasaki, Dave Robb, Frank Stewart, Kathy Uchida, eds., Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers (Honolulu: Petronium Press/Talk Story, 1978).41. Eric Chock, Last Days Here (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1990); Darrell H. Y. Lum, Pass on, No Pass Back! (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1990); Darrell H. Y. Lum, Sun: Short


shows more and more work in Pidgin (and Hawaiian, although less so��) in its pages beginning in the ’90s. While Lum’s earlier-quoted statement implies that Pidgin is used mainly as a symbol of local identity, and this is certainly true of much of his work, there are in the ’90s a number of works that are about Pidgin’s complicated history. (The Department of Educa-tion of Hawai‘i has at various moments segregated Pidgin speakers from standard-English speakers and has repeatedly discussed officially banning Pidgin in the classroom, most recently in 1999.) Tonouchi’s “pijin wawrz” in Da Word is a parodic response to some of these debates.�� The story fea-tures a mechanical being named “Big Ben” (after governor Ben Cayatano) who bans Pidgin and “Da Pidgin Guerilla æn hiz armi awv rebolz.” Tonou-chi writes the narrative frame in Odo orthography (a phonemic transcription system for HCE developed by linguists Derek Bickerton and Carol Odo in the ’70s; using it is a bit of a joke on the discussions that surround how to write Pidgin; Odo orthography is very hard to read for many who easily read literary Pidgin) and writes the character’s speech in literary Pidgin. Many would question, despite the shared island geography, group-ing together a writer such as Yamanaka, who writes in Pidgin about immi-grant heritages, with a writer such as Trask, who mixes her English with Hawaiian in the name of cultural indigenous activism. Many would question grouping together Pacific Island writers Trask and Yamanaka and Atlan-tic Island writers Brathwaite and Philip. Many more would question group-

Stories and Drama (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1980); Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre; Lee Tonouchi, Da Word (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 2001). Interestingly, Yamanaka’s first book in standard English, Father of the Four Passages, comes out in 2002. I talk more on what happens after 2001 in the last section of this article.42. For more on Hawai‘i’s Pidgin literature and its complicated relationship to Hawai‘i and Hawaiian activism, see Candace Fujikane’s “Reimagining Development and the Local in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,” Social Processes in Hawai‘i 38 (1997): 40–61, and “Sweeping Racism under the Rug of ‘Censorship’: The Contro-versy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 158–94; Haunani-Kay Trask’s “Writing in Captivity: Poetry in a Time of Decolonization,” in Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Pacific, ed. Cynthia Franklin, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke (Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 51–55; Dennis Kawaharada’s “Local Mythologies: 1979–2000,” Hawai‘i Review 56 (2001): 187–225; Rodney Morales’s “Literature,” in Multicul-tural Hawai‘i: The Fabric of a Multiethnic Society, ed. Michael Haas (New York: Garland, 1998), 107–129; and Rob Wilson’s Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).43. Tonouchi, Da Word, 130–39.


ing together Pacific and Atlantic Island writers and continental avant-garde writers like Tardos and Bernstein.�� A confession: In this article I want to poke at the truism that contem-porary literature is not one thing but is many, segregated things. Bernstein, for instance, puts this truism this way: “The state of American poetry can be characterized by the sharp ideological disagreements that lacerate our communal field of action.”�� From the 1960s, when Robert Lowell uses the terms the cooked and the raw, to the contemporary moment, when Ron Silli-man uses the terms post-avant and School of Quietude, this truism defines the various institutions within which contemporary writing circulates, from reading series to anthologies to journals.�� As Steve Evans notes, “Anyone acquainted with contemporary American poetry, for example, is aware that certain basic positions organize the field, that these draw in their wake specific kinds of position-takings, and that what constitutes a viable possi-bility from the standpoint of one position may well be strictly ruled out with respect to another. If Bob Perelman and Maya Angelou switched curricula vitae and a month’s worth of reading engagements, publication venues, and institutional functions, no one would not notice.”�� Further contributing to the idea that there are many literatures that do not talk to each other is how literature is taught in the academy. While early literatures tend to be sorted by century and nation, contemporary literatures, especially in the United States, are often sorted by ethnicity and race. Contemporary litera-ture is also often categorized by “schools,” such as the New York School or Language writing or Hawaiian Renaissance or Black Arts, groupings that often retrospectively ascribe shared aesthetic and literary sensibilities to communities of writers who share ethnic, racial, economic, and/or geo-graphic identities. The classic contemporary example here might be Lan-guage writing, a grouping that makes more social sense and less formal sense, as it groups together the lyricism of Rae Armantrout with the phrasal syntactical disjunctions of Bruce Andrews with the autobiographical sen-

44. Although Bob Perelman has an interesting chapter in The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) where he does see some connection: “For both Bernstein and Brathwaite, writing is an engine of social change” (95).45. Bernstein, A Poetics, 1.46. See Jed Rasula’s discussion on pp. 232–34 of The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996).47. Steve Evans, “The Dynamics of Literary Change,” Impercipient Lecture Series 1, no. 1 (February 1997): 23.


tences of Ron Silliman. Further, despite an increasing awareness of the importance of globalization to literary study, there have been few scholarly studies that question this balkanized vision of contemporary literatures. This article, thus, is a thought experiment in formal commonalities rather than diversities. Still, I want to acknowledge that the idea that there are literatures, not one literature, importantly exposes as a sleight of hand the claims of neutrality made by standard-English verse traditions. I clearly do not want to totally dismiss the idea that there are poetries, not a poetry. All the writers I mention in this article do write very differently and have dif-fering goals. And a more nuanced study should delve deeper into the pos-sible different intents of works that include languages of empire and works that include at-risk or marginal languages. But the division that defines this work of the ’90s is not the one between post-avant and School of Quietude. The majority of the writers I mention in this article do not fit into either of these categories. Instead, I want to suggest a different division, one between writing that turns from standard English and writing that upholds standard English. And this is something that I think can only be seen if one questions the divisions between the raw and the cooked, between the post-avant and the School of Quietude, as in any way defining.�� This ’90s-style thought experiment has been influenced by, on the one hand, the attempts to imagine a universalism that acknowledges par-ticularity and difference that define the work of theorists like Judith But-ler, Édouard Glissant, and others beginning in the late ’90s.�� And, on the other hand, it has also been influenced by those ’90s models of resistance that begin with the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and continue with the World Trade Organization protests at the end of the century.�0 The Zapatista and the WTO mobilizations are in themselves successful thought experiments in what a universalism with room for particularity might look like on a very

48. Perhaps most disturbing about distinctions like this is how the terms post-avant or School of Quietude ignore a huge amount of the poetries that I would argue are defining the ’90s.49. Much of my thinking about why these works of the ’90s might be something to feel optimistic about is indebted to Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), and Eduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).50. But when I say that I do not mean to suggest that these literatures of the ’90s are necessarily an important part of global justice movements. Some are, but most aren’t. Rather, I want to think about what we learn from literature when we see it less as a series of individual and unique moments and more as a dialogue that happens across languages and extends beyond both literary schools and national boundaries.


practical level: they were organized around direct-action affinity groups and allowed a number of disparate concerns to come together in support of global economic justice. I am thinking here of those early complaints made by the talking heads of the mainstream media about how the WTO protests made no sense because the message was about giant turtles and debt for-giveness and nursing mothers, complaints that missed the point that one of the strengths of the movement was this recognition that various trade poli-cies were negatively affecting many different people in many different ways, and that a movement that included all these differences was stronger than a singular platform. This cluster of works does not happen accidentally in the ’90s. While I am hesitant to suggest a one-to-one relationship between “current events” and formal trends in literature, I do want to note that, within the United States at least, the ’90s had a certain “perfect stormness” about it that would allow this turn away from standard English to feel so crucial to so many different writers. But before I get to the perfect storm, it is worth remembering that it is close to impossible to say anything coherent about the United States and languages. Over 176 languages are indigenous to the United States, although many of these are extinct. And around 162 languages are spoken in the United States. (All these numbers vary from source to source.) The U.S. government does not have an “official” language. But the collection of words and syntaxes that gets called English has an unchallenged domi-nance within the United States, and the country’s consistent underfund-ing of language acquisition programs in its schools makes this unlikely to change any time soon. Outside the United States, English is both expand-ing (through global U.S. economic policies and the growth in multination-als—especially technology companies—with U.S. ties) and putting various local languages at risk.�� Because of English’s ties with colonialism and

51. English is now the dominant or official language in over sixty countries and is repre-sented in every continent and on three major oceans. However, English is not a global language because it has the largest numbers of first language speakers, but because large numbers of people from many different locations learn English as a supplemental language. As David Crystal notes in English as a Global Language (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2003), English is a global language because it holds a special place, where it might be an official or joint official language or where it might coexist with other more local languages in many nations. His 1995 total of first language English speakers is 337 million and of second language speakers is 235 million. Ethnologue’s 1999 numbers add 508 million second language speakers to its 341 million first language


globalization, as work by Alastair Pennycook and others demonstrates, it “poses a direct threat to the very existence of other languages. More gener-ally, however, if not actually threatening linguistic genocide, it poses the less dramatic but far more widespread danger of what we might call linguistic curtailment. When English becomes the first choice as a second language, when it is the language in which so much is written and in which so much of the visual media occur, it is constantly pushing other languages out of the way, curtailing their usage in both qualitative and quantitative terms.”�� In the ’90s, though, more and more words that are not a part of English are being spoken within the United States. Immigration rises dra-matically in the ’90s. Foreign-born residents are at a low of 4.7 percent in 1970 (and I keep wondering what role this low number might have had in the rise of U.S. identity politics).�� After 1970, this number steadily rises. By 1990, 7.9 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born. By 2000, 10.4 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born. And with it the number of U.S. residents who declare that they speak a language other than English at home increases dramatically. In 1990, that number is 32 million. By 2000, that number is 47 million. This question was not even asked before 1980. But despite English’s assured status as the de facto language of the United States, and despite English becoming more and more dominant in a world arena, there arise in the ’90s various groups of people within the United States who worry that English is at risk and attempt to pass legislation to make English the “official” language of the United States.�� These “English Only,” and also “English Plus,” lobbying groups have some limited success.�� Before 1987, seven states have some sort of legislation

speakers. (Crystal tends to be more cautious in his estimates; the difference in these numbers should not be seen as representative of the growth that occurred between 1995 and 1999.)52. Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 14.53. These numbers on foreign-born residents are from the U.S. Census Bureau.54. This summary of legislation about the English language that follows is indebted to James Crawford’s work in Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English only (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992), At War with Diversity: U.S. Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2000), and his Language Policy Web Site and Emporium, available at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCrawford.55. “English Plus” is presented to voters as a less reactionary alternative to “English Only” legislation because it supposedly acknowledges the presence of languages other than English, but it more or less has the same effect as “English Only,” as it institutional-izes English as a dominant language.


that privileges English.�� By 1990, another ten have joined the trend.�� Cur-rently twenty-six states have some sort of Official English legislation (thirty, if you count “English Plus”).�� What all this legislation means, finally, is not much more than a statement of support for racism and xenophobia, since most of these states still have to produce government documents in other languages. That said, not all governmental action was negative. The Native American Languages Act of 1990 declares it a U.S. federal policy to pre-serve, protect, and promote the rights and freedoms of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages.�� There is also, at the same time, growing attention to the damage that the growth of English is inflicting on indigenous languages. The United Nations proclaims 1993 as the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, and the UN’s draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes language in their statement of support for the rights of indigenous people to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. In Hawai‘i there is growing attention to the Hawaiian language and the establishment of Pūnana Leo (Hawaiian language preschools) and also DOE Hawaiian Immersion K–12 classrooms.�0

56. California (1986), Illinois (1969), Indiana (1984), Kentucky (1984), Massachusetts (1975), Nebraska (1920), and Tennessee (1984). It is worth noting that prior to 1984, only three states were concerned enough about language issues to have English Only legis-lation; Hawai‘i is an interesting exception here because various occupying governments outlawed Hawaiian in the 1890s, and it is not made an official state language until the 1970s.57. In 1987, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Carolina make English the official and only language of the government. In 1988, Colorado and Florida make English the official language of the government. In 1989, New Mexico, Ore-gon, and Washington pass “English Plus” resolutions. In 1990, Alabama passes legisla-tion to make English the official and only language of the government.58. In 1992, Rhode Island passes an “English Plus” resolution. In 1995, Alabama, Mon-tana, New Hampshire, and South Dakota pass legislation to make English the official and only language of the government. There is also in 1996 the national “outrage” and contro-versy around the Oakland School Board’s discussion (yes, just discussion) about whether to institutionally recognize that many of their students speak a language that they call “Ebonics.” From 1996–2006, Georgia, Virginia, Wyoming, Missouri, Utah, Iowa, and Ari-zona pass legislation to make English the official and only language of the government.59. See http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/miscpubs/stabilize/ii-policy/nala1990.htm.60. For more information, see Sam L. No‘eau Warner’s “The Movement to Revitalize Hawaiian Language and Culture,” in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Prac-tice, ed. Leanne Hinton and Kenneth Hale (San Diego: Emerald Book Publishing, 2001), 133–44.


• • • •

That poetry’s relation to capital positions it as a commons is one thing—the fact that poetry’s compositional practice marks it at its essence as a commoning of linguistic and creative resources is something else. The stories of poetry’s common practice are legion and as old as the poem itself.��

The literature in English that turns away from standard English in the ’90s is not merely a literary style or trend. It is also a moment when literature reflects and comments on a very intense public debate about language that was also a discussion about globalization and indigenous and immigrant rights, a debate that changed not only literature in English but also govern-ing bodies and public school systems.�� This alone means that merely to include another language in one’s work, any other language, is a pointed statement for these writers of the ’90s (although the sort of pointing that it does, of course, varies from writer to writer). At the same time, to refuse to include another language or to suggest that “Writing doesn’t use another language, but the language we’re already using,” as Ted Kooser and Steve Cox do in Writing Brave and Free, is an equally pointed statement.�� On the most basic level, these works point out something mimetic: that we walk down shared, polylingual streets. Yet this in itself is not distinc-tive, because there are many examples of literatures, avant-garde modern-ism an obvious example here, that represent polylingual streets. Beyond the polylingual streets, this ’90s moment, when writers from various current and former empires and various current and former colo-nies all write against standard English, the very language that, for most of them, is their language of composition, is unusual and uncommon. This literature of the ’90s is part of a long discussion about what is the public business of literature, but these works are having to wrestle with the debts of contemporary relationality in a time of forced and dramatic globalization, with how humans are together in the same room. They are insistent that literature is not merely for individual self-expression. And they also assume that writing can be separated from its ties to the national. They suggest

61. Stephen Collis, “Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons,” available at http://www .forumonpublicdomain.ca/files/Of_Blackberries.pdf.62. While I see this cluster of work in the ’90s, as well as its transnational concerns, as important, I also realize there are many other stories that could be told about the decade.63. Ted Kooser and Steve Cox, Writing Brave and Free: Encouraging Words for People Who Want to Start Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).


that the ways that we talk about things do not belong only to us or only to the United States. That we need, at moments, the languages of others, languages we might or might not identify with. And not only that: it might be the only way we can think with any complexity about the contemporary moment. But I should also admit that this literature of the ’90s looks a lot like the WTO protests—full of diverging concerns—in the things these works have to say about that room that we are all in together. Some of these writers—such as Bernstein, Lew, Mullen, Tardos, and Torres—attempt a version of a social, networked writing, one attuned to finding different connections amid the frequencies of language, amid the noisy way that words and literary forms are public business.�� They explore the connections among languages. And they point to how languages are both national and universal, are both intimate mother tongues and yet clearly cultural, created by groups of individuals over time, requiring con-sensus, constantly absorbing what is often marked as foreign, and also permeable, since anyone can learn them. Some of these writers—such as Alarcón, Arteaga, Gómez-Peña, Herrera, Stevens, and Waldrop—acknowledge that as they write in English they overwrite the languages that were present before English arrived. These writers are often not fluent in all the languages they include in their work, and they often make no heritage claim on them. I read this not as appropriative but rather as an awareness that we are all defined by others, or by other languages, without our consent, and that part of thinking with others, and with literature, means thinking about how one negotiates this, means risking error. Some of these writers—such as Arteaga, Brathwaite, Kim, Stevens, Glancy, Sullivan, Teaiwa, Tonouchi, and Yamanaka—while they are atten-tive to the shared histories that are the inevitable product of colonialism, are also attentive to the differing access points and power relationships that define shared histories. Some of these writers—such as Apio, Gómez-Peña, Philip, and Trask—write more intensely in resistance to these shared histories, as they contest dialogue as a meaningful possibility. And some of these writers—such as Apio, Trask, and many who pub-lish in the journal ‘Ōiwi—pointedly align their work with various resistance struggles.

64. I am in debt here to Joan Retallack’s “poethic” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).


It is not that these differences do not matter. They do. And these differences have been well documented in much critical writing. But their similarities matter, too. This article more or less ends with the year 2001. And if I stop this larger story there, I can tell a story of a triumphant revision to multicultural-ism and of a return to the idea of a literary commons, one complicated in interesting ways by an awareness of imperialism’s shared and yet unequal histories. But the story I am attempting to tell does not end. It continues and gets more convoluted. While I do not want to indulge in the sort of myopia that insists that the U.S. 9/11 changed everything, there is, after 9/11, a ral-lying call made for lyric and for “plain speech” poetries in the United States. Poetry gets a lot of attention after 9/11. Days after 9/11 (or was it hours?), W. H. Auden’s strangely relevant “September 1, 1939” shows up in my email box from several different people, and it takes off from there.�� Publishers Weekly, in an article titled “Solace and Steady Sales” in the November 2001 issue points out that “people turn to poetry in times of crisis.”�� And Mary Karr announces in the New York Times in January 2002 that “the events of Sept. 11 nailed home many of my basic convictions, including the notion that lyric poetry dispenses more relief—if not actual salvation—dur-ing catastrophic times than perhaps any art form.”�� There follows from this a willful attempt to reclaim the poetic com-mons in the name of a nationalist literature in standard English by both gov-ernmental institutions like the NEA and private ones like the Poetry Foun-dation and the U.S. Poet Laureate position. In 2002, Ruth Lilly gives some $200 million to Poetry magazine. With this money, the Poetry Foundation hires John Barr, who declares that his mandate will be to help poetry find its public again, a process that involves rejecting poetry “written in the rain shadow thrown by modernism.”�� By 2003, Dana Gioia—whose 1991 Can Poetry Matter? is a diatribe against this same modernist tradition that con-tinues to upset Barr eleven years later—is chairman of the NEA.�� Among his legacies is a partnership between the NEA and Lockheed and Boeing.

65. See Eric McHenry, “Auden on Bin Laden,” Slate, September 20, 2001, available at http://www.slate.com/?id=115900, for a discussion of the poem’s reception after 9/11.66. Mark Bibbins, “Solace and Steady Sales,” Publishers Weekly, no. 47 (November 19, 2001): 29.67. Mary Karr, “Writers On Writing: Negotiating the Darkness, Fortified by Poets’ Strength,” New York Times, January 14, 2002, E1.68. John Barr, “American Poetry in the New Century,” available at http://www.poetry magazine.org/magazine/0906/comment_178560.html.69. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1992).


In 2004, Kooser—who pointedly claims on his Web site to be known for the “clarity, precision and accessibility” of his writing—is appointed Poet Laure-ate.�0 As Steve Evans points out in “Free (Market) Verse,” after 9/11 there arose “a cohort of midwestern white guys with business backgrounds aspir-ing to write instantly ‘accessible’ poems about authentic American life for the amusement and improvement of semi-literate ‘regular’ folks. . . . Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world.”�� This group has some institutional success. The Lilly bequest undeniably puts poetry into the business pages of the newspapers for a few weeks. Although whether any of these institutions manage to amuse and improve “semi-literate ‘regular’ folks” remains an impossible-to-answer question. It is hard to figure out what Barr, and by extension the Poetry Foun-dation, might mean by that “rain shadow” of modernism. In the ’90s, Barr published a book called Grace, which uses “the freedom of a Caribbean like speech to get away with murder.”�� It sounds like Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. This is a strange and bitter book. And it is hard to understand this strange bitterness, this blackface. Is it a mocking attack on the turn against stan-dard English that so defines the ’90s? Or is it something more mundane? And, similarly, the Poetry Foundation is at moments hard to figure out. The public face of the Poetry Foundation is their Web site and the jour-nal Poetry. The Web site appears to be ecumenical in inviting, and paying, a variety of poets to participate on their Harriet blog. Yet the Web site has a “Find a Poet” tool that features the names of around 8,000 poets. (Around 1,588 of these names have individual pages with a photograph, a biographi-cal note, and usually a few poems; the rest are the names of people who have published in Poetry magazine.��) I mention 27 poets in the first section of this article and only two of them—Bernstein and Glancy—are included on the site. No one owns literature. This fight over the public commons of litera-

70. See http://www.tedkooser.com.71. Steve Evans, “Free (Market) Verse,” available at http://www.thirdfactory.net/free marketverse-all.html.72. John Barr, Grace: An Epic Poem (Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1999), 6.73. I got this number of around 8,000 by clicking on the “Last Name” listings and adding them up. James Sitar kindly replied to my email to the Poetry Foundation, and he gave me the number 1,588 and explained that the listings of the poets who are just names with no pages are from Poetry magazine.


ture continues in provocative and interesting ways with the appropriation-heavy post-9/11 literatures that call themselves things like Flarf and Con-ceptual Writing.�� These are literatures that think about what it means to have the words of others in one’s own mouth, even as they go about this differently than those literatures of the ’90s, as they literally include the language of others (less so the languages of others). Those associated with Flarf in particular have asked what it means to have to take into one’s mouth the brazen, sometimes racist, sexist, classist words of others that are the stuff of the semi–public domain of the Internet.�� What interests me is how both the works of the ’90s and the appropriation-heavy literatures of the turn of the twenty-first century insist that the words of others are in our mouths all the time. That much of the work that comes out of these appropriation-heavy literatures is so prickly, so weirdly nasty, is perhaps more a sign of how the stakes of this literary public commons change after the U.S. 9/11. So I want to end with another confession: while I have been writing about the writing of others, I have been all along trying to figure something out about myself, about my own writing. The impulse behind this article per-haps has been self-involved: I have been trying to figure out why, despite their often oppositional political differences, I feel I cannot make sense of contemporary writing without considering the more “experimental” and the more “anticolonial” as part of the same tradition. I have been so under the influence of all this writing that divisions that seem clear to some make no sense to me. This, thus, is an attempt to justify my idiosyncratic map of contemporary literature. At the same time, I am attempting to understand my own writing. In

74. I am using the term appropriation-heavy here, because if there is any more “ur” of an example of the way that contemporary writing at moments indulges in unneces-sary balkanizations, it is in how similar the projects of these various poetries are and yet how rigorously those associated with both Flarf and Conceptual self-police their social groupings as constitutive of intellectual and aesthetic differences. For those in need of an introduction to Flarf, see “The Flarf Files,” available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html. For those in need of an introduction to Conceptual Writing, see “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetries,” a special issue of open Let-ter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 12, no. 7 (fall 2005), and the archives of the conference “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others,” available at http://poetrycenter.arizona .edu/conceptualpoetry/cp_index.shtml.75. There has been much discussion around race and Flarf. See, for instance, the archives of the discussion about Michael Magee’s “Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay,” available at http://www.saidwhatwesaid.com/race.pdf.


the ’90s, I wrote a book called Fuck You Aloha I Love You.�� In this book, I pointedly include both Pidgin and Hawaiian words. As I speak neither lan-guage, I went out of my way to do this. I looked up words I did not know in the dictionary, and I had many conversations with people who knew those two languages in a way that I do not. I would not have written that book before the ’90s, and I would not write that book now. Perhaps this article has been an attempt to figure out what presumption allowed me to feel as if I could or should write that book. And also to figure out why that book now makes me nervous and what is the story behind that nervousness. I am not sure I yet have the answer. But I do feel like I need to keep what I learned from these works of the ’90s—that the languages and the words of others come with recognitions and obligations and debts and are always unavoidably in our mouths—and not forget it in the turn of the century. I am, in other words, after writing this, now more suspicious of my nervousness, less willing to excuse it.

76. Juliana Spahr, Fuck You Aloha I Love You (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

The Stevens Wars

Al Filreis

In the house the house is allhouse and each of its authorspassing from room to room

Short eclogues as one mightsay on tiptoe do not infringe—Susan Howe, 118 Westerly Terrace

Howe’s poem, its title bearing Wallace Stevens’s suburban street address, takes us as far as one can imagine from the Stevens whom we (up through at least 1972) thought barely hid his secret French Symbolist iden-tity and who in the poems would always apparently rather be elsewhere.� Collected in The Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), Howe’s thirty-six-page homage to Stevens appears there with an intent that bespeaks the Stevens she reveres: native to, not alienated from, an American psychic past of uto-pian quietist sects, Jonathan Edwardism, and “history qua history”; dwell-

1. The project to make Stevens French culminated in Michel Benamou’s Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).



ing upon instead of repressing a poetics that meets at “antithetical cross-roads” and produces the “loose ramshackle / extract poem” rather than merely the ironic ditty that leaves its traces only as a passing early phase of Anglo-American modernism.� Any consideration of what has happened to Stevens since the mid-seventies must eventually return to Howe, but for now it suffices to say something about the way 118 Westerly Terrace culminates a general though disorganized project: many poets, including some otherwise unlike Howe, who are devoted readers of Stevens, see historical magic in the poetics of everyday life: the quiet house on a weekday evening, the reader in his chair, the large man made out of words, the sullen Old School Modern sitting at the end of his bed in the vestige of dream, the figure of capable imagination bathed in the ordinariness that can induce the quiet suburban night to rear up suddenly in a “Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.” That edge space he tried to write into writing—between dawn and day as between language and being, between thinking and composing, between irony and rumination, between being here (in the poem) and being displaced—is often, in the stanzas, a description of the scene of composition that serves as the starting point for fecund flights of what Stevens in the 1940s and Stevenseans from 1950 through the midseventies incessantly called “the imagination” (as suppos-edly distinct from “reality”). Radical feelings of dislocation can arise from situatedness. Dennis Barone, an experimental prose writer and poet who happens to live in West Hartford, where Stevens did, has reproduced this sense in the words and phrases he chose for his own recent poem “An Ordi-nary Evening” (2006), modeled on Stevens’s great late poem of slow seria-tic style, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949). Here are some of Barone’s words: “empty,” “quiet,” “large,” “slightly,” “nothing remains,” “dried out,” “sits,” “awaits,” “dreams,” “stretches forth,” “distant,” again “slightly.”� Most of the poems written by contemporary poets that overtly pay homage to Stevens comprehend a disaffected intensity—somewhat itself a typical modernist tone—and frame and formalize it with the sheer verbal excite-ments of admitting into the poem traces of the domestic space in which the act of writing occurs, the latter a postmodern mode Stevens perfected a few years before John Ashbery began writing maturely and a generation before Lyn Hejinian’s My Life disjunctively rendered the American home.

2. Susan Howe, 118 Westerly Terrace, in Souls of the Labadie Tract (New York: New Directions, 2007), 53.3. Dennis Barone, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens Journal 31, no. 2 (2007): 198–99.

Filreis / The Stevens Wars 185

Notwithstanding these later effects, the Stevensean disaffection has been a marvel, since it tends to prohibit definitive legacy. Had such a stance not thwarted obvious influence, I suspect the field would never have become so wide open that Howe could now, after all these years of admiration, place Stevens onto the Labadie tract uncontroversially. Stevens after 1975 has been, to be sure, a going concern, yet his effect on poetics has been diffuse and nearly unidentifiable on the whole. The figure of the man in the room in the house, or striding arrhythmically to the office, or sit-ting in the park, is itself sufficiently unfocused in an affection for mundane things—yet at once distrusts thingy poets as merely social and clings with surprising partisanship to abstraction—as to enable poetic identities across the literary-political and theoretical landscape. Reading poetry magazines, blogs, and reviews, one feels Stevens is everywhere but also nowhere. Modernist claims about locality, in for instance poems like “Description with-out Place” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” make an act much harder to follow than, say, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: noncollaged, all series and no essence, abstract yet full of referential bric-a-brac, radi-cally displaced yet apparently eschewing political position. If Stevens can seem anything to everyone, perhaps that is as it should be—the style generative, the figurations of the poet various. I can locate the posthumous Stevens as the tragic composer (in David St. John’s poem “Symphonie Tragique”�), as the impressionistic landscape colorist (in Charles Tomlinson’s “Suggestions for the Improvement of a Sunset”�), as once again the man made of words (in R. S. Thomas’s “Homage to Wallace Stevens”�), as the avowed urbanist (in Lewis Turco’s “An Ordinary Evening in Cleveland”�), and as the meditative midnighter by the suburban window hearing in night’s voices “[a]ll the oblique ruins of the unsaid” (in Ann Lauterbach’s “Annotation,” a brilliant replication of Stevens’s diction). “The room behind the room,” writes Lauterbach,

Has lost its particularity, a tentIn a field of tents.

4. David St. John, “Symphonie Tragique,” Wallace Stevens Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 27–29.5. Charles Tomlinson, “Suggestions for the Improvement of a Sunset,” in Collected Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6.6. R. S. Thomas, “Homage to Wallace Stevens,” in Collected Later Poems: 1988–2000 (Highgreen, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 266.7. Lewis Turco, “An Ordinary Evening in Cleveland,” in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959–2007 (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Star Cloud Press, 2007), 66–69.


These are like the endings of wordsAs rooms resemble the beginnings.�

Morri Creech’s Stevens leads him to a room, too—to the bed in which, in the Dantesque terza rima stanza of “The World as Meditation,” Stevens imag-ined the subject position of Penelope sleepily and passionately imagining Ulysses’ return, which she (and he—Stevens) can only conjure through a half-waking state. Creech, a formalist in the manner of Anthony Hecht (he was the first recipient of the Hecht Award) and much praised by poetic con-servatives, rewrites through “The World as Meditation” Primo Levi’s reminis-cence of “The Canto of Ulysses” in Auschwitz, recalled from the survivor’s bed back home in Turin. Stevens’s Penelope awaits Ulysses, but meantime the “patient syllables” of the poem itself enable her to survive alone, just as syllabic reductions of love can console us; on the other hand, Creech’s Levi dreads and needs the return of the poem of Ulysses at Auschwitz as the linguistic gesture that once saved him but now dooms him, while Stevens’s fictive frame must provide the dreamy domestic bed scene.� The Stevens in Robert Bly’s heroic poem “Wallace Stevens’ Letters” is a man hard to love, and thus beloved: “stiff and stern and almost like a hero.”�0 Stevens after Stevens is also sometimes merely an antipoetic influence to be awed, as in Richard Eberhart’s verse-memory of drinking pitchers of martinis with the big poet in his habitual lunchtime inn (“At the Canoe Club”), in which the recollected “jaunty tone, a task of banter, rills / In mind, an opulence agreed upon”�� of such drunken two-hour repasts is found absolutely nowhere in the poetics of the homage itself. (Talk about disaffection! Talk about anxiety of influence!) We also often find the businessman-poet who enjoyed a good income but then also contemplated money’s strangely rich idiomatic life, as in Dana Gioia’s clever synonym-generating satire called “Money,” a formalist’s riff on Stevens’s politically indecipherable mantra, “Money is a kind of poetry.”�� The Stevens we discern in homages and imitations ranges from the Hopperesque purveyor of hard flat American shapes and surfaces (in

8. Ann Lauterbach, “Annotation,” in Clamor (New York: Penguin, 1991), 34.9. Morri Creech, “The Canto of Ulysses,” in Field Knowledge (Baltimore, Md.: Waywiser Press, 2006), 21–22.10. Robert Bly, “Wallace Stevens’ Letters,” in Gratitude to old Teachers (Brockport, N.Y.: Boa, 1993), 8.11. Richard Eberhart, “At the Canoe Club,” in Collected Poems, 1930–1976 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 217.12. Dana Gioia, “Money,” in The Gods of Winter (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1991), 33.


Tony Quagliano’s “Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse at Two Lights, 1927”��) to the theorist of nothingness who makes us think with fecundity (in Jerome Sala’s “The Model Summer”��), from the fussy middle-aged man with the tropical imagination (Lisa Steinman’s “Wallace Stevens in the Tropics”��) to the atomistic language philosopher in Michael Palmer’s lyric on “linear inquiry.” Palmer’s preferred Stevens is the purveyor of logical-philosophical propositions, the deliberately unrigorous Wittgenstein of “Connoisseur of Chaos”: “A. A violent order is disorder; and / B. A great disorder is an order. These / Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)”�� Here is Palmer:

[Let a be taken as . . .]a liquid line beneath the skinand b where the blue tiles meetbody and the body’s bridgea seeming road here, endless . . .��

This homage is at once a philosophical investigation—that is, into the poetic language of philosophy—and a love poem, a final soliloquy with an interior paramour. Its words are the result of “the project of seeing things” in the ding an sich manner of Parts of a World (1942), poems like “The Poems of Our Climate,” “Prelude to Objects,” and “Study of Two Pears.” Palmer’s Stevensean epistemology runs this way:

things seennamely a hand, namelythe logic of the handholding a bell or clouded lensthe vase perched impossibly near the edgeobscuring the metal tin

Charles Bernstein has rewritten “Loneliness in Jersey City” (1938) as “Loneliness in Linden” (2008), reconstituting the prewar immigrant-filled

13. Tony Quagliano, “Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse at Two Lights, 1927,” Wallace Stevens Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 62–63.14. Jerome Sala, “The Model Summer,” in Visiting Wallace: Poem Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). This poem was composed in 2008 for Dennis Barone and James Finnegan.15. Lisa Steinman, “Wallace Stevens in the Tropics,” in Visiting Wallace.16. Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos,” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (Washington D.C.: Library of America, 1997), 194.17. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (Berkeley, Calif.: North Point Press, 1981), 58–60.


American city with more direct foreboding of the coming annihilation of these people’s Old Country relatives. In Stevens, “Polacks . . . pass in their motors / And play concertinas all night. / They think that things are all right.” Bernstein does not contradict so much as point up the irony of such playful-ness through another layer of irony pulling at Stevens’s apparently political unconscious, Linden being a place “Where Jews do Jewish things” and “No one pretends to understand” what happens “When the fear and the hum are one.” Bernstein plays upon the difference/not-difference between two industrial working-class New Jersey cities, such that readers will not easily perceive the extent to which the satire is set against the ideologically savvy yet anti-Semitic Stevens; and the poem is either literally or literally and aes-thetically “After Wallace Stevens.”�� Lytle Shaw has the distilled cadences of Stevensean rhetoric in his head as Bernstein does. A devotee of Frank O’Hara who sensed that “the epistemological dilemmas that [Stevens’s] work as a whole explores (of which “The Snow Man” is one of the best examples) gets replayed in a bit of an overly consistent way,” Shaw has written through the utterly familiar diction and cadence of that set-piece in a prose poem called “The Confes-sions 2” (2002), in which, as “mind of winter” becomes “mine of copper,” the geopolitical setting changes while all rhetorical traces are followed: “One would have to have a mine of copper, and have been cold to the union’s safety and wage pleas for a long while, and perhaps have amassed a cabi-net of classical artifacts in a sound proof basement displayed on custom aluminum mesh grids, or to have run for several city offices. . . .”�� As with Bernstein, the poem seems to offer an ironic reversal of Stevensean social positioning while perfectly and respectfully rhyming Stevens’s rhetoric in such a way as to affirm his politics of form. In today’s Stevensean poetry, one too frequently discerns Stevens the modernist who has gotten so completely under the later poet’s skin that pure satire, for instance in Mark DeFoe’s “13 Ways of Eradicating Blackbirds,” seems the only poetic recourse, a dead end. Here is DeFoe’s seventh epigram:

Dye yourself black. Whirl about wildly, thrash,Flap, chirp, and tweet like a demented lark.�0

18. Stevens, “Loneliness in Jersey City,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 191. Charles Bernstein, “Loneliness in Linden,” Conjunctions 50 (Spring 2008): 112.19. Lytle Shaw, “The Confessions 2,” in The Lobe (New York: Roof Books, 2002).20. Mark DeFoe, “13 Ways of Eradicating Blackbirds,” Epoch, no. 28 (Spring 1978): 281.


Such parodies (I could quote a dozen) tend to riff on a single poem, quick-take attempts at posing in a particular ironic position, one abandoned as quickly as assumed. These satires convey a Stevensean manner and do not entirely lack interest, but ultimately the measure of Stevens’s sustained effect is better assessed in the writing of poets who seek to contemplate “the whole of harmonium,” a term he used to support an insistence that his work was a single worthy but finally doubtful project, a Cantos under many titles, a flawed and not finally constructed edifice, a “greenhouse [that] never so badly needed paint,” a “great structure . . . become a minor house.”�� In “Thinking of Wallace Stevens,” Robert Creeley, a strong poet if ever there was one, faced a predecessor whose overall aesthetic sensi-bility was so rhetorically overwhelming that one could not help but fall into a demotic yet abstract Stevensean vocabulary, thus “mak[ing] all acqui-esce to one’s preeminent premise.” There’s an almost Bloomian anxiety of influence affecting Creeley here, awakened frighteningly, I think, in a writer whose ample fierceness is rarely reserved for others among the poetic com-pany and who explicitly—along with Jerome Rothenberg—despised Harold Bloom’s romantic-psychoanalytic theory of agony in the literary commu-nity. Yet here Creeley protests too much, in uncharacteristic verse: “No one can know me better than myself.” Such a negatively imagined disaster of poetic selfhood is followed by meditative unrhymed couplets right out of the late Stevens, where slowness, dullness, age, and an “almost ancient proximity” (Creeley’s phrase) lead to the exhilarating near-final realization that (in Stevens’s formulation) “the end of the imagination had itself to be imagined.” Here are two of Creeley’s Stevensean couplets:

The candle flickers in the quick, shifting wind.It reads the weather wisely in the opened window.

So it is the dullness of mind one cannot live without,This place returned to, this place that was never left.��

When Creeley is “thinking” of this figure, he fails to choose between a languagey Stevens and a meditative Stevens, such that one never really knows what the “preeminent premise” is. Is it that linguistic identity con-structs human subjectivity, that the “c” precedes both chorister and choir (to use the trope of “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”)? Or

21. Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.22. “Thinking of Wallace Stevens,” in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 428.


is it that the figure in the poems is part of nature and thus, also, in that sense, a part of us—a person, a human figure operating behind the poem, writing to us in various yet wholly associated states and moods, insistently “alive” and “at a table” (“The Man with the Blue Guitar”), telling us of a life consistently lived just at the point when we have begun to doubt such wholeness? The poems of Stevens do not come down on one side of this ques-tion, and yet it is the question that has dominated poetics in the past three decades. The various explanatory gestures in Stevens’s poems, essays, and lectures, and in memos and letters about the Supreme Fiction and other such concepts, seem of little direct help to us now. Reading across a hundred recent poems following from or inspired by him, we see that his style, reckoned in the era after which affiliation with social problems made a productive peace with process-oriented writing, functions variously but, again, inconclusively. And so again advocates of Stevens’s relevance to contemporary poetics have seemed disorganized—have not for the most part felt the need to form that community among so many others that serve the purpose of asserting the lineage back through modernism. It is not necessary that they break or be broken into camps. Indeed, were the Stevensean mode to function in contemporary poetics as the Poundian has from around 1950 until recently, the polarization might contradict its greatest effects. Still, the only useful function of the critic in this situation is to give some broad shape to the sides in an argument that is not being waged except here and there through skirmishes in which the antagonists can thus claim that other matters are at stake. The lack of contestation ipso facto means that one side has won the argument; the indifferent aspect of the discussion itself tends to permit the meditative, unagonistic Stevens to carry the day. Preparing to write this essay, I gathered together 120 poems operating in some way under the sign of Stevens; the majority are explicit responses.�� I then forced myself to divide them into two rude yet perhaps indicative categories. The first Stevens discernible here is the ruminative poet, essentially romantic although often cleverly dubbed “post-Romantic.” The subject’s pronoun can be vague—a plural “we” or a dissociative “one,” sometimes the third-person personal “he” as the speaker—but is always consistent. The speaker is a poet-figure evolving over the course of poems: a modern person always on the verge of, but finally doubtful of, natural

23. In this I was aided by an excellent gathering edited by Dennis Barone and James Finnegan, Visiting Wallace: Poem Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), for which I have written the foreword.


description; a romantic situation observed at the point where subjectivity qualifies realism. For many who admire the meditative-lyric Stevens, the sensibility is post-Christian; “Sunday Morning” is a poem for starters. When biography is engaged, Santayana’s influence becomes a reference point. Additionally or alternatively, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942)—arguably Stevens’s major programmatic poem—if read in a certain way, presents the developed idea (that in modernity the aesthetic has replaced divinity). A much later poem, “Not Ideas about the Thing” (1952), can be said to express the final subjectivist’s regret as the sound of the world out there is, in the end, prelinguistic and externally real. Language is not the final thing; the thing itself is. The late sedentary poems are an allure, as power-of-imagination lyrics, such as “The World as Meditation,” “Questions Are Remarks,” “A Postcard from the Volcano,” and “The Men That Are Fall-ing.” Poems of recollection, for instance “The Poem That Took the Place of the Mountain,” are not so much deemed metapoems, poems about poet-ics, as romantic high-view retrospectives of the personal landscape the poems form, a footing or purchase gained on a life observed. His effect is conservative—as a conservator of values associated traditionally with lyric. “His major poetry,” wrote John Hollander—that “elegant romantic” who on Stevens’s birthday in 1975 was said to have “one distinguished American predecessor: Stevens”��—“energetically engaged the task of preserving our cardinal nobilities from decay into trivialization and into mockeries of what they had been.”�� Stevens becomes a conservative modernist stand-ing against modernist excess. If Stevens was “one the very greatest of our poets in a century during which the loudest of assertions had started to ring false,” then the truth would sound in the “reverberating” lyricism, verse that does not make truculent, discordant claims but rather “eke[s] out the mind,” forming “the particulars of sound.”�� Thus for advocates of the meditative-lyric Stevens, the key poetic unit is the line. Distinct from all this is what might be roughly called a languaged Stevens: theoretical, serial, and nonnarrative, metapoetically radical, sometimes satirical (and antinarrative), always obsessive about the state of poetics and insisting on consciousness of the compositional mode as

24. Donald Davie, “Gifts of the Gab,” New York Review of Books, October 2, 1975, 30–31.25. John Hollander, “To Reinvent Invention: John Hollander on Wallace Stevens,” Ameri-can Poet 17 (Spring 2000): 14.26. Hollander, “To Reinvent Invention,” 14. Hollander was quoting Stevens’s “The Cre-ations of Sound,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 274.


itself a pressure inducing the poem to be composed. This Stevens offers a theory of rhetoric in which the poem does the work that the poem generally contends such a poem should or must do. The poems speak in a rhetoric of rhetoric while enacting rhetoric’s general centrality. Stevens here is no conservator of lyric tradition, no defender against decay, trivialization, or mock. The serial or seriatic style—early in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” more maturely in “Notes,” “Description without Place,” “Esthetique du Mal,” “Things of August,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” “An Ordinary Evening”—actually befits rather than rejects the cyclonic modernist historical modes adopted early and briefly by Eliot, grandly and insistently by Pound, and later by Williams. The work of reading history in the post-Pisan cantos and in Stevens’s longer poems of the mid- and late 1940s involves a surprisingly similar critical reading activity. That Stevens offers a way of understanding a particularly American kind of poetic historiography or philosophical concept of what it is to be historical is, I think, the primary cause of Howe’s great devotion to him, as most clearly disclosed in 118 Westerly Terrace. Many, although not all, contemporary poets who are coming to admire the lan-guaged Stevens—not Howe in this particular aspect; but Bernstein, yes—commence their affection with the antic, parodic, and self-parodic poems of Harmonium and other works in that mode that appear again, with a bit more gloom under the satire, in the mid- and especially late 1930s (for example, “Loneliness in Jersey City,” “Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is,” “Cuisine Bourgeoise”). This poetics is contingent but not psychological—unrevelatory. The poem is the mind in the act of finding what will suffice, but what will suffice is not mind but language. The man made out of words is words. And the words (stanzas in unconsecutive series) seem to move in their own direction. In recent years, Stevens’s long poems have been permitted the repu-tation of their directionlessness, but this had not always been so. In the mid-1960s, avant-garde poets who might have included Stevens in their advo-cacy of serial writing did not merely leave him unmentioned but believed in a conservative antimodernist academic conspiracy to possess the soul of the Stevensean poetic. For three minutes in the middle of Jack Spicer’s second of three famous June 1965 lectures in Vancouver—this second talk was about the concept of the serial poem, and gave Spicer a platform for commending such a method arising out of the Spicer/Blaser/Duncan con-fabulation—a surprising discussion about Stevens interrupted the flow. An audience member asked Spicer if he considered “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” a serial poem. Spicer, after hesitating quite a bit, thought not:


Stevens had had a plan and had stuck to it, even if he had allowed himself to wander in the middle. But, the questioner observed, Stevens at various times had said about that poem just what Spicer was now saying about the serial poem generally. “If you have a nice map,” was Spicer’s rejoinder, “and you want to get from here to the north tip of Vancouver Island, then it sort of isn’t the same thing as if you just sail out there and don’t know where you want to go, and let the wind carry you.” The questioner per-sisted, though, asking about “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Spicer began to take the point. Stevens did write serially, and Spicer conceded that the poems of Transport to Summer might at least be considered “edited serial” poetry. But then a second thought and a turn toward a vague but powerful institutional rationale for Stevens’s absence from such avant-garde talk: “I don’t know,” said Spicer after another moment. “The awful thing about Stevens is that everybody in English departments who hates poetry, which is just about everybody [laughter ], loves Stevens [more laughter ]. You know it really . . . I liked Stevens a great deal more before I saw that. . . . There’s just a real hatred. They always like Stevens. All of these people. The more they hate poetry [the more] they like Stevens, so although Stevens moves me I’ve gotten more distrustful of him.”�� Today’s much-admired meditative Stevens descends in part from the antimodernist academic assimilation of the Stevens whose modernist language and epic wandering are suppressed in such a move—the move Spicer deeply distrusted. That hegemonic stream joined the faction of those in the academic poetry world who wanted their modern poets in a lineage directly running from romanticism but didn’t want to engage the modernist-antimodernist battle. What Spicer was doing in 1965 was expressing a willingness to cede the entire ground to such readings—an error, as at least some in Spicer’s audience already understood, but one credentialed and well reasoned on the quasi-anarchic poetic left. By 1998, when Peter Gizzi transcribed, edited, and annotated Spicer’s Vancouver lectures and expressed his total admiration for the Spicerian project, half the Stevens ground had been taken back. That by then the field had opened is indi-cated in many ways; one is surely that Gizzi, an energetic advocate of the Stevensean mode as befitting rather than blocking experimental poetics, could accommodate Spicer’s Vancouver advocacy into his aesthetic world

27. I have transcribed these comments directly from the PennSound recording of the June 15, 1965, lecture in Vancouver: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html. Gizzi’s edition is: Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).


without fear of contradiction (or, for that matter, of academic co-optation or, on the contrary, of exile from the avant-garde company). Gizzi is one of our most important contemporary Stevensean poets, yet he is adamantly nonideological about it. Periplum and other Poems gathers early work from 1987 to 1992, and Stevens is everywhere, although in the background. Epigraphs from Emily Dickinson, Spicer, James Schuyler, George Oppen, Ashbery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Keith Waldrop assert the preferred literary company and don’t so much suppress the presence of Stevens as express a remnant of outmoded embarrass-ment (Stevens and Dickinson? Stevens and oppen?) and a debt more per-vasive than dedications can allow. The great sequence “Music for Films,” written in Provincetown in August 1990, looks and sometimes reads like the Oppen of Discrete Series but is more interestingly Gizzi’s attempt at his own “Variations on a Summer Day” (1940), floating, chartless, using weather as device for directionlessness and (momentary) lack of poetic ambition. Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) is Gizzi’s most Stevensean volume. Again the landscape-and-weather trope provides a means of laconic improvisation, a going which way the wind blows, a sub-ject as a cloud, “imitation[s] of life” that can use terrestrial being as an excuse for impersonality and dislocation. Gizzi here is in Stevens’s floating middle period: “Landscape with Boat,” “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” “The Search for Sound Free from Motion,” “Forces, the Will & the Weather,” “Debris of Life & Mind,” even the dour “Yellow Afternoon.” The ironic word-level sonority of “A History of the Lyric” has Harmonium in it, however:

There are beetles and boojumSpecimen jars decorated

With walkingsticks, water stridersAnd luna moths

A treatise on rotating spheres.��

Gizzi’s whole project might be captured in that phrase: “a treatise on rotat-ing spheres”—what Jordan Davis calls a “shorthand sublimity”�� at the level of the line combined with a knowing engagement with the pathetic

28. Peter Gizzi, “A History of the Lyric,” in Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 4.29. See the book jacket of Some Values of Landscape and Weather.


fallacy for the purpose of pushing the human to the top of abstraction and thus away from sentiment. Artificial Heart (1998) is the book in which Gizzi came into his own poetically. Here the pronominal address is often generalized; it points to the poet (even in the first-person plural “we”), an unidentified she—as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” a muse or paramour a bit damaged over time but still ready for verse, a version of the subject: “She sang unwrapping her bandages.” Articles refer to general impersonal states of being (“the body remembers joy”; “The day static with stuck weeds”�0), and a communal, funereally functioning “they” who arrive at the end of poems—Ashberyian in this sense—to bring stories that were not told in this poem but might have been told had we not done our work of telling about something else. Gizzi’s “Will Call” ends:

It was an average dayAn arrangement of place. A state of reportor a state of grace. For centuries weeds have hidden it.Now autumn. Silence is what we make

of eyes, trees and growing vine. It pierces.And these are the stories they will bring in boxes.��

The ut pictura poesis of “Utopia Parkway,” dedicated to New York School–affiliated poet-painter Trevor Winkfield, is written out of Stevens’s poems about paintings (especially in Parts of a World ) and the 1951 MoMA talk, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” which in its turn had influ-enced O’Hara, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Schuyler from the start. There isn’t much doubt that Stevens’s survival through the New American Poetry is owing largely to Ashbery, whose very earliest verse at Harvard could be said—only now that we can look back on it, for it would have been invisible to caretakers of the Stevens aesthetic then—to be the purest early postmodern legacy of this poet. We know that Ashbery’s college friend O’Hara learned his Stevens directly from F. O. Matthiessen in the classroom; O’Hara wrote a thesis for Matthiessen on “Chocorua to Its Neighbor.”�� Such a choice, in an era when the Stevens taught, if he was taught at all, was “Sunday Morning”—standard lyric, post-Christian

30. Peter Gizzi, “From a Field Glass,” in Artificial Heart (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck Press, 1998), 45.31. Gizzi, “Will Call,” in Artificial Heart, 53.32. Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 14.


“modernism,” but really just modernist sensibility smoothed into a Keatsian line—must have struck O’Hara’s other lit teachers as odd, willfully obscure, and “contemporary”: late, seriatic, post-Romantic, implicated in inexpli-cable ways with the pragmatic (northern New England) end of the Emerso-nian and Thoreauvian transcendental ethos. Ashbery’s Stevens at Harvard more likely was absorbed through the remnant of the Advocate-affiliated salon-style (and implicitly gay) evenings of talk with donnish descendants of Santayana, the crypto-Catholic milieu Stevens himself at Harvard drank in and which helped produce his over-the-top florid, Comedian as the Let-ter C style, in which words like green and blue seem to be mere on-the-grid symbols of the fertile imagination whose avatar is the modernist ephebe the young Ashbery doubtless wanted to be when he wrote poems such as “Some Trees.” Ashbery fifty years later returned to his and Stevens’s alma mater to accept, modestly, the Charles Eliot Norton Chair (the same that Stevens had turned down, having summoned even more embarrass-ment and irritation at the invitation than Ashbery��). What Ashbery said in a series of lectures there, published as other Traditions (2000), provides a map back from the New York School to Stevens, even though Stevens is not the subject of any of the lectures. Ashbery was intent on saying nothing that was obvious about his forebears and favorites, but his polite insistence that a nature poet could be modernistic (in describing everything—John Clare), that there were surrealists we’ve forgotten (David Schubert, whom Ashbery learned to admire because Stevens did), that early modernism needed to be rethought (Laura Riding), that Harvard and radicalism on one hand and modernism on the other did sometimes converge (in John Wheel-wright), has helped to rewrite the story of the development of Ashbery’s life-long rueful adieu to experience, now so famous as to have become ahistori-cal. Recent books such as Your Name Here (2000) have made Stevens’s importance to Ashbery’s language more profound than ever. After reading all the poems in such a book, one has the impression that this is where Stevensean modernism was heading all along: an occasional poem that never arrives at its occasion; conventional wisdom, rendered in idiomatic speech, which thus becomes new; the search for a supreme fiction in the way we live our days, as a parable of reality in addition to being meaning-ful in itself; objects, names, titles, sexy bric-a-brac, unimportant except as words and memories of old words now out of circulation; the erasure of

33. Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955 (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 300.


all difference between first-, second- and third-person address as (even) between singular and plural and the floating indexical pronoun (the rhetori-cal device polyptoton). If the pure Stevensean verse of “Some Trees”—a perfect imitation of the Stevens love poem, with a slight homosexual inflec-tion—marks the starting point of Stevens in the New York aesthetic a half century earlier, a minor poem like “A Postcard from Pontevedra” in Your Name Here clinches Stevens’s relevance to contemporary postmodern poetics. Two figures, apparently new to each other, meet under some trees, but the location cannot be located except by the measure of how far these two—are they prospective paramours? are they poet and new muse?—mark off the extent of their agreement “with the world”; greater disagreement “with the world” means the poem has moved far afield, but the two have arrived at that not-place together, “arranging by chance to meet.” The trees have a language and tell them just to be there, to touch accidentally, as trees do. “Some Trees” veers from nature poetry, as from love poetry, as accident becomes “accent,” the stresses of the words on the page, the patient syl-lables of lyric lines that otherwise don’t make complete sense, words “put on” as on a canvas with strokes effecting painted-on leaves. “Some Trees” is pure natural artifice, its accents “seem their own defense,” requiring no experimental reality check. The askew hierarchy of love’s actions—first we “touch,” then we “love,” then we “explain”—expresses hope that beyond love, greater even than love, is the performance of speech.�� Written at about the time of Stevens’s “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” this is Ashbery’s first such soliloquy, a poem about a direction in which the poems might move, measured by estrangement “from the world” and a new kind of affection for the disaffected Other: their accidental quality; their commitment to description without place; their lyric elevation of explana-tion (poetics) above lyricism (the poem itself). “Some Trees” is a beautiful Stevensean set-piece, almost didactic as such, yet formative for Ashbery in an era in which he had to contend with and maintain distinction from emer-gent Beat claims of natural writing, spontaneity, digression, and their own very different version of disaffection. Yet, as I’ve suggested, I deem the Stevensean Ashbery of recent years more significant. A poem such as “A Postcard from Pontevedra,” seeming at first to be one of those easy writes, a paratactic toss-off—

34. John Ashbery, “Some Trees,” in The Mooring of Starting out (New York: Ecco Press, 1997), 37.


chatty, demotic, randomly referential (“I was waking up / at the Maison Duck you see”)—ends up embodying the problem of how we can live abstractly, aptly dislocated, yet still be of the world, how one can be a ter-restrial being bearing a social language, leaving a legacy of poems that form what Stevens movingly called a planet on the table. If later genera-tions, “picking up our bones,” will never have known that the body once holding these bones together had made something—a human edifice, the built environment—then these later ones will “speak our speech and never know” that their language is unnatural, that our meaningfulness was made. The poem expressing this “Cries out a literate despair” itself; its status as lyric must console the poet-speaker with having made “A dirty house in a gutted world” that is nonetheless “smeared” with the natural, “the gold of the opulent sun.” That’s Stevens, writing about poetic legacy in the ironi-cally titled “A Postcard from the Volcano,”�� a little verse-message sent to us from an impossible place. It is a poem in which the speaker, despite his instincts to preserve his speech and to make a definite impact, goes along for the ride—permits the wearily observed “literate despair” to become itself the writing. The final opulence, reversing despair, is standard Stevensean modernism: the absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined, a positive emergence at the last moment from the negative out of the realiza-tion that emptiness at least must be conceived as such. “A Postcard from Pontevedra,” an actual, yet for the poet, wholly invented, seaside place—demands of Ashbery’s speaker, living in this postindustrial situation, that he not know where he is situated, that it not matter, that he be deprived of a sense of place. Knowing, rather than not knowing, is generative. The speaker is dislocated, but the questions that develop out of the certainty he does not feel—certainty being an obviously inappropriate stance here—lead us to the most basic earthly song, originary sounds produced in the ultimate open-ended place (the ocean), in verse aswim at the very end of the contemporary imagination:

I was waking up with this humming in my ears—sound of the sea, of a basket of nettles.

It’s O.K. to ride, to not go along. I’m not surewhere Pontevedra is. If I was I’d have to ask myself

so many other questions, ones you nevertaste in the brightness of your day,

35. Stevens, “A Postcard from the Volcano,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 128–29.


though they answer melike the risen sea.��

Where the early Stevensean Ashbery set out a viable poetic program and charmingly asserted his counteraesthetics, the later Stevensean Ashbery is real. His other-worldly line-by-line logic, his antic semisurrealism, is of our world. We know this as we read. Later Ashbery talks of an almost impon-derable contemporary social situation which, when Stevens pondered them in his time—talking and writing about war, the demise of newspapers, what we would today call “sprawl,” the bodily numbness produced by modern office work, the absence of suburban street life, the new political geogra-phy caused by radio, et cetera—induced a myth of disintegration about the great poet whose “personal life,” and even whose essays and other prose statements, stood separate from the lush poetry. Ashbery reminds us that the poem is the life. We didn’t and perhaps still don’t believe in Stevens’s Pascagoula, his Havana, his Tehuantepec, his Oklahoma, or his Tennessee, but Ashbery’s postcard from Pontevedra speaks of reality, notwithstanding (or rather because of) its devotion to the rhetoric of the unreal. John Hollander, a poet who as a critic is keenest about Stevens’s music,�� believes absolutely in the necessary veracity of those places. In the Frostian sense, they are discernible poetic destinations, to be (once) beheld and then excitedly recalled. It’s not okay to ride and not go along. Hollander’s 2003 book, Picture Window, struck reviewers and critics as a renewed case for the mode of Stevens. One critic saw in Picture Window that the poems’ speaker “ponders our habits of perception” in the manner of Stevens and Coleridge.�� A reviewer noted that Stevens and Auden were in these poems, as Hollander “combines a reader-friendly alertness with intellectual sophistication.” Stevens via Hollander “develop[s] an instantly recognizable take on ‘the mind’s / Complicating, fragile reflectiveness.’”�� Clearly (keeping to my rude binarism), Hollander is to the meditative post-1975 Stevens as Ashbery is to the languaged. While Picture Window can and probably should be read on its own terms, the late style of a poet richly and variously reexpressing an important early influence, I’m tempted to

36. John Ashbery, “A Postcard from Pontevedra,” in Your Name Here (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 74.37. John Hollander, “The Sound of the Music of Music and Sound,” in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, ed. Robert Buttel and Frank Doggett (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 235–55.38. Donna Seaman, untitled review, Booklist 99, no. 18 (May 15, 2003): 1633–34.39. Anon., Publishers Weekly 250, no. 20 (May 19, 2003): 67.


read it as a lyric contribution to the literary-political battle over one still unde-cided aspect of modernism’s influence on the contemporary—for poetic but also canonical, theoretical, and institutional reasons, a return to Stevens as if to the point where the young Stevensean entered the field (Hollander’s first book appeared in 1958) just as the New York School and more gener-ally the New American Poets, with their paratactic, anti- and nonnarrative, postlyric, antic or unrestrained, antiformalist, and serial styles, were being summoned and consolidated, minus Hollander to be sure. Picture Window is to my mind the strongest instance, from the meditative/(post)-Romantic side of the Stevens Wars, of the effort to reset the program, to “ponder our habits of perception” again in a 1950s poetic, restoring the moment when the direction after modernism was not yet clear. With a few notable excep-tions, the poems of the 2003 volume could have been written in 1958, and not badly, I might add. Deliberate innocence can be a viable mask. In this narrow sense I believe the remarkable poem “Those Fields” to be a delib-erately innocent rewrite of “Some Trees,” as if to say: this is how Stevens ought to play out in our poems. “Those Fields,” in unrhymed three-stressed quatrains (like “Some Trees”), begins in a field. It is a nature poem with simple pathetic fallacies (“kindly lichens”), until we come upon the phrase “among which . . .” and then the emergence of “someone.” This “someone then / was picking out a path / and heading for . . .”—for what? For a destination somewhere in those fields, an object that the grammar of the lyric withholds from us by qualified language, short enjambed lines, and an accumulation of logically confusing or distancing prepositional phrases. At this point “Some Trees” and “Those Fields” are siblings operating under the sign of Stevens. But in “Those Fields” the lone reflective figure makes meaning not by “picking out a path” through relationships that happen to be right there (in those fields) but by remembrances of elsewhere—by waiting, through qualified Stevensean phrasing, until the romantic revelation predictably arrives. And the peaked recollection during what is otherwise a tranquil scene is come upon at the end:

this quickened moment of the wild recalledfrom early solitude,

here at a late place where, spotted with rocks of fact, regathered fieldsarise in a calm room


in lamplight and its soft shadows that give shape to what the low soundof now has come to mean.�0

This is late Stevens (“A Quiet Normal Life,” “An Old Man Asleep,” “The Plain Sense of Things,” “Large Red Man Reading,” “The Poem That Took the Place of the Mountain”) rendered in a recalled early derivative style by a poet writing a late poem about “early solitude” made meaningful “at a late place.” But whereas in “Some Trees” the two figures (poet and muse? speaker and reader? versions of the subject? two people newly in love?) “[a]re suddenly what the trees try / To tell us we are: / That their merely being there / Means something,” the lone walker through the field in Hollan-der is “heading for what / can no more now be / determined than what tones // of sleep the overcast / sky had contrived to / vary its blank with,” and “all certainty” has “now” been “confined to knowledge / of a remem-bered red” and other colors and recalled images. “Some Trees” is less about a human relationship (it’s not really a love poem) than the very idea of relation: two (or more), including whatever quantity the word some sig-nifies, come to “mean something” in relation, the context created; merely being in relation (to nature or to selves) generates the meaning, thus acci-dentally in the case of poems whose words are themselves “arrang[ing] by chance to meet” in the poem’s language. The accents of the poem are their own defense. This is Ashbery’s post-Stevens Defense of Poetry, while Hollander’s “Those Fields” is a personal assertion of belatedness. Despite its insistence on “now,” it has set its direction toward “what / can no more now be / determined.” If Hollander returns to the poet’s house and room in order to reassess the lyric’s lineage up through the present speaker, then it’s a poem about poetry in that narrow sense. Susan Howe, in 118 Westerly Terrace, dwells upon the same room with an entirely different result. The room is the source of New World facticity, where “predecessors” contemplated bringing a pas-sionately utopian sense of the quotidian.

Face to the window I hadto know what ought to beaccomplished by predecessorsin the same field of labor

40. John Hollander, “Those Fields,” in Picture Window (2003; repr., New York: Knopf, 2005), 6–7.


because beauty is what isWhat is said and what thisit—it in itself insistent is ��

The poet’s predecessors, and thus Howe’s too (she sees herself in a uniquely unrendered American line that runs from Thoreau through Stevens), intone “the tone of an oldest voice.” They inhabit a space where the imagination is housed, a set of facts told in this almost concrete poem about the fact of living. For Howe, Stevens’s obsessive dwelling upon the problem of imagina-tion and reality is a literal dwelling. What happens thus in the house, in which the largest American red man is reading and writing, is that the passage—the key linguistic element of Howe’s historical collage style in Pierce-Arrow, The Non-Conformists’s Memorial, and elsewhere—becomes a space through which one must physically pass, on the way from sleeping to waking, bed-room to desk, imagination to reality, dawn to day. Through the literalization of the passage, Stevens’s singular dedication to the life of the imagination can be grounded in New World utopianism, each word reinvested with a spirit we thought we had lost when, from “Sunday Morning” on, Stevens seemed to have declared the end of theology, and his version of post-Christian modern-ism was born in Harmonium’s tremendous influence.

It was the passage I alwaysused at first fall of dusk sothe thought of it hangs likea bright lamp in the realmof spirit where each word isconsent to being or consentto partial being on its own��

Belladonna Press published Howe’s poem separately in 2005, and that was the year Knopf published Hollander’s “Those Fields,” yet how very different are the shadows cast by the domestic Stevensean lamplight. One bathes in the soft calm of a room in which an old personal intensity is rec-ollected. The other portends a “spirit storming in blank walls” (“A Postcard from the Volcano”) with the almost magical energy of which an American language has constituted itself.

41. Howe, 118 Westerly Terrace, 97.42. Howe, 118 Westerly Terrace, 98.

Not Ideas about the Bling but the Bling Itself

Nada Gordon

At the earliest antinomian disaster,On Mars, a prawny guy from outsideSeemed like he had blown his mind.

He knew that he blown it,A dry curd, under a fluorescent light,In the early harsh of mellow.

The sun wore purple underwear,No longer a buttered ganache above dandruff . . .It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast vacuum cleanerOf creepy jaded poetics conferences . . .The sun was wearing purple underwear inside out.



That brawny gay—It wasA chorine whose c preceded the bleach.It was part of the giant lox,

Surrounded by its collar rings,Still barbarous. It was likeA new knowledge of reality shows.

“The Rattle of Statistical Traffic”: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe’s The Midnight

Marjorie Perloff

We lack confidence in our authenticity.—Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers

In citation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify them-selves before language. And conversely, only when they interpene-trate—in citation—is language consummated.—Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”

To quote is to adduce words as facts, as exhibits, documents, to lift them out of context, to isolate them, to make them self-evident.—Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont



“Vagabond Quotations”

Halfway through Susan Howe’s complex book-length poem The Midnight �—a poetic text that embeds varieties of prose as well as treated photographs, reproduced paintings, maps, catalogs, facsimiles of tissue interleaves, and enigmatic captions in what is a tripartite sequence of short highly formalized lyrics—we find an item titled ALB, followed by the image of a postage stamp from EIRE (Ireland), portraying the poet’s maternal great-aunt Louie Bennett. Underneath the stamp, Howe places the follow-ing paragraph:

The first of a series of Irish suffrage societies began in 1908 when Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL). Aunt Louie Bennett’s name was on the subscription list for the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA) in 1909 and 1910; in 1911 she was appointed an honorary secretary. After WWI she was intensely involved in the Irish labor movement and served as General Secre-tary of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU). In 1932 she became the first woman President of the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), a position she held until 1955. She died in 1956. Recently her face appeared on a 32p Irish stamp, and there is a bench dedicated to her memory in Stephen’s Green. (M, 72)

What place does such a dry, factual paragraph have in a text osten-sibly classified as poetry? How do those dates (seven in all), names, and acronyms function in what purports to be imaginative writing? Is the para-graph an encyclopedia entry? Not quite, given its reference to Aunt Louie Bennett (the ALB of the caption), but otherwise it does read like one. Found text, and especially documentary, has always been important to Susan Howe. Her long lyrical montage-essay “Sorting Facts; or, Nine-teen Ways of Looking at [Chris] Marker” (1996) begins with an epigraph from the great Soviet film director Dziga Vertov:

• the FACToRY oF FACTS.• Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with

facts. Propaganda with Facts. Fists made of facts.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. Susan Howe, The Midnight (New York: New Directions, 2003). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as M.

Perloff / Susan Howe’s The Midnight 207

• Hurricanes of facts.• And individual little factlets.• Against film-sorcery.• Against film-mystification. . . . (1926)

Vertov’s and Marker’s lyric-documentary films provide a model for what Howe calls poetry as “factual telepathy”: “I work,” she declares, “in the poetic documentary form.”� A document (from the Latin documentum, lesson, proof, instance, specimen, charter) is defined by the oED (#4, dating from 1727–1751) as “Something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or informa-tion upon any subject, as a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, pic-ture, etc.” But the term documentary was not used until 1926, and then with reference to film; the oxford American Dictionary defines the adjective as follows: “(of a movie, a television or radio program, or photography) using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a fac-tual record or report.” As such, Tyrus Miller reminds us, the documentary has generally been taken as the antithesis of the modernist artwork, with its obliquity, difficulty, and heightened self-consciousness: “Documentary, in contrast, seem[s] to draw its energy and inspiration from the antithetical realm of the everyday, the popular world upon which modernist art and writing had demonstratively turned its back. . . . Honesty, accuracy, and openness to the contingent details of the empirical world were premium values in the documentary aesthetic, and objectively existing ‘reality’ its formal touchstone.”� The fabled “accuracy” of contemporary docudrama and reality TV is, of course, an elaborate simulacrum, the irony being that the easier it becomes to alter photographs or to introduce hidden changes into existing text, the more reassuring may be the presence of an actual date or sur-name. “Constatation of fact,” Ezra Pound called it, and the sense of the real provided by archival documentation stands at the heart of Pound’s

2. Susan Howe, “Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” in Beyond Document, Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 295–343, esp. 297, 300. For Howe’s own etymological definition of documentary, see 299. For the original epigraph, see Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 58.3. Tyrus Miller, “Documentary/Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity in the 1930s,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 2 (April 2002): 225–52, esp. 225–26.


Cantos as of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades. Indeed, in our own information age, the lyric self is increasingly created by a complex process of nego-tiation between private feeling and public evidence. I am not only what my subconscious tells me but a link—an unwitting one, perhaps—in a cultural matrix. Here, names and dates play a central role: the most important event in recent memory, after all, is known by its date—9/11. Consider that bio sketch of Louie Bennett, Susan Howe’s maternal great-aunt. In an earlier section, titled “Pandora,” we read, “The relational space is the thing that’s alive with something from somewhere else” (M, 58). In this case, that something else is an odd inscription: “My great-aunt Louie Bennett has written the following admonition on the flyleaf of her copy of The Irish Song Book with original Irish Airs, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Alfred Percival Graves (1895): ‘To all who read. This book has a value for Louie Bennett that it cannot have for any other human being. Therefore let no other human being keep it in his possession’” (M, 59). This admonition is presented as a caption underneath a reproduction of the fly-leaf itself, inscribed in a large scrawl. But the admonition obviously wasn’t honored: not only did this Irish Song Book pass out of Louie Bennett’s pos-session, but someone marked it up: on the facing page, partly covered by tape, is a stick figure, presumably drawn by a child. Below the illustration we read:

Graves’s collection, part of a larger New Irish Library Series edited by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, holds lullabies, ballads, laments, songs of occupation, dust of political conflict. How can the same volume contain so many different incompatible intrinsic relations? . . . Names are only a map we use for navigating. Disobeying Aunt Louie’s preda-tory withdrawal, or preservative denial, I recently secured the spine of her Irish Song Book with duct tape. Damage control—its cover was broken. So your edict flashes daggers—so what. (M, 59)

Here—and this is characteristic of Howe’s writing—what begins as a matter-of-fact description of an object, in this case a book, quickly turns oblique. “Names,” we are told aphoristically, “are only a map we use for navigating,” and the reference to “damage control” now leads from the literal (duct tape) to the need to place Aunt Louie’s admonition in context:

some anonymous American preschooler has sketched a stick figure in ink on the facing flyleaf—a merry unintegrated familiar—more diagram than imp—from oral tradition—from wilds and mountains—


running sideways—toward the gutter—indifferent as twilight—maybe superior to you—maybe the source of your power�

This is how booklore is disseminated. The anonymous preschooler—evi-dently one of Howe’s own children�—puts his or her own stamp on what is after all a book containing lullabies and songs to be read to children. And the child is now presented as free spirit, running toward the gutter, which is here also the street gutter where “imps” play. The “you” refers to Aunt Louie but also to the poet herself, whose “power” comes from tapping into her Irish family history. Here is the passage below the verso:

Why shouldn’t I? In all transactions of life we have to take a leap. My mother’s close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few survivors remaining in my possession) to be held, loved, carried around, meddled with, abandoned, sometimes muti-lated. They contain dedications, private messages, marginal anno-tations, hints, snapshots, press cuttings, warnings—scissor work. Some volumes have been shared as scripts for family theatricals. When something in the world is cross-identified, it just is. They have made this relation by gathering—airs, reveries, threads, mytholo-gies, nets, oilskins, briars and branches, wishes and needs, intact—into a sort of tent. This is a space children used to play in. The coun-try where they once belonged. A foreign audience will always be foreign. (M, 60)

The Midnight itself is just such an instance of “scissor work.” But how does the poet’s meditation on the dislocated “space children used to play in” relate to the factual entry on Louie Bennett’s contribution to Irish politics, placed under the heading ALB? Is the dignified Secretary of the Irish Women Workers’ Union, depicted on the postage stamp, the same person who declares, with tongue-in-cheek bravado, that no one else may have her Irish song book? How sort out such different aspects of what

4. In The Midnight, the verso with the stick-figure image is reproduced a second time, in reduced size. But in the earlier version of Howe’s poem, the fine-press book called Kid-napped (Dublin, Coracle Press, 2002), which is about half the length of The Midnight and contains primarily its prose portions, there is only one image, but a more striking one—the open book, silhouetted against a black ground on the left, and, on the right, another open book beneath it, with the admonition printed in italics at the right margin (M, 19).5. Susan Howe comments on the passage in her reading at the Kelly Writers’ House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., February 15, 2007, available at http://writing .upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Howe.html.


the poet ruefully calls her “maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance” (M, 66)? And what about Howe’s mother, Mary Manning—Irish actress, dramatist, novelist, critic, friend of fellow Anglo-Irish Protestant Samuel Beckett, wife of Boston Brahmin, Harvard law professor, and biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe—whose death at the age of ninety-four in 1999, the “midnight” of the twentieth-century, was the catalyst for Howe’s book? “A true account of the actual,” Thoreau quipped in a passage Howe likes to cite, “is the rarest poetry.”� How to recast the elegiac memoir—a memoir, in this case, of Howe’s mother as well as of her other maternal relations? This became the challenge, a challenge made difficult by the surplus of information available to readers in the age of the Internet. Tradi-tionally, elegists have assumed the right—indeed the necessity—to make judgments. Yeats, for example, writing his great elegy for Robert Gregory in 1916, could mythologize his not so heroic subject, celebrating Lady Gregory’s son, tragically shot down in World War I, as “Soldier, scholar, horseman,” indeed, “Our Sidney and our perfect man.” W. H. Auden’s 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” makes an eloquent case for Yeats’s bril-liance as a poet despite the necessary recognition of his shortcomings: “You were silly like us. / Your gift survived it all.” Twenty years later, Robert Lowell’s family elegies in Life Studies are distinguished by their pointed, if loving, critique of his once notable Beacon Hill blueblood family.� But today, as the conflicting information found in obituaries testifies, generally acceptable statements about the dead are much harder to make. Increasingly, the information, but not its assessment, is at our fingertips. Search for Louie Bennett on Google, and you find more than ten sites, begin-ning with the following from the Princess Grace (Monaco) Library (EIRE):

Life1870–1956; b. and brought up at Temple Hill, N. Dublin; ed. Dublin, London and Bonn, where she studied singing; became journalist; helped establish the Irishwoman’s Suffrage Federation, 1911, closely involved in 1913 Lock-Out Strike; elected 1st woman President of

6. Jon Thompson, “Interview with Susan Howe,” Free Verse, available at http://english .chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2005/interviews/S_Howe.html, 11 pages, p. 5. The passage in question comes from A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers.7. See Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); see also Marjorie Perloff, “The Consolation Theme in Yeats’s ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,’” Modern Language Quarterly (Fall 1966): 306–22; and Marjorie Perloff, “Robert Lowell’s Winslow Elegies,” in The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 131–60.


Irish Trades Union Conference, and elected to executive of Labour Party, 1927; resisted Labour Party support for Fianna Fáil, also 1927; issued novels incl. Prisoner of His Word (1908), on Thomas Russell; founder Irish Women Workers’ Union; close friend and colleague of Helen Chenevix; latterly resisted proliferation of nuclear energy and advocated establishment of joint council with Northern Ireland to deal with these and other problems; d. 25 Nov, at her home, St. Brigid’s, Killiney. . . .

WorksThe Proving of Priscilla (London: Harper 1902); A Prisoner of His World: A Tale of Real Happenings (Dublin: Maunsel 1908), 240pp.; Prisoner of His Word (Dublin: Maunsel; rep. 1914), 240pp.; Ireland And A People’s Peace: Paper Read by Miss Louie Bennett at a Joint Meeting of the Irishwomen’s International League and the Irish Sec-tion of the Union of Democratic Control, Feb. 27, 1918 (Dublin/Lon-don: Maunsel and Co. 1918), 16pp.

CriticismR. M. Fox, Louis Bennett: Her Life and Times (Dublin: Talbot Press 1958), 123pp. [. . .]; Diane Tolomeo, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers, ed. James F. Kilroy (MLA 1983), [q.p.]; Margaret Ward, ‘Nationalism, Pacificism, Internationalism: Louie Bennett, Hanna-Sheehy Skeffington and the Problems of “Defining Feminism”’, in Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Massachu-setts UP 1997) [q.p.]; Rosemary Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett [Radi-cal Irish Lives Ser.] (Cork UP 2001). See also Christina Murphy, The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twenti-eth Century (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1987).

Bibliographical detailsR. M. Fox, Louis Bennett: Her Life and Times (Dublin: Talbot Press 1958), 123pp., ded. to Helen Chenevix; CONTENTS, Author’s Note [7]; Early Years [9]; Keynote [19]; Going Forward [33]; Suffrage, Peace—and Connolly [40]; Baptism of Fire [52]; Shouldering the Burden [64]; Impact of War [74]; Peace Offensive [83]; Leadership [96]; Work and Vision [113]�

8. See Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco), available at http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/b/Bennett,Louie/life.htm.


Howe’s own “factual” account represents literally a fraction of the above. It refers neither to Louie Bennett’s youthful singing lessons in Germany, nor to her novel, enticingly called A Prisoner of His Word, or to Aunt Louie’s mysterious relationship with Helen Chevenix. My curiosity piqued, I quickly glanced at the other Bennett items and learned (from Rosemary Fox’s 1958 biography, a Google book) that Louie Bennett was evidently a member of an important lesbian circle of suffragettes and Irish nationalists. I also dis-covered that Louie Bennett was an acquaintance of the Countess Con-stance [Gore-Booth] Markiewicz, the “political prisoner” of Yeats’s poem by that name (“On a Political Prisoner”) and one of the key figures of “ter-rible beauty” in “Easter 1916”; together with her sister, the Countess was also the subject of one of Yeats’s great elegies, “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz.” Lissadell, the Gore-Booth home, was one of the great country houses of the Sligo region, mythologized a number of times by the poet as an emblem of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Indeed, to start with the Bennett thread in The Midnight and to pro-ceed along the route made possible by the EIRE entry above is to come first to the “woman question,” so important to Yeats, who castigated those of his female friends, beginning with Maud Gonne, whose voices had grown “shrill” from what he took to be their “unwomanly” absorption in politics and public life, and then to the role of Yeats’s poetry in the life of Mary Manning Howe and her children. Just as Pound’s Cantos catapult the reader into the world of Malatesta, Cavalcanti, Confucius, Eleusis, the Church of San Zeno in Verona, or the Sienese bank Monte de Paschi, so Howe’s docu-mentary “evidence,” juxtaposed to her lyric and visual images, takes us into the complex world of the Anglo-Irish middle class in the period entre deux guerres. Indeed, as in the case of “Possum” (Eliot) or Fordie (Ford Madox Ford) in The Cantos, a given reference in The Midnight points both outside the text to the countless memoirs, biographies, and gossip about this or that Irish writer, actor, or relative who had anything to do with the poet’s maternal background, and inside its covers to the diverse and contradictory clues that are woven together to create the book’s “factual telepathy”—its layered double portrait of mother and daughter, Mary Manning and Susan Howe. In the poet’s own words, “The relational space is the thing that’s alive with something from somewhere else” (M, 58).


Four Ducks on a Pond

The Midnight opens with a photographed title page of The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale by Robert Louis Stevenson, covered by a tissue interleaf—or more accurately, the reproduction of one.� On the page that follows, we read:

There was a time when bookbinders placed a tissue interleaf between frontispiece and title page in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together. Although a sign is understood to be consubstantial with the thing or being it represents, word and pic-ture are essentially rivals. The transitional space between image and scripture is often a zone of contention. Here we must separate. Even printers and binders drift apart. Tissue paper for wrapping or folding can be used for tracing. Mist-like transience. Listen, quick rustling. If a piece of sentence left unfinished can act as witness to a question proposed by a suspected ending, the other side is what will happen. Stage snow. Pantomime. “Give me a sheet.

Characteristically, Howe’s prose shifts seamlessly from documentation (the first sentence) to a statement of poetics (on the rivalry of word and image), to the insertion of personal expression—“Here we must separate”—that may well refer to a very different “separation” from that of word and image or page and interleaf. The paragraph obliquely introduces the central con-cerns of The Midnight: the contradiction between image and verbal cap-tion, the transparency of tissue paper as analogue for the “bed hang-ings” and curtains to come—the “spectral scrap” that divides one thing from another or provides it with cover, a punning “stage snow” (“show”) or “pantomime.” Dividing lines, margins, borders: the role of these and their various crossings in Howe’s poetry has frequently been discussed. Stephen Collis, for example, comments on “Bed Hangings I,” the opening section of The Midnight :

Beginning with the discovery of a copy of Bed Hangings: A Trea-tise on Fabrics and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650–1850 in the gift shop of Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum, Howe proceeds to explore the relationship between the history of ‘opus scissum,’ the ‘cutwork’ that was ‘Queen Elizabeth’s favorite form of lace’ and

9. In the expensively produced Kidnapped, there is a real tissue interleaf.


the literary “cutwork” of the poet-assembler who “cut[s] these two extracts from The Muses ELIZIUM by Michael Drayton. Text and tex-tile rub against each other in typically paratactic proximity: ‘versifi-cation a counterpane,’ ‘a cot cover, an ode, a couplet, a line,’ in the mention of those who ‘Could wave and read at once,’ . . .�0

The resulting assemblage alludes to many literary and historic figures familiar to readers of Thorow, Pierce Arrow, and Frame Structures, from Jonathan Edwards to Charles Sanders Peirce and Emily Dickinson. “Bed Hangings” itself, as Susan Bee’s parodically “genteel” images suggest,�� remains dedicated to Howe’s New England roots. But the prose sections of The Midnight, as well as the final lyric sequence “Kidnapped,” turns from the world of the American father, the Harvard jurist-professor Mark DeWolfe Howe, to the “matter of Ireland”—the “Ireland” transmitted to Anglo-Irish children in the wake of World War II. But why the opening spotlight on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae? The popular Scottish novelist of the late nineteenth century would seem, at first thought, to be a writer quite alien to Susan Howe. Those popular late-nineteenth-century boys’ adventure stories—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae—even the classic tale of the split per-sonality Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—hardly seem the stuff of Howe’s aurally and visually charged imagination. Yet The Midnight not only begins with the Stevenson title page; it concludes with a section called “Kidnapped.” And throughout its pages, there are references to Uncle John’s (Manning) marked-up copy of Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae, with special reference to the year 1745, the year of the last Jacobite rebellion, which ended all hope for the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy (see M, 73). At least five of The Midnight ’s illustrations, moreover, present drawings and engravings of dramatic Stevenson episodes, these complemented by the cropped post-card facsimile of Girolamo Nerli’s well-known portrait of the novelist:

10. Stephen Collis, “Drawing the Curtain on The Midnight,” Jacket 25 (February 2004), available at http://jacketmagazine.com/25/collis-s-howe.html. See also Collis’s Through Words of others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (Victoria, Canada: English Lit-erary Studies Editions, 2006). Bed Hangings was originally a separate book, with pictures by Susan Bee (New York: Granary Books, 2001). It encompassed what was to become “Bed Hangings I.”11. According to the Granary catalog, http://www.granarybooks.com, “This series of poems explores the themes of colonial America and its decorative arts, religion and Puri-tanism through a visual and verbal investigation of the metaphysics of beds, curtains, and hangings. The poems and pictures play off each other in a humorous, mystical and occasionally mischievous manner.”


What if what we actually see is mistakenly dubbed appearance? Uncle John has pasted a postcard with a reproduction of Count Giro-lamo Nerli’s half-length portrait of the author, seated in a slouching or lounging posture, just inside the front cover of Ballantrae. Nerli visited the Stevensons during 1892, at Vailima, their newly built wooden two-story house (“an Irish castle of 1820 minus the dirt”—Anonymous) in Samoa. (M, 56)

The Nerli portrait is juxtaposed to another fragment Uncle John Manning pasted inside the cover of Ballantrae—the photograph of a naval officer in full uniform, his back turned to what looks like an explosion. No doubt the two pictures represent the contrast between Manning’s prosaic life as a civil engineer, working for the Electricity Supply Board, and his literary, more exotic aspirations. Uncle John’s last years in a meager managed-care facility called New Lodge on Morehampton Road in Dublin (M, 54) prefigure the fate of his sister Mary Manning. On the last page (verso) of “Square Quotes II,” facing the recto photograph of little Mary (aged seven) with her jump rope and ribbons in her hair, we read the following biographi-cal account:

I have one of the last photographs taken of Mary Manning Howe Adams pinned to the wall over my desk. She is sitting on her La-Z-Boy chair with an old lap robe woven in Connemara, in her two-room apartment at The Cambridge Homes near Harvard Square on Mount Auburn Street. She appears to be astonished, slightly submissive but sweetly welcoming nevertheless. I can tell she is acting for the camera. The Cambridge Home is “an assisted living residence that fosters independence, camaraderie, and well-being.” They still send us promotional literature although she has been dead since 1999. Their most recent annual development report is titled “Growing Older in Community: Mastering the Challenges of Aging.” When she was a resident she had a blunter way of putting it: “We’re already in the coffin, Dear—but the lid isn’t closed yet.” (M, 146)

The photograph described so carefully here is pointedly not among Howe’s illustrations for The Midnight ; a picture, in this instance, would limit the suggestibility of the poet’s ekphrasis. Howe’s account provides a number of “hard facts”—the “La-Z-Boy” chair, Connemara “lap robe,” and “two-room apartment” on Mount Auburn Street. But note that, with the possible excep-tion of the chair, these facts are not deducible from the picture at all: the viewer cannot know where the lap robe in question was made, much less


where the room where Mary sits is found. Fact, even hard fact, is always subject to elaboration or interpretation. Then, too, the sharp old lady’s bon mot about the coffin (however accurate or not) is framed by the narrator’s somewhat catty remark that “I can tell she is acting for the camera”—a remark that undercuts the image of Mary’s “slightly submissive but sweetly welcoming” appearance. But of course Mary Manning was, first and fore-most, an actress, so why wouldn’t she be acting here? Or is her daughter imposing her own ironic judgment on the photo? Both Mary and John Manning, as presented in The Midnight, are drawn to Robert Louis Stevenson by their own self-exile; both can relate to his dépaysement: the chronicler of his native Scotland who had to seek warm climates for his health, settling finally in his “Irish castle minus the dirt” in Samoa, where exotic foreign dialects became his passion:

Accent is the link that connects syllables together and forms them into a note or a tone of voice. In his recently completed novella The Beach of Falesà R L S had hoped to picture the modern world of the Pacific—phonetically. “You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale, than if you had read a library.” . . . There is always the exotic question; and everything, the life, the place, the dialects—traders’ talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary expression . . . (M, 57)

To picture the world phonetically: this would become Howe’s own pursuit. But the deeper link to Stevenson—the hidden figure beneath the “filmy fab-ric” of the tissue paper flyleaf—is the familiar—perhaps too familiar—poetry book every middle-class English-speaking child owned until at least the mid-twentieth century, Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Neglected for decades as naïve, simple, and singsongy, erased from all the university anthologies (Norton, Oxford), this popular collection of children’s poems is surely due for reassessment:

When I was down beside the seaA wooden spade they gave to meTo dig the sandy shore.My holes were empty like a cup,In every hole the sea came up,Till it could come no more.��

12. Robert Louis Stevenson, “At the Seaside,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (London: Longman’s, 1885), 5. This is available as a Google book.


Stevenson’s ballad stanza (aabccb), with its alternate tetrameter and tri-meter lines, suspends its meaning till the last word: no more sea because there is no longer a hole to receive it: the rhyme “cup”/“up” says it all. It is the same sense of loss we find in Mary Manning’s “favorite of all poems,” William Allingham’s “Four Ducks on a Pond”:

Four ducks on a pond,A grass-bank beyond,A blue sky of springWhite clouds on the wing:What a little thingTo remember for years—To remember with tears. (M, 79)

“Four Ducks on a Pond” was Howe’s original title for The Midnight. Per-haps, the poet suggests, this late Victorian Anglo-Irish poem reminded Mary Manning “of the beautiful landscape around Dublin in comparison to the hideous (or so she felt) landscape in the Cambridge/Boston area. I always wondered that something so simple could be so loaded with emo-tion for her, but I suppose it represented the essence of nostalgia for her lost youth in another country and to this day it keeps playing in my head any time I sit in a park looking at ducks. Aunt Louie’s garden in Killiney (where we stayed the summer of 47) was to me the most beautiful place I had ever experienced. Just up the road from the sea, past a druid circle in a dark grove of trees.”�� Gardens, groves, druid circles: the “white clouds on the wing” of Allingham’s little poem may well refer to swans, and one remembers that Yeats’s “wild swans at Coole” were also counted—there were “nine-and-fifty.” “Analogies,” as Howe remarks after quoting “Four Ducks on a Pond,” “pass like lightning” (M, 80). Indeed, the poem “served as an audible sym-bol of desire and remorse. . . . Allingham’s unreal reality points to the cold mystery of windows lit in strange houses as opposed to your own house when you are outside looking in” (M, 80). This conclusion is odd, given that there are no windows mentioned in “Four Ducks on a Pond.” But Howe has provided the missing link most ingeniously, pasting into the paragraph just cited an image of a double-page spread, with the final page of Yeats’s romantic play Baile and Aillin on the left, and the title page of his 1904 volume In the Seven Woods on the

13. Susan Howe, email message to author, July 14, 2008, emphasis added.


right, the two nearly hidden by Mary Manning’s own tipped-in bookmarks. The “Seven Woods” was Lady Gregory’s estate, of which Coole Park was a part; the opening line of Yeats’s “Coole and Ballylee, 1931” is “Under my window-ledge the waters race,” and the beautiful “ancestral house” Lissa-dell is characterized by its “Great windows opening to the south.”�� In “writ-ing through” her mother’s copy of Yeats’s Later Poems (see M, 177n), Howe thus juxtaposes Mary Manning’s acting career at the Abbey, where Baile and Aillin was performed, as well as her love of the Irish balladry repre-sented by “Four Ducks,” to a poetry more sophisticated than Stevenson’s or Allingham’s but partaking of the same Irish sources—namely the poetry of Yeats:��

Maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is because my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even before I could read, “Down by the Salley Gardens” was a lullaby, and a framed broadside “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” printed at the Cuala Press hung over my bed. I hope her homesickness, leaving Dublin for Boston in 1935, then moving on to Buffalo where we lived between 1938 and 1941, then back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung Jack’s illustrations and prints on the wall of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were win-dows. Broadsides were an escape route. Points of departure. They marked another sequestered ‘self’ where she would go home to her thought. She clung to William’s words by speaking them aloud. So there were always three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory. Waves of sound connected us by associational syllabic magic to an original but imaginary place existing somewhere across the ocean between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. I loved listening to her voice. I felt my own vocabulary as something hope-lessly mixed and at the same time hardened into glass. (M, 74–75)

Here again, Howe produces a “paragraph” (prose poem?) that moves from flat statement (“my mother brought me up on Yeats”), to the documentary

14. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, rev. and ed. Richard J. Fin-neran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 233, 243. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Poems.15. In Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1934), 103–4, Yeats declares, “Allingham had the making of a great writer in him, but lacked impulse and momentum, the very things national feeling could have supplied.”


assurance of place names and dates, to lyric fantasy. The broadsides as windows look ahead to those windows of mysterious houses, mentioned in connection with “Four Ducks on a Pond.” The “waves of sound” connect not only to Mary Manning’s past and future but to the worlds of mother and daughter: the “three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory” are the dimensions of The Midnight itself. This passage, then, dramatizes more fully than could any summa-rizing statement or recounting of childhood incident the bond between mother and daughter. Yeats’s Later Poems, inscribed by six Irish actresses who were Mary’s friends (see M, 75), contains four narrow brown-paper markers with the faded titles of Yeats poems, “Sometimes I arrange the four snippets as if they were a hand of cards, or inexpressible love liable to moods. I like to let them touch down randomly as if I were casting dice or reading tea leaves. ‘The Collar-bone of a Hare’ has just fallen on ‘The Cap and Bells.’ She loved to embroider facts” (M, 76). Here two aesthetics diverge. For the actress Mary Manning, “poetry” is the verbal magic that takes us to the realm of the imaginary. For Susan Howe, such “magic”—lovely but not quite grounded, as in Stevenson or Allingham—must give way to the knottier, tenser language that is Yeats’s. Whereas Mary Manning “loved to embroider facts,” her daughter, following Yeats’s example, learned to cast off the Romantic “Coat,” “Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies” (Poems, 127). Indeed, Yeats’s locu-tions now become grist for Howe’s own “articulations of sound form in time,” her very particular language games. Thus,

Now “The Folly of Being Comforted” tip-in has fallen so it covers “The Heart of Woman” in such a way I can only see O N T rest; He An

O T m;

s, h. (M, 78)

Here is Howe’s source poem, “The Heart of a Woman”:

O what to me the little roomThat was brimmed up with prayer and rest;


He bade me out into the gloom,And my breast lies upon his breast.

O what to me my mother’s care,The house where I was safe and warm;The shadowy blossom of my hairWill hide us from the bitter storm.

O hiding hair and dewy eyes,I am no more with life and death,My heart upon his warm heart lies,My breath is mixed into his breath. (Poems, 60–61)

This is Yeats at his most fin de siècle: in Autobiographies, he disavows the “overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement.” “I deliberately reshaped my style,” he recalls, “deliberately sought out an impression as of cold light and tumbling clouds.” “The Folly of Being Comforted” (Poems, 78)�� was one of the first poems to exhibit what Yeats referred to repeatedly as “an emotion I described to myself as cold.”�� How appropriate, then, that the “Folly” bookmark should fall on “The Heart of Woman”? Howe’s “writing through” retains only a skeleton of let-ters, rather in the vein of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poems—a key influ-ence on Howe’s poems of the 1970s.�� Like Finlay’s “Homage to Malevich,” whose print block “Black Square” arrangement of words and letters Howe discussed in an early essay,�� her version of Yeats’s “Folly” creates com-plex lettristic play. The “O” is the first letter of line 1, but the “N,” not quite in line with “O,” is the last letter of the capitalized title. “O” is the first letter of both poems, and here it anagrammatically gives us “ON” or the first two letters of Yeats’s first word, “One.” Then, reading down, we have “The,” and “An.” with the suggestion of “An OT[her]”—appropriate because for both speakers, there can be no other. And the skeletal poem concludes with a “sh” for silence but also, perhaps, for Susan Howe.

16. The fourteen-line poem begins, “One that is ever kind said yesterday: / ‘Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey, . . .” and concludes “O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head, / You’d know the folly of being comforted.”17. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 74.18. For an excellent discussion of Howe’s early visual poetry, vis-à-vis such poets as Ian Hamilton Finlay and the artist Ad Reinhardt, see Kaplan Page Harris, “Susan Howe’s Art and Poetry, 1968–1974,” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 440–71.19. See Susan Howe, “The End of Art,” Stereo Headphones 8, no. 9–10 (1982): 40–43. Finlay’s “Homage to Malevich” is reproduced on p. 43.


Self-Portrait in a Citational Mirror

Howe’s “writing-through” of “The Folly of Being Comforted” implies that, however “cold” the emotion of Yeats’s 1903 poem, a century later, its rhetoric inevitably demands revision: love poetry can no longer be so direct and passionate. Then, too, the poet’s erasure prepares us for the elaborate verbal play and fragmentation of the lyrics in “Kidnapped” that follow. For example:

Book I am sorry fairCovering have fallenSilent O Moyle fairmaiden by cloudlightBook I am sorry yetsay we recollect itin Tenant (M, 165)

What links the “prose” of The Midnight to the “Kidnapped” lyrics is the marked citationality of the latter. In this particular poem, for example, Howe pastes in another popular Irish ballad, Thomas Moore’s “Song of Fionnula,” which begins, “Silent, oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water.” Such signature phrases as “fair / maiden” and “by cloudlight” carry on the Irish folk thread. The lyric breaks off in midtitle, Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (the Brontës figure repeatedly in The Midnight), another Romantic favorite that Mary Manning passed on to her children. No doubt, Susan Howe thinks of herself as a “tenant” to those master poets who are here memorialized. “Irish oral history” and “Fisherman seaweed seven”—this latter a reference to Finlay’s “Fisherman’s Cross,” a poem carved on stone, juxta-posing the words Seas and Ease—are brought together in the next poem (M, 166), and on the facing page, Yeats’s poetics are related to the Gate Theatre Company of which Mary Manning was a member:

Reader of poetry this bookcontains all poetry THOORBALLYLEE seven notes forstage representation Maycountryside you reader ofpoetry that I am forgottenLong notes seem necessaryUnworthy players ask forlegend familiar in legendthe arrow king and no king (M, 167)


Here the allusions to the two early Yeats poems “The Arrow” and “King and No King,” as well as to the poet’s celebrated tower Thoor Ballylee, are seen in the context of Mary Manning’s “seven notes for / stage representation” as well as the “May / countryside”: May, one suspects, refers not only to the season but to May Beckett, the mother of Mary’s great friend Sam Beckett, who, during their idyll in the summer of 1936, worked closely with Mary in the theater. Yet The Midnight is hardly an Irish nostalgia trip, containing sweet memories of “Four Ducks in a Pond,” Thomas Moore balladry, or even Thoor Ballylee. “Unworthy players,” we read in line 8 above, “ask for legend.” Worthy ones, presumably, demand a certain “constatation of fact.” Early on in The Midnight, we find the following passage about Mary Manning:

In May 1944 the actor and director Micheál Mac Liammóir pub-lished an excerpt from his unpublished memoirs called “Some Tal-ented Women” in Sean O’Faoláin’s magazine The Bell. It included a description of my mother: Rehearsals were in progress for a new play, “Youth’s the Sea-son” by a new authoress—a Dublin girl called Mary Manning whose brain, nimble and observant as I was, could not yet keep pace with a tongue so caustic that even her native city . . . was a little in awe of her, and one all but looked for a feathered heel under her crisp and spirited skirts. ‘Did you hear what Mary Manning said about so-and-so?’ was a favorite phrase; and her handsome, rather promi-nent eyes, deeply blue, and dangerously smiling, danced all over the room in search of prey. Copy was what she probably called it, but one knew that by the time it appeared in a play or newspaper column as a delicately barbed anecdote, it would be very well-worn copy indeed; much more like badly mauled prey than copy. Like many pullers from pedestals Mary Had a Heart and as Mr. Henry Wood might have said, that was not only “in the right place”; but in perfect working order. An impulsive sympathy was fun-damental in her nature; what people called her cattery was simply a medium through which she expressed her social ego. Her ruling passion was ambition. She worshipped success. It was the most natural reaction of a temperament set in the major key against the country in which she had lived all her life and where everything had failed; and it was inevitable that she should later have married an American and gone to live in Boston. (M, 49–51)


Why would Howe cite this particularly unflattering, indeed cruel, assess-ment of her mother in her own memoir? How do we reconcile Mac Liam-móir’s portrait of the malicious girl, whose “ruling passion was ambition” and who “worshipped success,” with the warm, imaginative Mary Manning who tirelessly conveyed her love of poetry to her daughter? The plot thickens. In “Scare Quotes II,” Howe presents what appears to be an extract from an impersonal biographical sketch, beginning with the sentence, “Born Alfred Willmore in 1890, Micheál Mac Liammóir started life in Kensal Green, London” (M, 118). Simple documentation, these facts immediately call Mac Liammóir’s own account into question: the Abbey Theatre insider, it seems, was no Irishman at all but an impostor of sorts from lower-class London. And further: Howe’s own version of Mac Liam-móir’s career mentions neither the plays he wrote for the Abbey nor his later one-man show about Wilde, The Importance of Being oscar ; rather, her biographical sketch recounts such petty details as his “earliest stage appearance in The Goldfish (1911), written and produced by Miss Lila Field, with music composed by a person whose name appears on the program as Mr. Eyre O’Naut,” with its play on Eire, naught, and aeronaut (M, 118). We next learn that Mac Liammóir, a.k.a. Willmore, “doubled as Macduff’s son and the Second Apparition of a Bleeding Child (for no additional fee) in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Macbeth” (M, 118). Hardly the stuff of star biography! And the seemingly informational account concludes with an anecdote about Mac Liammóir’s meeting with Sarah Bernhardt, whose “undescribable brilliance and seductiveness” he gushes about even as he wickedly exposes the “the uncanny stillness of the brown lace fringing her wrists” as a fraud, whispering to a fellow actor that the lace was “Gummed to her hands, dear” (M, 118). Given this portrait, is Mac Liammóir’s description of Mary to be taken seriously? Where does gossip end and truth begin? On the facing page (M, 119), Howe takes another stab at characterizing her mother, this time focusing on her “survival tactics during a time of war, revolution, counter-revolution” (M, 119). But it is the two photographs that frame the emigration story that are most telling. The upper one is annotated in the list of illustra-tions at the back of the book as “Photograph of Mary Manning, circa 1913. Caption reads, ‘Watching an aeroplane / Mary Manning’” (M, 177). Nothing in the rather muzzy photograph of a young girl, holding her hat, indicates that she is watching an airplane. But the unseen caption does relate to the photograph at the bottom of the page, which depicts, not as one might expect, Mary as an old lady as compared to Mary the young girl, but rather


the first page of her last address book, composed not long before her death at age ninety-four. A is evidently for Aer Lingus (800-223-6537), and also for Audio-Ears (484-8700); the entry above Aer Lingus, ending 8729, is hidden. Mary, one might say, is still “watching” for planes, no doubt to take her back to her beloved Ireland. Aer Lingus: the name of the Irish airline suggests both song (air) and language (lingus, lingua), whereas Audio-Ears, the name of a well-known hearing aid service, brings the realm of sound into the picture. Then, too, Ears is an anagram of Aer. Song, lan-guage, sound: these are Mary Manning’s domain, at least as her note pad is reconstructed by her daughter. The most ordinary references, the poet suggests, are charged with meaning, if we know how to read them. And even the cross-outs are significant: the first number contains something behind the “6,” and there is what looks like an “8” crossed out after Audio-. It is the shaky error-prone penmanship of an old person.�0 Names, numbers, citations, lists, photographs: such “constatations of fact” constitute what is paradoxically Howe’s ambiguous evidence. Even the lyrics of “Kidnapped” rely on “Winnowing each slip for re- / appearance” (M, 171), the references to the Noh Theatre, once more recalling Yeats, whose “Sailing to Byzantium” is alluded to in the line “Tattered coat our journey out” (M, 171) and who supplies the “memory cradle” (M, 172) for the entire book. Most startlingly, the title The Midnight recalls two major Yeats poems that are never mentioned by name in the book: “Byzantium” and “All Souls’ Night.” Midnight is the hour of sudden illumination, the epiphanic moment, whose emblems, in “Byzantium,” are the “great cathedral gong,” striking the hour, as well as the “starlit or moonlit dome” of Hagia Sophia—a dome that “disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.” Stanza 4 reads:

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flitFlames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,Where blood-begotten spirits comeAnd all complexities of fury leave,Dying into a dance,An agony of trance,An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. (Poems, 248)

20. For an earlier discussion of Howe’s page, see my Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Peda-gogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), xxx–xxxii.


And “All Souls’ Night” begins with the stanza:

Midnight has come and the Great Christ Church bellAnd many a lesser bell sound through the room;And it is All Souls’ Night.And two long glasses brimmed with muscatelBubble upon the table. A ghost may come:For it is a ghost’s right,His element is so fineBeing sharpened by his death,To drink from the wine-breathWhile our gross palates drink from the whole wine. (Poems, 227)

In a nice irony, Susan Howe’s own “All Souls’ Night” takes place not in some mysterious, otherworldly realm but in the Houghton Library at Har-vard, where she, a degree-less would-be scholar, has come to study the manuscripts, under lock and key, of Emily Dickinson. Again, the emphasis is on realistic documentation: the Houghton vestibule, we learn, is “10 feet wide and 5–6 feet deep,” with “plate glass” double doors looming ahead:

Passing through this first vestibule I find myself in an oval recep-tion anti-chamber about 35 feet wide and 20 feet deep under what appears to be a ceiling with a dome at its apex. I think I see sun-light but closer inspection reveals electric light concealed under a slightly dropped form, also oval, illuminating the ceiling above. This first false skylight resembles a human eye and the central oval disc its “pupil.” Maybe ghosts exist as spatiotemporal coordinates, even if they themselves do not occupy space. . . . (M, 120)

This description, at once precise and surreal, recalls the Beckett of The Lost ones or Imagination Dead Imagine: can a scholarly library really be so threatening? The narrative continues in this vein as the poet makes her way through coatroom and gift shop, through the Edison and Newman Rooms, till finally she enters the Reading Room or Houghton Library proper. The library mix-up that follows (the poet’s credentials are called into question because her ID cards bear her married name Susan von Schlegell) is per-ceived, irrationally but graphically, as Susan’s ultimate humiliation: “I feel the acne rosacea on the Irish half of my nose getting worse. I am blushing, defensive, desperate, and this is only the public sector” (M, 122). But then something strange happens. As the waiting reader glances around, she notices the bookcases, bearing engraved titles in gold, arranged


in groups of threes: “One, taller than the rest, has a blood-red leather bind-ing with gold lettering: Presented to Charles I at Little Gidding” (M, 123). In an epiphany, the reference to Nicholas Ferrar’s 1633 book brings to mind Eliot’s “‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot’s fourth Quartet [which] has served me as a beacon for what poetry might achieve.” And so her mind turns, via Emily Dickinson, to the Concordance Room at Little Gidding in England, the Gospels of the Four Evangelists, the design of the leather volumes, and the response to them by King Charles in 1642—a circuit, incidentally, that can clearly include The Master of Ballantrae. Entering the world of the books themselves, the poet begins to rally. But her “ordeal” is not yet over. Finally assigned locker No. 26 and admitted to the Reading Room, the nov-ice meets new obstacles. She doesn’t know how the buzz-in system works, she feels mocked by the inquisitive eyes of the seasoned scholars—and then, to top it all, “The material I requested isn’t there. They whisper among themselves, glance at me now and then, and politely but firmly say they don’t have it. They ask to see the Curator’s letter. I don’t have it” (M, 126). The deflation and despair are palpable. “I have waited weeks for this moment,” remarks the narrator melodramatically. “I think of the disarming of the Antinomians in 1637, coinciding with the founding of Harvard College in Cambridge, a provincial village of mainly British immigrants” (M, 126). However absurd at the literal level, such analogies are the very fabric of Howe’s writing. “In a chiastic universe,” as she puts it, “only relations exist” (M, 127). The narrative is suspended—fragments about Frederick Olmsted intervene—and only two pages later does the Houghton Library motif come back, this time as the subject of an annotated background sketch, perhaps from the Harvard brochure:

The Houghton Library built in 1942 (the year “Little Gidding” was published) is named in honor of Arthur A. Houghton (Harvard ’29), chief executive of Steuben Glassworks at Corning, New York. Under his management, Steuben’s use of independent designers brought out a new discipline to glassmaking. The American National Biogra-phy tells us that Houghton showed he was serious about producing a quality product by smashing every piece of glass (over 20,000 pieces valued at one million dollars) in the Steuben warehouse about one month after he assumed control. “From ash can to museum in half a generation” became the company’s slogan. (M, 130)

These facts could hardly be more deflationary. The august library on the most august campus: is a career of smashing glass really the road to book


collecting and connoisseurship? Yet this Jamesian plutocrat really did col-lect treasures: “Emily Dickinson’s heavily marked copy of Emerson’s Poems is in the Emily Dickinson Room on the second floor in a book-case behind locked glass” (M, 130). And this transferred epithet (it is the bookcase, not the glass, that is locked) is followed by the caption Never-Never Land and a cropped portrait of Nicholas Ferrar. But the final deflation is yet to come in the following notice “To Whom It May Concern” (M, 131):

The books in the Emily Dickinson room have been repeatedly studied and examined with the hope of finding annotations of the handwriting of Emily Dickinson. After years of study, no one has found a single mark that could be positively assigned to her. In the process of this fruitful examination the books have suf-fered, and many of them have been transferred to the repair shelf. In order to avoid more useless wear and the shattering of 19th century publishers’ cloth cases, we have closed the Emily Dickinson Room Library for further examination. Yours Sincerely,Roger E. StoddardCurator of Rare Books

Below this letter, Howe has placed a page from John Manning’s copy of Alice in Wonderland: the sequence “In a Little Bill,” depicting a humiliated giant Alice bursting the seams of her Lilliputian room. Here the found text and illustration measure the absurdity of Howe’s situation more fully than could any direct narrative account. She who knows that the Dickinson fascicles do indeed bear crucial marks revealing the poet’s intent is not permitted to examine them. The regime of power, of “library control” Howe has feared from the outset, has won out—at least temporarily. Documentary, in other words, is, in Susan Howe’s poetic lexicon, both threat and necessity. Roger E. Stoddard’s “To Whom It May Concern” represents the oppressive letter of the law, constraining the poet even as similar documents once challenged her mother and her Aunt Louie. Yet only by adopting the language of the library and the database—the language of facts, dates, historical ledger, map, dictionary, biographical entry, literary quotation—can the contemporary poet create what is paradoxically a new poetic sphere. Howe’s lyric “Bed Hangings,” originally published separately, are themselves tissues of citation, to be covered and yet laid bare by book-marks, paper tip-ins, photographs. In the assemblage that is The Midnight,


everything is at once separate and interwoven. The postage stamp bearing Aunt Louie’s picture is pasted beside Mary Manning’s tipped-in bookmarks, these and so many other scraps of paper and old snapshots defining what Howe wryly calls her “Anglo-Irish disinheritance.” The prose portion of The Midnight concludes on an elegiac note as Howe pays tribute to a facet of that inheritance not usually talked about—namely her own irreducible Irish accent. In British English, either is pronounced “eye-ther,” never “eether” (M, 145). Such laws are not to be violated. But in imperatives begin new possibilities. Either may well be pro-nounced “eye-ther,” but one can transpose the two middle letters of Eire, right above it in the dictionary, and derive Erie, “the most southerly of the Great Lakes” (M, 145), on whose shores in Buffalo Susan spent her early childhood years. From Eire to Erie: it is Mary’s—and also Susan’s—trajectory. “Each phoneme has an indeterminate nanosecond kink, each vowel its evocative vocalic value” (M, 145). At this juncture, prose gives way to the lyric of the coda, which concludes with the “sound twist” of the lines:

Style in one stray sitting Iapproach sometime in plainhandmade rag wove costumeawry what I long for array (M, 173)

When documentary reaches a certain density, it morphs into its opposite—the hyperreal of “factual telepathy.” As in Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, the more “individual little factlets” the text generates, the less the reader knows what they mean. In Howe’s memoir, the allusive is finally the elusive: the handmade array of the stray gone awry.

Lyric Dissent

Elizabeth Willis

Let’s start with the premise that the lyric is inherently social, that sociality is not a quality that can be separated from a category that is, by definition, so thoroughly bound up with the concept of voice. Much has been said about the lyric impulse as a cry of pain, something ineffable, unpre-sentable, maybe even unrepresentable. But the social qualities of the lyric are effaced when conventional readings of voice predictably reveal what they sought all along: the maverick genius, the “strong,” singular, unmedi-ated self. As a result, critical discussions of the lyric have often overlooked renderings of voice that engage—or represent—a more complex or less immediately recognizable set of social structures, relations, or intentions.


An earlier version of this essay was delivered in the context of a panel entitled “The Social Lyric” at the “Dissenting Practices” conference held at Georgetown University in late February 2003, a month before the beginning of the war against Iraq. Organized by Mark McMorris, the conference was a generationally defined follow-up to the 1992 poetry festi-val “Writing from the New Coast.” Participants included Rod Smith, Lisa Jarnot, Myung Mi Kim, Peter Gizzi, Tracie Morris, Juliana Spahr, Jennifer Moxley, and many others.


But these larger questions of collective desires, subjectivities, and address are central to the kinds of contemporary lyric poetry that interest me, espe-cially in the work of our generation. If the lyric’s defining characteristic is the priority of its sonic patterns (rather than, say, its capacity for expres-sionism), then it depends on being heard; it hangs everything on the pres-ence and engagement of its audience. Its articulations are in, with, to, and sometimes for a social context of which the writer is a part. Authorship need not be replaced entirely with readerly invention in order to acknowledge its grounding in collective enterprise. That is, in something literally and figura-tively progressive, evolutionary. Perhaps this is why the working definition of the lyric has been so confounding—and why it is so satisfying to find it represented in the context of dissent in general and dissenting poetic practices in particular. Rather than viewing the lyric’s long tradition as an embodiment of tradition for tra-dition’s sake, we can find within it the repeated reinvention of the present. The drive for generational identity entails a confrontation with the ways pre-vious social formations have engaged in similar struggles, whether in the formulation of dissenting political beliefs or dissenting aesthetic practices. In early 1920s America, when William Carlos Williams wrote that “the rose is obsolete,” he did not present this recognition as a singular subjective experience of disappointment or loss of value but as a trans-formative event of and beyond its moment, a shared event that is experi-enced within—and as—language. The rose may be obsolete as a trope of romance, but it is obsolete in the way that other manufactured things are—and before we know anything about the rose, we have to see it as a made thing, as artifice rather than as a “pure product” of Nature:

The rose is obsoletebut each petal ends inan edge, the double facetcementing the groovedcolumns of air—The edgecuts without cuttingmeets—nothing—renewsitself in metal or porcelain. . . . . . . . . .From the petal’s edge a line startsthat being of steel. . . . . . .

Willis / Lyric Dissent 231

The fragility of the flowerunbruisedpenetrates space.�

Here, in the midst of “Spring and All,” the garden is overtaken by the factory; the factory gone wild into the bedroom; the erotics of production suggestive of an abstract geometry and of a concrete war machine. Even spring is in quotation marks: a seasonal cue, a coiled mechanical force, or just a poet’s cast-off, “obsolete” miscellany. The poem is not a report on spring in New Jersey but a colloquial gesture toward what is so immediately evident it hardly needs to be mentioned, it being spring and all. The canoni-cal literary rose is transformed by big American love, its unattached desire violently reinvented, its symbolic weight relineated as a knife—all edges, metal or porcelain, literally cutting through the poem. What we experience is not a vertiginous descent or a soaring rise but the contrapuntal tension of opposing forces, the experience of resistance. It is “cold and precise”: a patterned dish dashed against unbounded “space,” a word machine that makes copper roses and steel roses. In the postwar stillness—and sup-posed prosperity—of the 1920s, the compressed power of the Old World’s rose explodes into American space like shrapnel. Two decades later Williams rewrites “The Rose” in The Wedge:

The stillness of the rosein time of warreminds me ofthe long sleep just begunof that sparrowhis head pillowed unroughedand unalarmed uponthe polished pavement orof voluptuous hourswith somebreathless book whenstillness was an eternitylong since begun.�

1. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems I: 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 195–96.2. William Carlos Williams, “The Rose,” in Collected Poems II: 1939–1962 (New York: New Directions, 1988), 74–75. The earlier untitled poem beginning “The rose is obsolete” is


Almost a generation after Williams’s “Spring,” even another poem-about-a-rose is also a political poem: a “wedge” cut from language, a simple device thrown into yet another world war’s elaborate, unseen machinery, a stoppage or “stillness” made perspectival, directing our attention to the dark contour between the monumental and the overlooked. Having fallen from its abstracted plane, the rose becomes a sparrow, a token of its own fallenness. As if to contradict the active, almost breathless lineation of the poem, “stillness” moves toward “stillness,” space translated into time through the most common means imaginable: a sparrow, a rose. Not new vorticist roses but the rose stilled by war; not eagle, not lark, not nightingale but the sparrow whose descent unnoticed onto the sidewalk is itself like a book whose primary actions have already occurred and are thus outside the frame of the “breathless” halted present. Such actions and their confes-sional weight, their self-assured notoriety, are beyond the concerns of the poet who stops to consider the detritus of the sidewalk, who places at the center of our minds an “obsolete” trope that is so immediately before us, so close to cliché that it seems almost not to reside in the realm of modern poetry at all. Another decade later, in Journey to Love, that dead sparrow is still decomposing, its poetic problem still being worked out:

Practical to the end, it is the poem of his existencethat triumphed finally; a wisp of feathers. . . . . . . . . . . .an effigy of a sparrow, a dried wafer only, left to sayand it says it without offense, beautifully;This was I, a sparrow.

also titled “The Rose” in Williams’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1985), 44–45.

Willis / Lyric Dissent 233

I did my best;farewell.�

When William Blake wrote that “a tear is an intellectual thing,” I don’t think he imagined a twenty-first-century academy enduringly committed to a con-fessional model of poetic production but something like the kind of human, emotional—I don’t mean sentimental—wager that Williams poses both in ideas and in things. As I reread the moderns in the context of our current political situa-tion, I am struck by the palpable presence of war in so much of their poetry and prose—especially in Williams and Wallace Stevens. While it’s rarely treated head-on, it permeates—or, like the rose in “Spring and All,” “pene-trates”—the “space” of their pages. And it—this ongoing war—persists like a shadow in our own pictures of the work at hand. Stevens wrote that “the imagination and society are inseparable,” that there is “a violence from within that protects us from a violence with-out” and that “the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”� Even a writer who seems to be as aesthetically—rather than overtly politically—driven as Gertrude Stein comments that “each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing.”� So now, even when we are not singing protests, we are “bound to express” the confounding music of our time. In it—by which I mean in our poems—I can hear that some of us are blogging, and some of us are marching. Some of us are organizing, some of us are writing letters to the editor, some of us are assembling events that allow us to see each other again so that we might despair less than we are prone to, and the sound we make is composed of all these things. Some of us are, as Stein put it, talking and listening at the same time, and some of us are looking for a way of breaking into some other form. Some of us are teaching because we believe in the possibilities of a social contract even more than we doubt the viability of academic institu-tions. Some of us are here because these are rooms for talking and listen-ing at the same time, which is a way of understanding and owning up to

3. William Carlos Williams, “The Sparrow (To My Father),” in Journey to Love (New York: Random House, 1955), 10–15.4. Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), 28, 36.5. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), 177.


our desire to be with others in the poems we love, especially when those poems become the vehicles for an understanding of the world beyond the market, and we are afraid that if we do not share our love for these poems they will die from inattention or be burned. Some of us go to work in rooms like this one because we believe that utopia flashes into being through the words of a conversation, that it is unfixed and moving, that this movement is not finished, that a poem is not the end of something, and that who we are is not an improvement over what we call the past in any way that we can know it or own it. In the troubled obsolescence of so much of what we love and what we do, the page is like this room. I love being here with you in the heat of what you know. I would like to hold this moment in my mind as if it were a picture. Gertrude Stein said she learned that to make a portrait you have to ask a question. “How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.”� So I want to ask all of you: how do you like what you have? This is a picture of who we are.

6. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 171.

SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS)

Tan Lin

All works sampled without alteration are indicated in the text with quo-tation marks. Absence of quotation marks indicates paraphrased or slightly reworded material. All pages and their corresponding ideas are approxi-mate. All material in this work has been sampled from other sources. All Rites Reversed. Tiny Basic Formatting Rules apply. A Disclaimer appears at the end of the work.


AAdorno, Theodor, 1Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

The, 7advertising, 59Afghanistan, 5Ahn (daughter),Aibo (Sony), B139Akunin, Boris,algorithm, 5Allman Brothers Band, 32

aluminum siding, 45ambience, 1–229 passimAmbient Devices, 45ambulance, 83Andersen, Hans Christian, 2anecdotes, 14Angie, 9answering machine, 23Appalachia, see also arteriosclero-

sis, 15Appalachian Plateau, unglaciated, 8


Aquavit (restaurant), 9Army Corps of Engineers, 14ASLSP (Cage), 30Athens High School, 49Athens Lake Motel, 52Athens Messenger, 73Athens, Ohio, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 73

Bbackboard (Sears Roebuck), 46Badiou, Alain, on poetry, 78Baker, John Calhoun,barometric pressure, 24beguilement (food), 59Bernard, Daniel, as quoted in

Traub, 13bicycles, see also Eddy Merckxbird bath (ceramic), 15Blimpie (restaurant), 9blog, 33blurb, 66bok choy Cadillac, 13Bordeaux (bottle), 12Brautigan, Richard (Trout Fishing in

America), 1–223 passimBreton, André, 8briansbelly.com, 58bromide, 25Brown Café, 156Buckeye Mart, 201Bull Frog Motorcycle Cocoon, 29Bush, George, 23

CCadillac, 11camping out (backyard), 89Central Park, 41Chicago (music group), 92Chinese cooking in Ohio, 47

Chkhartishvili, Grigory, 117chow (dogs), 201cigarette, 53clay,Clinton, William Jefferson, 23co-eds, 15collecting, 38Columbia Record Club (Hamilton,

Joe Frank & Reynolds), 49Conde Nast Traveller, 24copperhead, 32corduroy, 39crayfish, 15crime novel, 13crying (mother), 23; Mary Ellen, 25;

me (not), 45Cultural Revolution, 62

DD&G (Deleuze and Guattari), 47;

(Dolce & Gabbana), 145diverticulitis, 25dollhouse, 23–24dorm rooms, 15Douglas, Ann,Ducasse, Alain, 70Duchamp, Marcel, 10dying, difficulty of, 38, 39; inaccu-

racy of, 89; repetitiveness of, B123

Eeffectiveness, 45Elf, 22equations, for novel, 8, 18; for

videotape loops, 9Essex House, The, 110

Tan Lin / SOFT INDEX 237

FFacial Recognition Capacity (FCR),

35fairy tale, 12family, 14, see also happiness,

unhappinessfather, unhappiness of, 1–44; obitu-

ary of, 217; death certificate of (photo), 219; pots made by (photo), 222

feed farming, 69feelings, 37Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 8flea market, 69“Flora Gill Jacobs, 87; Dies, 104;

Opened Dollhouse Museum,” 23

fluorescent, 49Fly Fisherman, 13Formica, 35fortune (cookie), 62Fox, Margalit, “Flora Gill Jacobs,”

23Frango Mints,Fuzhou (China), 20

Ggeography (idyllic) and (forgotten),

12; generic, 32–33Gilligan’s Island, 21glaciers (mini), 70golf, 7–8gout, 15graffiti, 5, 26gravel (limestone) (driveway), 65;

see map, 89Greek Corner, B29grocery lists, 54

HHal, the Coyote, 41handicapping system, 53Hansel & Gretel, 135happiness, paradox of, 12; inter-

changeability with unhappiness, 22–25

heart attack, 55, 98–145 passimHGTV, 87historical fiction, 13Hocking River, 162Hopper, Dennis, 58

Iice cap, 41idyll, 13Iraq, 5

JJacobs, Flora Gill, 23–24Japanese carp,Japanese roses, 139Jimi Hendrix, 32

KKennedy, J. F., 180Kentucky, 10kiln, 73kindergarten, 58K-Mart, 152Koolhaas, 139–40Kyoto Protocol, 13

L“La Femme: Could a 52 Year-Old

Mother of Four be the Next President of France” (Traub), 13

Langhorne Slim, 10lawnmower, 7


Lee, Bruce, 42Leno, Jay, 96Liang Sicheng, 101lies, 112–13“Life and Death of Richard Brauti-

gan, The” (L. Wright), 23Lin Huyin (aunt), 93lipstick, B16longitude, B109lottery, 62love (too little), 13, 14; (too much),

50Lucky (magazine), 78

MMadison, WI, 11marble, 10Marshall Fields,Mary Tyler Moore, 152mathematically (speaking), 54maya (illusion), 31Maya (sister), 21McLuhan, Marshall, 59memories (intertia), 70Mercedes Benz 280SE (1978),

203milk-carton bird feeders, 47mini-deck (white), 15“Misses and Hits” (Rob Walker),

58M.I.T., 23Mitchell, Dan (“My Space No

Longer Their Space?”), 9mother, aversion towards nature,

42; love of, 1–34; cruelty towards, 17; at time of father’s death, 100; periods of crying, 7, 15, 36; sub-par cooking and camping, 44–48

motion events, 5Murphy’s Mart, 44

NNadja, 8National Park Relatives, 112nature (mother’s version), 61;

(father’s version), 62Nelsonville Bank, 21New York Times, The, 54New Yorker, The, 220Nike, 15Nolan, Tom, 70Noodles Romanov, 59nostalgia, 41novel, poverty of, 7; ambient vs.

serial, 7, 11, 24; poetry and the new novel, 4, 23; photography and, 3; resemblance to ferns, B97

Oobituary writing (and anticipation),

83; and the novel, 1–222 passimO’Brien, Conan, 61Ohio University, 10Ohmann, Richard (“practices of

objectivity”), 99Oldsmobile Toronado, 90173 Delancey Street, 10opossum, 32Oprah, B7Orton, Beth, 1

PPabst Blue Ribbon Beer, 53parakeet (Ling-ling),parking tickets, 37patio, 29–26, 30–31

Tan Lin / SOFT INDEX 239

PDF, 35persistence, 54photography, poverty of, 7, 37picnic table, 15pileated woodpecker, imagined

rarity of, see chart, 16pizza, 12P.J. (Paul Fraker), 17POD (print on demand), 134politeness, 19polyester, 49Pontiac Firebird (convertible), 47Port Authority (Marin County), 5Post, The (Ohio U), 12potting shed, 21predictability (and pleasure), 50putting green, 61

QQuonset Hut, 23

Rraccoons, see also crayfish, 15redwood bird feeder, 15repetition (non-literary), 70; and

remembering, B91Rheingold (beer), 131Rice-A-Roni (recipe, Chinese ver-

sion), 22, 59R.I.P. (album), 217–18Rose, David, 25Rothko (club), 10“Russian Master of the Whodunnit,

A” (Nolan), 9

SSan Mateo, 10Schaefer (beer), 58Seattle, Washington, 11

self-interviews with author, 4–9, B112–19

seriality (serial novel), as opposed to ambient novel, 57

Shanghai,Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), 79slowness, 77Smith College, 171SMS, 108Spahr, Juliana (This Connection of

Everyone with Lungs), 9Spot (Dalmatian), 101Star Trek, 21Staubach, Roger (and father’s

fondness for), 89Steppenwolf, 45Stiles, Julia, B101stock market, 23superficial (and decorative), 33swim trunks, 66Swiss Fairy Tale Association, 19SX-70, 11

TTaipei National Museum, 27Tay, Steven (M.D.), 22tennis balls, 54text message, 10, 13,3147 Broadway #17 (3 BR where I

lived), 41–42Tian An Men (Tiananmen) Square,

90Times Literary Supplement, 13title, 107TNT, 21Town and Country,tractor, 45traffic reports, 24train schedules, 37


Traub, James (“La Femme”), 13trombone (lessons), 63; abandon-

ment of, 65Trout Fishing in America, 4TV (watching), 4; Darwin and, B97;

geography and, 29; irrelevance of, B27; passivity of, B49; relax-ing and circular nature of, 20; and motels, B56

12 oz., 512x4, 61

Uugliness, 45unhappiness, 45U.S. Corps of Army Engineers, 19U.S. Navy, 93

VVance-Leach, 17varicose veins, 15Vietnam (television), 91Volk, Sussman (inventor), B31

WWalker, Rob (Misses and Hits), 58Wal-Mart,

Warhol, Andy, and Bergdorf Good-man, B33

weather, 23“What Will Happen to Books?”

(Kevin Kelly), 55Wikipedia, 32Wild, Wild West, The, 21Wilkinson lopping shears, 86Wisconsin, Madison, 2witch ditch, 11Wolf, India Lin (niece), 55World Happiness Databank, 22Wright, Lawrence (Life and Death),

23www.YoungLivesUK.com, 22

Xxerox, 117

Y

ZŽižek, Slavoj,

Books Received

Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? And other Essays. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2009.

Armstrong, Philip. Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political. Electronic Mediations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Berry, R.M., ed. Forms at War: FC2 1999–2009. FC2. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala-bama Press, 2009.

Beverley, John, and Sara Castro-Klarén, eds. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Birla, Ritu. Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Boer, Roland. Political Myth: on the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes. New Slant: Religion, Politics, Ontology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Carrier, David. Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art. American University Studies, Series XX, Fine Arts. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009.

Cheah, Pheng, and Suzanne Guerlac, eds. Derrida and the Time of the Political. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Clingman, Stephan. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Codrescu, Andrei. The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess. Public Square Book Series. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Damrosch, David, ed. Teaching World Literature. Options for Teaching. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.

de la Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.


Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. “Notes from Underground” and “The Double.” Trans. Ronald Wilks. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009.

Dunning, Stefanie K. Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Farrell, Stephen, Christian Jara, Matt Lavoy, and Steve Tomasula. ToC. Interactive novel on a CD. FC2. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gooding, Francis. Black Light: Myth and Meaning in Modern Painting. Critical Quar-terly. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Guzik, Keith, and Andrew Pickering, eds. The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming. Science and Cultural Theory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Herbrechter, Stefan, and Ivan Callus, eds. Cy-borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2009.

Herlinghaus, Hermann. Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South. New Concepts in Latino American Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Hill, Christopher L. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States. Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Hoffman, Eva. Apassionata. New York: Other Press, 2009.

Holmqvist, Ninni. The Unit. Trans. Marlaine Delargy. New York: Other Press, 2009.

Honneth, Axel. Pathologies of Reason: on the Legacy of Critical Theory. Trans. James Ingram. New Directions in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Kawashima, Ken C. The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan. Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Knauer, Lisa Mava, and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds. Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Radical Perspectives: A Radical History Review. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Laderman, Scott. Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory. American Encounters/Global Interactions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Books Received 245

Lefebvre, Henri. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Trans. Neil Brenner, Gerald Moore, and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Logan, Peter Melville. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

Maira, Sunaina Marr. Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

McGann, Jerome. Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx’s Riddle of the Dog. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009.

Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Platt, Donald. Dirt Angels. New Issues Poetry & Prose. Kalamazoo: Western Michi-gan University, 2009.

Pritchard, Stephen. Culture, Knowledge, Property. North Melbourne, Vic.: Austra-lian Scholarly Publishing, 2008.

Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Roberson, Matthew. Impotent. FC2. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Sarkar, Bhaskar. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Dur-ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Schiwy, Freya. Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology. New Directions in International Studies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

Schweppenhäuser, Gerhard. Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction. Trans. James Rolleston. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Mak-ings of Globalization. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2009.

Tansman, Alan, ed. The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Taussig, Michael. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Woodward, Kathleen. Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emo-tions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.

Contributors

Charles Bernstein is Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems is forthcoming (Spring 2010). Blind Witness: Three Ameri-can operas was published by Factory School in 2008.

Christian Bök is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Calgary, where he teaches poetics. Bök is the author of Eunoia (2001)—a best-selling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. The Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has recently awarded him a large grant to create a genetically engineered poem, designed to be implanted in a durable microbe so that the poem might outlast ter-restrial civilization.

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-gardes. He is the author of Reading the Illegible and the editor of Language to Cover a Page: The Collected Early Writ-ings of Vito Acconci and The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics. An anthology of conceptual writing, coedited with Kenneth Goldsmith, is forthcoming, and a collection of essays on sound and poetry, coedited with Marjorie Perloff, is forthcoming.

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and founder and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Secretaries of the Moon (1987), Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (1991), Modernism from Right to Left (1994), and Counter-Revolution of the World: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 (2009). He hosts the podcast “PoemTalk” and, with Charles Bernstein, directs the PennSound archive of poetry recordings. He is currently writing a book about 1960.

Benjamin Friedlander is associate professor of English at the University of Maine and author of several collections of poetry, most recently The Missing occasion of


Saying Yes (2007) and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (2004). His editorial work includes Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems, 1945–2005 (2008) and, with the late Donald Allen, Charles Olson’s Collected Prose (1997).

Peter Gizzi’s books include The outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other Poems, 1987–92. He coedited, with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the poetry editor for The Nation.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Inter-views, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming.

Nada Gordon is the author of Folly, V. Imp, Are Not our Lowing Heifers Sleeker Than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, and, with Gary Sullivan, Swoon, an e-pistolary nonfiction novel. A proud member of the Flarf Collective and an incipi-ent filmmaker, she practices poetry as deep entertainment.

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, ambience, and Heath: Plagiarism/outsource. Seven Controlled Vocabularies and obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking is forthcoming. He is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book on the writings of Andy Warhol. He has recently completed a sampled novel, our Feelings Were Made By Hand. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University.

Joyelle McSweeney is the cofounder and coeditor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and Web journal for international writing and hybrid forms. She is the author of the novels Flet (2007) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), and the poetry books The Commandrine and other Poems (2004) and The Red Bird (2001), which was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer, bandleader, and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Ronald Feldman Gallery, and the Jamaica Cen-ter for Arts and Learning. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is an associate professor of humanities and media at Pratt Institute. She is completing an academic work, WhoDo with Words, on the work of philosopher J. L. Austin; a poetry collec-tion, Rhyme Scheme; and an untitled CD with music.

Marjorie Perloff recently retired from the Sadie D. Patek Chair of Humanities at Stan-ford University and is currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books on twentieth-century poetry and poetics,

Contributors 249

including Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media; Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the ordinary ; and, most recently, Differ-entials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Her collection of essays, coedited with Craig Dworkin, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (2009), contains an essay by Susan Howe.

Herman Rapaport is Reynolds Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has published extensively on critical theory and the arts, and is completing a book on contemporary poetry. “Four Types of Empathy” appeared in Comparative Approaches to European and Nordic Modernisms (2008); “Restoration Politics” appeared in the “Future of the Humanities” issue of oxford Literary Review (Spring 2008); and “Deregionalizing Ontology” appeared in Derrida Today (2008).

Brian M. Reed is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006) and a coeditor of Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (2003). Thanks to a Fulbright scholar-ship, he is spending 2009 in Germany teaching at the University of Bochum and the University of Dortmund.

Jim Rosenberg was born in 1947. His work has included a wide variety of forms including linear work, works for multiple voices both live and on magnetic tape, and word environments constructed in San Francisco and New York. He began a life-long concern with non-linear poetic forms in 1966, with a series of polylinear poems called Word Nets. By 1968, this concern had evolved to an ongoing series, Diagram Poems, which continues to the present. Since 1988 his work has consisted of inter-active poems, beginning with Intergrams, published by Eastgate Systems, Cam-bridge Massachusetts. Two newer titles, Diffractions through: Thirst weep ransack (frailty) veer tide elegy and The Barrier Frames: Finality crystal shunt curl chant quickening giveaway stare, are also published by Eastgate.

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (2009). She is working on a critical manuscript titled “This Amphibious City: Venice and the Digressive Inven-tion of the Modern,” which explores post-Romantic Venice’s paradoxical status as a crucible for experimental aesthetics; the article in this issue derives from an evolving manuscript on ambient historiography. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing and affiliate faculty of romance languages at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.

Lytle Shaw is assistant professor of English at New York University. He is author of Frank o’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) and editor of Nineteen Lines: A Draw-ing Center Writing Anthology (2007). A contributing editor to Cabinet magazine, Shaw’s art catalog publications include essays on Gerard Byrne (for Koenig Books, 2007), Robert Smithson (for Dia Center/University of California, 2005), and the Royal Art Lodge (for The Drawing Center, 2003). His poetry books and art collabo-rations include Cable Factory 20 (1999), The Lobe (2002), and, with Jimbo Blachly,


The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008). Shaw is currently com-pleting two book projects: Fieldworks, on site-specific poetry and art as forms of experimental historiography and ethnography, and Specimen Box, on new forms of collecting in relation to the history of Institutional Critique.

Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot (2008) and Politi-cal Cactus Poems (2005). Skinner edits the journal ecopoetics (vols. 1–7, 2001–2009), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. His essays on the poets Ronald Johnson and Lorine Niedecker appeared in 2008 in volumes published by the National Poetry Foundation and by University of Iowa Press, respectively. His current project is a hybrid text on the poetics of urban open space, written in and on the major Olmsted parks. Skinner is assistant professor of humanities in the environmental studies program at Bates College, in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

Juliana Spahr is a poet and scholar who currently teaches at Mills College. In recent years, she has published the coedited, with Joan Retallack, collection Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (2006) and The Transformation (2007), a book of prose which tells the story of three people who move between Hawai‘i and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonial-ism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars. She has edited the journal Chain with Jena Osman for the last twelve years, and with nineteen other poets she has been an editor of the collectively edited and collectively funded Subpress.

Elizabeth Willis is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Meteoric Flowers (2006). Her writing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry focuses on the inter-sections of public and private life, the effects of political and technological develop-ments on aesthetic production, and the relation of poets to their sources. An edited volume entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place was published in 2008. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Writing at Wesleyan University.

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Documents

Boundary 2, 'American Poetry After 1975' (Vol 36 No 3, Fall 2009)