"Gerald Bruns, or're of our most distinguished philosophical critics, here turns his at-tention to the cuttin€l-edge poetry and poetics ot the past few decades, seeh throughthe prism of such theorists as Adorno, Blanchot, ahd Levinas. Bruns's readings areeverywhete animated by his profoqnd learnineiand his knowledge ofthe larger po-etic tradition, For anyoyre interested in the avant-eiarde to day, Whqt Are Poets For?is alr indispensable book."-Mariorie Pedoff, author, Uroriginqt Genius

"Gerald Bruns's learhil1fl is prodi€lious, and he seems hot onlyto have read but torecall on command iust about all of even mihor aestheiic documents (and the basicscholarship on them) since Kant. Yet he holds his learhing lightly, bringing it to bearonly wheh it is called forto illuminate a point. MoreoveF, he writes elegantly, fluidly,and lucidly on quite difficult material, and he has excellent taste. Most important,Bruns makes the stron€lest and richest statements I know of an aestheticthat dlivesrthe work of his authoPs""

-Charles Altieri, authot, The Art of Moderu Americsn Poet*

is the William P, end Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus oI En€llishat the University of Notre Dame. A prolific author, his works i nclude Modem Poetry dnd th,e

lded of Ldngudge, tnventions! Writing, Textudlity, dnd Undetstdnding in Literdrtt History,Heftneneutics Ancientdnd Modefi, Ttdgic Thoughts dt the End ol Philosophy! Lo,r',gudge,Literotute, dnd Ethicdl Theory,The Mdaefidl of Poetryt Sketches for d Philosophiccrl Poet-ics, Oo the Ancrrchy of Poetry dnd Philosophy, and On Cedsing to Be Human.ln 1974 a:nd

agaih in 1985 he received GuElgenh€im fellowships end has been a fellowet the lnstitute forAdvanced Study at Hebrew University ofJerusalem (1985-1986), the Centerlor AdvancedStudy ilr the Behavioral Sciences at Sta ford ('1993-1994), alrd the Stahtord HumanitiesCehter (2007-2008). ln 2OO8 he was electcd to the American AcedemyofArts ahd Sciences,

tsBN l3: 978 1-6093A-0a0-9ISBN-10: l-60934-0a0 0

Cover image from Asenlc Mctgttzine #2,1,is usedcourtesy ofDavid Dellafiora and Tim Gaze- , llillru[xl U[ilrlllll tlnu[u[tt

CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN POETRY SERIES

SeriesEditors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris

{&ffiffi&H-ffi A_" &SffiffiruS

WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

alr anthropologyof contemporary poetnyand poetics

l:.:, l:. l( ,:'i l;i t r'

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiiiAbbreviations xvii

WhatAre Poets For? r

Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise? r8

Voices of Construction I On Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics

(A Citational Ghost Story) 35

A PoemaboutLaughterand Forgetting I Lyn Hejinian's ABorderComedy 56

Amongthe Pagans I The Polyvocal PoetryofKaren MacCormack 7z

The Rogue Poet's Return I OnlohnMatthias's PoeticAnecdotes 9r

Adding Garbage to Language I On l. H. Prynne's "Not-You" ro6

Anomalies of Duration in Contemporary Poetry rz3

Nomad Poetry | A Ludic Miscellany from Steve McCaffery r37

On the Conundrum of Form and Material I Adorno's Aesthetic Theory r5z

Notes 167

Bibliography zor

lndex zr9

Literature is a concern for the reality ofthings, for their unknown, free

and silent existence; literature is their innocence and forbidden presence,

it is the being which protests against revelation, it is the defiance of whatdoes not want to take place. In this way, it sympathizes with darkness

(l'obscuritS,with aimless passion, with Iawless violence, with everythingin the world that seems to perpetuate the refusal to come into the world.ln this way, too, it allies itself with the reality of language, it makes

language into matter without contour, content without form, a force thatis capricious and impersonaland says nothing, reveals nothing, simplyannounces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from thenight and will return to the night.

-Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death"

One of my first attempts to write about poetry-more than half-a-century

ago-carried the title, "The Obscurity of Modern Poetry." My first book, Mod-

ern Poetry and the ldeq ofLonguage (1974), pursued some of the various ways inwhich this topic emerged in literary history, from the ancient conception oflanguagc as a "substantial medium," through St6phane Mallarm6's poetryand

ix

poetics, to the writings of Joyce, Beckett, Wallace Stevens-and Maurice Blan-

chot, whom I began reading as an undergraduate at Marquette University inthe r95os, thanks to my Francophile roommate, Dan Finlay, and to my Jesuit

teachers, who were in those days deeply under the influence of French intel-lectual culture. Later came a study of Blanchot's work, particularly his theoryof d.criture-the materialization of language in fragmentary writing of the kindthat we find in the poetry of Ren6 Char and Paul Celan, as well as in Blanchot's

own work (forexample, L'attente,l'oubli1196z]). More recently, inTheMaterialof

Poetry Qoo5),1 attempted something like a traditional apology for recent ex-

periments in sound poetry, visual poetry, and poetry as a form of conceptual

art. And inThe Anarchy ofPoetry and Philosophy (zoo6), I tried to clarifr an argu-

ment about literary modernism that turns up in different forms in the writingsof many European thinkers, namely that the work of art (one of Duchamp's

readymades, for example) is something absolutely singular, that is, outsidethe alternatives of universal and particular, refractory to categories and dis-

tinctions, anarchic with respect to principles and rules: in a word, anomalous.

ln lean-Frangois Lyotard's words, modernism makes "pagans" of us all: "When

I speak of paganism," Lyotard writes, "l am not using a concept. It is a name,

neither better nor worse than others, for the denomination of a situation inwhich one judges without uiteria. And one judges not only in matters of truth,but also in matters of beauty (of aesthetic efficacy) and in matters of justice,

that is, of politics and ethics, and all without criteria."'The present volume of essays continues this nominalist line-and tries

to cope with its consequences. For if there is no one thing that can be calledpoetry-if it is made of anomalies (a one-word poem, for example, or a collage

of letters or letterlike scribbles)-then one's study of it must proceed, like an

anthropologist's progress through an alien culture, atground level, from one

local practice or artifact to another, without subsuming things into a system.'?

Of course, at ground level pitfalls and double binds are waiting at every turn:remember the sculptor Donald Judd's famous remark: "lf someone calls it art,

it's art."r Anything goes, even if not everything is possible at every moment:hardly an intellectually defensible thesis, at least in respectable academic cir-

cles. As a dodge I take recourse to Wittgenstein's idea that things (games, forexample, but also philosophy itself) have a history rather than an essence, and

that history is made of family resemblances, so that as one proceeds along theground one finds connections in which different forms of words and thingsshed their light on one another.+ In this event the simple juxtaposition of cita-

tions often proves more fruitfulthan lengthy exegeses on behalf of some uni-fied field theory.

For this reason I have often found myself following, often against the ad-

vice of mentors and friends, Walter Benjamin's program: "Good criticism is

composed of at most two elements: the critical gloss and the quotation. Very

good criticism can be made from both glosses and quotations. What must be

avoided like the plague is rehearsing the summary of the contents. In contrast,

a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed."s Unfortu-nately exorbitant permission fees occasionally prevent one from putting good

criticism into practice.

My first chapter tries to locate some ingredients that recur in the disparate

essays that follow-displaced subjectivity, found texts and open forms, not tomention the many diversions of materialized language. The second chapter

is, basically, an argument against efforts (including my own) to ground po-

etry upon any philosophical justification that would efface the singulariry ofits forms and events-a kind of iconoclasm that both philosophy and literarystudies are prone to. As for subjectivity, a main point of interest in my chapter

on Susan Howe is her recuperation ofYeats's conception ofthe poetic subject

as a receptacle for the voices of others, which is one of the forgotten features

of romantic poetics-recall Keats's "negative capability." "For something towork I need to be another self," Howe says. Meanwhile she locates her "self"within a "constructivist" context of found texts and paratactic arrangements ofwordswithinthewhitespaceofthe pr:inted page (as inTh eMidnight). Found texts

and paratactic arrangements-but in very d ifferent rend itions-characterizethe work of Lyn Hejinian and Karen Mac Cormack. lohn Matthias's poetry, as

Matthias himself notes, is composed of quotations and pastiche-and of an-

ecdotes: a form to which very little thought has been given. Matthias, interest-ingly, is an American poet who seems most at home among the British: he is

a major scholar of the work of David lones, and thinks of himself as being inperpetual transition back-and-forth between the United States and England,

neither here nor there. It seems right to place him alongside I. H. Prynne, therecondite "Cambridge" poet whose work is influenced very much by Ameri-can poets like Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, although Prynne's way of puttingwords together (if "together" isn't exactly the wrong,word) seems peculiarlyhis own. The chapter on "Arrhythmia" takes up George Kubler's cha[lenge in"The Shape of Time" to "imagine duration without any regular pattern." A

good deal of poetry-Michael Palmer's, Tom Raworth's, among others stud-

ied here-is an exercise in just such an irregular imagination. The chapter onTheodor Adorno might at first seem out of place in this book, but much of ittakes up Adorno's essay on paratactic form in Holderlin's late hymns as wellas his essays on two experimental German poets seldom or never studied in

x,l

this country, Rudolf Borchardt and Hans G. Helms. Adorno's AestheticTheory

is perhaps the most important work of philosophical aesthetics since Kant,sthird critique and Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, but its major weakness is itspoverty of examples. Happily there is nothing impoverished about Adorno'sliterary essays, which are remarkably in tune with the "nomadic" innovationsof the Yorkshire/Canadian/Buffalo poet Steve McCaffery, who reminds us thatif contemporary poetry bears anything like a distinctive feature, it is that free-dom from determinations of any kind is a condition of comedy-and a formof the good life.

=-fl

I owe a great deal to a number of peopre for their herp and encouragement onthis project, particularly Marjorie perroff, Herman Rapaport, charles Artieri,Ralph Berry, Charles Bernstein, Dee Morris, steve Tomasula, and John wilkin-son. I remember especiaily a course on experimentar poetry that Romana Hukand I taught together at Notre Dame severar years ago, which made me rearizethat, left to my own devices, r wourd never find myway through the comprexi-ties of contemporary poetry and poetics.

This book is for my friend Steve Fredman, in memory of our quarter_cen_tury ofconversations, the courses we taught together, the poetry ieadings weorganized-not to mention the perpetual round of administrative dJties,committee meetings, and visiting lecturers, none of which, to my amaze_ment, ever seemed to defeat steve's serenity and good humor. His writingson American art and poetry-poet's prose (r9g3), The Grounding of Americon poetry(rg,,), A MenorohforAthena (zoor), and Contextualpractice (zoto), among manyothers have been and wirr remain the best of intelectual compl'nions.Mcanwhilc there is his own incomparabre contribution to,.carifornia,,poetry,\rrrslrr4 (lt;7j).

riii

Several of the chapters in this book were completed while I was a fellow

at the Stanford Humanities Center in zooT-zoo8. My thanks to lohn Bender,

then director of the Center, and to the Center's marvelous staff, particularly

Robert Barrick, Nichole Coleman, Susan Sebard, and MatthewTiews.

Chapter z appeared in Sub5tance: A Review ofTheory and Criticism,38.3 (zoo9),

7z-gt.Chapter3 appeared inContemporaryLiterature,5o.r (zoo9), z8-53. Chapter

4 appeared inTextualPractice,23.3(zoo9), 397-416. Chapter 5 appeared in Anriph-

onies: Essoyson Women'sExperimentalWritinginCansds, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto:

The Gig, zooS), rg4-2r3. Chapter 6 appeared in The Ssk Companion to John Mqt'

thios, ed. Ioe Francis Doerr (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, zotr), rz-zg. Chapter

ro appeared as "The Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno's Aesthetic

Theo ry" in The J o u r nal of Aesth eti cs and Art Criticism, 66. 3 (z o o8), 2z5-35.

l'm grateful to John Ashbery for permission to reprint the following: "Crazy

Weather" and "Syringa," from HouseboatDays. Copyright o 1975, tgzz by John

Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Ceorges Borchardt, lnc., on behalf of the

author. "The System," fromThreePoems. Copyright @ tg7z, 1985, rgg7, zoo8 by

lohn Ashbery. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Georges Bor-

chardt, Inc., on behalfofthe author. "Scheherazade" and "No Way ofKnow-

ing," from Sef-PortrqitinqConvexMirror. Copyright O 1975, rggo by John Ashbery

and Viking Penguin, lnc., reprinted by their permission. My thanks to Charles

Bernstein for permission to reprint lines from hisDarkCity (Sun & Moon Press,

tg94), RoughTrcdes (Sun & Moon Press, r99r), "Poetic lustice," RepublicsofReal'

ity,tglS-rggS(Sun & Moon Press, zooo), and WithStrings (University of Chicago

Press, zoor); to Christian Bokand Coach House Books for permission to reprint

some lines from Eunoio (zoor); to DalkeyArchive Press for permission to reprint

some Iines from Shorrer Poems (1993) by Gerald Burns; to Suhrkamp Verlag, forpermission to reprint several poems from Paul Celan's 6 esammekeWerke (Frank-

furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983); to Kenneth Goldsmith for permission to reprint

some passages from Soliloquy (zoor); to Tim Gaze for permission to reproduce

the image of an "asemic poem," fromAsemic, vol. r (KentTown Australia, n'd.);

to Lyn Hejinian for permission to reprint passages from A Border Comedy (Grana-

ry Books, zoor) as well as lines fromTheColdofPoerry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994),

The Fatqlist (Omnidawn Press, zoo3), My Lrfe (Sun & Moon Press, 1987), My Life

in rhe Nineties (Shark Books, zoq),Slowly (Tuumba Press, zooz), andWritingls

sn Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Press, rgg6); to Susan Howe for permission to

reprintpoemsfromTheEuropeofTrusts:SelectedPoems (Sun &Moon Press, 1989),

Frqmestructures:EarlyPoems,ry74-79(NewDirections, ry96),TheMidnight(NewDi-

rections, zoo3),TheNonconformist'sMemoriol (New Directions, ry93),Pierce-Arrow

(New Directions, r 999), Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, I qso), and Souls

oftheLabadieTracr(New Directions, zooT);to Simon larvis for permission to re-

print passages from The Unconditionql: A Lyric (Barque Press, zoo5); to Eduardo

Kac for permission to reproduce both his digital poem, "Letter" (t996), and

his holographic poem, "Adhuc" (r99r); to Karen Mac Cormack for permission

to reprint poems from At lssue (Coach House Books, zoor), Implexures (Chax

Press, zoo3), Quill Driver (Nightwood Editions, 1989), Quirk and Quillets (Chax

Press, r99r), andVanity Release (Zasterle Press, zoo3); to Steve McCaffery for per-

mission to reprint poems from Seven Pages Missing,ll: Previously UncollectedTexts,

t968-zooo (Coach House Books, zooz),SlightlyLeftofThinking(Chax Press, zoo8),

TheCheatofWords (ECW Press, 1996), andTheoriesofSedimentffalon Books, r99r);

to John Matthias for permission to reprint poems from Turns (Swallow Press,

rg75), Crossing (Swallow Press, 1979), Northern Summer: New ond Selected Poems

(SwallowPress, 1984),A6ctheringofWays (SwallowPress, tggt), SwimmingotMid-

night: Selected Shorter Poems (Swallow Press, 1995), Beltane atAphelion: Longer Poems,

(Swallow Press, 1995), Poges: New Poems tr Cuttings (Swallow Press, zooo), Working

Progress,Working Tirle (Salt Publishing, zooz), New Selected Poems (Salt Publish-

ing, zoo4), Redging (salt Publishing, zooT); to Michael Palmer for permission

to reprint poems from FirstFigure (North Point Press, 1984); to l. H. Prynne forpermission to reprint "Not-You" from Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999); to Tom

Raworth for permission to reprint lines from Ace (Edge Books, zoot); to Wes-

leyan University Press for permission to reprint lack Spicer's poem, "Sporting

Life," from My Vocabulary DidThisto Me:TheCollected Poetry oflockSpicer (zoo8).

Every effort has been made to avoid errors or omissions in the above list.

Please advise if any corrections should be incorporated into any future edi-

tions of this book.

F or full bibliographic information for these sources, see the bibliography.

AI

AP

AT

B

BC

BM

C

CP

CPH

CW

D

DC

ET

x vli

Atlssue. Karen Mac Cormack.

A Poetics. Charles Bernstein.

AestheticTheory. Theodor Adorno.

Breqthturn. Paul Celan.

A Border Comedy. Lyn Hejinian.

The Birth-mark. susan H owe.

Crossing. f ohn Matthias.

Collected P rose. Paul Celan.

Th e Cold of Poetry. Lyn Hejinian.

The Cheat ofWords. Steve McCaffery.

The Differend. lean-Frangois Lyotard.

Dork City. Charles Bernstei n.'fht

Lurope of f rusrs. Susan Howe.

F TheFatalist. Lyn Hejinian.

FB FathomsunsandBenighted.PaulCelan.

FP Fitto Print. Alan Halsey and Karen Mac Cormack.

FS Framestructures. Susan Howe.

GW GessmmelteWerke,l-lll.PaulCelan.

HD HouseboatDays.fohnAshbery.

I lmaginorions. William Carlos Williams.

lC ThelnfiniteConversation.Maurice Blanchot.

lM lmplexures. Karen Mac Cormack.

K Kedging.lohnMatthias.

Ll TheLanguageoflnquiry.LynHejinian.

LP LqstPoems. Paul Celan.

M TheMidnight. Susan Howe.

MED MyEmilyDickinson. Susan Howe.

ML MyLife.LynHejinian.

MLN MyLifeintheNineties. Lyn Hejinian.

MM Minima Moralia. Theodor Adorno.

MW MyWay Charles Bernstein.

ND NegativeDialectics.TheodorAdorno.

NI Northoflntention.SteveMcCaffery.

NL NotestoLiterature.TheodorAdorno.

NM TheNonconformist'sMemorial.susan Howe.

P Poems. f . H. Prynne.

PIM Pages.JohnMatthias.

PM Priorto Meaning. Steve McCaffery.

PNM PhilosophyofNewMusic.TheodorAdorno.

PPC PoemsofPaulCelsn. Paul Celan.

QD QuillDriver. Karen Mac Cormack.

QF QuasiunaFantasia.TheodorAdorno.

aQ QuirksandQuillers. Karen Mac Cormack.

RR Republicsof Realiry. Charles Bernstein.

RT RoughTrades.CharlesBernstein.

S Sin.gulorities. Susan Howe.

SH Slowly. Lyn Hejinian.

.:"<II

SL Slighdy LeftofThinking. Steve McCaffery.

SLT SoulsoftheLabadieTrqct.susanHowe.

SM Stanzasin Medirdrion. Gertrude Stein.

SMM SwimmingatMidnighr.lohnMatthias.

5P Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror. John Ashbery.

SPM Seven Pages Missing, II. Steve McCaffery.

SPP Selected Poetry ond prose. paul Celan.

T Turns. John Matthias.

TC Threadsuns. paul Celan.

TP ThreePoems.lohnAshbery.

TS TheoriesofSedinrenr.SteveMcCaffery.

VR Vanity Release. Karen Mac Cormack.

WF TheWorkof Fire. Maurice Blanchot.

WL WritingsandLecrures,GertrudeStein.

WP Working Progress,WorkingTitle.lohn Matthias.WS WithStrings.CharlesBernstein.

WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

To make things of which we do not know what they are.

--{heodor Ado rno, AestheticTheory

In his Prologueto RorainHell:lmprovisations $9zo), William Carlos Williams re-

calls his conversation one day with Walter Arensberg in which he asked Arens-

berg (one of the earliest collectors of modern art) what painters like Charles

Demuth and Marcel Duchamp were up to. As an answer Arensberg mentionedDuchamp's idea that "a stained-glass window that had fallen out and lay moreor less together on the ground" was more likely to be of interest than anythingan artist might produce in a studio.' Williams then goes on to mention thecontroversy over Duchamp'sFountqin, "the porcelain urinal fsubmitted] to thePalace Exhibition of r9r7 as a representative of American sculpture."'A ready-

made anecdote follows: "One day Duchamp decided that his composition forthat day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store

he should enter. lt turned out to be a pickax which he bought and set up in his

studio" (1, ro).

As we know, one implication of readymade aesthetics is that what definesthc work o[ art is the displacement of intentionaliry, as if the work were less

,r wolk th:rrr arr cvcnt or discovcry something whose arrival is unpremedi-

I

tated, contingent, and anomalous. Thus an improvisation, being unplanned

and unrevised, is, formally, a fragmentary arrangement of materials: things al-

Iowed to stand where they happen to fall.: Williams refers at one point to "the

brokenness of his composition" (1, r6), ofwhich the following gives us but one

example among others assembled differently: "when beldams dig clams their

fat hams (it's always beldams) balanced nearTellus's hide, this rhinoceros pelt,

these lumped stones-buffoonery of midges on a bull's thigh-invoke,-what you will: birth's glut, awe at God's craft, youth's Poverty, evolution of

a child,s caper, man's poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun's self

turned hen's rump" (1, 5r: a "beldam" is an old woman; "Tellus" was a Roman

goddess ofthe earth).

what is broken here, given "whatyou will," are the rules of a schoolmaster.

Outside the classroom words have their own chemistry, "a kind of alchemy of

form,, (1, 75) for which the attendant poet provides the laboratory space of a

white page. lmagine a poetics that figures the poet as less an agent of the work

than someone who underwrites it, say by attaching a signature or a title that

gives the work, not a definition, but a place in or against an art-context. For

the philosopher Theodor Adorno, this sort of thinking reveals the distinctive

antinomy, or performative contradiction, of modernism, where the aim is to

produce an artwork that is absolutely singular, refractory to categories and dis-

tinctions, irreducible to models or to any rule of identity-a kind of monad.c

ln Williams's words, "The true value is that peculiarity that gives an object a

character by itself" (1, r4). This "aesthetic nominalism" marks the end of art as

such, that is, ofany notion ofan ideal work reflected in its particular approxi-

mations (no more concrete universals).sThere is no longer any one thing that

can be called art or poetry which henceforward must draw its concepts from

a history of local practices-as the poet Charles Bernstein says, "poetic posi-

tions . . . have to be understood within the context of other poetic positions

that are articulated by other poets, or nonpoets, at the moment but also in the

past,, (AP, r56). Hence the modernist proliferation of prefaces and manifestos

whereby art tries to work through its antinomies, not at the level of universals,

but on the ground where controversies arise among conflicting notions as to

what counts as art ("Here I clash with wallace stevens" [], r+]). ln this respect

Korq in Hell is, like one of Duchamp's readymades, a piece of "conceptual art"

that carries with it its own distinctive "suPport language," not only in its pro-

logue but in the intervening "interpretations" thatWilliams added later-and

above all in its reigning statement of principle: "A poem can be made of any-

thing" (1,7o).6

Not that "anything goes," exactly. What doesn't go for Williams is the hov-ering of antecedents. "Our prize poems are especially to be damned," Wil-liams says, "not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because theyare rehash, repetition-just as Eliot's more exquisite work is rehash, rep-

etition in another way of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck-conscious orunconscious-just as there were Pound's early paraphrases from Yeats and hislater cribbing from the Renaissance, Provence, and the modern French: Mencontentwith the connotations of their masters" (1, z4). Instead of literarylan-guage Williams proposes "a language of the day":

That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our days'-

affairs mingles with whatever we see in the streets and everywhere about us as itmingles also with our imaginations. By this chemistry is fabricated a language ofthe day which shifts and reveals its meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky andsometimes send down rain or snow or hail. This is the language to which few ears

are tuned so that it is said by poets that flew men are ever in their [ul[ senses since

they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagi-nation is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate thishidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain dis-tinctions oIrhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech. Nowadays

the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of thelistener and the poet are left free to mingle in the dance. (1, 59)

Two things are worth noticing about this passage. The first is that Williams'simagination is not Wordsworth's "awful Power" rising from "the mind'sabyss" (The Prelude,Yl.Sgq); it is simply a perceptual keenness toward everyday

sights and sounds. The second is that "the language ofthe day" is structuredlike the weather ("clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send downrain or snow or hail"); it is, like an improvisation, turbulent and unpredict-able ("brokenness" of composition)-but not just nonsense. Chaos theo-rists would call it a "complex entity."7 Poets "of old" tried to introduce somemeasure of order into this complexity, but now the task is not to organize thislanguage poetically but simply to "set [it] down as heard." And so what we getFrom Williams-as, in a slightly different turn, from his contemporary Mari-anne Moore-are plain words whose order is not metrical, nor perhaps even

syntactical, but open-ended, as in a run of anomalies.

Here are some lines from Marianne Moore's "Poetry," which begins (fa-nrously), "l too dislike it":

thc sanre thing may be said for all of us, that we

<lo rrot adnrire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

that feels a flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician-nor is it valid

to discriminate "against business documents and

school books": all these phenomena are important.s

ln an essay on Marianne Moore, Williams wrote: "The only help I ever got

from Miss Moore toward the understanding of herverse was that she despised

connectives" (1, 3r3)-a point later amplified by Iohn Ashbery in a review ofMoore's TellMe,Tell Me: Granite,Steel, and }therTopics (rg6q):

Some of us will regret the kaleidoscopic collage effects of the early poems, and

with reason for they were also a necessary lesson in how to live in our world of"media," how to deal with the unwanted information that constantly accumu-

lates around us. What can we do about those stack of Nationol Geogrophics, leaflets

from the BellTelephone Company, the IllustrotedLondonNews,the NewYorkTimesMog-

ozine, business letters, overheard remarks, and also the habits ofjungle flora and

fauna, which we shall probably never see and which in any case can never concern

us? Well, live with them is Miss Moore's answer, recognizing them as part of the

rhythm of growth, as details of life possibly helpful in deducing the whole, in any

case important, in any case important as details.e

Here is the basic question of complexity: "how to deal with the unwanted in-formation that constantly accumulates around us"? The problem is not non-

sense but t00 m uchsense, the philosophical solution to which is to reduce things

to their basic types, categories, or essentials: integration of elements into a

unity is the standard received definition of intelligibility (the "hermeneutical

circle"). Marianne Moore's procedure by contrast is nonreductive: within oramongthescatterofcategorymistakes(bats, elephants, critics, baseball fans),

even "business documents" and "school books" matter. lmagine nonexclu-

sion as a principle ofpoetic diction: such a principle defeats the very idea ofapoetical diction, which historically is a closed system that rules out ducks and

toads as ingredients of a true poem. But for Marianne Moore, as for Wi[liams,

"A poem can be made of anything."

ln his "Robert Frost Medal Address" (rggs), Ashbery recalls thatwhile living inFrance during the r95os he "began to realize how much the spoken American

language . . . had entered into mywriting":

For the next two or three years, I lived in a state of restless experimenting. Of-

ten I'd visit the American Library and leaf through popular magazines, [ook-

ing for the tone of voice I felt was lacking. Or I'd buy magazines like Esquire and

look through them, copying down random bits of phrases in a sort of collage

technique-unaware that about the same time Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and

Gregory Corso were practicing doing "cut-ups" elsewhere in Paris. lt's an odd co-

incidence that we all happened on this way of writing at that particular time and

place. (Selected Prose, z5o)

Found texts, assemblage, collage: Ashbery's HouseboatDays (1977) contains the

following poem that begins with an American catchphrase, "crazy weather":

It's this crazy weather we've been having:

Falling forward one minute, lying down the next

Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.

People have been making a garment out of it,

Stitching the white of lilacs togetherwith lightning

At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls

To the deafearth. The proverbial disarray

Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.

You are wearing a text. The lines

Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need

Any other literature than this poetry of mud

And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily

Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had

A simple unconscious dignitywe can never hope to

Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody

Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,

Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots,

for all we know. (HD, zt)

Weather is a major preoccupation of chaos theory which celebrates the ratio-

nality of turbulence, as does Ashbery's poem, whose first line answers (at least

formally) a request fora reason: What is causing this anomaly?The poem itselfis an anomaly-machine, producing things of which we do not know what they

are. "Falling forward" and "lying down," for example, are a bit like "lt is rain-

ing," whcre "it" is a phantom subject, a purely functional occupant of what

upscale grammarians call the "middle voice." And then there is the problem

of "nameless flowers" (whatwould Louis Zukofsky have said of such things?).'o

Meanwhile you can make a "garment" out of the weather by talking about it,as people do in the absence of anything else to say-recall ancient rhetoric

in which words are the "clothes" and "colors" of things, although "white" is

a shifry or anomalous word, especially when "Stitching the white of lilacs to-gether with lightning," thus producing a name given to moonshine and rockbands. lnterestingly, "anonymous crossroads," besides echoing "nameless

flowers," are where suicides used to be buried, ideally against a gothic back-

ground of lightning and thunder. The indifferent earth is their shield against

a vengeful heaven. Speaking of garments: rumpled pajamas will right them-selves when you get to your feet; but if they are (still) a garment of words, wellthen, "You are wearing a text."

Ashbery doesn't entirely "despise connectives," but in the tradition of"broken composition" his lines form periods filled with insubordinations:"The lines / Droop to your shoelaces," as if wet, and, being wet, form, of all

things, a literary plenum, than which none greater can be desired: a "poetry ofmud" conjoined to "ambitious reminiscences of times" when another phan-

tom "it" ambled through what were once "woods and ploughed fields"-allquite beyond us now. Have we become too thoroughly modern, or modern-ized? No longer believing in the folklore of "crazy weather"? Time to repairelsewhere-to "narrow ravines" where horticulturalists never tread, but

where ("for all we know") some "rare, / Uninteresting specimen" of we-don't-know-what might be starting life or poetryall overagain, as in these lines from"Scheherazade":

Other dreams came and leftwhile the bank

Of colored verbs and adjectives were shrinking from the Iight

To nurse in shade their want of a method

But most of all she loved the particles

That transform objects ofthe same category

lnto particular ones, each distinct

Within and apart from its own class. (SP, 9)

lmagine Scheherazade as Gertrude Stein ("And therefore and I say it again

more and more one does not use nouns")." ln fact these lines describe some-

thing like Ashbery's philosophy of composition, in which plain words are

turned loose from their propriery or "aboutness": call it an anarchic poetics

in which meaning proliferates into singularities, "each distinct / Within and

apart from its own class"-a common event at ground level, as in Ashbery's

prose poem (or poem in prose) "The System," which begins with a straightfor-ward statement: "The system was breaking down" (TP, 53).'' ln which case-

Whatdid matter nowwas gettingdown to business, or back to the business ofday-to-day living with all the tiresome mechanical problems that this implies. And itwas just here that philosophy broke down completely and was of no use. How todeal with the new situations that arise each day in bunches or clusters, and whichresist categorization to the point where any rational attempt to deal with them is

doomed from the start. And in particular how to deal with this one that faces younow, which has probabty been with you always; now it has a different name and a

different curriculum vitae; its qualities are combined in such a way as to seem dif-ferent from all that has gone before, but actually is the same old surprise you have

always lived with. Forget about the details o[name and place, forget also the con-cepts and archetypes that hauntyou and are as much a part ofthe q,pical situationyou find yourself in as those others: neither the concept nor the state of affairslogically deduced from it is going to be of much help to you now. (TP, 87)

Notice: another question about complexity-"How to deal with the new situ-ations that arise each day in bunches or clusters, and which resist categori-zation to the point where any rational attempt to deal with them is doomedfrom the start." The answer is coherent with aesthetic nominalism. Resist-

ing categorization is the way mere things (and artworks) turn philosophy onits ear, thereby keeping their freedom.'3 What breaks down inThree Poems, as

in so much of Ashbery's writing, is the subsumption of particulars, of whichthere are too many for concepts to bear.'c In place ofcontext-formation we getsomething [ike context-dispersal (fragmentation), as in the heterogeneoussentence that concludes"Crazy Weather," or this from a poem aptly entitled"No Way of Knowing":

Yes, but-there are no "yes, buts."

The body is what this is all about and it disperses

In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around

But difficult to read correctly since there is

No common vantage point, no point ofviewLike the "l" in a novel. And in truthNo one never saw the point ofany. (SP, 56)

I hink of itl-a pointless (or empty) vantage point, as from inside a storm thatspreads itselF in "sheeted fragments." Complex entities, being unstable, givetlre definition of the uncontainable, or ungraspable, like Eurydice. "Syringa,"

;r l)ocrn whose title is the name of a (nonwhite) lilac, but which is about theIrrtility of bcing Orpheus, exhibits an even wilder complexity:

But how late to be regretting all this, even

Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too latel

To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,

Replies that these are ofcourse not regrets at all,

Merely a careful, scholarly setting down ofUnquestioned facts, a record ofpebbles along the way.

And no matter how all this disappeared,

Or gotwhere itwas going, it is no longer

Material for a poem. lts subject

Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly

While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad

Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward

That the meaning, good or other, can never

Become known. (HD,7r)

The composer (ofelectronic music and otherturbulent artworks) Herbert Brilnsays that there is one sort of complex entity that "prefers its problems to its so-

lutions," and will resort to violence in order to prevent solutions from beingattempted.rsAshbery's swiftly movingpoem seems to qualifr as such an entity:it leaves "all this" behind, as Orpheus does Eurydice, except that Orpheus inthese lines is a speaking cloud, as gods sometimes are. Actually each line of the

poem leaves its subject behind, breaking as it goes the law ofnoncontradic-tion, among other rules of composition: "all this" matters "too much, and notenough," as the violent poem streaks past, "a bad / Comet screaming hate and

disaster" at the poor exegete who tries to take hold of it.

In the early r97os the poet Bernadette Mayer conducted a poetry workshop at

5t. Mark's Church, which for several years had sponsored a number of avant-

garde projects in poetry, dance, theater, and film.'6 Among her pedagogical

exercises was an extensive list of "Experiments," of which the following is a

brief sampling:

Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas

have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non-connota-tive word like "so," etc.

Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece

of writing: eliminate alt adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all the

words beginning with "s" in Shakespeare's sonnets.

r! i:i fi il i:e

Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.

Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of preposition-al phrases, or, add a gerund to every line ofan already existingwork.

Get a group ofwords, either randomly selected or thought up, then form thesewords (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demandtheir own forms, or, use some words in a predetermined way.,z

Naturally the question arises as to the point of these assignments. Taking thelast sentence of this citation as a cue, one could refer to Williams's improvisa-tions, or (in a different register) to the proceduralwritings of the Oulipo group(the }uvroir de littd,rature potentielle, or Workshop of potential Literature, whichincluded writers like Raymond Queneau, ltalo Calvino, Harry Mathews, andGeorges Perec-this last the author of LaDisporotion, a novel of some 3oo pagesin which the letter "e" never appears).,8 In both cases the basic idea (as perWil-liams) is to expand the possibilities of composition by distributing the inten-tionality of the work across impersonal regions of language. Oulipovians, forexample, subject the act of writing to sets of purely formal constraints: palin-dromes, lipograms, anagrams, acrostics, crosswords, including compositionsmodeled on mathematical rules and equations.re The Canadian poet ChristianBdk gives us a contemporary rendition of procedural poetics in Eunoia, a lipo-grammatic poem in five parts, one for each vowel, as in the following from"Chapter A," dedicated appropriately to the Dadaist Hans Arp:

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard

as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an

alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars

all stanzas and jams all batlads (what a scandal). A

madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh-a hand-

stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a

mark that spark an ars m0gn0 (an abstract art thatcharts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark

sage (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackbal[s all

annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and

Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fonaro bans

all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.,o

As B<ik says, the paradox of Oulipianism is that rule-following can produceunforeseen events: "even a machinic calculus has the potential to generatethe novelty of anomaly."'' We'll return to this paradox in a moment, probablywithorrt hopc oIrcsolving it.

Meanwhile a hard-core conceptualist like Sol Lewitt (r9zg-zoo7) would saythat Mayer's "writing experiments" need not be put into practice at alI becausean ideo for an artwork is already itself a work of art: "The idea itself, even if notmade visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product.', In fact, Lewittadds, the "realization" of an artwork is conceivably self-defeating: ,'Concep-

tual art is meant to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emo-tions. The physicality of a three-dimensional object then becomes a contra-diction to its non-emotive intent."., On this theory, a conceptual poem is anartifact in a possible world. Transposing it to our world, that is, reducing it to a

material work, however striking, might just be the way to destroy it. Recall thepoem Hart Crane once imagined, one that gives "the reader a single, new word,never before spoken and impossible actually to enunciate, but self-evidentas an active principle in the reader's consciousness.".3 Unfortunately Cranedoes not say anything about what the experience ofsuch a word would be like.Perhaps it would simply take the form of an alien visitation-something onthe order of lack Spicer's idea that "there is an Outside to the poet,,,who is apassive rather than expressive subject: someone taking dictation or receivingsignals like a radio-or taking punches, rather too many of them:

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radiosdon't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a

transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagramburns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like thatpunchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet

Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored himin New lersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds witha champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if thescar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where theinvisible champions might not have hit him. Too many ofthem.

The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a

counterpunching radio.

And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even

know they are champions.,+

The "outside," whatever or wherever it is, is clearly not inhabited by school-masters. It is a complex entity, overloading the poet with mixed metaphorsthat unfold like episodes in a serial or rounds in a fight (or a drinking bout)

-'.:I

where everything ends in confusion.'s At any rate, spicer's poet is croser toPlato's ludic schizoid than to Aristotle,s cool plot_maker.

speaking ofradios, there is (at reast conceptuaily) a genearogicar rine fromJack spicer (t925-65) to Kenneth Gordsmith lb. rgor), whose wiitings consistof transcriptions offound texts, includingwhat is said on the radio, ,-, in cota-smith's Trilog: weather (zoo5), which transcribes a year,s worth of a radio sta-tion's daily weather reports; Troffrc (zoo7) is made of traffic reports broadcaston a New york radio station during one day ofa horiday weekend; sporr (zooa)gives us the play-by-pray broadcasr ofa yankees basebail game.,6 (Recail irre st.Mark's church assignmenil "Experiment with theft and pragiarism.,,) s oritoquy,meanwhile, is a transcription of everyword (in ract, orever!sound) uttered byGoldsmith during the course of a week. This is not a diarogic text, but simprythe edited tape of coldsmith's noises, ail words ofothers hiving been dereted.A portion ofhis talk, describingthe projectjustas itgets undeiway, providesthe work's "support language,,;

Here's a here's a new project I,m working on. OK? l,m taking a leap of language.l'm recording everything r'm saying for an entire week. I mean it no, t,m ltwaystaking [sic] about the vorume of language that's around I mean what wourd yourlanguage look like ifit was you coilecteJ every piece ofshitword thatyou said foran entire week. yeah and what wourd it rook like and you know what form wouldit you know it say you just printed it out and put it in a big stack and it,s a visualrepresentation oFall the crap thatyou speak in a week. That see there it,s a visualrepresentation of language.,z

"set down as heard," in ail of its turbulence. The fuil text of soriroquy comes tonearly 5oo pages, which means that the reading of the work would be some_thing of a school assignment-cordsmith himserf remarks on the deadry te-dium ofhaving to proofread the text (twice). A friend ornis suggesreiiirr,t

"printed book could simpry be exhibited in a galrery as pieces of instailation art.Goldsmith regards this as a "dumb" idea-but "to do a z4-hour reading of thebook in the gallery would be interes ting,, (Soliloquy, 16). Interesring for i,homl

However, as Coldsmith explains in a talk entitled ..Being Uoing,, (zoo4),

"You really don't need to read my books to get the idea of what thly,re rike,you just need to know the generar concept."28 (rn other wordr, ,,,"nd at reastto the "support language.") Gordsmith identifies his work as

,,conceptuarwrit-ing," where "the idea becomes a machine that makes the text.,,rs such writing,he says, "is not necessarily rogicar," but rike oulipianism it is procedurar (or"nrodular"): the writer's task is to serect the form that,,becomes the gramma.

12

for the total work" ("Paragraphs," ro9). Any actual writing-down could be leftto one's scribes or apprentices. lndeed, the purpose of the text's bulk seems

precisely to throw the idea behind the work into the foreground by making

the prospect ofreading seem like a Sisyphusian project, or at least a gauntlet

meant to separate critical readers from mere idlers.:o

What is interesting about Goldsmith's "writing" is that what looks like a

closed system-composition according to rule-works like a complexity, the

more so when the transcription is of events rather than of finished texts. Gold-

smith's Day (zoq), to be sure, reproduces a day's edition of the New York Times

(September t, zooo), but Doy is basically a second-order transcription, since a

newspaper is itself a record of the passing show, like Goldsmith's Fidget, which

tracks a day's worth of Goldsmith's own bodily movements-movements that

grow increasingly complex (or chaotic, or maybe just boring) as the day draws

to a drunken close.3'

In an essay entitled "Art in a Closed Field" (1962), Hugh Kenner argued that

the invention of the printing press produced a culture defined by such

things as books, dictionaries, enryclopedias, and a systematic conception oflanguage-language conceived as a finite set of elements and rules for com-

bining them into self-contained objects.r'Such a culture did not (pace Henry

James) generate a literature of loose and bagry monsters; rather it gave us

Custave Flaubert's dream ofa "book about nothing," a work held together by

purely formal relations, indifferent to anything save its own possibility; lames

loyce's Ulysses, a book made of dictionaries, directories, records, maps, and

(above all) a system of correspondences in which each word is, to the attentive

ear, an echo every other; and Samuel Beckett's Wort, where Watt is (as Watt's

interlocutor, Sam, experiences him) something of an aphasic whose speech

follows not the rules of grammar but an exhaustive series of mathematicalpermutations:

Then he took it into his head to invert, no longer the order ofthe words in the sen-

tence, nor that ofthe letters in the word, nor that ofthe sentences in the period,

nor simultaneously that of the words in the sentence and that of the letters in the

word, nor simultaneously that of the words in the sentence and that of the sen-

tences in the period, nor simultaneously that of the letters in the word and that ofthe sentences in the period, nor simultaneously that of the letters in the word and

that ofthe words in the sentence and that ofthe sentences in the period, ho no,

but, in the briefcourse ofthe same period, now that ofthe words in the sentence,

now that of the letters in the word, now that of thc scnt('nc('s in tltc period, now

13

simultaneously that of the sentences in the period, now simultaneously that ofthe words in the sentence and that of the letters in the word, now simultaneously

that of the words in the sentence and that of the sentences in the period, nowsimultaneously that of the letters in the word and that of the sentences in the pe-

riod, and now simultaneously that of the letters in the word and that of the words

in the sentences and that ofthe sentences in the period.::

"l recall," Sam says, "no example of this manner" (Watt, 169). Watt is, in his

way, a conceptual artist, or an Oulipovian beside the fact.

Interestingly, Kenner remarks in passing (he was, in fact, among the firstto notice) that "American literature . . . has always tended to reject" analogies

between writing and closure, and this is especially true of American poetrysince Williams, which "has patterned itself aggressively on speech, not print,and furthermore not the speech of conversation, which is always in danger offalling into a closed set of patterns . . . , but rather the speech ofwhat is some-

times called spontaneity but is actually just naked utterlnce, spontaneous orpremeditated" (6o9)-rather like Goldsmith's Soliloquy, where the spatiality ofthe closed field gives way to the temporality of things that, like Spicer's serials,

stop but do not end. Think of Beckett's Unnamable as-what?-an inversionof Watt, and Goldsmith's prototype.

To speak strictly, however, Coldsmith's transcriptions, particularly Soliloquy

and Fidget, cannot help reducing events to spatial form, whose boundaries

Goldsmith has explored in search of an exit, which he finally finds in digitaltechnology's eradication of the page. In his conversation with Marjorie Perl-

ofi he writes: "ln my practice, I've come to believe that language by its nature

is fluid and will assume any form it's poured into. Hence my production has

taken the form of everything from gallery installations to computer programs

to couture dresses to CDs and books, all using the same language. Before the

computer, language was much less fluid and it was almost impossible to coax

off the page. Reproducing technologies such as Xerox just gave you morelanguage glued to the page. Now, once language is digitized, its transportiveand morphic tendencies are foreground. Great chunks oflanguage have been

melted and are free to assume a myriad of forms" ("A Conversation," 9).Recall Williams's idea that words have their own autonomy, and that what

the poet provides is a place for them to sit down. Now we see that the page

is itself a closed field, however open words might themselves try to remainin the "what you will" of their assembly. The typographical experiments ofnrodernism-from St6phane Mallarm6's Un Coup de Dis (r897) through lsidorelsou's l-ettristcs to the various forms of visual and concrete poetry that have

llorrrishc<l sincc thc r96os attcnrpted to keep the page open by rejecting the

idea of language as any form of mediation.3a A poem is made of words, notideas, and words, at bottom, are made of ink-as in Rosaire Appel's "word-

less" poems orTim Gaze's Asemic writing.:sDigital technology (if l, a Luddite, have it right) liberates poetry from the

fixity of ink by mobilizing it within a four-dimensional electronic space. In an

essay titled "Holopoetry" (19g6) the digital artist Eduardo Kac writes:

Holopoetry belongs to the tradition ofexperimental poetry and verbal art, but ittreats the word as an immaterial form, that is, as a sign that can change or dis-

solve into thin air, breaking its formal stiffness. Freed from the page and freed

from other palpable materials, the word invades the reader's space and forces himor her to read it in a dynamic way; the reader must move around the text and findmeanings and connections the words establish with each other in empty space.

Thus a holopoem must be read in a broken fashion, in an irregular and discon-

tinuous movement, and it will change as it is viewed from different perspectives.36

The holopoem, in other words, is a virtual text that moves and changes as thereader wanders through it, thus giving Williams's practice of "broken com-

position," not to mention the concept of a complex entity, a new turn-something one might compare to a funhouse tour, since the reader, however

much now a collaborator of sorts, remains (rather like Spicer's poet) subject

to the words themselves, or at least to the letters (or digits) that endlessly re-

shape themselves and their environment.3T

To be sure, any form is inevitably caught in the double bind of its technol-ogy, which limits or confines what it makes possible-witness the difficultyof citing a holopoem; "Because of their irreducibility as holographic texts,"

Kac writes, "holopoems resist vocalization and paper reproduction. Since the

perception of the texts changes with viewpoint, they do not possess a single'structure' that can be transposed or transported to and from another medi-um" ("Holopoetry," t3213). The best one can do is to make a film of such a

poem, which Kac has done in the case of several of his works.38 A mere pho-

tograph (see figure 2, a stop-frame of Eduardo Kac's "Letter") simply turns thework back into a piece of visual poetry.

Marjorie Perloff's book Poetry 0n E }ffthe Page concludes with a chapter onthe video artist Bill Viola, who makes the claim that one of his pieces is "a

form of visual poetry." At which point Perloff asks: "What makes such an in-stallation 'poetic'?" Her speculation is that Viola's videos, however visual, are

something other than "retinal art, " and that the nonlinearity of contemporarypoetry is an example of this "other.":s Similarly, Eduardo Kac claims allegiance

to "the tradition of experimental poetry and verbal art," not bccause his art

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is "poetical" (or even linguistical), but because ofthe way it executes the con-cepts of turbulence, nonidentity, and open form:

In its reaction against fixed structures, holographic poetry creates a space where

the linguistic factor ofsurfaces is disregarded in favor ofan irregular fluctuationofsigns that can never be grasped at once by the reader. This turbulent space, withbifurcations which can take on an indefinite number of rhythms, allows for the

creation of what I call textual instability. By textual instabilig, I mean precisely

the condition according to which a text does not preserve a single visual structure

in time as it is read by the viewer, producing different and transitory verbal con-

figurations in response to the beholder's perceptual exploration. ("Holopoetry,"

Bs-tq)

One might put it this way: it is as if holopoetry transported us through a look-ing-glass back into the legendary khdra, Plato's aboriginal space of proliferat-ing structures on the hither side of any formal order, a receptacle whose an-

archic purpose is to maintain itself in a perpetual neither/nor (neither eidos

nor kosmos) in which no one is anything and everything is otherwise (imaeus,

5ta-5zc).aoNot surprisingly, I'm reminded of Gertrude Stein's line, "l have lost the

thread of my discourse," to which she adds: "it does not matter if we find it"(SM, r55).

SHOULD POETRY BE .ETHICALOR OTHERWISE?

A sign

combs it togetherto answer a

brooding rockart.

1 I :! .ir l; ;:i

to link up poetry and the political-the critical mandate from the r97os and

r98os whose force is still felt both in and out of the seminar room-the articu-lation of poetry and ethics carries with it, certainly with the best of intentions,an attempt to provide poetry with a justification that it may neither want norneed-nor, for all of that, entertain as a possibility. fhe ghost of Aristotlespooks the whole project. What if poetry, at least in some of its versions, onlygets interesting when it is in excess of its reasons for being?

A number of writers, myself included, have proposed for better or worse thatthere are at least two conceptions ofthe "ethical" to choose from in our cur-

rent intellectual environment (which is two too few, Badiou would say). Onegoes back to Kant and has to do with the application of principles or rules as

to what is right and good. These rules are either universal, or, as in Hegel's

theory, they comprise the Sittlichkeir, the moral customs, of integrated com-munities. In either event the point of ethics is to enable one to rise and remainabove reproach in one's actions, beliefs, and character (at ease with the face

in the mirror). Self-possession, or autonomy for short, is the principal ethi-cal ideal. To this normative theory the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas

offered an alternative by arguing that the claims other people have on me are

in advance of whatever reasons I might use to justifi my conduct. I am respon-

sible for the good of the other come what may: that is, my responsibility is an-

archic, on the hither side of moral principles and the reasonings that provide

their support-which means, among other things, that my relation to othersis not one of knowing but, as Levinas likes to put it, one of proximity, as of skinexposed to the touch.aThis reversal of subjectivity is crucial. Being approached

or addressed by the other, not the cogiro, makes me what I am, namely some-

one who exists in the accusative, not so much an I as a me to whom the other"happens" as an event oftranscendence ("otherwise than being, or beyond es-

sence," as Levinas's motto has it: outside the grasp ofconcepts and categories).Kantian ethics appears more utopian (more in tune with bourgeois comforts)than does Levinas's theory, but a Levinasian would argue that ethical respon-

sibility belongs to the economy of the gift rather than to systems of exchange

and their returns on investment (where the good I do for others puts them innry debt). The ethicaI is, whatever else it is, a critique of these systems, alongwith their presiding icon: the disengaged punctual ego exercising rational( ontrol over its possessions.s The ethical subject, by contrast, is an offering,,r nrovcnlclrt oIorre-for-the-other. Sometimes Levinas figures this movement

Ein Zeichen

Kemmt es zusammen

zurAntwort aufeinegrlbelnde Felskunst.

-Paul Celan, "MitMikrolithen gespickte" (GWll, 237)

ln recent years there has been a good deal of important work on the relation

between poetryand ethics.' Notsurprisingly, oneconclusion to bedrawn fromthis materialis thatthe relation between poetry and ethics is highly conflicted,

not simply because of the conceptual instability of the terms in question-"Ethics does not exist," says Alain Badiou'-but also because any effort of con-

junction threatens to limit the autonomy that opens the practice of poetry to

its multifarious futures. (On my desk, as I write this, is a copy of the TimesLiter'

ory Supplement containing a review, entitled "The Poetry of Ethics," of Geoffrey

Hill's Collected CriticalWritings. The reviewer, Adam Kirsch, notes that ever since

his first book of poems, published in 1959, "Hill has been concerned with the

ethics of poetry. What, if anything, makes it morally acceptable to write po-

etry in an age dominated by suffering and evil?"3 The word "barbarism" has

had poetry under surveillance for at least the last half-century.) Like the effort

IB

20

as a Saying (le Dire) on the hither side of language, that is, prior to predication

or production of the Said (le Dit).6 Saying is not self-expression (except perhaps

in the literal sense of self-expulsion); in one of Levinas's favorite similes, it is a

turning ofoneselfinside-out "like a cloak."7

Arguably there is an open boundary (or crack) between poetry and Levinasian

ethical theory in the sense that poetry seems to have long since broken withany analytic culture of principles and rules, together with the various con-

cepts ofmastery and authority that such a culture sponsors, as in the universal

supervision ofparticulars. There is no one thing that can be called "poetr),"neither now nor at least since the start ofthe last century when, as Adorno

says, artworlds began producing "things of which we do not know what they

are" (AT, rr4). ln which case it follows that there are no criteria by which any-

thing could be set aside as nonpoetic-an anarchic state of affairs in which

poets like Charles Bernstein have flourished for a seemingly endless number

ofyears. Here is a samplingof brief passages from some of Bernstein's poems

in an early collection entitled, appropriately or otherwise, Poeticlustice (r979):

Listen. I can feeI it. Specificatly and intentionally. It does hurt. Gravity weighing

it down. lt's not too soft. I like it. Ringing like this. The hum. Words peeling. The

one thing. ("Palukavitle" IRR, ra5])

One problem with a fragment sitting. Wave I stare as well at that only as if this all

and not form letting it but is it. ("Lo Disfruto" [RR, r+8])

its the DENSE

stU Ff again that shlt i cANt UN DErstAnd when yOu gO oN that way ("elecTric"

IRR, r5a])

izwurry ray aZoOt de puund in reducey ap crrRisle ehk nugkinj sluxYY senshl. lg

si heh hahpae uvd r fahbeh aht si gidrid. ("Azoot D'Puund" [RR,16r])

all that on a fall that sweats in it upon layers of, and if, the on, just a, silk, soiled,

crying down the banisters, mommy, mommy, the cornflakes, the stale beer in

the hall ("'OutofThis Inside"' [RR, r65])

HH/ie,sobVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv i iibalfmgmMw er,, me"ius

ieigorcyCjeuvine+pee.)a/na.t" ihl"n,s

ortnsihcldseloopitemoBruce-Oiwvewaa3gosoanfl ++, r" P

21

rH I Dftppnee"eantsanegcintineoep emfnemtn t'e'w'aswen

toTT pr'-kkePrym l (" Lift Ofl' [RR, r7a])

My weight becomes something that neither holds me down nor gives me release

the stomach hair eyes all set themselves in a separate way downflow you might

say as Susan says shimmering is too strong an end note not that this particular

bulb or cube doesn'tglow but that figuration almost too overwhelms, which

cries out for some quieter moment ("Faculty Politics" [RR, r77])

Bernstein's work is, whatever else it is, a persistently comic investigationof the idea that there are more ways of putting words together than can be

contained within the standard received model of a (unitary) speaking voice.

This is the form his iconoclasm takes. His poetry suggests a more complex and

decidedly more porous and ludic subjectivity than the linguistic concept of aspeaker can contain; it is one that belongs to a history of poetry made of differ-ent conceptions of what voices are and where they come from, whether fromgods, demons, the other minds in one's head, a good library, or the channels,

circuits, airways, and back alleys of mass (and mis-) communication. All of theabove and a good deal more apply in Bernstein's case, since what characterizes

his poetry is not the disappearance of the voice (as one of the graphic stews

above might suggest) but its wild, heterogeneous proliferation in forms ofpastiche, parody, and manic impersonation-poetic madness as madcap-asin "The Age of Correggio and the Carracci" (from Wrrh Strings), whose title has

no bearing on the poem, unless we imagine something baroque about Bern-

stein's paratactic interruptions. The poem in any event breaks up the idiom ofa familiar kind of letter:

Thanks foryour ofalready some

weeks ago. Things

very much back to having returned

to a life that

(regrettably) has very little in

common with, a

totatly bright few

or something like

it. Was

delighted to get

a most remarkable & am assuming

allcorrtinues, well

thcrcabouts. (WS, r9)

22

Bernstein describes his work as "a mix of different types of language pieced

together as a mosaic-very 'poetic' diction next to something that sounds

overheard, intimate address next to philosophical imperatives, plus a mix ofwould-be proverbs, slogans, jingles, nursery rhymes, songs" (MW, z5*26). To

which one should add: puns, jokes, goofr wordplay-"mentality / drives the

/ spoon" ("Epiphanies of Suppression" [RT, r9]-Bernstein's poems won'tleave home without them. ln the essay "Comedy and the Poetics of PoliticalForm" Bernstein refers to such goofiness as "acting out, in dialectical play, theinsincerity of form. . . . Such poetic play does not open into a neat oppositionbetween dry high irony and wet lyric expressiveness but, in contrast, collapses

into a more destabilizingfield of pathos, the ludicrous, schtick, sarcasm. . .

where linguistic shards of histrionic inappropriateness pierce the momentarycalm of an obscure twistof phrase" (AP,zzo).8

"lnsincerity of form" is a curious phrase, but perhaps it only means thatform is not "expressive" in the sense that Susanne Langer gave this term inFeeling and Form, where the work of art is said to reflect the dynamic structures

of feeling-growth and attenuation, conflict and resolution, speed and arrest,

and so on.e Form for Bernstein is, after all, not formal but materialized: an ale-

atory mixture of found sounds and incongruous words ("linguistic shards ofhistrionic inappropriateness": Bernstein is not Rousseau, or Geoffrey Hill)-

A poem should not mean but impale

not be but bemoan,

boomerang

buck(le)

bubbte. Malted meadows & hazelnut

innuendos: l'll bet the soda water

gets the shakes sooner than

Dan gets to Tampa. "Don'tTampa

with me or I'll lacerate that

evisceration offyour face so fast

you'll think my caddle prod was a

lollipop." "Stay out of my face or I'lldeploy my assets against whatever

collateral you've got left after I

targetyourabstemious alarm." ("Dark City" IDC, rar])

The word "sincere" derives from a Latin word for "clean." lt means, says the

)ED,"pure, unmixed, free from any foreign element," and in particular free of"dissimulation" (note that for Levinas the word defines the ethical subject: "to

23

be uncovered without any defense, to be delivered over";.'o Bernstein's verse

is entirely otherwise-call it "vociferous," or "vociferential," or "ventrilocol-loquial": very much like the Shakespeare of whom Samuel lohnson com-

plained that the quibble "has some malignant power over his mind" ("Preface

to Shakespeare"). According to the 0ED, a quibble originally meant "ethically

dubious matter." One of Bernstein's "Fragments from the Seventeenth Mani-festo of Nude Formalism" reads: "Poetry has as its lower limit insincerity and

its upper limit dematerialization," which is to say that materiality is the condi-tion in which insincerity thrives." By contrast a "dematerialized" poetry is one

that presumably can rise (and remain) above reproach: lyrical ascent as against

the art of sinking.

Or, alternatively, one can invoke the upside-down spirit of Tristram Shandy,

who broke the law of gravity that remains foundational for the ethical underwhatever philosophical description. Recall the grave Levinas in his early essay

"Reality and lts Shadow" (1948) :

Magic, recognized everywhere as the devil's part, enjoys an incomprehensibletolerance in poetry. Revenge is gotten on wickedness by producing its caricature,which is to take from it its reality without annihilating it; evil powers are conjuredby filling the world with idols which have mouths but do not speak. It is as thoughridicule killed, as though everything really can end in songs. . . . Myth takes theplace of mystery. The world to be built is replaced by the essential completion ofits shadow. This is not the disinterestedness of contemplation but of irrespon-sibility. The poet exiles himself from the ciry. From this point of view, the valueof the beautiful is relative. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly inartistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as oFfeastingduring a plague. (Collected PhilosophicalPapers, e)

On reading this Boccaccio's name comes to mind, followed quickly by Ador-no's, among others. The problem, as Plato understood, is that the poet is a

light and flighty thing. The task of philosophy, as it has been since Aristotle, is

to read poetry seriously, that is, to redeem it (ground it) by way of appropria-tion or subsumption into categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful("allegory" is the word for it). Levinas does this in his later work by anchoringpoetry to the grauitos of le Dire,the movement of one-for-the-other that consti-tutes the ethical subject. lt is worth reciting the passage cited in note 6 above:"Saying is not a game. . . . The original or pre-original saying, what is put forthirr tlrc firrcword, weaves an intrigr-re oFresponsibiliry. It sets forth an order

24

more grave than being and antecedent to being. By comparison being appears

like a game. Being is play or ddtente, without responsibility, where everything

possible is permitted."

ln hisessay"PaulCelan: From Beingto theOther" (1972) Levinasrefers usto

Celan's famous address "Der Meridian," where poetry is, however obscurely,

said to be vocative in character:''

But the poem speaks. lt remains mindful ofits dates, but it speaks. True, it speaks

only on its own, its very own behalf [in seiner eigenen, allereigensren Soche]. But I

think-and this will hardly surprise you-that the poem has always hoped, for

this very reason, to speak on behalf of the strange-no,l can no longer use this

word here-on behalf of theother, who knows, perhaps of an altogetherother.

And a bit later:

The poem intends another lDasGedichtwillzueinenAndere), needs this other, itneeds an opposite lGegenilberl. It goes toward it, bespeaks it [es spricht sich ihm zu].

For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure [6estolt] of this other toward

which it is heading. (GWlll, rg6-g8; CP, 48-49)'3

It would be surprising if Levinas did not try to see himself (or his forebear,

Martin Btiber) in these lines, whose elusiveness allows for a good deal of in-

terpolation. One of Levinas's purposes in this essay is to pry Celan's remarks

on poetry loose from Heidegger's poetics of world-making where the poet

calls things into the openness being and, in the same stroke, gathers us (hu-

mankind) into a conversation.'4 Not an easy undertaking for Levinas, because

Celan's writings on poetry are saturated with Heidegger's vocabulary, as in the

following from his Bremen address:

I tried, during those years and the years after, to write Poems: in order to speak,

to orient myselfi, to flnd out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.

It meant movement, you see, something happening, being en route, and at'

tempt to find a direction lEswor . . . Ereignis, Bewegung, Untennegssein, eswar derVersuch,

Richtung zu gewinnen]. (GWl I I, 186; CP, 34)'s

ln "Der Meridian" Celan figures the poem not fiust) as an art object but on the

model of Heidegger's thinker who is on the way (Unterwegs) to an elsewhere

(a-topia) not obviously marked on any map.'6 lt can be said that Celan differs

from Heidegger because he populates this elsewhere with another person

(there are, basically, no people in Heidegger's philosophy: anonymous Das-

ein, gods and mortals, the faceless crowd, but no one whom anyone would

recognize). Specifically Celan borrows someone from the Russian poet Osip

Mandelstam, who drew a distinction between prose and l)octry that seenls

25

centralto Celan's poetics. The prose writer, Mandelstam says, always address-

es himself (if "himself" is the word) to a familiar audience-his "public": "la-

dies and gentlemen." The poet, by contrast, must not know whom he is ad-

dressing. "Without dialogue, lyric poetry cannot exist," Mandelstam says, but,

paradoxically, it is a formal condition of poetry that its audience must remain

a stranger-an unknown and anonymous interlocutor. To address someone

one knows is to speak predictably, knowing in advance or from experience

how to make oneselfunderstood; but to address a stranger is not to know how

one will sound or what one will say-for the point of writing, after all, is to

catch oneselfby surprise: "there is only one thing that pushes us into the ad-

dressee's embrace: the desire to be astonished by our own words, to be capti-

vated by their originality and unexpectedness."'z To which Celan adds a screw-

turn of his own, figuringthe poetas a kind of Orpheuswhose audience is made

of things as well as people:

The poem becomes-under what conditions-the poem of a person who stillperceives, still turns toward phenomena [dem ErscheinendenZugewandten), address-

ing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation-often desperate

conversation lv erzwerfekes Gespriichl.

Only the space of this conversation ldiesesGesprdchsl can establish what is ad-

dressed, can gather it into a "you" around the naming and speaking l. But this

"you," come about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness

into the present. Even in the here and now of the poem-and the poem has

only this one, unique, momentary present-even in this immediaq lUnmittel'

barkeitl and nearness, the otherness gives voice to what is most its own: its time.

Whenever we speak with things fDinge] in this way we also dwell on the ques-

tion of their where-from and where-to, an "open" question "without resolution,"

a question which points toward open, empry, free spaces fins )ffeneundLeereund

Freieweisenden Fragel-we have ventured far out.

The poem also searches for this place. (GWlll, t98-99; CP, 5o)

Or, as a Heideggerian would say: GelassenheitzuDingen.

l(rokus, vom gastlichen

Tisch aus gesehn:

zeichenfii h liges

kleines Exil

einer gemeinsamen

Wahrheit,

tlu brauchst

it'tlt'n ll:rlrn. (GWlll, tzz)

Crocus, spotted from a

hospitable table:

small sign-

sensing exile

ofa common

truth,

you need

cvcry blade. (SPP, 37a)

26

Notice that this is not exactly (or only) an apostrophe to the crocus. Rather it isan address to a situation held in common, as from one exile to another, witha piece of advice thrown in: take with you as much as you can, since whateveryou leave behind is a piece of yourself, Perhaps there is more to be said, since

the crocus is the first to bloom in the spring; and then there is the traditionthat extends from Wordsworth's daffodil to Zukofsky's eighty flowers. Wheredo Celan's flowers fit in? There are certainly more stones than flowers in Cel-

an's poetry-the two are frequently in conflict, and flowers usually lose-soone should think carefully about the crocus.'s Another crocus, of sorts, willturn up in a moment.

i!:il

ln his Celan essay Levinas stops short of claiming any ethical standing forpoetry, which he regards as a parallel universe to be addressed in the form ofrhetorical questions-"Does [Celan] not suggest poetry itself as an unheard-ofmodality of the orherwisethanbeing?" (ProperNames,45). Levinas is rather moredeclarative in "Language and Proximity" (r967), where he reconfigures his dis-

tinction between Ie Dir and le Dire as a distinction between language as kerygma

and language as contact, where the one predicates something of something(rhis as thot) while the other is an event of sensibility or proximity in which thevisible is no longer an object of consciousness, a phenomenon or sensation,but is an impingement or obsession: "ln the ethicalrelationship with the real,that is, in the relationship of proximity which the sensible establishes, theessential is committed. Life is there. Sight is, to be sure, an openness and a

consciousness, and all sensibiliry, openingas a consciousness, is called vision;but even in its subordination to cognition sight maintains contact and prox-

imity. The visible caresses the eye, and one hears like one touches" (Collected

Philosophical Papers, u8).Then, withoutwarning, much less explanation, Levinas gives the name "po-

etry" to this "ethical relationship with the real":

The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before be-

ing approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But

over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the thingsthey have held, the images ofthose things, the fragments ofthose things, the con-texts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the wordsthat are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs oflanguage, the letters traced,

the vestiges, the relics-over all things, beginnlngwith the human face and skin,tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible. (Col-

lected Philosophical Popers, tt}-t g)

27

"The poetry of the world," Levinas says, "is inseparable from proximity par ex-

cellence, or the proximity of the neighbor par excellence" (Collected Philosophicol

Papers, rrg).

No doubt this formulation captures something, namely that poetry is, insome sense, a ground-level mode of responsibiliry, as when Heidegger speaks

of listening as being antecedent to discursiveness.'s lt is possible that Levinas

crosses over into metaphor when he says that this "relationship of proximity. . . is the original language, a language without words or propositions, purecommunication" (CollectedPhilosophicalPopers,:rg).lf thiswereso itwould nolonger be clear how poetry could be a practice with a history, that is, some-thing made up concretely (materially) of poems. We'll see very shortly the formthis problem takes in Celan's later poetry. What interests Levinas is the paradoxthat the proximity of others and of things does not diminish their distance;that is, sensibility is not serenity or repose but is, on the contrary, a "restless-

ness" or anarchy with respect to any order of things (Collected Philosophical pa-

pers,rzo-zr). And this is perhaps coherentwith the obscurities that beleaguerthe relationship between "l" and "you" in Celan's poetry, where, as Gadamer

says in his commentary on Atemkristall, "'1,' 'you,' and 'we' are pronounced inan utterly direct, shadouryr-uncertain and constantly changing way" (Gadomer

on Celan, z7). Not for nothing are pronouns called "shifters." "1" and "you" are

restless, but so are Celan's poems, whose language is arguably no longer a

form of mediation but is anarchic initsWortaufschilttung(Gwll, zg)-its weirdand wild way of combining and compounding words;'o

Kalk-Krokus, im

Hellwerden: dein

steckbriefgereiftes

Von-dort-und-auch-dort-her,

unspaltbar,

Sprengstoffe

ldcheln dirzu,

die Delle Dasein

hilft einer Flocke

aus sich heraus,

in den Fundgruben

Chalk-crocus

the coming of lighr your

indivisible

mellowed in the warrant

From-here-and-there-too,

high explosives

are smiling at you,

existence the nick

helps a snowflake

come out of itself,

at the source-points

staut sich die Moldau. (CWll, 4o6) the Moldau is rising. (LP, r49),,

One can only imagine what Levinas would have made of "steckbriefgereiftes"or of'the nriddle stanza with its smiling "sprengstoffe" and "die Delle Dasein,"wlrich (as in Ross's rendition) should perhaps be allowed its Heideggerian res-

28

onance ("the dent ofDasein"). Meanwhile the chalk-crocus here does not ap-

pear to be a flower, although perhaps a good horticulturalist could identifi it.

lnterestingly, a photograph of a chalk-crocus (that is, of an image of a crocus

inscribed in chalk on a rock) is available online at http://flicker.com/photos/melisdramati cl 4655486261. lt is hard not to take the photograph as an inten-tional allusion to Celan's poem, given the almost obsessive place stones have

in his poetry. Turning a flower to stone is the work of a Medusa-head, Celan's

muse and nemesis-recall from "Der Meridian" Celan's elucidation of Georg

Btichner's Lenz:"'Onewould [ike to be a Medusa's head'to . . . seize the naturalas the natural by means of art. . . . This means going beyond what is human,stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny-therealm where the monkey, the automaton and with them . . . oh, art, too, seem

to be at home" (GWl I I, rg:; CP, 4z-$).To which he later adds these words:

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, per-

haps poetry goes its way-the way of art-for the sake of just a turn. And since thestrange, the abyss ond Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to liein the same direction-it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort outthe strange from the strange? lt is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, thatMedusa's head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I,

estranged and freed Weigeseercn befremdeten lch) here, in this manner, some other thing

lein Anderesl is also set free?

Perhaps after this the poem can be itself. . . can in this now art-less, art-freemanner go other ways, including the ways o[art, time and again? (CWIII, 195-96;

cP,47)

Art freezes the life out of things. The poem wants to breathe life back intothem. No doubt the poem borders the possible/impossible relation of artand life. That is, the poem is not (ust) an art-object but, following Heidegger

and Mandelstam, a movement both toward utopia and toward an unknowninterlocutor; but, turn and turn about, kunst-loseundkunst-frei, it can also movealong the path of art-as how could it not? This leaves poetry in a neither/norcondition, or leaves us uncertain as to what it is. Let us say that for Celan it isantinomic, being both immaterial as a breath and as grave as a stone, as whenbreath crystallizes, as it frequently does in his poetry: witness Atemkristall.,,

Celan wants to break with Mallarm6's hermetic thesis that poetry is made ofwords, not of things we use words to produce; poetry is immaterial language(GWlll, zoz', CP,55: "immaterial, but earthly"), rather likc l.evinas's poetry of

29 ):, :i .,:: i,i ,. fi? ti i:i i": .' ,l ,i 11, P 1' ll." ; "i

the proximity of things, which is "the original language, a language wirhoutwordsorpropositions,purecommunication" (Collectedphitosophicalpopers,ng).But of course this is contradicted at once by the brute material fact of Celan,spoems23-

Weggebeiztvom Eroded byStrahlenwind deiner Sprache the beamwind ofyour speechdas bunte Gerede des An- the gaudy chatter ofthe pseudo-erlebten-das hundert- experienced-my hundred-ztngige Mein- tongued perjury-Cedicht, das Genicht. (cwll,3r) poem, the noem. (B, 95),4

These lines are commonly taken as a valedictory in which celan turns awayfrom his earlier, more conventional (lyrical-poetical-figural) verse towardthe characteristically incongruous word-clusters of his later work-,.das was-sergewordene Buch" (GWIl, 47), "blauschwarzen Silben,, (CWll, 6r), ..Der

Ke_hlkopfuerschlu8laut / singt" (GWIt, u4), "Der herzschriftgekri.imelte sichtin-sel" (GWll, r74)-that occasionally fragment into sound poetry:,s

Deine Frage-deine Antwort. your question_your answer.Dein Gesang, wasweiBer? yourchant, whatdoes it know?

Tiefimschnee,

Iefimnee,

I-i-e. (cwil,39)

Deepinsnow,

Eepinno,

l-i-o. (B,to7),6

Certainly this is a long way from the iconic "Todesfuge," which is still regardedas celan's signature poem. "Aboutness" fades from the later texts, as in thefollowing from F adensonnen:

Die Fleissigen

Bodenschdtz, hduslich,

die geheizte Synkope

das nicht zu entritselndeHalljaha

die vollverglasten

Spinnen-Altire im alles-

[iberragenden Flachbau,

die Zwischenlaute

(noch immer?),

rlic Schattenpalaver,

rlic Angste, eisgerecht,

Busy

mineral wealth, domestic,

thermal syncope,

insolublejubilee,

vitrailed

spider-altars in the all-

paramount block,

the semivowels

(still?),

the shadowparley,

dread, ice-just,

The poem forms a single period without becoming anything resembling a

sentence, until perhaps the last (Poe-like) lines. Paratactic phrasing replaces

the discursiveness of speech. And the baroque-covered "spracheschluckende

Duschraum"-literally, "the language-swallowing shower-room"-is char-

acteristic of the heterogeneous ways in which, in the later poetry, words and

things are constellated along the same material plane of existence:

They eat:

the bedlamite's-truffle, a piece

unburied poetry,

found tongue and tooth. (B,r47)

At the assembled

signs, in the

wordmembraned oiltent (8, r7o)

die Sprachtiirme rings the language-towers everywhere

in der totzuschweigenden Zeichen- in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign-

Zone (GWll, 9r) zone (B, zt9)

flugklar,

der barock ummantelte,

spracheschluckende Duschraum,

semantisch durchleuchtet,

die unbeschriebene Wand

einer Stehzelle:

hier

leb dich

querdurch, ohne Uhr. (GWll, r5t)

Sie essen:

die Tollhiiusler-Triiffel, ein Sttick

unvergrabner Poesie

fand Zunge und Zahn. (GWll,59)

Bei den zusammengetretenen

Zeichen, im

worthdutigen 0lzelt (GWll, 69)

schlaksig

kommt eine riber-

mtindige Silbe geschritten (CWII, r4z)

Kleide die Worthohlen aus

mit Pantherhauten,

erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,

sinnhin und sinnher (GWll, r98)

clear to fly,

the baroque-immantled,

tonguesluiced shower-room,

semantically translumined,

the blankwatt

ofa standing-cell:

here

you must live through-

out, withouttime. (FB, ro5)

gangly,

a more than

major syllable comes walking (TC, 95)

Line the wordcaves

with panther skins,

widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,

sense-hither and sense-thither (TC, zo3)

lmagine, ifyou can, "unburied poetry": cadaverousverse-"Poetry, ladies and

gentlemen: an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain" (GWlll,

zoo; CP,5z). The "wordmembraned oiltent" meanwhile belongs to the family

of "wordcaves" lined with "panther skins." Plus an ambulatory syllable look-ing for all the world like Franz Kafka. lt would be interesting to read Celan's

poetry just to follow the often tragicomic course of his "winterhard-cold / syl-

lables" (GWl, I, z9o: "winterhart-kalten / Silben"):

Die Abende graben sich dir The evenings inter themselves

unters Aug. Mit der Lippe auF underyour eye. With lip-gesammelteSilben-sch<ines, uploadedsyllables-lovely,

lautloses Rund-helfen dem Kriechstern

in ihre Mitte. (GWI, 235)

noiseless circle-help the creepstar

into their midst. (my translation)

One could say that as Celan's poetry thickens, the question ofpoetry and theethical fades into the distance. But perhaps this would be to take a narrowviewbecause, after all, in its break with principles and rules the ethical is about thelimits of my ability or power as a subject (the limits of possibility), which is

exactly what Celan's poetry brings me up against. ln his later writings lacquesDerrida, drawing on the work of Maurice Blanchot as well as that of Emmanuel

Levinas, came to think of the ethical as an event of the impossible. An eventof the impossible is something like an epiphanic break-what complexity-theorists call a catastrophe-an absolutely singular disruption in the courseor order of things, as when I am called upon for forgiveness. Derrida's idea is,

not surprisingly, paradoxical: "lf I forgive only what's forgivable, I've forgivennothing. . . . lf I forgive only what is venial, only what is excusable or pardon-able, the slight misdeed, the measured and measurable, the determined and

Iimited wrongdoing, in that case, l'm not forgiving anything. . . . I can onlyforgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn'tpossible to forgive." (As if forgiveness were governed, like the gift, by the prin-ciple of loss.) The ethical event, in other words, is an advent of the impos-sible, where the impossible, Derrida says, "is not simply negative. " The ethicalmeans that "the impossible must be done. The event, if there is one, consistsin doing the impossible."'z

Besides forgiveness Derrida offers the example of invention-that is, theinvention of a work of art: "lnvention is an event; the words themselves indi-cate as much. It is a matter of finding, of bringing out, of makingwhat is notyct here come to be. lnventing, if it is possible, is not inventing. . . . If I can

irrvcrrt what I invent, if I have the ability to invent what I invent, that means

32

that the invention follows a potentiality, an ability that is in me, and thus itbrings nothing new. It does not constitute an event. I have the ability to make

this happen and consequently the event, what happens at that point, disruptsnothing; it's not an absolute surprise" ("A Certain Impossible Possible Say-

ing," 43). Likewise if I merely say what can be said, nothing happens (recall

Mandelstam on writing to surprise onesell or Adorno on making "things ofwhich we do not knowwhat they are": the event of modernism). ln this respect

the ethics of invention would consist in doing what cannot be done, as whenMaurice Blanchot, in one of his earliest theoretical texts, writes:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothingto write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by

the utter necessiry of always writing it. Having nothing to express must be taken

in the most literal way. Whatever he would like to say, it is nothing. The world,things, knowledge are to him only landmarks across the void. And he himself is

already reduced to nothing. Nothingness is his material. He rejects any forms inwhich it offers himself to him, since they are something. He wants to seize it not inan allusion but in its own actual truth. He is looking for a "No" that is not "No" tothis, "No" to that, "No" to everything, but "No" pure and simple. . . . [The] "l have

nothing to say" ofthe writer, like that ofthe accused, encloses the whole secret ofhis solitary condition.'8

A text that Samuel Beckett happily plagiarized:

B. The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a cer-

tain order on the plane ofthe feasible.

D. What other plane can there be for the maker?

B. Logicalty, none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of itspuny exploits, wearing of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a littlebetter the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

D. And preferring what?

B. The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to ex-

press, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express,

togetherwith the obligation to express.'s

"Language," Blanchotwrites, "is possible only because it strives for the impos-sible" (WF, zz). The true poem is preciselywhatcannot bewritten. To which he

adds, in an essay on Rend Char (r9a6): "The search for totality, in all its forms,is the poetic claim par excellence, a claim in which the impossibility of being

accomplished is included as its condition, so that if it ever happens to be ac-

complished, it is only as something not possible, because the poem claims

to include its impossibility and its non-realization in its very existence" (WF,

ro4). or again, in an essay on poetry as a refusal ofthe powers ofexpression("The Great Refusal" [rgsg]): "Poetry is not there in order to say impossibility;

it simply answers to it, saying in responding. Such is the secret lot, the secret

decision of every essentiaI speech in us: naming the possible, responding tothe impossible" (lC, 48). No doubt this responsibility is what Levinas would

call "an unheard-of modality of the otherwisethonbeing."

It would not be difficult to locate Celan in this antinomic context-in his"Meridian" address he says quite explicitly, if a bit gnomically, that the poem

of which he is speaking "certainly does not, cannot exist" (GWll, r99; CP, 5r).Poetry is, in Blanchot's word, ddseuvrement: worklessness:

A new kind ofarrangement not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconcilia-

tion, but that accepts disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out ofwhich, through speech, relation is to be created: an arrangement that does notcompose but juxtaposes, that is to say, leaves each of the terms that come intorelation ourside one another, respecting and preserving this exterioriry and this dis-

tance as the principle-always already undercut-of all signification. luxtaposi-tion and interruption here assume an extraordinary force ofjustice.:o

lmagine poetry as a defeat ofpoiesis: the fragmentary imperative. As I once triedto show, there is in this embrace of contradiction, interruption, and paratax

a deep kinship between Blanchot and Celan, who wrote in German, to be

sure-

Sprich- Speak-Doch scheide das Nein nichtvom la. But keepyes and no unsplit.

(GWI, r35) (PPC,9e)

-but whose poetry and poetics are deeply informed by the French intellec-

tual culture in which Blanchot was such a powerful presence.a' Here are the

last lines of "Wer herrscht?" ("Who Rules?"):

Die schwarzdiaphane

Cauklerg<isch

In unterer

Kulmination.

Der erkimpfte Umlaut im Unwort:

dein Abglanz: der Grabschild

eines der Denkschatten

hier. (GWII, rr6)

The black-diaphanous

jugglerjack

in lower

culmination.

The hardwon umlaut in the unword:

your reflection: the tombshield

of one of the wordshadows

here. (TC,39)

34

"The hardwon umlaut in the unword": the line captures as concisely as possi-

ble the event of Celan's poetry. I'm reminded, in conclusion, of one of Michael

Palmer's Celan-like poems:

Unutterable

pages

ofcounterlightin the fluid window

a dog sings songs

asking nothing

we cannot speak?'

vorcEs oFCONSTRUGTION

on susan hourets poetry end poetics(n citational ghost stony)

My purpose here is to give a fairly comprehensive account of Susan Howe's

work, particularly from the standpoint of her later writings, principally The

Midnight (zoo3) but also with reference to the more recent Souls of the Labadie

Tract (zoo7). My general thesis is that Howe's work is a proiect of self-forma-tion through the appropriation of the writing (and therefore the subjec-tivity) of others. This self-formation is not just metaphorical but is meantto be taken literally, because for Howe the texts that she reads and cites are

pneumatic-inhabited by the ghosts of their authors. I take this to be a deeplyYeatsian dimension of her work, which becomes increasingly pronounced as

her writing develops. ln My Emily Dickinson (rS8S), for example, Howe writes:"Myvoice formed in my life belongs to no one else" (r3)-to all appearances a

straightforward statement, but "voice" and "life" turn out to be terms of con-siderable complexity, as we are reminded by one of Howe's statements (in her"Personal Narrative," which introduces Souls of the LabadieTract) in which she

recalls her reading of George Sheldon's A History of DeerfieldMassochuserrs (1895),

one oI the source texts for her "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" (1987),

:rnrl t he tcxt in which she encounters (and embraces) one of her alter egos, the

ll !t

36

Puritan minister (and outcast) Hope Atherton: "l vividly remember the sense

of energy and change that came over me one midwinter morning when, as the

book lay open in sunshine on my work table, I discovered in Hope Atherton's

wandering story the authoriry of a prior life for my own writingvoice" (SLT, t3).

Note where "authority" is located here: "voice" and "life" are heteronomous

rather than univocal or self-identical. We shall have to imagine the poet as a

fluid or, to turn the metaphor, a porous subject, not the sealed-off punctual ego

of modernity-Howe is not interested in self-possession but in selFalterity (ifsuch a term can be permitted): "for something to work," Howe said in an inter-

view with lon Thompson, "l need to be another self' (SLT, 7).'

Let me try to locate Howe's statement about life and voice, and others like it,

within the conceptual frame of her poetics considered as a whole, and which

l've taken the liberty of distilling into five propositions, each one of which

seems in some way paradoxical or even antinomic when taken in relation to

some of the others.

t.The poem is a physical object, aspltial qndvisualartrfact, inwhichwords ond letters zre

imagestobeplacedlikelinesand colorsonthewhitespace oftheprinted (orperhapshandwrit'

ten) page. As Howe said in her intewiew with Lynn Keller (speaking of her early

career as a painter): "l moved into writingphysicolly because this was concerned

with gesture, the mark of the hand and the pen or pencil, the connection be-

tween eye and hand. . . . Though my work has changed, l've never really lost

the sense that words, even single letters, are images. The look of the word is

part of its meaning-the meaning that escapes dictionary definition, or rather

doesn't escape but is bound up with it."'What is it to write physically-or, forthat matter, to read that way?3 (ln the Talisman interview with Edward Foster,

Howe asked: "How often do critics consider poetry a physical act? Do critics

look at the print on the page, at the shapes of words, at the surface-the space

of the paper itselP Very rarely" [BM, rsz].) Howe's poetry forces you to look at

words, letters, shapes, and white space, there being (at first glance) little else

to do. I must confess to looking with a blank stare at "the shapes of words,"

or the white space of the page. Here is the first poem from HingePicture Qg74),Howe's first collection of poetry:

invisible angel confined

to a point simpler than

a soul a lunar sphere a

demon darkened intelle

ct mirror clear receiv

37

ing the mute vocables

of God that rained

a demon daringdown in h

ieroglyph and stuttering(FS,::)

As we shall see, this is, in many respects, a signature poem, off-square, likeone ofAgnes Martin's paintings from Howe's painterly period. (..My formats,,,Martin said, "are square, but the grids are never absolutely square; they arerectangles, a bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance,though I didn't set out to do it that way. when I cover the square surface withrectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.,,)4 Howe,spoem is a fragment of a narrative shaped geometrically into the look of a lyricwith line breaks that emphasize the physicality or, as someone might nowprefer, the graphicity of syllables and letters.s "l was scared to begin writingsentences," Howe says in an interyiew with Lynn Keller, as if hesitating to saythings instead of makingthem.6 In the background we glimpse the artworld ofminimalism and concrete poetry that Howe writes about in "The End of Art,"where she cites the visual poet Eugene Gomringer's poetic theory: .,,Restric-

tion in the very best sense-concentration and simplification-is the very es-sence of poetry. ln the constellation [of words] something is brought into theworld. lt is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other.,,,z Torestrict is to confine within limits; in this case the limits are those of being (atleast or no more than) a mere thing. But Howe's poems rarely discard their"aboutness" entirely. ln her "Preface" to Fromestructures and elsewhere, Howe(born in t937) identifies herself as a war poet: "my early poems project aggres-sion" (F5, z9), and accordingly this first poem inHingepicturegives us shards ofthe first war-the casting out of angels from heaven. Figure Lucifer as the firstantinomian. But perhaps the key word in the poem is "stuttering,, in virtue ofthe discreet but crucial place that hesitation comes to have in Howe's poetics,as when she writes of Emily Dickinson.

she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intel-lectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inac-cessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagos/. pullingpieces of geometry, geologr, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology,mythology, and philolog from alien territory, a "sheltered,,woman audaciouslyinvented a newgrammargrounded in humilityand hesitation. HESITATE from theLatin meaning to stick. stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking.(MED, zr)

Except that for Howe this difficulty is not so much a speech defect as an alter-native way of puttingwords and things together, as in the poem just now cited,

or in one of Emily Dickinson's poems, with its paratactic dashes and appen-

dixes of alternative words. "Dashes," says Howe, "drew liberty of interruptioninside the structure of each poem" (MED, z3). Howe's dashes (or [iberties) are

invisible, as are punctuation marks, as in this recent poem from "u8 Westerly

Terrace" (Wallace Stevens's address in Hartford, Connecticut), which toys withStevens's " carefor particulars," as Louis Zukofsky called it.8

Poets have imagined you

whoever you are implicitmelody familiar metaphor

bawdy tapestries archaic

pillage love patience the

scales the dogs the boots (SLT, 8r)

Who are you ("whoever you are")? lnterestingly, in many of the poems in"rr8 WesterlyTerrace" an anonymous speaker addresses an unidentifiable sec-

ond-person singular. Maybeyou are the perfect poem-perfect in the way geo-

metricaI objects are perfect, but unlike geometricaI objects poems are made

of particulars: from "bawdy tapestries" and looted antiquities to "the dogs rhe

boots." Or maybeyou're the ideal poet, a man with a blue guitarora comedianas the letter "c." But perhaps the main character of "u8 Westerly Terrace" isjust the house Stevens lived in, and, who knows, he may be there still, since inHowe's world you can't have a house (or a poem) without a ghost in it:

I want my own house I'm

you and you're the author

You're not all right you're

all otherwise it appears as

if you don't care who you

are-if you count the host

(sr,78)

Pronouns are not called "shifters" for nothing. Think of this as a poemabout the difficulty of inhabiting shifters (or any place at all). But to reod thepoem in this (or in any other) way is to obscure its physicaliry (obscure its ob-scurity(). So for now contrast the austerity of Howe's lyric with the luxury ofso much of Stevens's poetry ("We drank Meursault, ate lobstcr Bombay withmango / Chutney"). Of course, my citation of Howc's pot'rn rrrisrcprcscnts it

because on this paper there is not enough white space around its lines. We

need to invoke the spirit ofAd Reinhardt and his black paintings:

A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, 5 feet wide 5 feet high, as wide as a man's

outstretched ars (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one

horizontal form negating, one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, direc-

tionless) three (more or less) dark (lightless) noncontrasting (colorless) colors,

brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a mat flat, free hand painted sur-

face . . . which does not reflect surroundings-a pure, abstract, non-objective,

timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting-an objectthat is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware ofno thingbutArt absolutely (no Anti-Art). (cited by Susan Howe, "The End ofArt," z)s

Imagine aesthetics as a kind of negative theology in which nothing positive

can be predicated of the work of art. But of course that was never Ad Rein-

hardt's position. ln an interviewwith f eanne Siegel he said: "l've been called a

godless mystic, which is not true."ro But eliminative procedures are meant to

deprive us (and not just us) ofthings to say:

clutching

myCrumbl

ejumble (FS,5r)

z. The physicaliry of wriring suggests that (in keeping with a number of American or,

for that mqtter, modernist poetic traditions) poetry for Howe is on objective construction,

not a subjective expression. The intentionality of the poem is more formal than

semantic-but also more aleatory and serial than architectonic: "l never startwith an intention for the sub ject of a poem. I sit quietly at my desk and let vari-

ous things-memories, fragments, bits, pieces, scraps, sounds-let them all

work into something. This has to do with changing order and abolishing cat-

egories" (BM, r6a). Abolishing categories is the work of anarchism. Of Emily

Dickinson Howe says in the Tolismon interview that "she abolishes categories"

(BM, r57), which is to say that she "disturbs the order of a world where com-

rnerce is realiry and authoritative editions freeze poems into artifacts" (BM,

r9). Likewise of Dickinson's practice of "variation and fragmentation," Howe

writes: "This space is the poem's space. Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap

to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and ruptured stanzas are points ofcon-tact and displacement. Line breaks and visual contrapuntal stresses represent

.rrr athenratic compositionaI intention" (BM, r39). An "athematic composi-t i<rna I irrtcn tion " describes Howe's A Bibliography of the King's Book: Eikon Basilike,

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42

words tossed, and words touching, crowding each other, letters mixing and

falling away from each other, commands and dreams, verticals and circles. lfit was impossible to print, that didn't matter. Because it's about impossibility

anyway" (BM, t75).

Howe writes in the Talisman interview: "l felt when I finished [Eikon] that itwas so unclear, so random, that I was crossing into visual art and that I had

unleashed a picture of violence that I needed to explain to myself" (BM, t65).

She seems to have found one explanation in chaos theory, with its ideas of

randomness, self-interruption, turbulence, and singularities. "ln algebra,"

she explains, "a singularity is the point where plus becomes minus' On a line,

ifyou start at x point, there is +1, +2, etc. But at the other side ofthe point is

-1, -2, etc. The singutarity . . . is the point where there is sudden change into

something completely else. lt's a chaotic point. lt's the point chaos enters cos-

mos, the instant articulation. Then there is a leap into something else" (BM,

r73)." And so a page ofa Howe poem is aPtto lookvery strange, as in these off-

cited lines from "Articulation of Sound Forms inTime":

rest chondriacal IunacY

velc cello viable toilquench conch uncannunc

drumm amonoosuck ythian

scow aback din

flicker skaeg ne

barge quagg peat

sieveeataeemb

stint chisel sect (S, to)

Read this page as an "articulation of sound forms" in space rather than in

time-but time/space dimensions fold into one another in Howe's work,

which is the point of her love of "polyphonic visual complexity" (BM, r4t). ls

"quench conch uncannunc / drumm amonoosuck ythian" a sonic or a visual

line? (of course it's physical in either case.) Recall the assertion: "The look of

the word is part of its meaning" ("lnterview" 6): the question is, what part? ln

My Emity Dickinson Howe converts this proposition from sight to sound; "Sound

was always part of perfect meaning" (SS)' No one has ever developed a satis-

factory answer to the question of how sounds ought to be written, much less

of how writing is to be sounded.'' The section of Howe's "Defenestration o[

Prague" entitled "Tuning the Sky" is worth consulting in this context. lt ap-

pears, perhaps appropriately, to be made oFnoise:

43

oblivious window of Quietclosing

egeiptes aegistes aegiptes egeps Egipp

egypt here there

Scotus (that is darkness)

forged history) slayius slamius stanius Monarch

greengrail mist-grey who

soundless parable possible Quiet to flame

hay (ET, 87)

Closing the "window of Quiet" means letting sound in (in the form of ca-

cophony). Perhaps we can read the third and fourth lines as a process oftun-ing that finally produces the familiar word (or sound of) "erypt." Or perhaps

the closing window is the dying of day that produces the guttural rhythmsof frogs. The middle name of medieval theologian John Duns Scotus (bornin Duns, England) produced a famous pun (dunce), which echoes the duskycolor of dun. Scotus championed the doctrine of the lmmaculate Conception,and so could be the subject ofthe ensuing predicate. Further tuning produces

sounds (but not words) of Latin: "slayius slamius stanius." Philip lV was kingof France when Scotus lectured at Paris. Philip enraged Pope Boniface Vl I I by

taxing church property to fund his wars. The pope excommunicated the king,who then had the pope put in prison, where he died. Scotus, having sided withthe pope, was sent backto England. Notice thatthe "gnashingpattern ofallit-eration" (ET , tzz) concludes with a tuning: "greengrail mist-grey" is given therepose or rhyming closure of "hay."

3 . ln other words , poetry is also an acoustical art: words are sounds os well as images . Butsounds ofwhat, exactly?And do we knowwhatsounds are? Here is EmmanuelLevinas on the primacy of seeing-

Seeing means being in a self-sufficient world that is completely here. . . . Visionis a link to being in such a way that being once seen precisely appears as a world.This is where the primacy ofvision lies in relation to the other senses. And the uni-versality ofart also rests on that primacy ofvision. lt produces beauty in nature, itcalms and soothes it. The arts, even those based on sound, produce silence.

Seeing is compositional: it means distance, perspective, arrangement, andr(r pose. Levinas seems to think of it as an essentially aesthetic activity (thinkofaesthetic distance). Butsound for Levinas is antithetical or, better, anarchicwith rcspect to vision:

Sound-and consciousness conceived as hearing-includes within itself the split-

ting apart of the always completed world of vision and art. Sound as a whole rings

out, detonates, and is scandalous. Whereas, in the realm ofvision, forms embrace

and soothe their contents, sound is like the sensory world overflowing itself,

forms being unable to hold their contents-the world ripping asunder-that by

which this world here extends a dimension which cannot be converted into vision.'3

Sound is discord, disturbance, disruption, dissonance, disarray, disintegra-

tion, distress, disaster, but not distance. Eyes are easier to close than ears. What

is the color of tinnitus? The first section of "The Defenestration of Prague" is

tuned into this aggressive character ofsound (againstwhich no doubt we con-

struct music to protect us, but Howe prefers the conflict of word-sounds):

sound sounde) ofsoun

amend unto

bowrougholder borrougolder borsolder bar

soldier burrow holder Him

bring into Awe

stranglerstragglers no

nightstealer

(by ways and blind fords)

Bog

some little fortilage

woden castle

ragtaile ragtayle two letters worn offwere a sea-poole

corner (ET,93)

Howe seems to have registered Levinas's insight that sound (like other people)

produces the experience ofbeing turned inside-out and exposed to a some-

thing-or-other that cannot be grasped conceptually but instead sets a limit to

our powers of cognition, coherence, composition, containment, and control.

Reading Howe's poetryalways involves the experience of this limit, even when

her anarchic sound-forms ("bowrougholder borrougolder borsolder bar")

evolve into linear patterns, as they do in the second section of"Defenestra-

tion," called "speeches at the Barriers," whose justified left margins seem to

restore the conventions of poetry-or anyhow of literary history:

Say that a ballad

wrapped in a ballad

a play offorce and play

offorces

fa[[ing out sentences

(hollowwhere I can shelter)

falling out over

and gone

Dark ballad and dark crossing

old woman prowling

Ceniat telling her story

ideal city of immaculate beauty

invincible children

threshing felicity

Forwearelanguage Lost

in language (ET, 99)

"Speeches at the Barriers" even contains a lyrical "t," although it is one whosays "we are language / Lost in language," which is perhaps why the poemis not made of speeches but of fragmentary allusions to the world of medi-eval romance, courtly love, and courtly forms of poetry-ballads, pastorals,masques-where the "Crumbling compulsion of syllables,, (ET, ro6) stillsounds the keynote ofthe whole:

Skeletal kin

tiltitaliclunaE

long lines of Iittle difference

Seventy memories

masks

singing and piping

to be

(halfwords)

beginning and begetting

strangers nodding to one another

stumbling and scrambling

(uncertain theme)

random form (ET, rr3)

lmagine this as a poem aboutwhat poetry is made o[, startingwith antinomicsound-forms like "skeletal kin." What is interesting, however, is that for Howesound is also pneumatic or even demonic because a sound made of phonemesis alrcady avoicinq.ln her interviewwith Keller Howe saysthat

in spite of all my talk about the way the page looks, and particularly in regard to

these pages constructed as ifthey were a kind ofdrawing, strangely the strongest

element I feel when I am writing something is acoustic. For example the pages in

Nonconformist M emorial and Eikon Basilike fwith their constellations of words and in-

tersecting, overprinted lines] are in my head as theater. I hear them in one particu-

lar way. I think that comes from my childhood and very directly from my mother

fthe lrish actress Mary Manning]. Even now, when she is eighty-nine years old, the

theater is her greatest passion. She was always fascinated by voice, by accents, and

she very early passed on to me that feeling for the beauty ofthe spoken voice. ("ln-

tewiew," r3)

But voices are not just voices. ln The Midnrghr Howe recalls her early experience

of Yeats's poetry:

Maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is be-

cause my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even before

I could read, "Down by the Sally 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 r938 and r94r, then back to Cambridge, Massachu-

setts, was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung lack's illustrations

and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were

windows. 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 dimen-

sions, visua[, textual, auditory. Waves ofsound connected us by associationaI syl-

labic magic to an original 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 hopelessly mixed and at the same

time hardened into gtass. (M, 75)

Sound is transport but only because or when our relation to it is a form ofobsession. To be obsessed is, etymologically, to be besieged and possibly

overtaken: the prose poem of"Thorow," concerning her experience of Lake

George, New York, contains this strange fragment: "lnterior assembling offorces underneath the earth's eye. Yes, she, the Strange, excluded from formal-

ism. I heard poems inhabited byvoices": to which Howe adds a citation from A

Thousqnd Ploteaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: "'The proper name (nom

propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the indi-

vidual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome ofthe most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires her

true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension o[ a

47

multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehendedas such in a field ofintensity"' (5, qz). So that's how poetry begins: a subject ispervaded by multiplicities. ln the Tolisman interview Howe says, in response toa reference to lack Spicer's idea that the poet is in some sense "the transmit-ter of the poem" that arrives from elsewhere (BM, r55): "Well, I do believe thatSpicer radio-dictation thing, as I read it in Robin Blaser's essay on Spicer-thatpoetry comes from East Mars. But the outside is also a space-time phenom-enon. I think the outside, or East Mars, consists of other people's struggles andtheirvoices. Sounds and spirits (ghosts ifyou like) leave traces in a geography"(BM, r56)-in New England, say, or (perhaps much the same thing) in a library.The porous subject: "You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell / Where you leaveoff and I begin" (S, S8). ln her introduction to The Europe ofTrusrs Howe writesa much-cited line: "l wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history,voices that are anonymous, slighted, inarticulate" (ET, ra). Compare the fol-lowing from the Keller interview:

No, no. I don't hearvoices (though I'm scared I might). you don't hearvoices, butyes, you're hearing something. You're hearingsomethingyou see. And there's themystery of the eye-hand connection: when it's your work, it's your hand writing.Your hand is receiving orders from somewhere. yes, it could be your brain, yoursuperego giving orders; on the other hand, they ore orders. I guess it must seemstrange that I say poetry is free when I also say I'm getting orders. It can be veryfrightening. ("Interview," 33)

Likewise, in "Personal Narrative" in Souls of the Labadie Tract, she writes: "lwished to speak for libraries as places of freedom and wildness. Often walk-ing alone in the stacks, surrounded by raw material paper afterlife, my spiritswere shaken by the great ingathering oftitles and languages. This may suggestvampirism because while I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my lifeas a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath" (SLT, r6):

"Here we are"-You can't

hear us without having to be

us knowingeverythingwe

know-you knowyou can't

Verbal echoes so many ghost

poets I think ofyou as wild

and fugitive-"Stop awhile" (SLT, 58)

Poetry as connatural knowledge: "You can't / hear us without having to be /trs. " Pcrhaps it would be simpler to say that there is a powerfulyeatsian dimen-

49

sion to Howe's poetics, which is to say that for her Poetry is a form of ghost-

writing; or, to give the screw another turn, poetry is a certain way of inhabiting

and resonating with a world in which even mere things-leftover, discarded,

or forgotten things like things in a desk drawer-are haunted, which would be

a way of reading this fragment from The M idnight: "Wagons, rusty buckets, tires,

tables shovels, broken bottles, broken glass, cash boxes, plastic cups, old

clothes, torn magazines, newspapers, memos, business records. When the

other half of the dialogue of mind with itself is nothing but a picture, the sta-

tus of a spectral self resurfaces" (M, r:S).Whose self is this? ("You are of me & I

ofyou, I cannot tell / Where you leave off and I begin" [S, 58].) The poet's self is,

in Deleuze and Cuattari's language, a "multiplicity"-but at the same time one

cannot help thinking of Yeats's "Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can."r4

4.Thepoemisanassemblageoffoundtexts(in otherwords,citational). Susan Howe

famously describes herself as, from an early age, a "library cormorant" in need

of "out-of-the-way books" (BM, r8), but whose first experience of a library is

that of forbidden territory (she was not allowed to follow her father into the

stacks of Harvard's Widener Library)-hence her association of the library and

the (early American) wilderness: "Thoreau said, in an essay called 'Walking,'

that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. What is forbidden is wild.

The stacks of Widener Library and of all the great libraries in the world are still

wild to me" (BM, r8). Forests are inhabited by spirits-and so are libraries. In

her "Personal Narrative" in Soulsofthe LabadieTract, Howe recalls her experience

of the Sterling Library at Yale where her husband, David von Schlegell, was a

professor of art, which meant that she now had library privileges:

ln Sterling's sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable

phantoms. The future seemed to lie in the forest of letters, theories, and forgotten

actualities. I had a sense of the parallel between our always fragmentary knowl-

edge and the continual progress toward perfect understanding that never withers

away. I felt a harmony beyond the confinement of our being merely dross or tin;

something chemical almost mystical that, thank to architectural artifice, these

grey and tan steel shelves in their neo-Gothic tower commemorate in semidark-

ness, according to Library ofCongress classification. (SLT, t4)

Years ago Northrop Frye wrote: "Poems can only be made out of other po-

ems, novels out of other novels": all of literary history is a recomposition ofreceived texts.rs Likewise Howe and her Emily Dickinson: "Forcing, abbrevi-

ating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she

[Dickinson] pulled text from text" (MED, zg)-an activity that produces or re-

flects something more complex than the structuralist's "intertextualiU." Su-san Howe's philosophy of composition-very much a feature of the r96os-isthat of quotation and collage, to which she adds, however, a dimension ofintersubjectiviry, meaning that in writing she is always herself and others ("in-numerable phantoms"), which is to say that she herself, as a writing subject,is formed out of her library encounters with other subjects, each of which is,moreover, historically, geographically, and (there being no better term) ideo-logically situated: "My writing has been haunted and inspired by a series oftexts, woven in shrouds and cordages of classic American nineteenth-centuryworks; they are the buried ones, they body them forth"-to which she adds:"Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne guided me back to what I oncethought was the distant seventeenth century. Now I know that the arena inScripture battles raged among New Englanders fchiefly the antinomian con-troversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson] is part of our current American sys-

tem and events, history and structure" (BM, qS, 47).So the library is a kind oftime machine-except that the present does not 0ust) return to the past; rath-er the past is always with us, perhaps as much in the form of traumatic mem-ory (the stereotype ofthe New England writer) as that ofthe legendary eternalreturn. "The pastis presentwhen lwrite," Howe says in her interviewwithTomBeckett, which means thatwhen Susan Howe speaks in her own voice, it is notonly she herself who is speaking, because her writing is also a kind of ingath-ering and appropriation-and this is true both in her poetry and in her prosewritings like My Emily Dickinson (but the distinction berween poetry and prosein Howe's writings is, like her relation to others and their texts, an open bor-der).'6 The principles of this form ofwriting are perhaps most fully articulatedin "Submarginalia," the continuation of Howe's introduction to TheBirth-mark,

in which she elucidates both the natural history of the cormorant as a deep-seafeeder and the cultural history of the library-cormorant, starting with SamuelTaylor Coleridge, whose writings feed off of his (obsessive-compulsive) read-ing, which is to saytheyare citational in the form of marginal embellishments(a species of open form) as well as in the form of quotation. The question natu-rally arises as to how one is to read what amounts to the readings of others.("1 thought one way to write about a loved author," Howe says, "would be tolollow what trails he follows through words of others: what if these penciledsirrgle double and triple scorings arrows short phrases angry outbursts crossescryptic ciphers sudden enthusiasms mysterious erasures have come to findyou too, here again, now" [NM, 9z].) This is perhaps one of the chief criticalr;rrcstions raised by Susan Howe's writings: it is a question that determines thel.rnr as wc'll as the content oF her work. A preliminary answer is that what we

50

will read has been left mostly unread-for example, Cotton Mather's Magnalia

Christi Americqno, a prototype of Howe's writings since it is a montage made of"blizzards of anecdotes, anagrams, prefatory poems, dedications, epigrams,

memories, lists of ministers and magistrates, puns, paradoxes, 'antiquities,'

remarks, laments, furious opinions, recollections, exaggerations, fabrica-

tions, 'Examples,'wonders, spontaneous otherversions" (BM, 3o). Howe cites

an exasperated editor of Magnolio, who complains that Mather "'was primarilya smatterer, constantly skimming through whole volumes in search of pas-

sages containing ideas which he thought he could develop in his own way

or which might sewe him as appropriate quotations for use in his own writ-ing"' (BM, 3o). Cormorant. (l once tried to show that this method of citational

composition has its roots in ancient rhetoric, with its concept of invention as

"finding things to say" in what has already been said, or written, with a view

toward its application to the discursive situation in which one finds oneself.

An authoritative text is a glossed text; the concept oforiginality, of"creative"writing, is one of the constructions of modernity.)

5. The material of poetry is historical-or, more occurately, archival and, more strictly

still, anecdotal. In fact, Howe's relation to the past is that of an antiquarian (or"antiquary') rather than that of a historian. This is not to gainsay the many ex-

cellent things that have been written about Howe's historical imagination and

her "anarcho-scholasticism."'7 ln The Amateur and the Professionol: Antiquarians,

Historians, andArcheologissinVictorianEngland,fi3S-t886, Philippa Levine studies

the professionalization of both history-writing and archaeology during the

middle of the nineteenth century-a process that entailed the scapegoating ofantiquarians as mere amateurs, that is, genteel but provincial hunter-gather-

ers without any conceptual framework or methodology, meaning chiefly thatthey did not have universiry degrees (:S-:S). Historians study documents inorder to reconstruct (objectifr) the past of England, Europe, the world. Anti-

quarians are mere connoisseurs offound objects and keepers oflocal records.

Howe is an antiquary (down to the point of lacking a doctoral or even univer-

sity degree). She is a collector of oddities-of books, manuscripts, religious

(and poetic) practices, archaic forms or idioms of English, and particularly

vanished communities, misfits, nomads, and keepers of the fringe:

Com e aw ay--:f his w ay, this woy-Ca lvi n ists, Congregatio na I ists, Ana baptists, Ra nt-

ers, Quakers, Shakers, Sandemans, Rosicrucians, Pietists, reformers, pilgrims,

traveling preachers, stro[[ing players, peddlers, pirates, captives, mystics, embroi-derers, upholsterers, itinerantsingers, penmen, impostors scattered throughout

51 3:lr I ii: :::, Ji :': ': i' .il

antiquarian New England, Pennsylvania, and New york, I cling to you with all mydivided attention, itinerantly (M, 66)

Voices I am following lead me to the margins. Anne Hutchinson's verbal expres-sion is barely audible in the scanty second- or third-hand records of her two tri-als. Dorothy Talbye, Mrs. Hopkins, Mrs. Dyer, Thomas Shepard, Mrs. Sparhawk,Brother Crackbone's wife, Mary Rowlandson, Barbary Cutter, Cotton Mather mayhave been searching for grace in the wilderness of the world. They express to mea sense of unrevealedness. Theywalk in my imagination and I love them. (BM, a)

ln her " Prefac e" to Framestructures, in the section or fragment entitled "The An-gel in the Library," Howe gives us something like a genealogy of her method:"Antiquarianism," she says, "is as old as historical writing"-and in fact un-denvrites it:

lnGibbon andHisRomanEmpire, David P. Iordan shows the ways The Dectine and FolloftheRomon Empirewas partially built on the research ofskeptics and historical pyrrhon-

ists outside the universities. Pyrrhonists were usually proud to be catted amateurs.often their research developed out of a need to classi! their own collections ofcoins, statues, vases, inscriptions, emblems, etc.; and the work demanded newtactics. Gibbon calls the literary results ofthe labors ofthese dilettante research-ers the "subsidiary rays" of history. The best known defender of uncertainty inhistory, Pierre Bayle, depended heavily on the work of antiquarians. Studies ofmedals and inscriptions were more reliable less subject to human corruption, hefelt. Bayle's first idea wasn't to write an encyclopedia rather he hoped to producea record of mistakes. . . . Bayle's Historical and critical Dictionary follows the spirit ofcoordination's lead rather than a definite plan. Trivial curiosities and nonsensicalsubjects are kernels to be collated like tunes for a fact while important matters areneglected. (FS, r7-r8)

This last sentence tells the tale: what falls beneath the threshold of academicattention-the low overlooked by the high-is what Howe gathers into herwork. TheMidnrght contains an anecdote of hervisit in r991 to Harvard's Hough-ton Library to examine Emily Dickinson's manuscripts. Naturally her first ex-perience upon entering is ofghosts inhabiting a panoptical space:

Passing through this firstvestibule I find myselfin an oval reception antechamberabout 35 feetwide and zo feet deep underwhat appears to be a ceilingwith a domeat its apex. I think I see sunlight but closer inspection reveals electric light con-cealed under a slightly dropped form, also ova[, illuminating the ceiling above.This first false skytight resembles a human eye and the central oval disc its,.pu-pil." Maybe ghosts exist as spatiotemporal coordinates, even if they themselvestlo not occupy space, even ifyou've never seen one, so what? Ifthe design ofthe

52

antechamber can be read in terms of power and regimes of library control, and ifghosts .,presentty,, ,,occupy" papers, you need to understand the present tense of

"occupy." (M, rzo-zr)'8

lnterestingly, Susan Howe experiences ghosts as familiars, but experiences

herself as an alien presence: her clothing possibly a violation of Harvard re-

search decorum-"and I have a new monogrammed black leather Coach brief-

case my husband gave me for my birthday because we knew I was making this

trip and it seemed professorial. Neither of us has a college degree so we have

that feeling of failure in common and are always at war with what we wear" (M,

rzr). And then there is the question of how to sound. Told that the Dickinson

materials are not available, and asked to show proof that she has a right to

inquire after them, Howe think:

I have driven up that day from Connecticut and booked into the Howard lohnson

Motel, my pencils are sharpened, notepaper ready. I have waited weeks for this

moment. I think of the disarming of the Antinomians in r637 coinciding with the

founding of Harvard college in cambridge, a provincial village of mainly British

immigrants. I think of Roger Williams and the "gap in the hedge or wall of separa-

tion between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." I think

about the rattle of statistical traffic. Where and when did Engtish prosodial gram-

mar become American? As a hatFlrish or half-Angto-lrish woman, I know an audi-

ence will always react to the materiality of the voice as a sign. Deepness of tim-

bre is preferable to shrill. I am feeling a sense of humiliation and angry despair'

I know my reaction is extreme. I can hear my voice running into its irksome high

pitch, jostling genteel decorum. The librarians are feeling its ugly assault. (M, tz6)

Recall Howe's love of her mother's voice, whereas of herself and her sister

Fanny she writes: "Our voices are grotesquely shrill-the way we pronounce

or don,t pronounce r's and u's, Amuurrica, waaturrr. Our Iong nasal a's: Baaast-

n, haarr-br, p40k, caa. The horribly dropped s in Yes to form a sort ofneigh-

ing eeYea. I can underline letters and use italics for emphasis, but two ears

cannot be in two places at once, such marks are charades" (M, r3z). voices are

not disembodied; better to say that they are uncontrollable and uncontain-

able singularities, apt to break out or in upon you in their most unwanted

forms. But they are incarnated in books as well as in oneself and others (past

and present)-imagine bodies as well as libraries as forms or regions of wil-

derness where unheard-of voices resound. lnThe Midnight Howe cites Henry

lames,s complaintagainst"'our national use ofvocal sound,"'which he called,,.slovenly-an absolutely inexpert daub of unapplied tone,"' as if sound were

a kind of paint (M, r3z). Yet it is precisely the nonconformity or, more exactly,

the antiquiry of sounds that Howe articulates, as in these lines in The Midnight

that derive from the Middle English poem "The Owl and the Nightingale":

Stille one bare worde

iseon at bare beode

iseon at bare beode

Fleao westerness iseo

Opertuo go andsware (M,39)

Compare to the Middle English original: "Me may iseon at pare neode / Hwan

me schal harde wike beode" (lines 529-3o), (roughly) "lt can be seen in hard

times / From whom hard work shall be demanded."

Concluding note on the anecdote. The historiographical equivalent of the anti-

nomian or the misfit is the lowly anecdote, which is one of the forms Howe

uses to contextualize her lyrics, asinThe Midnight, a volume inspired by Howe's

discovery one day in a gift shop of Bed Hongings: ATrestise on Fqbrics and Styles in

the Curtaining of Beds, t65o-r850. We lack a good theory of the anecdote, which

is perhaps not just one thing. Anecdotes sometimes adorn official historicalnarratives, and also sometimes subvert them, because they inhabit the under-

belly of history. ln "Anecdote and History" Lionel Gossman tells the story ofProcopius, who produced a history in eight books of Emperor Justinian's wars

against the Persians, Vandals, and Goths, but he also composed his Anekdota,

a "secret history" of lustinian's court-"instances of the most brutal exercise

of despotic power, as well as scurrilous tales of palace and family intrigue, that

were completely at odds with the celebratory narrative of Procopius's official

History." To which Gossman adds: "Notsurprisingly, the friends of power, those

concerned with maintaining public images and decorum, have generally been

fearful of anecdotes and have lost no opportunity to denigrate them, while

at the same time enjoying them in private and, when necessary, using them

against their enemies."'s This observation suggests that from the anecdote a

different conception of the self emerges from the one we extract (Ricoeur-like)

from Aristotelian forms of narrative-epic, history, biography, and (especial-

ly) autobiography and the novel (originally a species offorged autobiography,as Hugh Kenner once s aid ofTheStrange and SurprisingAdventures ofRobinson Crusoe,

Gentleman [r5]). The product of Aristotelian forms of narrative, let us say, is in-evitably large-scale, like Odysseus, Oedipus, and the subsequent "great men"of history. The product of the anecdote is, like the anecdote itse[[, small-scale,

one could even say "minimalist," being loca[, frequently personal, and merely

ctrrious:

54

The earliest account of bed hangings is in a legend from the lrth century. After

a run of bad luck a seamstress named Thorgunna got fed up and left her home

somewhere in the stormy Outer Hebrides. ln England it didn't take long for

special notice of the immigrant's fantastically embroidered needlework to get

around. Soon she was in danger of being Promoted to the witch category' Trouble

followed trouble until she warned that ownership of her hangings could mean

curtains. Coulds are iffr. Throwing caution to the winds, she either burned or

tossed her tapestries out. It's an aesthetics oferasure. (M, qC-CS)

Or again, a page later:

ln "The Boston Upholstery Trade, voo-175o," Brock lobe tells us Samuel Grant

owned a shop in Boston called the Crown and Cushion for fiftyyears. His most

prolific worker was Elizabeth Kemble, a widow. Betlveen 1766 and 1768 she pro-

duced eighty-seven sets of hangings, fifty-three of cheney, eighteen oI harateen,

eight of printed fabrics, two of calico, and six of unspecified material for field

beds. Mrs. Kemble earned one shilting four pence a day. If style is a means and not

an end, does this historical anecdote illustrate genius in its manic state? (M, a6)

The history of bed-hangings, an antiquated practice, is made of anecdotes-as

is the history of insomniacs, who (starting with Howe herself) appear with

great regularig inThe Midnight (ghosts, interestingly, from Howe's earlier writ-

ings): there is Frederick Law Olmstead, superintendent of the New York De-

partment of Public Parks and one of the ciry planners of Buffalo, New York, ofwhom Howe includes a number of anecdotes; likewise Charles sanders Peirce,

one ofwhose "earliest memories was of being taken to hear Emerson lecture"

(M, 4g)-Emerson, who preferred architecture to embroidery (M, 46-47)." An-

other early memory was of playing rapid games of double dummy from ten in

the evening until early sunrise with his father, the mathematician Benjamin

Peirce. In dummy at whist, an imaginary player is represented by an exposed

'hand'is managed byand serves as Partnerto one of the players. In double

dummy two 'hands' are exposed and each of the players manages two exposed

'hands' at once. Naturally Peirce became an insomniac" (M, 49). But for the

most part the anecdotes, citations, definitions, memories, and illustrations

that make upThe Midnighr are genealogical, that is, rooted in the handed-down

material possessions of the Irish side of Susan Howe's family, from which her

mother, Mary Manning, emerges as the principal ghost:

ln May 1944 the actor and director Michedl Liammdir pubtished an excerPt from

his unpublished memoirs called "Some Talented Women" in Sean o'Faoldin's

magazine The Bell. lt included a description of my mother: Rehearsals were in

progress for a new play, "Youth's theseos on" by a new authoress-a Dublin girl called

55

Mary Manning whose brain, nimble and observant as it was, could not keep pace

with a tongue so caustic that even her native city (unchanged and unchangingsince Sheridan brought its greatest social activity to light in his most famous com-edy and laid the blame on London) was a little in awe of her, and one all but lookedfor a feathered heel under her crisp and spirited skirts. (M, 5o)

An anecdote, this, that itself produces subsequent anecdotes about Richard

Brinsley Sheridan, whose grandfather produced a dictionary showing how thewords that make up the English language should be pronounced, and whoseplay, The Riyals, is about Howe's obsessive theme, namely impersonation,mistaken identity-or perhaps, in the spirit of Mary Manning, the theatricalnature of the subject who inhabits or is inhabited by multiplicities (formedby a plurality of voices). There are doubles everyrryhere-double truths ("di-altheism" [M, 6g*Zo]), double-dealings ("Above the shoulders poetry and

philosophy-below, the feathered heel" [M, 7z]), "double words for every-

thing" (M, 77).The upshot is that no single thought, much less description oraccount, can capture the selfofSusan Howe, who describes the collage form ofThe Midnightasfollows: "l am assembling materials for a recurrent return some-where. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preserva-

tions, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous.Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced" (tvt, SS). lmagine thisas an account of self-formation.

' ' ':':'

.t:)a)

. l:,j:',..

lvn

ril i.;ll.,.ji

,....'t ,.''.l'' l

niants

ALAUGHTER AND

a bonden comedy

POEM ABOUTFORGETTING

Poetry at this time, I believe, has the capaciry and perhaps the obligation

to enter those specific zones known as borders, since borders are by

definition addressed to foreignness, and in a complex sense, best

captured by another Greek word, xenos. It, too, means "stranger" or

"foreigner," but in a sense that complicates the notion as we find it in

barbaros. -Lyn

H ej inian, " Barbarism" (Ll, 326)

It seems reasonable to approach Lyn Hejinian's ABorder Comedy (zoot) by first

consulting the things she has to say about borders in her book ofessays, The

Language of Inquiry-for example, that they are sites of "encountef' (L1,44)and milieus of "experience" (Ll,3z7), and that, perhaps more important, they

are mobile or fluid rather than fixed: "Like the dream landscape, the border

landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discon-

tinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied

by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of re-

definition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly chang-

ing background" (Ll,3z7). Borders, in otherwords, are restless-like language

(ML, r7), or like the writing ofA Eorder Comedy itself'.'

56

57

I began all this months ago, years maybe-in lune, anyway , of rgg4

I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem that kept itself apart from me

And from itself

A short lyric of shifsA page or two at most

A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts

I would write a line or two

No more

And go away

And come back another day only to add something that would change everything

(8c,63)

Why write this way, as if starting the poem over again every "line or two"?Gertrude Stein's answer is canonical: "Beginning again and again is a naturalthing, even when there is a series." Or imagine a kind of writing that requires

thatyou leave things behind. A "poetics ofthe frontier," Hugh Kenner oncesaid, means you can take only very few books with you when setting out fora new world-your Bible, maybe Pilgrim's Progressi European literature disap-pears from memory.'And we know that in composing music and poetry lohnCage and lackson Mac Low took recourse to various forms of chance opera-tions in order to leave themselves behind-to free their compositions fromhistory-laden forms of intentionality hidden in the ego. A Border Comedy bor-ders these lines of thought, and also redraws them.

There are closed borders, to be sure, but for Hejinian the border is the typeand figure ofopen form-"notthatatwhich somethingstops but, as the Greeks

recognized, that from which something begins" (BC, r8). A border is a crosspointat which one begins a journey or experience (Erfahrung)-setting out on an ex-

pedition rather than getting on a train with schedules and destinations: recallthose early explorers Hejinian celebrates in "strangeness" who describe met-onymically the particulars of their progress without a sense of an ending or acomprehensive view of what is happening to them or even where they are.: A

border by definition borders a world where everything is otherwise ("involvingobjects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renam-ing"), a no-man's-land or perhaps a future in which one can no longer remainoneself but becomes subject to forms of estrangement, like the anonymous"magician" who appears early in ABorder Comedy, who is precisely not enclosedby boundaries, limits, definitions, or frames of reference, and who (therefore?)"lived in confusion" (BC, r3)-and also, it appears, without a self or identitythat, as in Paul Ricoeur's theory, an Aristotelian narrative would confer:+

There was no accounting for her mutabitity since she lived entirely alone

But the number ofevents it takes to create the probable sequence

Necessary to cause a change in any person's state

Is far larger than one might think

Therefore any account of it must be very long

And during all that time

Reality moves around

Changing orientation (BC, r3-14)

An Aristotelian narrative edits the material of a life in order to make it continu-

ous and coherent; the magician's life has more in it (more changes) than any

narrative can contain. A chronicle is what her life requires (and the chronicle

is, in principle, or like time itself, interminable: it may stop but does not end)'

An odd figure, this magician, with no audience to fool.s lmagine a magi-

cian who dwells, not behind the scenes, manipulating them, but within

them as within a "dream landscape" of "ever-shifting images." Hers is not

so much Spenser's mutability as the one Proteus suffers (or enjoys): Prote-

us, who is constituted by shape-shifting and so has, strictly speaking, no life

one could give an account of, unless it would just be an account of his end-

less transformations-a progress that would be hard to follow. As Hejinian

says, "The history of mutability is very long / And hence it has long sentences,

with increase in semantic duration" (BC, zr)-rather like A Border Comedy it-

sel[, whose lines (long and short) form sentences without periods that move

digressively or metonymically from one topic to another ("A fable, fate, an

infant prophet, or infant bandit, banal, infamous, professing cacophony or

blame" [BC, zr]), resisting (although not entirely defeating) the formation of

patterns thatwould give us the sense of a whole superior to its parts ("the very

purpose ofpattern is to be reassuring" [BC, t5]).

One could put the matter technically, as Heiinian does in an interview with

reference to seriality: "Time as it divides produces repetitions and permuta-

tions; time as it accumulates produces sequences, series" (Ll, 167). My Lrfe is

structured according to divisions: forty-five sections composed of forty-five

sentences corresponding (in the 1987 edition) to forty-five years ofthe poet's

life. ABorderComedy,by contrast, is cumulative. No one wished it longer, but it

could have been. Long poems are those one learns to live with.

Cumulative, but of what, exactly? Arguably (if only roughly) a basic unit ofA

BorderComedy (beyond the line and the sentence) is the anecdote, aboutwhich

the second book ofthe poem has a good deal to say:

59

An anecdotal story is merely a span

Consisting of separate facts

Each tenuously connected to the next

What we respond to are the attractiveness of the facts

And the view each one provides

There are even such things as philosophical anecdotes

Going around

Beautifully feathered and perfectly circlin gGC, zl)

(A "span" is paratactic, like the distance between thumb and forefinger, whichis the original meaning of "span."):

I ust as, in the old days (to quote Victor Shklovsky)

One anecdotal factwould be followed by another

And many togetherwould make a story

Consisting of "separate facts tenuously connected"

And conspired

Story to story

To which everyone should add and be added

And be confused (BC,3r)

An anecdote is (loosely) a brief story told from below (outside the grand nar-

rator's panorama) and which, being local and incidental, does not take us very

flar ("time requires anecdotes to contradict it" [BC, rz]): it belongs structurallyto the "round," as in a round of ditties, jokes, ordrinks thatform a momentarycircle of companions-"To which everyone should add and be added / And be

confused," no doubtwith one another, or maybe like the magician (confusionreigns at every border). Meanwhile philosophical anecdotes are like birds,"Beautifully feathered and perfectly circling," as if geometrically, or perhaps

like birds of prey. Or say that it is in the nature of the anecdote to make its way

around by way of recitation: it is (like gossip and the secret) a word-of-mouthgenre (BC, ro9).6 On Hejinian's or Shklovsky's theory, the anecdote is paratac-

tic both in itself-"separate facts tenuously connected" (if at all)-as well as

in its connection to other anecdotes, which would at best hang together in theloose and baggy form of a collection not bound by logical or cognitive rules,

which is how a serial poem develops (avastbetween without extremities):

Not to search for the perfect poem, as Spicer said to Robin Blaser

But to let the writing of the moment go atong its own path

Explore and retreat

60

And never be fully realized (confined) within boundaries ofone poem

Or the perimeters of the mental life of one person's day (BC, t87-88)

As Spicer said: "lt does not have to fit together."z (Compare Hejinian on "the

chaos that good stories introduce" IBC, z6].)

lust so, proliferation and mobility (restlessness) are the distinctive features

ofthe form of ABorder Comedy:

I can say my sentences which I dot by day

They are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic lampoons ofsystems, and all manner of reversed reveries (BC, 7r)

Recall William Carlos Williams: "A poem can be made of anything." ABorder

Comedy seems to be searching for (in order to breach) the limit of this vener-

able principle. The poem is not governed by any principle of exclusion, much

less a principle of identiry. lts borders are oPen to what happens, or fails

to happen-"discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession":

imagine a poem as a container of the uncontainable, not to mention the dis-

carded or dispensable ("reversed reveries" defeating their telling):

And so begins a true biography of a true person emitting a story

Though it comes out strangely

Lacking in outcome

Losing face

Returning to memory in the round clown's face

All over the map

With squeakand thump

Between Full stoPs

From wingto skin

And Fart to forge

Without premeditation

Though the vowel sounds change in self-contained speech

What the true person says is uncontained

The poem walks away and it remains

Then I shout, Hey, get outl

5htt!

And it clears off(BC, zs)

A certain garrulity is perhaps inevitable ("Excessive difference elicits babble"

[BC, 5r]). The "true person" is not opposed to the false friend ("as l've said

before, there are no opposites" [8C,03]), iust as the "l" is not opposed to the

61

"not-I" but rather forms relations of proximity, as "From wing to skin / And

fart to forge / Without premeditation." SelFcontained speech would presum-

ably have a beginning, middle, and end, but maybe it would just be speech

that contains a sefas opposed to a person, as per Hejinian's distinction in "The

Person and Description," where the "uniqueness of the person" is said to be

"very different from his or her essential selftrood" (Ll,zot), which is what po-ems are sometimes thought to express. In the passage just cited the "poem,"

no doubt serial in its construction, wanders offwhile "the true person" (if thatis what it is) remains-recall the line cited earlier: "l thought I could . . . followa poem that kept itself apart from me" (BC, 63). Only here the "1" is not a "true

person"-"The term 'l' is a narrative clich6" (BC, 47)-but the one who chases

"it" away after the poem departs (if that's how it goes).8

Of course one can no more contain these lines in a reading than in a writingof them. Two lines from "The Person" come to mind: "The difficulty of reading

is such / that there is no comprehension" (CPH, r5z). There is no comprehen-sion, or anyway no comprehensive (much less any certain) reading, because

the mutability of contexts confines the construction of meaning to no morethan a few lines at a time, destabilizing them in the bargain by depriving themof any standing that an end-point might provide: think of Beckett's Textsfor

Nothing: "it's the end gives meaning to words."s Or, in Hejinian's version: "lt'sthe beginning and end that are sorry messengers / And the bearers ofwriters'lies / About anything" (BC, r9):

My ambition being to unite the process of transformation with that ofinterpretation

And ifthat is taken as didacticism

Then what have you learned from this poem

And what have I learned as I'm writing itThrough a sequence ofwilled culminations, in the culmination ofwillWhispering [or disturbance

Of my consciousness (the best partition)

Which is a[[ that lies between what I did yesterday and what I'll do next

Plurals increasing-it's all about "them"

They're more vulnerable than before

To interpretation, paranoia (BC, Z:)

What would it be to unite "the process of transformation with that of inter-pretation"? Recall the (by now) well-known statement from "The Refusal ofClosure": Whereas the closed text preempts interpretation ("all elements ofthc work arc dircctc<l towar<l ;r single rcading of it"), the "'open text,' by defi-

nition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. lt invites participa-

tion, rejects the authoriry of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy,

the authority implicit in other . . . hierarchies. lt speaks for writing that is

generative rather than directive. . . . The'open text' often emphasizes or fore-

grounds process, either the process oforiginal composition or ofsubsequent

compositions by readers" (Ll, +:). But when Proteus is driving the motor ofcomposition we may be in danger of falling between the lines. ln ABorder Com-

edy, atany rate, the reader is hardly or barely in a position to put together what

the poet is perpetually setting apart, unless it is the case that here we have a

text so strangely determined that we may begin imagining ghostly inaccessi-

ble intentions hovering over and around us at every turn: "Although I feel that

I too am being watched / Which may explain something about my poetics"

(BC, 89). The strange [ine aboutwriting in "a sequence ofwill culminations, in

the culmination of will," might be thought to suggest the whole art and craft

of paranoia, which sees purpose and design, not to mention authority, more

vividly in their absence. "And the pleasure of seeing intentionality everywhere

is incredible / It makes everything in the universe mental" (BC, r7o). As if toward off such madness, Hejinian's advice in "The Rejection of Closure" is that

one should read an open text in much the same aleatory manner in which itwas composed (not trying to put together what has been decomposed, but

composing anew from the material of the text): "Any reading of these works

is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but incuryes, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract

attention repeatedly" (Ll, 44)-words like "paran oia," for example:

But from your motionless face I suspectyou aren't Iistening

lust reading

Without reference

The paranoid are afflicted with an overabundance ofreference

Reference for which even the plenitude of the world is inadequate

So the language of paranoia lacks world enough to match

But here you come now with a cauliflower (BC, 156)

However, it is difficult to read ABorder Comedy without listening or with-out reference because it is, like the magician's life, a poem with too many

meanings-each line is an excess of words or, as Lyotard would say, an excess

ofphrases whose linkages cannot be terminated ("as Lyotard says, for a phrase

to be the last one / Another one is needed to declare it" [BC, ro6]):'o

Thus the apples are effortlessly disguised

As objects ofappetite

That could never be traced back

Their denarrativization having been achieved

Through an excess oIreferential and symbolic detailAs in a baroque sleep around a medieval dreamAtthe end ofa daythatwent byofits own accord. . . .

Or as one must run through the alphabet to complete a rhymeFrom a great lock oflettersThat recurrently duplicates itself, interminably fissures itselfAnd contradicts itself without remaining the same (BC, ro5)

An "excess of referential and symboric detail," indeed. A poem not governedbyany principle ofexclusion defeats the raw ofthe same, or the law of noncon-tradiction: Thisisnotanappte."rtis," we are told, "the markof a foreign soul totrust non-rational perceptions" (BC, 63), but foreign souls (barbarians) is whatwe are, orwhat the poem makes of us who lose ourway in it. In heressaytitled"Barbarism" Hejinian cites the critic Marcel Raymond: "'To become a barbar-ian . . . is, first of all, to receive sensations and to leave them a certain amountof free play, not to place them in a logical frame-work and not to attribute tothem the objects [for exampre, appres] that produce them; it is a method ofdetaching oneself from an inherited civirized form in order to rediscover agreater plasticity and expose oneself to the imprint of things,,, (LI, 335.n4):

That's why I've kept this writing of fifteen books unfinishedFifteen underway

I move From one to the next

In the course ofmany days adding every dayA few lines to a bookEach of which takes a long time and considerable thoughtAnd that passage of time facilitates forgettingThen forgetting makes what's been written unfamiliarAs if some other writer had been writingAnd each of my returns to each of the book is promptedTo immediates in a sudden present

Only pastness, which provides forgetting, can provide it (BC, r5r)

what about this forgetting? Recall the point (or necessity) of leaving things oroneself behind. ln a brief review of the poem Jennifer scappetone says th;t,,Allorder Comedy's compositional process results from Hejinian's enduring inter-cst in the way memory determines pattern (i.e., in pattern,s ,psychical ,,past_

rrt'ss"'), and accounts for thc work's disjunction: she adds lines ,"qr"niirlly,rt ross tlrc pocm's Iiltcr,n h.,ks all sirnrrltaneorrsly'underway, --in order to

64

tap the lapses generated by time's passage."" As il in contrast to epic tradi-

tion, ABorder Comedy were a poem composed by forgetting, paradoxically rais-

ing amnesia to the level of poetic inspiration and, therefore, to that of Poetic

experience as well.

For example, one might imagine the poet's experience of her poem, and

hence the reader's, as that of picking up found texts-something similar, per-

haps, to Louis Zukofsky's experience of returning after many years to his

own earlier writing, in which poems seem like found objects arranged ran-

domly in a museum exhibit.'' Forgotten writing is an experience of alterity,

as if someone else-some anonymous other-had been writing one's poem:

"Personality has nothing to do with it-subjectivity counts for nothing" (BC,

r53).,3 Some anonymous other, or perhaps (echoing and even exceeding Cage

and Mac Low) mere chance: "lf everything that occurred did so through pure

chance all movementwould take place without transition" (BC, r74), one event

dispatching another, as if the basic unit of time were the interruption, or as ifthe purpose of time (pace Ricoeur) were to dissociate past and future from the

present (which is why the figure of lapsing applies equally to time, memory,

and desire):

One day after another

lmportant things have occurred

Which immediately afterwards I forget

As if to alter their effects and write this diffbrently

It causes me to wonder in a new way, from a new vantage point

That offorgettingAbout memory and its function in the associative, interpretive linking

That constitutes whatwe consider making sense

Ofexperience (BC, r99)

Heidegger thought that having an experience with language does not occur

in the speaking of it but rather when words faiI or get away from us, going off

on their own, to which Derrida added the experience of the pun, which is a

word-event whose intentionality is in the sound-play of language itself-aplay that philosophy struggles to suppress in the interest of univocity but

which poetry sets free: "Aliquid, nonquid, thought quid, nought" (BC, zo4).'+

Likewise, especially after a certain age, one exPeriences memory most dra-

matically not in the possession of it but in its loss ("And here a tale comes to

mind and leaves again" [ac, gs]). The question is whether such a loss is alto-

gether a bad thing. Hejinian seems (in many places) distinctively Nietzschean

in her conception (or experience) oFforgetting, which is somcthing very close

to a creative principle or at the very least a principle (and practice) offreedomfrom whatever bears down on us from the past and, for all we know, from the

future as well, since it is in the future that promises and prophecies fall due.'s

We may think of this as an achievement of Gertrude Stein's "continuous pres-

ent." So in the passage just cited forgetting is, like the border, a starting point,a beginning, a frontier way of writing differently-an anti-Proustian break

with "memory and its function in the associative, interpretive linking / That

constitutes what we consider making sense / Of experience. " Not fitting thingstogether but dissociation as from the upright first-person singular and all thatgoes with it (" 1 would get rid of I if I could" lLl, zrz)):

When I was young, for example, whenever I wrote I was a man

So I mentally imitated men

But in the end the form was too hierarchical

Constructed with too many ups and downs

And it wasn't that I wanted to be a man in any case but only that I wanted freedom

Without having to sacrifice the disguising conventions and a domestic Iife

(BC, r87)

One can read ABorderComedy as a poem of freedom, of diversions, digressions,

and dislocations in which everything becomes otherwise than is the case,

which means in particular the experience of freedom from categories and dis-

tinctions (containments) of every sort. Thus gender-switching (and -blurring)

is a recurrent motif in the poem, with its "Lesbian boys" (BC, rzz), its "hotelcatering to cross-dressing clientele / Engaged in a play on words" (BC, 94), its"male woman" and "female man" (BC, r98). "Writing is cross-dressing" (BC,

zr), as we remember from My Life: " As such, a person on paper, I am androgy-

nous" (ML, ro5). The idea is not to be either a man or a woman but to be elusive

or evasive (the gist of comedy):'6

The flesh often offers answers that do not answer the question raised

Will I be happy?

But that question cannot be addressed to fate

or rather, fate can't answer

Happiness is gratuitous, free

A response to chance, to hazard, accident

And hence it is itselfhazardous, precarious (BC, r8r)

" Fate" is a tragic term (terminal, fixed): instead of a border there is a crossroads

whcrc everything turns toward a predetermined end.'7 A Border Comedy, by con-

trast, is a lr.rdic poem filled with outbursts of craziness-

66 iri:al!:{.l,. ;:ii

She must see herself(front and back) and profit by itPtotting a delightful break-out from culture's close quarters

By dipping her hands in mayonnaise and running them over her buttocks

(BC, u5)

-among other bodily rebellions: "And then a slender woman appeared in a

narrative sentence and loudly farted" (BC, rz3)' $here is surely more farting

and pissing in ABorder Comedy than in any other poem in modern memory.) Not

surprisingly Leo Tolstoy arrives to complain-

It's clear he doesn't like A Border Comedy

He says it's an awkward act of affirmation

Bobbing where the world can take no more than the impress of a nod

But I (with the point of view of a man, so I am a man) don't laugh

All night a mocking bird or bricklayer or bibliomancer and I have been switching

identities

That way we can maintain inconsistencies (BC, 79)

-while Napoleon appears "in his Donald Duck pajamas" (BC, t4), and Aris-

totle is transformed like a character in Ovid (this is, after all, a "Poem of meta-

morphoses" [8C,63]):

In a series

of slaps, of smacks, of boPs, ofwhacks

As Liuba as Phyllis

Who gets Aristotle

On all fours

To gallop her through the garden

Saddled and bridted (BC, tt6)

ln his book 0n Humour the philosopher Simon Critchley says that humor,

especially in its eighteenth-century (and thus most rational) expression, is a

superior form of comedy because it is wry and witty and elicits a smile rather

than a laugh.'8 Laughter is too often a form of cruelty-it is one of the plea-

sures of xenophobia, for example.'s Critchley prefers the Earl of Shaftesbury to

laughter's prime movers, Aristophanes, luvenal, and Rabelais.'o Hejinian puts

it this way:

The authors ofnew comedies differ from the authors ofold

As Aristotle himself pointed out

To the authors ofthe latter indecent language is funny

To those of the former innuendo is more so (BC, 86)

67

By contrast, A Border Comedy-"without dirty (words) feet I cannot dance(speak)" (BC, zo)-is as non-Aristotelian in its comedy as it is in its form ("Theactor wearing a phallus so engorged that his whole body laughs" [BC, r88]); itbrings the low and the broad back to life in defiance of seminar-room deco-rum:

Diderot may have been right

The mind may be nothing without the impulse-ridden body

To laugh at (BC, r3o)

And speak of the cheek!Your mouth has become a muzzle, dear

You are doomed to be chased by hunters

Over the elements on all fours

Floundering

Flapping

Fuckingwith unwilling movements (BC, roo)

He didn't know she would say something funnyBut she untied some babies and did

Morewomen morewords!

More geese moreturds! (BC, tz4)

Nietzsche's principle

"lt's false if it doesn't make you laugh at least once" (BC, r48)

"But what is laughter?" the poem asks, and then lists a number of familiar an-swers from Hobbes to Freud (BC, 8o-8r). Possibly, being usually inappropriate(think of fits of giggling in church or classroom), laughter is a kind of seizure:

Laughter

And what kind oflaugh is being laughed

The laughter ofa laugher

Whose only wish is to stop (BC, r6t)

Or, more wickedly, as in "an old woman laughing":

She uncovers

l-ifting the sentimental curtain bottom

And inserting her nicety (also known as philosopher's willow)Irrto a milky little actualgrammarwrinkle

t)f veracity (BC, r76)

68 i; lli !r i.i ii i:

Or, for no reason, as when things get out of hand, which is all that chance

means, it just happens:

Noting the numbers of people who've suffered wasp stings or been bitten by

snakes or by cats, those who've been pecked by ravens or kicked by a horse,

those who've been butted by goats or even gored by pigs

Through no fault of their own

It's just luck thatwe're caught in the web of comedy

And poisoned by a spider

Which raises a welt

Which in turn occasions slaPPing

A moral struggle ensues

The strugglers succumb to laughter

Which is to saY each other

since the source oflaughter lies not in the funny situation but in the one who

laughs (BC, t55)

lf ABorder Comedy has a heroine-hero, it is the body, or more exactly the end-

less series of anonymous bodies whose various parts, functions, and secretions

fill justaboutevery page of the Poem:

The ineffable poise ofthe cadaver

Its organs in its naked hand

Making the Familiari$ it had with itself available

Displaying its physicality, a physicaliry it still has in common with us

But which is now all we share

Being otherwise completely severed from each other

The autonomy and independence (anonymiry) and ultimately the authority of its

body parts

Having become comPlete (BC, to:-+)

Indeed, "flesh" would be the more exact term for what A Border Comedy is all

about. The body (soma) is a Greek and famously heroic concept (although,

interestingly, etymotogically soma refers to a corpse). lt is a masculine figure

of strength and beau{; lean and hard, it is built for action, struggle, and vic-

tory, and as we know from Homer it never laughs (gods and fools-Penelope's

suitors-laugh; Achilles and odysseus weeP but do not laugh). The body

achieves its apotheosis in marble. Flesh by contrast is a biblical concept (bosor

in Hebrew). lt is a figure of passivity and weakness; it hungers and thirsts, it

eats and is eaten, it is soft and corpulent, wet and smelly, and subject to com-

plaints without number. Defeat is its horizon-mutilated Hcctor and Achilles

69

with his heel are bodies reduced into flesh, as are the heroes ofancient tragedy

(Agamemnon in his bath, various kings ofThebes). In her book on abjection

lulia Kristeva gives the flesh a splendid articulation:

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does

not srgnrfi death. In the presence of signified death-a flat encephalograph, forinstance-l would understand, react, accept. No, as in true theater, without make-

up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in or-der to live. These bodily fluids, this defllement, this shit are what life withstands,

hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my

condition as a living being. My body extricates itself,, as being alive, from that bor-der. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains

in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-codere, cadaver.''

Kristeva is a bit too serious, perhaps, butyou get the point. Living flesh is al-

most an oxymoron, perhaps because living in flesh is a borderline condition.lndeed, unchecked growth of flesh-uncut hair and toenails, among otherprotuberances-gives the definition of "monstrous." And flesh is what I must

abject in order to achieve and maintain self-possession, which illness, pain,

and agingworkto subvert-and theyworkwithout fail: the trim sculpted body

of youth eventually decays into the loose and bagry monster of an old man

("Excessive change in time will destroy the sensing body parts" [BC, z3])." For

which there is no remedy (or other ccnclusion) than to put old bones to rest:

It should not be surprising then that the skull

is seen to have a face stillIt's expressive though not ofself(S, z7)

But of course there is no rest-restlessness is the engine of Hejinian's poet-

ics, and at breakneck speed it drives ABorder Comedy, with its ambulant "border

ghost" (BC, rz)-"so exhausted by reference it doesn't know it's dead" (BC, 68).

Comedy permeates the border between here and the hereafter as well as every

other boundary, as when "lucky heads . . . speak, sing, advise, prophesy, and

cntertain / Long after their owners are dead" (BC, r16). Or, again,

Like the ravening thought ofan uttering corpse

Showing emotion, stumbling over sounds

Soft, breathless (BC, r67)

At any rate, flesh is what it comes down to (with apologies to EdgarAllan Poe):

llctwoen woman and aninral, man and candle

llrt'rc shakcs thc cow;rr<1, lk'sh irr liquid, skin in shreds

Back from the dead

And smellingawful

Withoutwarning

People vomit

Right there on the dance floor

Death begins

The promise of resurrection has got to be withdrawn (BC, r4z)

"Death begins," as if spreading like a plague, metonymically, indifferent to

fences and defenses alike, the paradox being that it cannot itself be termi-

nated. The dead return, not to life-"The promise of resurrection has got to

be withdrawn"-but as comic ghouls, creatures of the betvveen, "smelling aw-

ful."'a So one might figure death as an ellipsis . . . - another species of open

form. Anyway, what can be more foreign than death?-which, if we follow the

moral ofthe epigraph above, is one ofthe border zones that poetry "has the

capacity and perhaps the obligation to enter" (BC, rz6). Surely this accounts for

the many ghosts and cadavers that roam and litter ABorder Comedy:

Reason is an aid to stories

It's the ghost out of the cell

Reciting what it remembers, ruling nothing out

Like the narrator known as Anonymous

With his or her anonymous consciousness

But ifthe flesh ofthe ghost is no longer under pressure

Male and female

Then, like a ghost, it's gone

From its unusual or even downright alien position (BC, 54)

Ghosts are notoriously restless, which in Hejinian's world means discursive,

Iiterary, garrulous, in contrast to the mute or anyhow breathless and palpable

cadaver:

The cadaver (the original) will not sPeak

The cadaver cannot link imPressions

It is immediate

It lacks habits, is proximate to nothing, will not argue

Norwill it rinse its finger over a word

And mean metamorphosis

Spotting the ironies between aphorisms (BC, ro4)

On this theory it would fo[low that a poet is more ghostly than any fleshly re-

]'! ::{ l{, ]rt:ii | : : i} ii

mains, not so much a dead author as a figure of catachresis: "Nameless in my-self but full of synonyms and homonyms" (BC, ro9).

More ghostly, but on the whole much less interesting because, free of itsfl esh, no longer comic, or anyhow less memorable than A Bor der Comedy's manysurreal comic turns, ofwhich this is one of my favorites:

In church, in the palace, on parade, facing the department head, the policeman,

the administrator, no one laughs

The serf is deprived of the right to smile in front of the landowner

So he lifts up his shirt

He is another

And another, wearing high heels, his sex distending his silk dress, was walkingtoward me while tenderly sucking pearls

Yes, his hands were clammy with fear

He knew damn well what was going on

Which was the equivalentof saying, "Nowwe will change"

With the tail parting and shrinking into whar humans call nice legs

They had yet to be shaved

The thorns on them ripped my tongue (BC, 59)

When the serf lifts up his shirt, he reveals himself to be a stranger to the orderofthings. He opens in any case a border zone where anything goes, nothingis forbidden, certainly not laughter or horror or confusion-or whatever a

cross-dressing young demon with an extended phallus and metamorphic tailmight inspire in you. If one asks, irrepressibly, what he inspired in the poet, orspeaker, or whoever it is that licked his thorny legs, one answer would surelybe that the spirit ofA Border Comedy is, in the tradition ofAristophanes and Ra-

belais, anarchic, libidinous, and superbly grotesque.

And I haven't even mentioned the clowns and geese-but time is up andspace is at an end.

the potyvoGal poctry oI karen mac GormaGk

"Are you acquainted with Vienna?" Felix inquired'

"Vienna," said the doctor, "the bed into which the common peoPle

ctimb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves,

ferocious with dignity-l do, but not so well but that I remember some

of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going to school' flock of

quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun'

.ry-.t..t"a, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths' smelling of the herd

chiidnood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight' soon

to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof' Youth is cause'

effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data"'

-Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

On several occasions Karen Mac Cormack has said that her poetic career be-

gan with the reading, at age sixteen, of Djuna Barnes's Nighwood' a novel Pub-

iished by Faber & faber, under T. S. Eliot's imprimatur, in 1936' Nightwood is a

workwhoseprose(likeDr.MatthewO'Connor'sglorioustalk'citedhereinthe epigraph) disengages itself from the grammar of consecutive discourse'

inctuaiig especially the logical progressions of narrativc' Nichtwood does not

AMONGTHE PAGANS

fail at these things, but it interrupts them. Barnes had difficulty getting her

book published, revising it several times in order to give it the semblance ofAristotelian virtues that novels-even avant-garde ones-were (and are) stillexpected to possess. Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway are, for all their formal innova-tions, arguably more integrated than Nighnuood, with its peculiar, edgy, oftensarcastic voice that prefers wild commentary to mere storytelling:

She did not smile, though the moment he spoke, she placed him. She closed hereyes, and Felix, who had been looking into them intently because oftheir mysteri-

ous and shocking blue, found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless

behind the lids-the long unqualified range in the iris ofwild beasts who have nottamed the focus down to meet the human eye.

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever ar-

ranged, is for the contemplative mind the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets

a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will re-

duce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast

on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland

coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil,

a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh thatwillbecome myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hun-ger pressing lts breast to its prey.

Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past-before her the structure ofour head and jaws ache-we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten deathreturning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of ourfo refathers. (N ighw o o d, 36)

One can imagine Henry lames admiring this passage, but also puzzling over"a woman who is beast turning human," a metamorphosis that reverses Ovidin a way that a surrealist might envy. Her "every movement will reduce to an

image of a forgotten experience." lt's hard to picture what "an image of a for-gotten experience" might look like. Iwouldn't have imagined "a mirage of an

eternaI wedding cast on the racial memory" (reference, neither the first norIast, is to Felix's Jewishness) complete with an eland (a species of antelope)

in a bridal procession, with "a hoof raised in the economy of fear," as if themarriage ceremony were resolving into a sacrificial one. The third paragraph

in the citation is one of my favorites in all of modern literature. Ifyou ask, howdo these sentences hang together (adding up to a portrait ofa lady we woulddo well to avoid but never do: "we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten(lcath returning"), it takes some time to answer. One could begin by puttingthe question to Gertrude Stein, who was perhaps the first to explore the ways

words could be made to form dissonantyet self-contained portraits:

74 !-: .i:! !:r rii: t {'

A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE

A tittle calted anything shows shudders.

Come and say what prints all day. A whole fewwatermelon' There is no pope'

No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really

little spices.

A little lace makes boils. This is not true.

Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean

on the toP.

lf it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head.

A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve a

blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window'

Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch

of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning'

I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little

leading mention nothing.

Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for'

Please could, please could, iam it not plus more sit in when''

I think that the kinship between Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein is intimate

and complementary. Provisionally one could say that Barnes remains within

the horizon of the predicate-subjects, verbs, and objects doing their work of

mediation, however digressively and to whatever many strange purposes: her

reticulated prose retains the form if not always the content of what philoso-

phers call "aboutness"; whereas parataxis-the defeat of wholeness and hier-

archies of every sort-is internal to Stein's phrasings, which interrupt the dis-

cursive operations that integrate small things into large. Gertrude Stein's is an

insubordinate poetics of the little and the discrete ("a little piece, a little piece

please,,lselectedwritings,4B)),andthisappliestoherwordsandphrasesaswell

asto theworld of dainty Pauline, with her"bluegreenwhite bow." Meanwhile

Djuna Barnes's is a poetics of the long, slow amplification of particulars, as in

the medieval (or is it gothic?) tapestry that the narrator weaves as a gloss on

Felix's gripping encounter with Robin Vote's animal-iris eyes'

Karen Mac Cormack's QuiltDriver Q989) is a text that seems to me to split the

differences (and explore the family resemblances) between Barnes and Stein,

and in the bargain it opens up a conceptual context that helPs us to exPerience

certain kinds of writing that are, even now, more familiar than understood.

Here, for example, is the first paragraph (if paragraph is the word) of Mac cor-

mack's "Reunion the ReProduction" :

75

Further alive. Perhaps when the heart stops beating the

tiredness leaves. There are questions but not obvious ones,

any other yellow centre. The furor she caused in ltaly,

buying daisies for a non-funereal purpose. Two women

equally shocked. She totd me other colours, occasionally

the light would fail. Despite assorted revolutions we order

our lives past, present, future, to apply to what is ongoing

out of the tempest. lf we line these up there's still the one,

two, three ofit but not Van Gogh. (:r)

"Reunion the Reproduction" contains twenty-two such paragraphs of vary-

ing length. Like the writings of Barnes and Stein, it lays transparency to rest

but not intelligibility. The task of the reader is (among other things) to under-stand how such self-interrupting sentences are connected, or at least to ex-

perience the ways in which the passage does not just break down into mereslivers. (Nonlinearity is not mere dispersal or diffusion.) Close reading in Mac

Cormack's case reveals many small internal coherences such as references todeath, color, correctness, order (and, by implication, anarchy)-we narrate

our lives according to Aristotle's rules, but what if we did so according to Van

Gogh's, color and texture trumping continuity and point? As philosophers ofcomplex systems have explained, chaos is paradoxically a condition of orderlyarrangements. Foreigners and the weather refuse to act predictably, but if we

follow the two carefully as they proceed we will see patterns develop, even ifno reason (or future) can be assigned to them. Rationality is not rule-governedbehavior but the abiliry to negotiate turbulence (an abiliry Aristotle calledphronesis, or practical reason). The coastline ofCalifornia has a form that frac-talists can explore in detail, but it duplicates nothing but itself A world of ran-dom particles can only be described by reproducing it piece by piece. Death touniversals.

Karen Mac Cormack's Quill Driver situates itself within complexities of thissort. For example, I read Mac Cormack's work as an ongoing exploration oflean-FranEois Lyotard's anarchic conception of the phrase.'"Phrqse" is theFrench term for sentence as well as our term for grammatical relations be-

neath the levelof a complete thought, but Lyotard takes it to be the (indefin-able) basic unit of language on the hither side of every conceivable grammar,

logic, genre, or norm of discourse, these things simply being some of the" ph rase regimens" that phrases make possible, but none of these regimes can

s;ry what a phrase is. There is no metaphrase. To be sure, a phrase implies a say-

irrg of something to sonrcone about something (the "phrase universe"), but

76

nothing can be said about a phrase in general except that it is capable of [ink-

ing up with other Phrases, and there are multiple and heterogeneous forms

of linkages, some of them syntactical (subject-verb-object), some logical (i/i

then), some propositional(s is p), some hermeneutical (this as that), and some

narrative (this then that), but Lyotard's point is that there are (indefinitely)

more forms of enchainment than those we learn to use in school (reasoning,

describing, questioning, narrating). Phrasing is not systematic construction.

We inhabit a universe of phrases that are rhizomatically proliferating and tan-

gling tike crabgrass. There is no first or final phrase-recall Lyotard:

The paradox ofthe tast phrase (or ofthe last sllence), which is also the paradox of

the series, should not give x the vertigo of what cannot be phrased (which is also

called the fear ofdeath), but rather the irrefutable conviction that phrasing is end-

less. For a phrase to be the last one, another one is needed to declare it, and it is

then not the last one. At least, the paradox should give x both this vertigo and this

conviction. -Never mind that the last phrase is that last one that x saysl -No, it is

the last one thatx has as its direct or "current" address' (D,u)

Lyotard,s application in our present context lies in his conception of the

pure negative freedom of phrasing: "To link is necessary, but how to link is

noc,(o,66).Alinkisagapbetweenphrases,whichwefillwilly-nillywithmany things, including passage phrases, but without being able to close the

gap. ForexamPle:

The phrase that expresses the passage operator employs the conjun ction ond (and

soforth,andsoon). This term signals a simple addition, the apposition of one term

with another, nothing more. Auerbach (1946: ch. z and 3) turns this into a charac-

teristic of "modern" sq'le, paratax, as opposed to classical syntax' Conjoined by

ond, phrases or events follow each other, but their succession does not obey a cat-

egorical order(because;if,then;inorderto;although . . .). loined to the preceding one by

ond, a phrase arises out ofnothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the

abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, and it stresses the surprise that

something begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most al-

lows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defring

it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention). . ' . lnstead ofand, and

assuring the same paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing. (D, 66)

paratax: the phrase of modernism. This is a crucial paragraph, if paragraph

is the word, because it describes Lyotard's own poetics, which is to write, not

books, but "notes," "fragments," "sketches," "rudiments," "lessons," "discus-

sions,,-these are the terms he applies to his writings (D, xiv-xv). The point

is to avoid "big talk." The structure of TheDifferentt, for cxatttplc, is segmental

77

and performative rather than simply informational. In Lyotard's vocabulary,his writing is aform of pagonism. A pagan is someone who thinks, judges, acts,

and links phrases together without criterio.z ("Pagan," from pagus: boundary,

frontier, or edge. A pagan is someone who traverses these things.) ln Lyotard's

sense, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Karen Mac Cormack are pagan poets

phrasing outside the limits of regimens favored by logic, linguistics, Aristo-telian poetics, structuralist poetics (among other formalisms), and most phi-losophies of language, not to mention current critical methods and numer-ous poetical schools, with their suspicion of opaque language. Writing is, as

Lyotard says,uneffiired'enchainementdephrasesthatleavesusopentocomplex-

ity. lt is the opposite ofsuch phrasings as calculative reasoning or representa-

tional thinking, which are, in contrast to paganism, redeemed beforehand by

their formal procedures, which simply give us what we want-framing rules,

connecting ends and means, constructing models, forming concepts, puttingthings in their proper places, producing narratives (D, 68-69). Pagans love

category mistakes, or in other words are satirical with respect to forms of cor-

rectness.

Here is a portion of Karen Mac Cormack's "Sleep ls Incurable in Our Life-

time":Serenity is unpopular, it distracts from the major ambushes

ofexterior concerns. Never a bugle boy. The manufacture

of white gauze, its disposal after first time use. Then there

was the birthdaywe went to tattoo you. A flesh wound.

Deemed eligible, the bank account provides a sense of style

(so might a fedora in turbulence). lt's become more than

six months ago I referred to another sequence ofdaring.

Do men blink more often than women? Certain reflexes

seem to count as memory in nerve, muscle and example:

the cat looks up to a drawing of its counterpart losing

feathers. A title doesn't confer talent conveyed. Calvados

from a snifter late into what they also knew last century.

First sip. Not implant but tenacious hamstrings. Complaint

of content-its lack thereof or from. An elegant suppleness

should be consumed relativelyyoung. Orgasms aren't

oblique on the morning o[, or in the night. Sex is precision."No local passengers carried between stations marked A".

It's froth on the inside that's dangerous. Whist, the silent

< artl ganre l. . . l The

tlc;rrl rlon't borrow lrorrr rrs,rs wt.rlo lr<lnr them. How

different is brooch from broach. The cat rolls on

flowers but doesn't crush the print, as in cotton, not description

ofthe auto-erotic. ln that chair this conversation, a

utilizable not employable table. How tender in twelve?

Supplant this with the word terse, or focus on all the

visible points simultaneously. Light doesn't blister itself

but the epidermis becomes disorganised. Pallor, sometimes

misconstrued as a manifestation of missing (QD, t8).

This poem continues for another several sentences before breaking off-MacCormack's poems stop but do not end. Like Dr. O'Connor's monologues, each

of her poems is cumulative rather than conclusive and could still be unfolding

somewhere in a parallel universe. What is compelling about "Sleep ls Incur-

able in Our Lifetime" are the subtle, fragmentary interactions between one

phrase and another. There is a kind of echo principle at work, not so much at

the level ofsound (but by all means keep your ears open) as at the level ofref-

erence, perception, and concept: phrasing here is a kind of thinking (without

criteria)-thinking that proceeds by the proliferation of phrases rather than

by some linear principle of internal necessity (phrases do not add up to state-

ments, except under severe coercion). I'm not sure why serenity is unpopular,

but I know serene people are less shaken by "ambushes ofexterior concerns"

than I am, and maybe serenity is just another form of superciliousness' Coin-

cidentally just the other day I was listening to the Andrews Sisters sing their

great World War II hit, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy [of Company B]." A bugle

boy is certainly a source of external ambushes, as, for example, at 5:oo a.m.

Meanwhile bandages made of gauze had bexer be discarded "after first time

use." Amateur tattoo artists are apt to cause "flesh wounds" requiring, and so

forth. "Do men blink more than women?" ltdepends onwho we think is more

reflexive in "nerve, muscle and example." Talent trumps pedigree, except in

the hierarchies of academic life. "First sip" is of "Calvados [a splendid cognac]

from a snifter late." "Orgasms aren't oblique" because "sex is precision." "Sex

is precision" is at once erotic counsel, an elegant piece of graffiti, and a philo-

sophical theory. "Not implant but tenacious hamstrings" may be for all I know

a source of sexual precision. A tenacious hamstring sounds erotic to me. lm-

plants are for the young.

Players only love you when they're playing: a traditional hermeneuticalway

to respond to pagan poetry is to appropriate a phrase rather than to try to deci-

pher its intention-this means that one makes the phrase one's own by taking

it now this way, now that, the way the ancient rabbis trsctl to rcad scriptural

79

verses: not consecutively, but by linking them with verses from other (some-times distant) parts of the Bible, finding echoes in words and even parts ofwords. So reading becomes itself uneaffaired'enchqtnementdephrases, reweavingtexts into new networks ofphrasing. "An elegant suppleness should be con-sumed relatively young": such consumption could apply here equally well tocognac or to sex, although if so the line is apt to make an old man scowl. I'msure Mac Cormack didn't have this reading in mind. Hermeneutics says thatthe rule of reading to be followed is that of charity, or the invention of truthconditions-reading does not decipher but improvises supporting languages

(or contexts) that enables the phrase in question to come out true. For somephrases this is easy: "Whist, the silent card game," fulfills the conditions ofa true statement for the same reasons that "Chess, the silent board game,"

would. Likewise "The dead don't borrow from us as we do from them": anaper-

cu worthy of TheTstler. "'No local passengers carried between stations markedA"' is true just as a rule is true ifenforced and obeyed; anyhow the phrase is a

citation, which technically cannot be false ("British intelligence reported that' lraq has weapons of mass destruction"' is a true statement about false intel-Iigence, and also, therefore, a classic piece ofofficial rhetoric).

But Mac Cormack eludes even the most charitable hermeneutics. Most ofher phrases play with truth conditions, multiplying rather than just fulfillingthem: "Light doesn't blister itself but the epidermis becomes disorganised.Pallor, sometimes misconstrued as a manifestation of missing." My counselis to construe these sentences lightly, keeping to one's breast thoughts ofsunburn and anemia, allowing the phrases to percolate their nuances, sincethe superformation of nuances is pretty much the poetics at work here. Ap-propriation, after all, is a form of regimentation, settling what is mobile intoplace-an execution of nuances in both the formal and the lethal sense. As

Lyotard says (in a section of The Differend devoted interestingly to GertrudeStein's phrases), "A phrase is not mysterious, it is clear. It says what it means tosay. No 'subject' receives it in order to interpret it. lust as no 'subject' makes it(in order to say something). It calls forth its addressor and addressee, and theycome to take their places in its universe" Q,AZ).This is good anthropological.rdvice: the idea is to learn how to inhabit the milieu of this strange languagerrntil one feels at home-Clifford Geertz calls it "becoming real," feeling the

l)urpose and pleasure ofthe Balinese cockfight, no longer having to justi$ it.l'xplanations have to come to an end somewhere. The point is to change one-sclIso as to experience the thing as it is. And if you keep changing, so will thepocnr. Think of reading as a practice of musical accompaniment.

l)agan poctry is lrcr;rrcrrtly tlrc work of great comic writers, owing perhaps

80

to the anarchy of it unregimented phrases are usually (and unusually) funny:.,Furniture isn't everything. Did Eve enjoy the first orgasmZ / Accompaniment

ends in isolation from the event. Then / dovetail. Percussion in the anteroom

to conger the doctors" (QD, rS). Conger? Conger is a species of eel. Congeries

are aggregates ofheterogeneous elements, so "conger" used as a verb would

mean "to gather together." But one can also imagine percussion in the an-

teroom conjuring doctors-conceivably a more efflcient way of getting to see

them than we Presently have. "A bale of direct contraries" (QD, t5)'

Which is most interesting. From tricycle to try sexual. (QD, zE)

(Could someone be quadrisexual? Perhaps a quadropedophile')

lnheritance is the cleaning process our forebears foreswore,

occupied as they were, in each other's esteem. Not that

society is polite, it is rude to those who don't agree with

its particular modes of savagery. I don't wear pearls. All

those articles of torture. A man once slept in a room with

a cow's skull suspended by transparent fishing line above

the mattress on the floor. Hopefully height is not crucial as

I don'twant to lie. There's the biography minus the kittens.

Why was the amethyst thought to prevent intoxication? (QD, eZ)

Reconstruct the spiral stare. (QD, :g)

Who invented the first commercial weed killer? (QD, 53)

Of course, in a certain sense it is a distortion to cite these lines out of their

contexts, for doing so subverts their resistance to interpretation, because in

context each phrase works as an interruPtion (a shift from one context or reg-

ister to another)-"Who invented the first commercialweed killer?" is, all by

itsel[ without complication, but as situated it pops like a gun:

An aberration in the earth's crust, for

example. Who invented the first commercial weed killer?

Recitals. Written in front ofyou not as a door but a latch,

now lift it. (Qo, Sa)

lnterruption: we tend to be bothered by interruptions, but they are crucial

to sociability, as is brevity, which interruption makes possible. Recall Mau-

rice Blanchot on the absence of interruptions: "l wonder if we have reflect-

ed enough upon the various significations of this pause that alone permits

speech to be constituted as conversation, and even as sllccclt. We end up by

confining someone who speaks without pause. (Let us recall Hitler's terriblcmonologues. And every head of state participates in the same dictare, the rep-etition of an imperious monologue, when he enjoys the power of being theonly one to speak and, rejoicing in the possession of his high solitary word,imposes it without restraint as a superior and supreme speech upon others)"(lC, lil.One wonders what Blanchot would make of Dr. O'Connor's mono-logues, those oratorios of purple gusto: "but the interruption was quite use-less. Once the doctor had his audience-and he got his audience by the simpledevice of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable andpossessive as a maddened woman's) some of the more boggish and biting ofthe shorter early Saxon verbs-nothing could stop him" (Nrghtwo od, t4).

Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes have distinctive voices. Karen Mac Cor-mack is polyvocal, ranging from an avocal or neutral voice in which "no onespeaks" to complex heterophonies culled from the histories of languages,

the writings of ancestors, as well as the idiomatic expressions of old and newforms of popular culture.

At the avocal boundary, Quirks and Quillers (r99r)-tricks and quibbles, quirksof fate and howwe evade them-is made of forty "sentences," each one oc-cupying its own page (so that an experience ofwhite space is part of the experi-ence ofthe poem):

The untried decibeI of seamless hose

unhurried sentence its adjectives the chosen

ladder geological manoeuvre or landing

strip spangles the same man connected

poillenes cramp the page's reproduction notours or the level's pinafore before piano

trudgingwords ahead of their names an

algebra ofwhat is scene momentous

underneath. (QQ,9)

Here the challenge would be to know how to read this poem aloud-where(or whether) to introduce pauses that would shape the sentence rhythmicallyiFnot semantically. (Karen Mac Cormack reads the pieces in this volume fairlyrapidly in a cadence that avoids any hint of prosody: no pausing for empha-ses, so the poem ceases to be made of lines.)+The semantics of this particular"sentence" lies in "its adjectives" ("trudging words ahead of their names" like"seamless hose," "unhurried sentence," "geological manoeuvre," "landingstrip," "the same man," "connected poillettes"). The poem contains only onetrarrsitive verb, "cranrp," an<l possibly not even that, since a "cramp" is more

82

often felt as a noun. ("Scene," to be sure, implies "seen.") ln truth Quirksand

Quillets is not, strictly speaking, made of sentences, but of proliferations ofphrases within loose, unPunctuated periods. Proliferation here is an event ofcomplexity, an anarchic defeat of unity, structure, closure, and point (but not,

curiously, ofan internal play):

Foregoing impartial likeness threads drop

where the thermometer left off it only

matters to someone else that the door is

closed upon leaving for now the

proliferation of exits is grief enough arms in

these leaves drying an open solitude in

increments the belief that there's paint on walls

paintings patching anomalies or

marbles in the mouth a fast-growing

background attention span in the form ofeveryday objects of a giving culture basting

corrects this sink is full. (QQ, +Z)

Notice that the phrases here all make a kind of sense-"Foregoing impartial

likeness," "threads drop where the thermometer left off," "it only matters to

someone else that the door is closed upon leaving," "for now the proliferation

ofexits is griefenough," "arms in these leaves [read it as a verb] dryingan open

solitude in increments," "the belief that there's paint on walls," "paintings

patching anomalies," "marbles in the mouth," "a fast-growing background,"

"attention span in the form of everyday objects of a giving culture," "basting

corrects [dehydration]," "this sink is full." The poem appropriates the seman-

tic ingredients that go into sentences-the readym ade enchainements that make

possible everyday speech (about "everyday objects of a given culture"). The

phrases ofQuirks ond Quillets are not poetical, but they are tricky and evasive (no

pinningthem down). The point is thateach one (almosteach one) is recogniz-

able: these are phrases that, but for a tr,vist here and there, we ourselves might

have used.

After all, where do phrases come from? From our various discursive envi-

ronments, which Karen Mac Cormack seeks to reconstruct and explore by

investigating several centuries of linguistic usage as well as the idioms ofcontemporary popular culture. Her poetry is, among other things, an archae-

ology of language, as the title of Quirk and Quillets suggests-it takes a good

deal of searching among dictionaries to find the word quillet: thanks to Shake-

B3

speare it is still occasionally cited as an archaism. The point is that phrases,whether contemporary or archaic, are found objecrs. They are not products orcreations-they cannot be traced back to an origin. phrases are, in Heidegger'slingo, "at hand": they have an equipmental rather than objective mode ofbeing-that is, we don't hold them up for inspection but rather put them intoplay, which is what Lyotard means by phrasing or enchainment. What KarenMac cormack does is alter the field of play by citing (and rephrasing) texts fromboth past and present.

Recall the concept of poetic diction. This was, in the eighteenth century, a

circle drawn around our vocabulary that excluded certain words as flatly un-poetic: duck, toe, fart, potato, intestine-make your own list. Modernism didnot reject the idea of poetic diction, but it enlarged the circle so that its cen-ter would be everywhere and its circumference inaccessible: hence "etherizedupon a table." The purpose of much of Karen Mac Cormack,s recent work hasbeen to develop new forms of poetic diction out of found texts. In Fitto print

(1998), written in collaboration with Alan Halsey, the found texts are news-paper items-news stories, advertisements, notices, but also forms of layoutthat makes the page the basic unit ofverse:

EMANCI-PATIO

roots dangler lowdown upstart fermi down and roardrawbackcocksure live to-die-fororal stroller

aggregates anoint conundrumbalanced marshiest oasis

outsourcing deliverables

virtual courseware

sharpshooter's clone

estop "Hurricane buys site"

now inhale finalize

recovery in times of duress

loans abstrusity

hard-to-get comparison

as if a mistake could "improve"

to encash outdo

day-to-day tread

subject crop weedy

greetings uncouple prefer (Fp, 35)

A footnote explains that the title of this poem was originally a typo in the To-

ronto Globe E Msil, and that "Hurricane buys site" was a "headline for a Globe EMoilarticle statingthat Hurricane Hydrocarbons Ltd. wins right to become ma-jor oiI producer in Kazakhstan in 1996" (Fp, 6r). Likewise Mac cormack'sArlssue(zoor) is, she says, "a series of poems most of which (but not all) utilize thevocabulary and spelling found in magazines of a diverse nature,,-Vogue, fort'xample, and others even more strictly "geared to a female readership,, (AI, 9):

84 j. r rt,,,i.i

AT ISSUE III

Putting shaPe into getting without Perfect in a culture that

doesn't think, pumPs up, the two traits go at the face of rate

themselves, cropped by impasse, express your monochromatics

from within, discover it blushes, reduce the signs to surface'

sharing space in a new high-tech fabric, the pale face extra-

prevent every day year after year, retreat returns by filling out

advance notice, since seeing is oxygen more supple' sways'

iust take graceful, tilt feature-controls are big' stable rattles

accept different speeds sing, sprawl-moguls seized a story'

raking in celebrity, heat-activated genre, hands full turned'

loops removable gusseted, postpone television' revelations'

introspection, an assemblage not incidentally imposed' cross-over

success, so many boxesyet smashes toward toward ' ' ' (Al' r7)'

Twopoints:Theexhibitionoffoundtextsisaformofsatire-thephrasesofthetextarejumbledinawaythatexposes(andsodefeats)theirrhetoricalpur-pose ("expres, you,

^ono.hrorn.ti.t from within")' At Issue is' among other

iningi, ,n urr"y on cultural narcissism (culling its language from publications

like lelfl. But perhaps the formal point is more interesting' By appropriating

her volabulary and spelling from found texts' Karen Mac Cormack accom-

plishes two (paradoxically clmpeting) things: in the spirit of modernism' she

enlarges the field of poetic diction -to

include the language of everyday life

(whatever its virtues or comedy). However, at the same t'T:' lrr:ltjL'llt "t

traditional poetic diction 1rt *Li as in the spirit of such writing communities

as oulipo oi the "chanc" op"r.tions" oflohn Cage and lackson Mac Low) she

subjects her writing to a system of arbitrary constraint (no phrases allowed

thai don't apPear in Selfl. Recourse to source texts or found language is a po-

etics that subjects the writing subject to an objective language (or linguistic

field). lt is a poetics of finitudl thaicornbines the openness of chance with the

confrnement of originary stipulations: no saying what has not' in some sense'

already been said, but doingso without repetition-imagine citations taking

the form not of quotationiut of collage' The idea seems to be to find a new

form of originality, one that is more rhetorical than romantic because it is a

form of writing that interrupts and recomposes what has already been written

and not a form of creation ex nihilo' As I said earlier' language is not internal

to the writing subject but is an environment of phrases capable of open-ended

redistributions. The crucial point is that these environments are local rather

thanglobal:onewritesfromtheStandpointofinhabit;rti<lrlwithindiscursive

85

communities. Certainly one can make fun of the idiom of Vogue and Sel,/i butthe appropriation of these idioms is also a form of redemption, because now

one experiences their peculiar comedy, richness, and even utopian potential.

lohn Cage perfected the form ofthe found text after having invented themesostic by "writing through" modernist texts like loyce's FinnegansWake, using

loyce's name as the spine along which his (loyce's) text is reassembled:

wroth with twone nathandJoe

A

MaltjhEm

Shen

pftlschute

sOlid man

that the humptYhillhead of humself

is at the knoCkout

in thE Parks

Writing through found texts is, as Cage argued, a way of escaping the confine-

ments of subjectivity, in which confinement means repetition, self-imitation,the articulations of style, identity, and tradition, and where escape means

bringing oneself arbitrarily under the discipline of the environment of an-

other's language in which one is (anthropologically) free to explore, expand,

and rearrange. Here the transfer of composition is from a Chomskyan linguis-

tic competence, in which the subject is able to produce an infinite number oforiginal sentences from the deep structure of linguistic rules, to the pragmatic

discourse that appropriates and renews what is given in the discourse that

constitutes a social and culturalworld. A poetics ofthe lively surface of histori-cal particulars in this event replaces a structuralist poetics ofinnate rules and

conventions that mechanically reproduce a history of universal forms.Found texts are archaeological artifacts. Mac Cormack didn't find her texts

by accident. lmplexures (zoo3) is an exploration of her ancestry, which evidentlygoes back to Elizabethan times (when the word "implexure," meaning fold orfolding, was still, if only rarely, in use). The poem is in part a series of "histori-

cal letters" made of heterogeneous voices from many sources and periods-"To absorb a history of family through the centuries requires a forebear's at-

tention to facts and no fear of paper" (lM, ro). The voices (and years) cannot

always (and never easily) be identified or distinguished from one another-"'l-anguage as primary environment' applied to re-reading letters (one's own,rrrrl others') the rlccrrlt's itrtcrlcavcd on every surface to blur and redefine the

86 87

living in & perception's architecture" (lM, 44'45)-except perhaps for the

(italicized) letters home from a modern youngwoman traveling to places Iike

Mexico, ltaly, Greece, and TurkeY:

t enjoy travelingsolo.There are problems,butthey are notinsurmountable.Theltqlian and 6reek

men are totally perplexed by single women going around the world E it seems to unnewe them that

there are so many. (lM, si)

But mostly the language is incremental in its phrasing, as if a collage (or per-

haps "implexions": entanglements, interweavings, interfolds) were being

constructed fro m ancestral fragments:

Form at certain taverns never documentary during their scramble. To the west

spell jeopardy and drop to [ower ground rasp's running with a lantern. Later

through the front door, down the hall and out again, coach, frills adhere to it'Horn of boxwood and in existence a diary usua[[y is a provoking document. Hov-

ered very much to the fore and exasperating. Consentwithheld and why? Every re-

cord drawn a blank and so impossible to forgive her being a Perfect Lady. Drifting

coming on to the answering mountain made no picture. Into three editions and

many infidelities (the former begot missiles). An independent line . . . freedom ofoutlook (not one but two bribes of peerage failed) and then the Repeal ofthe Salt

Tax. Meanwhile, diligent in her Latin and "very new-fangled of my ltalian," she

didn't object to his taking a sprogue now and then. A "nip" appeared in the pit

and he was then alone. Trappings beyond perennial drain, the dusk, in his chair,

but no marker or tablet, it being December what flowers could there have been?

(lM, t9)

Again: a portrait of a lady-but as in Gertrude Stein's portraits the subject here

is integrated into her environment, and so the collage is of a time and place

and not simply of a subject, meaning that the references are local and tempo-

ral, embedded in lost contexts, and thus outside the glossing capabilities ofmodern readers-and most libraries, although industrial-strength research

will turn up some interesting connections: "sprogue," for example, is hard

to find anywhere except in FinnegansWake (5o7.t9: "A strangely striking part ofspeech for the hottest worked word of ur sprogue."). Every dictionary I know

of rejects it. The context in Mac Cormack's Poem suggests that it could mean

"a drink now and then," but loyce's context makes it more likely a word for

language ("sprog" is Danish for language, so "ur sProgue" would be something

like Ursprache). "Sprogue" is also probably a loycean pun (sprog, brogue). Dili-

gent polyglots won't mind a pun now and then, or a gJre and gimble in the

wabe, norwillspace Rogues (or "sprogues," as they call themselves). Sprogue

is a common surname, evidently originally Cornish, but it is tttort' itrtcrc'stittg

as a phantom noun-a found word that eludes lexicography. (Karen Mac Cor-

mack tells me the word means "jaunt," an aimless stroll.)Speaking of dictionaries, one section of lmplexures is called "DEVELOPMEN-

TAL DICIIONARY (from ry67 to circa r98z)." It is a text in two parts. part Twoconsists ofwhat looks like a random series ofwords:

contiguity induction chimerical inimical didactic vicissitude pithy maxim apho-rism portentously sedition sedulous irascible specious plausible esoteric contriteintellect intellectuaI faculty usurp sagacious discernment artifice contrivance ne-gate glaucous rapacious respite retrieve vituperative obsequious euphemism as-

cribe disparate acumen ingenuous expunge intrinsic tacit cogent denote acquisi-tion peripatetic ebullient anomalous pullulating extraneous jejune hyperboreanabstruse incondite tantalum acronychal erudite tautophony (lM, 59)

Mostly familiar words, perhaps used less commonly than others-appearing,I would guess, more often in writing than in speech. Some you'd not think touse ("incondite tantalum acronychal"), and you'd want to consult a diction-ary before deploying a number ofothers. And that appears to be the point oftheir appearance in lmplexures. Part One of "Developmental Dictionary" is a list(three-and-a-half pages in length) of definitions, synonyms, or instances ofthe words in PartTwo. So in reading one applies the following to the first fivewords of the series-

contact, proximity

prologue, introduction

production (offacts) to prove

general statement

offanciful conception

hostile

meant to instruct (lM, 56)

-and these to the last five:

ill constructed, crude, unpolished

rare white metallic element

highly resistant to heat &

action ofacids

happening at nightfall

learndd

rcpetition of the same sound (1M,59)

"l)cvclopmental Dictionary" is an archaeological document-as is, whenorrc corrsidcrs it, any dictiorrary, cspecially one that supplies the meanings of

B8

words with a history, allowing one to dig up old uses or to discover thatwords

are protean, owing to their multiple and heterogeneous etymologies: "in-

duction" is not just one word but several, depending on the context. ln the

Elizabethan theater, it means "prologue, introduction." It is also, of course,

a term of art in togic and the foundation of the empirical sciences' And it is

also how one gets into a Hall of Fame (or, worse luck, into the military). As a

good archaeologist, Karen Mac cormack gives us the Middle English meaning

of"specious" ("ofgood aPpearance" Ittvt, 56]), and in the bargain alludes to its

proximity to the nextword in the series, "plausible" ("seemingly reasonable or

probable" [f fvr, 5O]), which "specious" in our current use of the word must be:

a baldly incoherent explanation, incredible from the start, would not be "spe-

cious." Plausibility is a condition of deception.

lust so, the words in PartTwo of "Developmental Dictionary" do not make

up a random series but are internally connected-phonetically, morphemical-

ly, semantically: "induction" is an instance of "contiguity"; "inimical" echoes

"chimerical," and so, more subtly, does "didactic" (the series is an example of

"tautophony"). Maxims are pithy, and so, being maxims, are aphorisms' "Ob-

sequious,, is a reversal of "vituperative." And without doubt the series grows

more "abstruse" or "erudite" (recondite but by no means "incondite") as it

draws to a close. "Acronychal"-"happening at nightfall"-concerns the ris-

ing or setting of stars, as opposed to their rising or setting at sunrise (which is

,.cosmical,,). The )xfordEnglishDictionary'sentry is worth a moment ofyour time

$ou,ll be hard pressed to find the word anywhere else). while in the neighbor-

hood, consult "acroPhonY. "

poetry as an archaeology of [anguage brings new life to the now tired con-

cept of ,,open form." The idea is to recover and explore different linguistic en-

vironments, whether ancient or modern, high or low, lost or forgotten. Let

me conclude by citing Voniry R elease (zoq), in which Mac Cormack appropriates

a number of unique vocabularies. She begins with "a statement: re 'sourced'

poems in VANITY RELEASE":

I have become increasingly intrigued by tate rgth and early 2oth century short-

hand dictionaries and manuals (and most recently a mid-zoth-century typewrit-

ing manual), in addition to phrase books for travelers through the zoth century.

The choice ofword lists, sentences to learn by, and the exercises in these respec-

tive manuals reflect not only the ongoing changes in North American English for

this period, but also shifts in educational, business, and technological terminol-

ogy. To engage with these terms in a context of contemporary investigational po-

etic practice is one way to perplex meaningfully what is so easily taken for granted

technologically, linguistically, and socially in our own tinrt's (Vl{' ';)

89

"UP," my favorite poem in the volume, takes its words and phrases from Uniyer-

salPhonography, H. M. Pernin O 1886, Sixth Edition, 1893. Phonography, liter-ally sound-writing, is a form of stenography invented in 1837 by lsaac Pitman."UP" begins:

Phonography dispenses with useless letters by recording the sounds ofwords only.In practiceyou should endeavor to forgetthe ordinary spellingofwords, and thinkonly of the sounds of which they are composed. Remember always to write whot

youhear and notwhatyousee. Accuracy is the first essential. . . . "Make haste slowly."

Sz sh zh, j ch, are horizontal curves traced from left to the manner indicated onpage 36 facing the right. The sound ofx is a combination ofthe sounds k s

Get the doctor a cup ofblack tea, Harry feared the boat would veer to the left. A red

leaffell at the foot ofthe oak. (VR, 3r)

The first "stanza" gives us the basic rule ofphonography, which is to forget thephonetic alphabet and to replace it with minor strokes of the pen or pencil, as

indicated in "stanza" two: the sounds "sh" and "zh" are written as curves likethe lower right quarter of a new moon. The first sentence of the third stanza

would be written as follows:

l(rf / _lr/, - \,1'r _l.However, what matters in Mac Cormack's archaeology is not simply the recov-

ery of the forgotten text but the recuperation of its peculiar idiom-namely,the pedagogical sound ofthe late-nineteenth-century office manual:

The majority of business houses prefer their correspondence rypewritten, it be-

ing not only more tegible than ordinary longhand, but also much more rapidlyexecuted. Comparatively few people are really good spellers, a fact due in a great

measure to the absurd construction ofthe language and partly to early neglect ofthis important branch ofeducation. The stenographer who would keep abreast ofthe times should also be acquainted with the shorthand literature in general. The

word ushas been inadvertently omitted from theLord's Prayer. (VR, 36)

The "absurd construction ofthe language" indeed. It turns out that what Kar-

en Mac Cormack's poetic research recovers from these manuals is the strugglebetween the rationalization of the world, the programs of efficiency, control,and split-second reproduction on which our modernity depends, and the es-

sential paganism of language-the sheer excess and unmanageability of a

language not really made for literacy, legibility, or the various technologiesof'word-processing. Thc. attempt to streamline human speech, including the

90

manufacture of buzz words, acronyms, sound bites, not to mention email and

who knows how many new forms of digital shorthand, fails because, asVanity

Release shows, streamlining produces its own special forms of comic materi-

ality, as in the penultimate poem inVonityRelesse,"WE-23."4 The source-text

for this poem is a ryPing manual, GenerolTyping, t9r Series @ 1965 by the

McGraw-Hill Company of Canada, Ltd., filled with finger exercises, helpful

hints, moraI encouragement, cautionary notes, and useful examples for the

eager secretary.

BODY centered opposite the J key, a hand-span from the machine

She fed us egg salads. Ed fed us eggs.

Fred sells red jugs; red jars are free.

Ask Dr. Grass. Dr. Grass leads us all.

This book has many "clinics."

area dear drag flu gush gulfhire huge

idea jugs lark kill read selfside drug

Errors should not alarm you; insteod, they should guide you.

Control Hyphen, Q, and ? keys

Can you keep your elbows still?

sofa soap sock soak son sod sox sow

side ofthe center

STRESS: Continuity

Watch for it. Get set. (VR, at)

The poem continues for several pages, concluding with what is surely the

twentieth century's most important advice: "REMEMBER: Don't give in to the

temptation to look upl" (VR, SZ).

olt

THE ROGUERETURN

POET'S

iohn matthiasts poetic anecdotes

. . . which word, by the way, Johnson always condemned.

-Boswell, Lrfe of )ohnson

l'I start by citing one of lohn Matthias's earliest poetic anecdotes, "Alexander

Kerensky at Stanford," from Turns (r975):

He rose one Winter from his books

To sit among the young unrecognized.

Itwas 1963. ltwas 1917.

He sipped his coffee & was quite anonymous.

Students sat around him at their union

Talking potitics: Berkeley, Mississippi.

A sun-tanned blonde whose wealthy father

Gave her all his looks and half his money

Whispered to her sun-tanned lover:

"Where is VietNanr?"

ltt

92 :1 ir i) ; il i'

He thought no thought oftheirs.

ln his carrel atthe Hoover lnstitute

He had the urns of all his ancient enemies.

Their dust was splattered on his purple tie. (T, 57)'

Kerensky was the Russian prime minister in the Provisional Government

(luly-september rgrT) that ruled briefly after the czar's overthrow. when Lenin

i.rn" to po*.r in October Kerensky fled to Paris, then to NewYorkwhere he fi-

nally settled. He was a fellow at stanford University's Hoover lnstitute between

rgOr and 1966 while lohn Matthias was at Stanford (1963-65) working toward

his M.A. in English.

About this same rime $96z-6$ I was at the University of Virginia studying

with Hugh Kenner, whose books on Pound, Eliot, loyce, and Beckett gave us

our first detailed examination of modernism-this against the background

of the New Critics who found these writers, even Eliot (whose critical writ-

ings they substantially appropriated), mostly unreadable. what I chiefly recall

abtut Kenner was his ability to speak in complete sentences (without ems and

ahs), each of which was apt to contain (verbatim) a lengthy citation. lnvited

to lecture, he would not recite from a prepared text but would compose as he

spoke, then later write up a text for publication that matched pretry closely

what he had said extempore.' Milton is said to have committed the Bible to

memory. Kenner did pretty much the same with most of what he read, includ-

ing, if you can believe it, much of Pound's contos. A corollary of his fabulous

memory is that Kenner cultivated a Baconian disdain for general ideas; con-

cepts and theories turned his face into a death mask. ("Clich6s of theory," as

Matthias says in "Private Poem" [sM, 136].) lt is no wonder that his master-

work, The Pound Era, is essentially a book of anecdotes-it begins with an ac-

count of a chance meeting between Henry lames and Ezra Pound' then resid-

ing in London, sometime around r9o8:

The Chelsea street that afternoon however had stranger riches to offer than had

"society." Movement, clatter of hooves, sPutter of motors; light grazing house-

fronts, shadows moving; faces in a crowd, their apparition: two faces: Ezra Pound

(quickjauntyrubicundity)withalady.Eyesmet;thecoupleshalted;ritualswerein-cumbent. Around them Chelsea sauntered on its leisurely business. lames to Play:

.,Mr. Pound! . . .,, in his searchingvoice, torch for unimagined labyrinths; and

on, to the effect of Presenting his niece Margaret; whereupon Mr' Pound pre-

sented to Mr. Iames his wife Dorothy; and the painter's eye of Dorothy Pound, n€e

shakespear, "took in" as lames would have phrased it, Henry larlcs. "A lairly portly

figure"-:

93

Meanwhile, inThePound Era, figures like "patterned energy," introduced withan anecdote about Buckminster Fuller on "knots" OCS-56), displace catego-

ries and distinctions; luminescent particulars do the work of universals, as

they do in Pound's poetry. ln fact, as Kenner once said to me,ThePoundEro isaworkof literary history modeled on The Cantos,"a poem including history," but

including it chiefly in the form of synecdoches gathered from below:

So this is (we may take it) Mitteleuropa:

Mr Corles was in command of machine guns

butwhen the time came to fire

he merely lit a cigarette and walked away from his battery and seated himself in

a field,

So some subaltern gave the order to fire

and Mr Corles did not suffer the extreme penalty

because his family

was a very good bourgeois family in Vienna

and he was therefore sent to a mind sanatorium.a

What is an anecdote? The historian Lionel Cossman notes that we lack any

clear concept or definition of the anecdote, arguably one of the oldest forms

of narrative (recall the laconic Cain and Abel story), but one that only came

under theoreticaI scrutiny in the early nineteenth century as a briefinciden-tal tale that sometimes underwrites but also frequently undermines the grand

narratives of history as when Procopius supplements his laudatory history

of Emperor lustinian's wars with anecdota ("secrets," or "unpublished tales")

about .lustinian's private life, especially the extravagant sexual appetites ofhis wife, Theodora.s Just so, sex and the anecdote are traveling companions:

both belong to the nether regions of gossip and jokes-although according

to P6ter Hajdu anecdotes also (as in nineteenth-century Hungary, forexample)

function as a medium of "national consciousness."6 Both Matthias and Pound

capture the form's essential mischief, but also its classical decorum-the im-personality ofits narration and its Aristotelian structure ofexposition, crisis,

and resolution. So here, in Matthias's poem, is the old democrat, Kerensky,

half a century after his moment in history, anonymously (anomalously) sip-

ping his coffee among Stanford's students (hedonists turning into dissidents

and back again), then repairing, as if to a time machine, to his carrel at the

Hoover lnstitute, with its vast archive of dusty Russian documents. An anec-

dote of survival, as is Pound's, which is also a kind of anti-Msuberly in its story

ol'a separate peace.

Anecdotes arc historical, but, being local and particular, they stand at the

94 95

intersection of history and memory; or perhaps one should say that the anec-

dote is a certain way of relating (to) history with the immediacy of memory. ltcould be that "proximity" is the word I'm looking for, but proximity to what?

Matthias's poems are sometimes anecdotal memories, but what truly makes a

memory anecdotal, its basic condition of possibiliry, is the presence of a cer-

tain kind of proper name-7

First time I saw

him, Segovia,

he wouldn't play.

Now he probably

can't.

ln from the wings,

holding the

thing like a chalice,

as if it might spill,

the music, out,

before he played-

you weren't supposed

to breathe.

Maybe he only noticed

somebody blink ("Tunes for Iohn Garvic" [T, tt])

The name Segovia belongs to the history of music, but, except in passing (mak-

ing room for the odd eye- or ear-witness), official histories of music are not

usually anecdotal.s One question is how, when, or why events of history or

memory take (or are given) the form of anecdotes, as against that of extended

narratives or, conversely, of fragments, vignettes, or montage. One answer

is that mischief must be quick, as Matthias is quick in his skewering of Sego-

via (lohn Cage would have loved this poem). Anecdotes are a species of dev-

ilry with respect to whatever is worthy, serious, or officially above reproach.s

The poem on the page facing "Alexander Kerensky at Stanford," for example,

is a paratactic anecdote in which an artist aPpears momentarily in the public

realm (as Kerensky, the public man, had reemerged in the private):

A PAINTER

Marc Chagall knew nothing

About dialectics.

Caily, daily, in Vitebsk,

Cows & horses danced in the air.

Superstructure he hopelessly

Muddled with structure.

Gaily, daily, in Vitebsk,

Cows & horses danced in the air.

After October, Chagall was

Commissar for the arts for a year . . .

But was dismissed: The Man

Leaping Over the City.

Daily, daily, in Vitebsk,

lcons ofLenin & Stalin objectivety stare. (T, 56)

This poem, as the notes to Turns indicate, is the third in a sequence derived

or devolved from Matthias's reading of Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Stqtion,

which is a sort of anecdotal history of revolutionist thought, or more exactly a

book of stories about revolutionaries from Michelet and Marx to Trotsky andLenin-the subtitle of Wilson's book is A Study intheWriting and Acting of History,

which is to say that the question for Wilson is not so much "What did Lenin

think or do?" as "What was it like to be Lenin (disembarking, for example, at

the Finland Station), and thus to think and act like him?"'o Or, as per Matth-ias's "Bakunin in ltaly," which (anecdotally) crosses the history of revolution-aries with that of music:

Wagner's face is still illuminated

Over Dresden in that fire I fed

And in the glow of it I see my sister

Walking through the snow beside Turgenev.

Did I spit my teeth out in the Peter-Paul

Only to release the homicidal genius

OfNachaev? I should have been a lesuit,

A mason. Castrati sing the Internationale

And dance the choreography oFKarl Man.

I should have been a tenor playing

Sophie Hatsfeldt in an opdra-bouffe

lly Ferdinand l.:rss;rlt'. (I, 54)

96

No doubt the glossing of proper names is a necessary if insufficient way of

readingan anecdotal poem (cf. Terrell'sACompaniontoTheCantosof EzraPound,

cited above). During the May r84g "Uprising in Dresden" the anarchist Mikhail

Bakunin (r8r4-76) manned the barricades with Richard wagner $es, that Rich-

ard Wagner: a leftist in real life, did you know that?), and later he lost his teeth

while imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg-actually,

it was the Castle of Shlisselberg near St. Petersburg that claimed his teeth. Ba-

kunin admired, perhaps loved, but then condemned the young agitator Sergei

Nachaev Q8a7_76), for whom yiolent revolution was a good in itself. Bakunin

was against violence, and thus a critic of Marx-hence the joke about Marxist

castrati. Meanwhile Sophie von Hatzfeldt (r8o5-8r) was a German aristocrat

("the red countess") whose opdra-boffi divorce was handled by the socialist

Ferdinand Lassalle $825-46), who founded the first German workers' pargr,

the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein.

ln his bibliographicalnote to Turns Matthias indicates that he is (like Pound)

basically a documentary poet-one who writes things down instead of think-

ing them up:

I have plundered various sources as indicated below (r) to get my general bearings

in the course of a composition or (z) for passages and fragments which provide

documentary material in which Poetic enerry can be isolated so as to expand the

voicing of particular parts of this book-sometimes quoting, sometimes translat-

ing or transmuting them (videTurns). A poet's random, pretty unscholarly (though

sometimes purposeful) reading over certain Periods of time when engaged in as-

sembling certain kinds of structures' (T, ro9)"

Northrop Frye: .,Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of

other novels,, (Anatomy,gT). This seems right, but Matthias operates within a

larger system-for example, a library (close to the one imagined by Borges)

whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is indeterminate, re-

calling again Williams's motto that "A poem can be made of anything," even

newspaper clippings (1, 7o):

THREE LOVE SONCS FOR U.P.I.

(i.m.RarlKraus)

r. The ArmyTold Congressmen

The army told congressmen yesterday it has enough of a single nerve gas in its

chemical biologicatwarfare arsenal to kill the world's population many times

over. But Russia, one lawmaker rePorted, may harbor an even more lethal

capabitity in this little discussed and highly secret ftel<l. l hc \rrl)sllrrcc is Iabcled

97

by the army "G.B." and the world's population is estimated at around 3-4 billion.Rep. Robert L. F. Sikes, D-Fla, said he thinks the U.S. is not doing enough in the

field. Sikes said it is estimated that the Russians have "seven to eight times" the

capability of the United States. The U.S. has enough "G. B." to kill the world's

estimated population about 3o times. Russia, on the other hand, has enough to

kill the world's estimated population, say, 16o to r9o times. (T, z9)

U.P.l.: for United Press International. Karl Kraus (187r-1936) was the famous

Austrian satiristwhose periodical, Die Fackel(The Torch), was the vehicle for hi-larious attacks on the banality ofViennese social life-in particular the fatuityand hypocrisy of its public discourse (Rede). "This quibblea" Walter Benjamin

said of Kraus, "probing between syllables, digs out the larvae that nest there inclumps. The larvae of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, child-ishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty."l'?Among other things.

Karl Kraus wrote: "You can expect no word of my own from me." Kraus's

rogue method of citation and parody is a source or model of Matthias's attrac-

tion to "quotation, commentary, pastiche" (C, 8r), or what Matthias wouldlater call "cuttings," as in "A Civil Servant," a Pakistani hangman's tale liftedverbatim (so a note tells us) from the Times of London:

Because the Muslims and the Hindus cannot

do this job, they turn to me-a poor, impoverished Christian. They pay me

ten rupees each time, some fifty pence.

And look at this-one mud room, two beds,

a Pepsi calendar, a Coca-Cola

poster and the crucifix. My father, an

untouchable, cleaned the toilets in Lahore

and then converted. The British brought in

hangingwith the cricket, but they

couldn't find a hangman. My father volunteered.

He'd rather hang a man than clean latrines.

They never tell me whom I'm going to hang.

They come and get me, or they send me

money for the bus or train. l'm the only

hangman in the country; I'm on call.

They got me up at2 A.M. for Bhutto. Itwas

rrining, and they brorrght him on a

98 ii.:i,i !: t: /

stretcher. He wore the shalmar-kameez

and traditional long shirt. He was steady

as I fastened up the hood around his head

and then put round the noose. He didn't

say a word before I Pulled the lever,

but somehow lwas certain he was innocent.

I went home and drank all night and drank

so much I woke uP in the wards with

alcoholic poisoning. They came to get me

there to hang the officers who gave

the evidence convicting Bhutto. They'd been

promised pardons butwere being hanged

instead. They repudiated all their evidence

before I hanged them, one bY one.

What kind of country is this anyway? l'm 65

l've been the hangman here since mY

father died. When they came to get me in the

wards, I told them I was far too sick to go.

But this is Pakistan. l'm Christian. So I went. (PIM, 34-35)

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir Bhutto's father) was president and later prime

minister of Pakistan during the rg7os. ln ry77 he was overthrown by a mili-

tary coup let by General Muhammad Zia-ul Haq. Bhutto was then accused of

conspiring to assassinate a political rival and imprisoned in Rawalpindi jail'

After a rigged trial and failed appeal, he was executed on April 4, 1979' There

is an account of the execution by the superintendent of Rawalpindi, Colonel

Rafl ud Din, entitled (in Urdu) Bhutto kay akhn 34 din ffhe Last3z3 Days of Mr'

Bhutto;.': The executioner, whose name was Tara Masih, gives us an alterna-

tive version-an expos6 from below, up close and yet detached, including the

story, not mentioned by colonel Rafi ud Din, of the subsequent execution of

the officers who had testified against Bhutto. on luly 8, rg8+, the NewYorkTimes

ran the following obituary: "Tara Masih, the offlcial executioner who hanged

ousted Prime Minister ZulfikarAli Bhutto in r979 and an estimated 5,ooo other

people over 25 years, died Friday ofheart disease in Pakistan's northern city of

Lahore, jail officials said today'" Obituaries are a species of anecdote'

The French writer Maurice Blanchot championed the argument that Poet-

ry'svoice is thatof the alien, the exile, the misfit, the pagarr (from p0.gus: the

99

border, the outlying region beyond the control of administrative centers).r+

Writing, Blanchot says, is ddpaysement, "a habitless inhabiting" (lC, 3o8). Mat-thias is famously unsettled, aboard ship, following ancient and modern itin-eraries across layered or legend-laden landscapes, as in Bathory and Lermontov

(r98o) and in much of AGatheringofWcys (r99r).'s But the point here is that thevoices ofpoetry and anecdote singa kind ofduet upon the same contrary, cen-sorable, underground plane, as in Matthias's "scherzo Trio: Three at the VillaSeurat"-blue unquotable monologues by Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell,and Anais Nin (PlM, t6-tl); or, somewhat differently, the first poem in Kedging

(zoo7):

POST.AN ECDOTAL

I

And then what? Then I thought ofWhat I first remembered:

Underneath some porch with Gide:

Oh, not with Cide. But after years & years

I read that he remembered what he firstRemembered, and it was that.

tl

Not this: Someone calling me,

lohnny,lohnny. I was angry hid.

Itwas humid, summer, evening.

I hid there sweating in the bushes

As the dark came down. I could

Smell the DDT they'd sprayed

That afternoon-it hung there in

The air. But so did the mosquitoes

That it hadn't killed. lohnny!

Oh, l'd notgo backatall. I'd

Slammed the door on everyone. (K, :)

What is Andr6 Gide doing in this poem? Possibly only to pose the questionof first or early memory: "Not this"-young Gide seems never to have beenangry-but that: a young boy hiding somewhere:

I remember [Gide writes] a biggish table-the dining-room table, no doubt-withits table-cloth that reached nearly to the ground; I used to crawl underneath withthe concierge's little boy, who sometimes came to play with me.

"What are yorr doing under there?" my nurse would call out.

100

,,Nothing; we're playing." And then we would make a great noise with our

playthings, which we had taken with us for the sake of appearances. ln reality, we

amused ourselves otherwise, beside each other but not with each other; we had

what I afterwards learnt are catled "bad habits""6

one has to be out of place (an anomaly) in order to enter the anecdotal uni-

verse. For example, imagine young Matthias in Hollywood:

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD STANDS ON HIS HEAD

Half way to a doubte dactyl with that title'

I think he stood like that for ten or fifteen minutes,

Which is almostworthy of hexameters'

Whywas he standing on his head?

(l was standing on my feet, and mightily

Perplexed-a student down from Stanford

ln 1.A., lookingatanother kind of life')

He said he's finished his new novel

lust that day and thought he ought to celebrate'

And then he stood on his head. He told me

That he'd Picnicked recentlYwith

Atdous HuxteY-meant to be there at

The party-and the aging Chaplin, when they

Found themselves on someone's private property

Accosted by the police' They were told they'd have

To leave. Huxley said: Do just let us finish lunch:

This is Charlie Chaplin, back for a visit to America'

The cop damn well knew Chaplin when he saw him-Little guy with a derby, cane & funny walk-These three tresPassers could

Pack it up and move it out, he said-and that

Included Charlie Chan . . .'z

An anecdote aboutbeingout of placel It continues (sorry, but an anecdotal

poem has to be cited in full, since it has, after all, a beginning, middle, and

end, each of which is indispensable to the whole)-

And I thought

I knewAldous HuxleYwhen I saw him-Approached a tall man in a corner sipping wine

Who said-Bu t t' m leff Chandler, actually!

Astonished, I stared atChiefCochise, noble lndian

101

Hero of my childhood, limmy Stewart's Friend,

Star of Broken Arrow which l'd seen a dozen times.

I could feel myself perspiring, and I

Couldn't think ofanything to say. AldousHuxley is quite

0ld, he sniffed. So is Ch arlie Chaplin, who is ov er ther e.

He's talking with Marlene Dietrich, Chandler said-lsherwood still standing on his head. (K, 9)

Names fall off the screen, or out of history, into the anecdote. One couldgive this screw another turn by way of Mikhail Bakhtin's take on the Platonic

dialogue and its effect on the Athenian public sphere, whose epic songs and

long-winded orations are brought down to street-level talk and made thereby

palpable and mute: roguish Socrates relocates lon and Protagoras offstage inan everyday life-world that Plato's writings transcribe as if overheard.'8 Recall

how casually the Symposium is framed (t7za-t74a): Apollodorus is asked about a

banquet atwhich Socrates and others discussed the question oflove, and aftersome sorting out as to when exactly the banquet occurred (some fifteen years

earlier, it turns out), he proceeds to relate the entire conversation-as he had

heard it from Aristodemus ("in his exact words"). The Symposium, like most ofPlato's dialogues, is an extended anecdote.

Matthias's "Automystifstical Plaice" (zooz) is collage of anecdotal pieces

about the early Parisian avant-garde that links Georges Antheil's Bolletmdca-

nique j9z4) to the invention of radio-guided torpedoes, a connection made

possible by Hedy Lamarr's descent from the screen back into the time of her

life when she was wife to the Viennese arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl,

from whose business she learned a great deal about weapons technology. An-

theil's Ballermdcaniquewas (and is) itself a piece of high-tech weaponry, scored

for sixteen player pianos accompanied by two grand pianos played by live

musicians, as well as three xylophones, seven electric bells, three airplanepropellers, and a siren.'e If I follow the narrative correctly, the problem withguiding torpedoes via radio signals is that the enemy could easily jam the air-ways. Hedy Lamarr's idea was to prevent jamming by communicatingwith thetorpedoes via changing (or "hopping") frequencies-but how to synchronize

these frequenry changes in both transmitter and torpedo? Antheil's solution:slotted paper rolls of the kind one would need to synchronize the sounds pro-

duced by multiple player pianos.'o

Antheil is much the most interesting figure here. Born in Trenton, New ler-sey, he was a quintessential American in Paris, where, in ry23, a performanceoIhis dissonant sona(as (he was himself the soloist) became the scene of a riot

102

staged by his friends-including Ezra Pound and lames loyce-and fitmed by

the French auteur Marcel L'Herbier to provide footage for his film L'lnhumoine

(1924), starring Georgette LeBlanc as Claire Lescot (an automaton ofsorts-,.the girl without any mother born a machine"-who occasionally is given

lines to speak in Matthias's Poem):''

Thddtre des Champs Elysdes. Everyone's there. The soloist

doesn't know that he is a she. He doesn't know

he's set up, doesn'tyet know they've scripted him in a riot

(those lights are too many, too bright.)

Mere human being he sits there robotic she looks like

a presence out of Bohemia via Berlin's RUR.

He begins with Sonata Sauvage.

A camera's panning the audience, pick out the famous:

Picasso and loyce, Duchamp, Milhaud and Satie'

We see them there with Leblanc as Lescot in the film

butwe don't hear a sound Mr. Pound leaping

right out ofhis seat and shaking his fist as people begin

to walk out on Antheil himself at his Airplane Sonata

by now sweating and sweating away but we don't hear a thing as we gaze

at the girl without any mother born a machine

who would sing out success du scandale a clickityctack

ofthe dactylicanapests jerking the film

through a circle oflight the soloist booed from the stage

the piano rolls looping their loops

in tlvelve Pianolas electronic bells and a xylophone siren

another Picabia made from the parts

of a Model-T Ford. (WP,5)

Ezra Pound on Antheil: "Antheil is probably the first artist to use machines.

I mean actual modern machines, without bathos." To which he adds: "Ma-

chines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they

have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and

enerry; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d'orre, as if their essence.""

That grinding sound you hear as you read this isTheodorAdorno turning in his

grave (,.As little as art is to be defined by any other element," says Adorno, "it is

simply identicalwith form" [AT, r4o]).

In this same modernist spirit, one might say that while "Automystifstical

Plaice" is anecdotal, its connective tissue is material rather than [ormal, more

acoustic or even percussive than narrative-think of it ;rs .t kirrtl ol pot\ma mdco'

103

nique whose sounds ("clickityclack") follow one another the way notes in An-theil's Sonaresauvage (tg4) do:

Great Lord, she says, Mon Dieu.

That must have been one nine two three, the year I went

to the races with Hem at Anteuil, the year

youngAntheilwas going to play Cyclops for iim.A working title indeed, she says, a walking tittle or tattle l'd say

to your automystifsticaI plaice-you're fishing again in some pre-Riemannian river

and don't understand the riviters have it all over

the rhetors who can't even master the minor recursions

while minding the algorithmical gaps.

No one could actually ploy that piano roll A wrote into the score,

the digitals moving at speeds and at intervals

nobody's ten carboniferous digits could match.

So down at the hurdle went Manzu, tossing his jock,

and Hdros the Twelfth and L'Yser dashed at long odds

for the finish. Seining out in the sea near Le Havre

you wouldn't net any sonnets much less Seigneurs

out of Proust. You understand, she insists,

there are no parallel lines in rivers thatwind & nothing butnorhing

my love appears to cohere from inside the system

trust me l'm a truffler I know my way around. (WP, 6)

Georgette LeBlanc is the name Hemingway gave to a prostitute in The Sun Also

Rises. The real Georgette LeBlanc Q875-tg4r) was the lover of Margaret Ander-son (1886-1973), editor of the Litde Reyiew. Antheil composed some music foran (unfinished) opera based on the "Cyclops" episode of .;oyce's Ulysses. Hdros

XII was a celebrated racehorse at Anteuil (France) during the years followingWorld War t (but the race in question was won by L'Yser, owned by Louis,leanVictor Sdv6re Decazes de Ghicksberg, 4th Duke de Decazes and 4th Hertig ofGliicksberg). Oddly, the 1xford English Dictionory doesn't recognize the word"truffler" (a mycologist of sorts, connoisseur of edible fungi), which other-wise might pass as the name for a trickster (to truffis to deceive), or maybe

someone who just deals in simulacrs-images for which there are no originals(pre-Riemannian or Euclidean rivers), which in a way is what movie stars andrnaybe all sights and sounds and words of verse are: electro-mechanizationsoIthe world-picture.

104

Where EP is Express Pdquette. Who plays, thatwhore, for larks.

That open door ofMontparnasse. And Harpo Marx. These sparks

that fly. And A s pneumatic-driven notes become electric quotes

from 1923. ln r94r it's done in spite of Paramount for Miss Lamarr.

And then it's done for Milstar in the sky or Disklavier that's clear

on time's uncertain rhymes. Twelve hundred measures in your file

for sequencing. Select your samples from a hand-cranked siren and

orchestral betl and biwing props. Prepare a click track and beware

the signatures that change six hundred times. Calculate in

milliseconds and deploy the sixteen retrofitted grands. Clap hands. (WP, za)

On the afterlife of Balletmdcanique: in the digital age "As pneumatic-driven

notes become electric quotes" driving both the satellite Milstar (launched in

rggO) and Yamaha's pianolas that are synchronized by electromechanical so-

lenoids and optical sensors, thereby making it possible at last to realize An-

theil's score as originally conceived.

All of this tends toward the conclusion that John Matthias writes a special

kind of comic poetry, different from Charles Bernstein's stand-up routines,

Steve McCaffery's ludic wordplay, or David Antin's talk. l've mentioned that

the anecdote belongs to the common world of gossip, joking, the backsto-

ry, street-talk. Bakhtin would locate the anecdote within the topside-down

history of laughter, which is to say among "the forms and variations ofparodic-travestying, indirect, conditional discourse" that have been the irre-

pressible gadflies ofthe serious, straightforward word, especiallysince Roman

times-"ltwas Rome," Bakhtin says, "that taught European culture to laugh

and ridicule."': (Recall that neither the Homeric heroes nor the church fathers

ever laugh, while "loking lesus" was born in an Irish pub.) Here is Matthias at

his most Roman, translating the 0dyssey into "Laundry Lists and Manifestoes"

(and Nausicaa into a California Girl)-

Meanwhile in the elsewhere, Nausicaa was playing

With her beach ball having done the wash and laid it out on

Rocks to dry: her thong, her super-low-cut jeans, her black-lace

Demi-bra and other things she's ordered from the catalogue

She read with flashlight underneath her sheet.

Suddenly a stranger came out ofthe bushes holding

lust a leaff twig to hide his genitals. She told him that her name was

Nausicaa and that she'd come to do the wash. Then

She asked to see his manifest. Alas, he said, l've lost it with

My ship and all my men, but you can put this on

105

Your laundry list-and took away the twig. lmpressed, she

Bathed the stranger in the stream where she had washed

Her under things along with father's robes and brother'sCricket togs. But soon she realized she's left the list itself at homeWith half the things the whisperer had spoken of. (K, ro6)

I think of Matthias as the incarnation (perhaps better to say: the rejuvenation)

of the rogue poer, a scholarly Petronius upending from within the gated com-munity of a universiry the hallowed or hollow missions, not to mention theself-importance, of official culture, whether academic or literary, ail of coursewithout those in charge knowing a thing about it, and now much too late tostop it:

Clans ofcourtesans and baseball fans hurrahAmong the tangled wires and brachia

The polys, seriations, pleonasms in extreme

Ofthe quantum ofthe zero ofthe one ofthe watcherOf the disambiguating

decoherence ofthe end ofthe beginningand beginning ofthe end

Ofthe letrer ofthe law ofthe laughter ofthe lawless . . . (K, tz6),+

"Laughter of the lawless": that's it, exactly. Let's hear it for the reprobate.

olr i. h. pnynnG's "not-youtt

f . H. Prynne's "Not-You" (1993) begins with two epigraphs, the first by David

Lewis and the second byThomas Nagel:

Truthfulness-by-silence is truthfulness, and expectation thereof is expectation oftruthfulness; but expectation of truthFulness-by-silence is not yet trust.

Love of semiconductors is not enough.'

My starting point in this chapter is to see whether the first of these epigraphs

sheds any light, or has any bearing, on Prynne's recondite poem.' (Let us

bracket, for the present, the second epigraph.3) "Not-You" is made of a series

of austere, mostly minimalist lyrics whose arrangement seems to have been

given careful architectural attention. lt begins and ends with a series of eight

neatly lineated nine-line poems, each divided into three stanzas; in between

these book-ends are a number of free-verse and even fragmentary pieces, but

also a sequence of five eight-line lyrics, some of them with end-rhymes.a Ex-

egesis from scratch does not appear to be a useful way to approach this mate-

rial. So the idea here is to begin by asking what sort of material have we got in

this assembly. The epigraph from David Lewis (r94r-zoor), who is sometimes

t06

107

thought of as the Leibniz of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, may offersome preliminary suggestions. Prynne is citing one of Lewis's essays, "Lan-guages and Language" 0g1il, which takes up once more a question Lewis had

asked in his first book, Convention (1969): namely, "What is a language?" The

first form of Lewis's answer (in its analytic idiom) had looked like this: "L isan actual language of P if and only if there prevails in P a convention of truth-fulness in L, sustained by an interest in communication."s The idea is that a

language is not (just) a formal system for framing representations; it is alsoa social activity governed by whatever it is that governs social practices so as

to ensure that a population P will hold these practices in common and do itsbest to make them work. Lewis's definition aims to identifu the social condi-tions that make an "actual" language L possible: specifically, "a convention oftruthfulness," that is, a presupposition (underwritten by "an interest in com-munication") that a spoken or written sentence will be, whatever its defects,

true. (lt might be interesting to speculate, however contrary to Lewis's inten-tions, as to what would follow from a practice of falsehood, or maybe just a

congenital failure of truthfulness: not surprisingly Swift's Gulliver'sTrqvels, withits Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, springs to mind.) In the revised version of thedefinition of L that appears in "Language and Languages," Lewis added thenecessity of trust: "My proposal is that the convention whereby a populationP uses a language L is a convention of truthfulness and trust in 1," where the ob-ject oftrust is the truthfulness ofpropositions uttered in 1.6 Speaking, under-standing, or having a language means, in other words, having confidence inyour conventions and practices (trusting, for example, that people more oftenspeak like Houyhnhnms than like Yahoos).7

Lewis's essay, "Language and Languages," is an attempt to answer, amongother things, a variety of unsurprising objections to his assertion of a "con-vention of truthfulness," since, after all, much of human talk is not proposi-tional (logical and cognitive) in its form but is "untruthful" in all sorts of freeand easy ways-irony, metaphor, hyperbole, joking, tall tales, and white liesilrc some of the "nonserious" utterances that Lewis mentions. Lewis does notcxamine conditions, perhaps of the kind Samuel Beckett imagines, in which,rrry confidence in language seems altogether foolhardy-a condition that,r ounterintuitively, does not inhibit various kinds of garrulity (think of The Un-

mnoble). But Lewis does address an interesting issue, which he frames first as

.rrr objection to his thesis:

Oltjccrion. Let L be the language ofP; that is, the language that ought to count as

rlrc most inclusive language used by P. (Assume that P is homogeneous.) Let L+

ADDING GARBAGETO LANGUAGE

108

be obtained by adding gorbage to L: some extra sentences, very long and difficult

to pronounce, and hence never uttered by P, with arbitrary chosen meanings in

L+. Then it seems that L+ is a language used by P, which is absurd. (My emphasis')

A sentence never uttered at alt is a fortiori never uttered untruthfully. So

truthfulness-as-usual in L plus truthfulness-by-silence on the garbage sentences

constitutes a kind of truthfulness in L+; and the expectation thereof constitutes

trust in L+. Therefore we have a prevailing regularity of truthfulness and trust in

L+. This regularity quatifies as a convention in P sustained by an interest in com-

munication. (r87)

without trying to master the technicalities here, I want to extract the point

that L+ is a language never "used" by a population (that is, anyone we know

o0; it is obtained by adding garbage to a language we actually speak-"some ex-

tra sentences, very long and difficult to pronounce, and hence never uttered

by P. " What about this garbage? The objector proposes that garbage sentences

are not false; they are rather examples of"truthfulness-by-silence" that "con-

stitutes a kind oftruthfulness in L+; and the expectation thereofconstitutes

trust in L+."

Now part of Lewis's reply to this obiection is whatwe are given in Prynne's ep-

igraph, to wiI "Truthfulness-by-silence is truthfulness, and expectation there-

ofis expectation oftruthfulness; but expectation oftruthfulness-by-silence is

notyettrust."The replycontinues: "Expectation of(successful) truthfulness-

expectation that a given sentence will not be uttered falsely-is a necessary

but not sufficient condition for trust. There is no regularity oftrust in L+, so far

asthegorbagesenrcncesarcconcerned. Hence there is no convention of truthful-

ness and trust in L+, and L+ is not used by P" (r87; my emphasis)' The question

is how to read the sentence "There is no regulariry oftrust in L+, so far as the

garbage sentences are concerned." Evidently the difficulty, or some of it, is that

garbage sentences render truthfulness (and therefore trust) vacuous, since

there will never be an occasion in which such sentences are Put to use "in any

reasonable sense" (Philos ophical Papers, r87), whatever that might mean.8 But

then of course there is the problem of what to do when garbage sentences

do turn up in one,s L. what might "adding garbage to language" actually look

like? Naturally, since we are trying to read Prynne, thoughts fly to Poetry's

possibly Prynne's choice of Lewis's difficult sentence as an epigraph for his

poem is just another instance of the wide range of his arcane discursive plea-

sures; or maybe it is iust the sound and shape of the wor<ls itl t hc cpigraph that

109

invite his enjoyment. Neither is a wicked irony to be dismissed out of hand:

depending on conditions, "truthfulness-by-silence" might be, in practice,

hard to distinguish from one of its companions, for example, a mental reser-

vation once associated with the f esuits (can one trust silence?). But there is inaddition Lewis's intriguing concession (see note 8) that garbage sentences, de-

spite appearances, enlarge the possibilities ofwhatcan count (logically, philo-sophically) as a language. A garbage sentence, remember, is not false, if only

by default ofnever being uttered in L (what is called "truthfulness-by-silence");

nor, evidently for the same reason, does garbage conflict with the "interest incommunication" (being, after all, a possible-successful-speech-act in L+).

So the inference would be that, counterintuitively, we ought to judge Prynne's

own sentences, such as they are, if that is what they are, as philosophicallyjustified according to analytic arguments that, paradoxically, these sentences

appear to confound and confuse, if only by shaking our trust in L. The upshot

is that coping with L+ (that is, coping with a language that we [P] do not use)

is not a matter of mastering rules and understanding systems but a pragmotic

matter of trial and error, the more so because, after all, the problem is how to

deal with a language to which garbage has been added, not just as a thoughtexperiment (Lewis) but to make a poem (Prynne). lf I have this right, Prynne

is on the side of Lewis in thinking that, whatever our theories of language os

such might propose, 0 language is a practice with innumerable alternative pos-

sibilities as to how conventions of truthfulness, and so forth, might be, if notsatisfied, then at least acknowledged and maybe even celebrated by the way we

foolwith them (which is surelywhat Prynne is doing).'o

ln any case, imagine this complexiry that I have just tried to describe (sup-

posing that it makes some sense) as the conceptual background against which"Not-You" starts out:

The twins blink, hands set to thread out

a dipper cargo with tithium grease enhanced

to break under heat stress. Who knows

what cares arise in double streaks, letting

the door slip to alternative danny boy in-

decision. She'lI cut one hand offto whack

the other same-day retread, leaving its mark

two transfiguration at femur tength. Ahead

the twins consult, shade over upon shade. (P, :8:)

110

Someone, but probably not David Lewis, might say that "conventions of truth-

fulness and trust, sustained by an interest in communication," urge us to read

these lines as a narrative (which is, in its Aristotelian form, a species of propo-

sitional language). This urge is what "trust in L" might be thought to entail.

So (we may ask) what about the twins? Are they assigned an assembly-line

task of tubricating tools or machinery, which is what "lithium grease" is

for? The verbal details in these lines are obviously in excess of anything so

straightforward-here the "dipper cargo" is "enhanced / to break under heat

stress,,,which makes a hash of "lithium grease"-but no doubt a certain inge-

nuity could continue to play about with possible plots: that the twins "blink,"

for example, might be a sign of hesitation or anxiety-who knows, after all,

"what cares arise in double streaks," as opposed to cares felt only in one? one

wonders whether "letting / the door slip to alternative danny boy in- /deci-

sion" turns on a colloquialism (concerning whether to head out the door or

not). Meanwhile the woman possessing (one infers) some sort meat-ax and

corresponding thoughts of dismemberment is cause enough for blinking. lt

may or may not be superfluous to add that ifyour hands are removed your up-

per limbs may no longer quite reach "femur length." Hence "the twins con-

sult, shade over upon shade," putting their heads together, cheek by jowl, try-

ing to decide what to do next. As for the bloody event: Arrive-t-il? In a possible

world perhaps.

Of course, one could also try to read the poem as if the twins were a pair of

eyes: possibilities, Iike worlds, are without number.

The problem with trying to make these nine lines come out true (in some

sense of truth as coherence) is that the effort, however customary in a disci-

ptinaryway, is as tedious a procedure as it is trivial in its results. Besides, trying

to read garbage sentences as if they could be made into sentences of L seems

to be a way of missing the point of Prynne's invocation of David Lewis, whose

counsel, if I follow him, would be thatwe should tryto emigrate to the alterna-

tive universe in which L+ is a possible language instead of allegorizing garbage

by mapping onto it grids that fit the sentences we construct here at home'"

some semblance of an alternative world might be extracted from lean-

Frangois Lyotard's TheDffirend,with its conception of phrases whose linkages

"obey other regimens than the logical and the cognitive [and] can have stakes

other than the true," as in the case of parataxis, which for Lyotard is one of the

distinctive features of modernism:

The term lparataxlsignals a simple addition, the apposition of one term with the

other, nothing more. Auerbach [Mimesis] turns this into a characteristic of "mod-

ern,,style, paratax, as opposed to classical syntax. collioirrt'tl hy rtrtd, phrases or

111

events follow each other, but their succession does not obey a categorical order(because; if,rhen; in order to; olthough . . .). ;oined to the preceding one by ond, a phrase

rises out of nothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss ofNot-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that somethingbegins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the con-stitutive discontinuiqr (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while deffing it throughits equally constitutive continuity (or retention). . . . lnstead of and, and assuringthe same paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing. (D, 65-66)

Nothing, says Leibniz, is without reason. So whywrite paratactically? What un-derwrites or justifies the juxtaposition rather than interconnection ofphras-es? Not an easy question: parataxis is the figure or form ofwriting that defeats

the giving of reasons (the question of why) because it breaks up consecutive

reasoning (because,if-then,inorderto), which is to say itdefeats the integrationof parts into a whole, or the formation of contexts, on which intelligibility de-

pends (the venerable hermeneuticalcircle). Meaning just means belonging toa context, but in parataxis the part is insubordinate to anything larger thanitself, which is the basic anarchic principle of fragmentary writing-writing inwhich contexts fail to form. From a Leibnizian standpoint, the juxtaposition

rather than interconnection ofphrases is just adding garbage to [anguage.

Lyotard turns Leibniz's world upside-down. The purpose of paratax is: "To

save the phrase: extract it from the discourses in which it is subjugated and re-

strained by rules oflinking, enveloped in their gangue, seduced by their end"(D, 68). ("Gangue" is the worthless material-sand, rock, or other impurities-surrounding a mineral of interest. The OED calls it "the earthy or stony mat-ter in a mineral deposit; the matrix in which an ore is found." Lyotard, likethe old alchemist, wants to turn gangue into gold.) Traditional hermeneutics"saves the text" (makes it come out true) by finding a reasonable place or con-text for the aberrant phrases that inhabit it-what used to be called "allego-

ry." In Lyotard's hermeneutics freedom trumps truth. Paratax confers upon a

phrase-a word or meaning or maybe just the sound or shape of some lin-guistic material-an autonomy otherwise foreclosed by the principles of in-ternal necessity that motivate grammatical formations and lexical coherence(hypotax).'' lnstead ofdisappearing into the crowd a phrase is, so to speak,

exhibited or theatricalized as a thing in itself.';"Not-You" is, whatever else it is, a paratactic poem ofsaued phrases. Here

lre some samples: "he does well / at the promise line" (P, 384); "everythingtitillates to the contrary" (e,385); "a pervasive overtone" (P,386); "porticopay-outl Creep reductionl" (P,3BB); "refitcrooked intercession" (P,389); "tostrip choicc lornratior.r / front its blister pack" (P, 39t); "the flush deepens to

112

ingot words under / killed steel" (P, zsl); "some indrawn spine" (P' :g8); "the

.lipsn.gs"ttheferrule" (p,4oz);"critical flowtore-mapasoftverge"(P,+oq).

None oithese phrases is grammatically coherent with the sentence (or' more

accurately, the period) that contains it; each is what one might call a singuloriry,

which is (in catastrophe theory) a point at which, without warning' or for no

reason, something changes into something else ("titillates to the contrary).'4

A singularity is a break in the order of things-where the word "break" is as

much a term of freedom as of destruction, as in jailbreak or when one takes

a break from one's routine or job of work. And then of course there are "epis-

temological breaks,,' as from one picture of the universe to another, or for all

ofthat from one word to another, as when (see above) "overtone" usurps the

semanticthrone of "undertone." Meanwhile "tine breaks" are what poems are

made of, on which point "Not-You" is for a couple of pages quite fearless:

Her pan click

elb

second fix

forthem

pencil

breather Park

over

tatk at small to

better or yet

in hours

boiling as

as sun wi[[ on

ban

herlinker'''(P'Sgz)

Another way to Put this is that none of the phrases that make up .,Not-You,,

is (merely) nonsensical by itself but only or mainly in its "relation" to the

phrar"s that surround it: "he does well at the promise line" is every bit a "new

sentence,, in Ron silliman's famous description of constructions that are re-

sistant to context-formation because of their "torque" ("promise" dislodging

the expected ,.finish,, is atorque,a singularity).,5The Point is doubly interesting

because, with the exception of the fragments just cited' Prynne frames his ec-

centric phrases within what look for all the world like conventional stanzaic

forms, particularly the groups of eight nine-line poems that begin and end the

poem as a whole:

113

Marking up assertion's vapour why don'tthey gain back anyway, in belligerent cover

plan to tall command; front load later added

better to sour rack division. That's to sell

out attainmentwashes at silver top debate,

curtly in set-aside bit, bit, soon to beam

this family in main display. Few laps ring

the order teeming with order ranking, though

sad at critical flow to re-map a soft verge (P, 4o4)

How one might go about "Marking up assertion's vapour" is a nice question,unless one were to imagine that "assertion's vapour" is cousin to the nominal-ist's flatus yocis, which is one way to describe the material of Prynne's poem:namely (in by no means a descending order of importance), phrases, words,syllables, consonants, vowels, phonemes, letters-elements that in othercontexts are defined by their work of mediation, but which here enjoy the free-dom (or anarchy) that open or paratactic forms make possible.

So let us entertain this hermeneutic possibiliry, namely that we should try toread "Not-You" serially, that is, not by trying to integrate phrases into largerunits (as we do in L) but to take them, willy-nilly, as they come (L+): fragmentsthat are not broken pieces of something conceivably whole but singulorities

whose virtue lies in their abruptness, their interruptions ofusual sense, theiranomalous refusal ofany categorical order ofsuccession. Like "Not-You" as

a whole, "Marking up assertion's vapour" is a series of small catastrophes-"why don't / they gain back anyway," "front load later added / better to sourrack division," "to sell / out attainment washes," "curtly in set-aside bit, bit,soon to beam / this family in main display." The task would then be to pickup on things (anomalies, lunacies, echoes) thatwhirlwithin this turbulence.,6

It seems important to advise that lohn Wilkinson, not to say Prynne him-sel[, would reject this way of reading the poem as a "wallow in unearned prod-igality" ("Counterfactual Prynne," r95), which would mean reading Prynneas if he were just another "language poet" championing aleatory combina-tions and "the rejection of closure." ln his "Letter to Steve McCaffery" Prynnestands against "the totalising rebuttal of grammar accompanied by an unca-rronical employment o[ its phrasal serialism" (44). Meanwhile in "Counter-

114

factual Prynne" Wilkinson argues that the Poems in "Not-You" (or at least

the first eight ofthem) are stiuctured according to an "algebra" ofthe kind

that governs the combination of images in dreams and of thoughts when we

are awake: "The poem's activity could be conceived' in W' R' Bion's terms' as

marked by alpha-function, that is as processing sensory impression into a

dream-work which according to Bion is active during the waking day" (tgS)'

The idea is that a systematic linking of phrases is going on despite' among

other things, "the deployment of uncontextualized nouns [that proposes]

connections made in a space we do not inhabit" (rS8)''' Wilkinson doesn't

give us a reference, Uut hL is thinking of W' R' Bion's Learnin g from Experience:8

I-f I und",,tand Bion,s theory, the mind,s (or brain,s) alpha-function works on

sensations or the elements of immediate experience in order to turn them

into cg-elements-memories, for example-that make up both our dreams

and our waking life. But the alpha-function does not always function (or not

always in everyone). lf not, sensations are not transformed into memories or

materials we might dream or think with' Bion calls these unused and unus-

ablematerialsB-elements,whicharemorelikemerethingsthanthoughts.So one might ask, arguing in favor of paratax rather than syntax or algebraic

d"ep stru.irres, whether the phrases that make up "Not-You" are not more

like B-elements than oa-elements, that is, opaque' thinglike phrases not ame-

nable to mentalfunctions-or, in David Lewis's metaphor' garbage'

Atthe centerof"Not-You" there is a thirty-two-line poem composed inwhat

one might just as well cal[ ,.free verse.,, lts first ..sentence,, reads as fol[ows:

With an eye turning for entry, mostwill

gather as others have, from the spicy bed

ofa risingvertical trust: enough to clear

line to line clasP essentials, all

the same to claim Plus set-off

to shun this terrible cure' (394)

Are there meanings (or "readings") available for the words or phrases that ap-

pear in this paratactic arrangement? For example' what is the difference be-

tvveenaneyethatturnsandonethatlooks?onelooksforanentrance,escape,or opportunity, but one turns toward an apPearance or event (say a noise or

,ou.n1. lnstead of categorical orders of succession' possibilities fan out in

multiple directions. ..turning,, could thus be a substitute for .,looking,,,

as

.,trust,, could be a substitute ior "thrust" in the phrase that follows, depend-

ing on what we take "spicy beds" to be-erotic playgrounds or herbal gar-

dens? There is no context, only serial formations "t'llotrlllt to clcar / line to

115

line clasp essentials," where "clasp" substitutes for "grasp," which idiomati-cally is what one usually does with "essentials." The whole idea of "lines" is to

keep them clear, but here the "sentence" is not an orderly sequence ofwordsin a line but a series ofoverlapping or self-interfering layers punctuated by a

variety of echoes-"all the claim to same" is a local echo, whereas "to shun

this terrible cure" is one of the many free infinitives that appear in "Not-You,"

and it reminds us that "seeking the cure" is idiomatic but not always the best

course when it may prove lethal, as cures frequently do ("there are plagues in-tent on this" [386]).

The poem continues:

Across clouded

skies the current lies at

crossed tiving abruptly, outshining

the smart pulse in its sheltered prospect,

not like shoes and food in a clamour ofspent cases by rounding up

to the last place defence.

Each says the same, applying to take

out ofthis bruised event the frame ofprovoked

aversion. Ablative child care bleeds tonightl

Sound and sense play off one another in a series of collisions, confusions,

echoes, and turnabouts that keep the lines from forming a sentence, which

they nevertheless threaten to do as thecurrentliesacrosscloudedskies,outshiningthe

smartbutshekered pulse,whileshoes andfood do their bitofclomoring, roundingup nothing

loose norwinding downto alastditch defense, or words to that effect-all this, more-

over, against the recurring background noise of a bruised body's exposure toits undoing, or perhaps its dissolution into the fluid state:

They all got blood delay

at the wrist insert marker, lifting a cover

over blackswilled albumen. (386)

"Ablative child care bleeds tonight!" is one of the oddest of these echoes.

The line blares like a headline or marquee inviting us to come and watch. To

what noun does one's ear assign the adjective? Do I know or have I heard ofoblative children? The ablative case is one that most languages have lost, a fate

many children share. But the word is also a medical term: "ablation" means

removing the causes, symptoms, or consequences of some disease or disor-

dcr, which is what carc of children, but perhaps not in a day-care center, aims

116 ,r: 1;' 1i ;:'j t ,i.

to achieve (by blood-letting?). lncongruities accumulate the more one stares

at the line, but that's what liberated phrases add up to, and it is what we are

meant to experience. The poem in any case shows that dissonance is a form of

wit (which is, whatever else it is, an unexpected experience of meaning):

No grip frightens the one falling

by mild derision, the acts have

been performed in mimic

troop tint delaY affront, there

is no default position at true discount

up to innumerably more. Stop the boat

with a plug for floatation: the mothers assemble

at the sorting office, provably liquid he says

in pro tanto extinction. (394)

"No grip frightens the one falling" is, having the form ofa proverb, as true a

proposition as David Lewis could wish for. But it is one thing to fall and be

caught, quite another to be succeeded "by mild derision," among other non

sequiturs. The term "anacoluthon" means "want of grammar," but the aim of

paratax (certainly in Prynne's case) is not just the mixing of word-salads but to

play the meanings of words agoinst their syntactic positions, if only to see what

happens: "Stop the boat / with a plug for floatation": "boat" occupies the place

of "[eak," while "a plug" is not, strictly speaking, a floatation device, although

properly placed it will prevent sinking the way a grip will keep someone fal[-

ing from descent. Meanwhile "the mothers assemble / at the sorting office,"

no doubt searching for their ablative children (who are, as all of us are, "prov-

ably liquid" and,"protqntg" [sooner or later], doomed to "extinction" like as-

sertions that vaporize). Likewise, like a "default position" (but unlike falling,

with its horror of the fateful bottom),

Blind

transfer goes ahead wiltingly, no fear

tripping the snug instep to a price floor,

gentle planets counting, rates mounting, winding

up to replace a slipped bracelet. Thus in mutual

fond delay the daY advances

yawning astragal with due

race to provision beyond the fixed mark of

break-out liable detachment, laid apart. (394)

t17

These lines (mostly) give us gentler, more subtle forms of motion, promises ofdeferral or return ("winding / up to replace a slipped bracelet")-perhaps thiseven applies in some way to the "yawning astragal": "astragal" sounds pasto-

ral, coming as it does off the "mutual / fond delay" in which "the day advanc-

es," but in fact it is a piece of bone, the heel or "huckle-bone," from which dice

were once made-hence astragalomonq, the art of forecasting by the casting ofdice, which is an ancient form of "provision, " coping with the unforeseeable

(as one must do with parataxis); butthe OfD abo lists it as an architectural termfor a section that separates different parts ofthe architrave in ornamental en-

tablatures (hence "yawning"). None of these possibilities, however, is meantto displace the unfamiliar sound and look of the word itself, with its soft allu-sion to the stars. The word is not a function but an experience.

On the facing page the poem either continues or is followed by another inthe same free-verse form:

From whose seed spread out

bend and cut, in the field, in far

rows sideways

partingwith the left

hand, in plane or out over, the movement

ofa deep-shaded allocation: but grind

at the back, to the root, ofone chilci

in the profile sombre to black

where section presides willingly, so they

go to bend with the overt

sway of a little dust marked by croud

now invisible in the furious storm. (395)

Something like the open distribution of a (rural) landscape seems to form inthese lines without, however, cohering into a settled state of affairs. One has

to wonder, amongotherthings, how"partingwith the left/ hand" differs frompartingwith the right, which somehow has a biblical intimation, as of sheep

From goats. Of course one parts with a hand that is cut of[, which seems to be

the fate of hands in this poem, and notof hands only: atone pointsomeone orsomething is "found dead in a bundle" (388). And then there is the recurrence

otthe child, who seems ablative just in the sense of being in a "profile sombre

to black." Occlusion is certainly a recurring effect-"Not-You" is a very cloudy

;roem, although here the cloud is made invisible by a "furious storm," which

118 "J ": ' ;" l ilt\

119

is what happens when skies darken at midday, as do rooms at night or stairs at

their top, and as one's old mind does without warning ("darkness shades the

witless question" [ao7]).The free-verse poems are, interestingly, followed by five eight-line lyrics,

the first, third, and fifth of which are distinctive for their end-rhymes:

Their catch-up is slow and careful

to limit levels in thick shade

fallen there but untouched Yet

by the hot slants which fade

Both coming and going. On a stair

or quickly the defined

several inlays make a breath

of so much ascent, in mind. (396)

Adversely so far, so and

slight to salute the brow

given, this once beaten frame

will permit next to now

some indrawn spine, in due

allowance. Match on less

for the doorway, void of light

and even traPPed excess. (398)

As will go to staY back,

to tell ofa cut-out hand

which well and hardly long

in this, laying the band

of colour marks, no thought

can swell a fear to rise

up to early missing Parts

inturning as with new eYes. (4oo)

Again, the point to mark is that the (relatively) closed verse-form of these lyr-

ics makes the paratactic play of their periods seem all the more aggressive.

There's no telling here whose "catch-up is slow"-one can imagine some fond

or maybe not-so-fond pursuit taking place up or down a stairway whose "thick

shade,,is..untouchedyet/ bythe hotslants" of light; but in factnoword falls in

comfortably with its fellows, leaving us not iust to wonder how "several inlays

make a breath / of so much ascent, in mind" but to puzzle over, among other

things, the word "inlays" itself, which is not a word onc cl]corlnters much ottt-

side the dentist's office, and which here seems to have overtaken the respira-

tory work of "intakes." The word perhaps invokes once more the background

figure of a stressed body-"this once beaten frame," the "indrawn spine," the"cut-out hand," "fear," "missing parts / inturning as with new eyes" ("inturn-ing," as in "indrawn" and "inlays"),

Of course, "background" is another word for "context," any formationof which the poem aims to confound with its relentless miscombination ofwords, many or some of which, depending on one's mood or frame of mind,ring "true" for comical rather than logical or cognitive reasons:

Based on new-for-old

organ barrage, alderwithout heartoryoung

cheese without bone (4o3)

The organ here doesn'tsound like a Hammond, despite its "barrage"-maybeit's a street grinder, unless it's a body part; the "alder without heart" might be

the black alder, which does, however, have red berries; and "young / cheese

without bone" should not be waved aside with a superior gesture just because

it brings us up short (l'll have the young boneless cheese, please), as do these

lines-

Avian protection like a court plank / as much as I do (38a)

they / don't think he's more casual by i the hour on low heat (387)

Finger prints up with the scratch attack (389)

to stay calm as / milk solids (aor)

at a cute burr segment / able grains prevail (4oz)

No acts / rot more slowly in memory (4o7)

The Avian Protection Society is dedicated to the protection of parrots in pet

stores (see http ://www. avianprotection. homestead.com/). But how "to stay

calm as / milk solids"? Milk solids are the fat and proteins floating in your cup,

or mother's breast, and for all I know are conducive to sleep; but of course thepoem isn't asking a question or even constructing a sentence-whatever itis, "So to stay calm as / milk solids in defect control amendment" (4or) is a

complexity of thought rather than a complete one. The poem is just addinggarbage to language-"scratch attack," "able grains prevail"-bits of which,nevertheless, ring disturbingly true: "No acts / rot more slowly in memory"-a phrase that surely opens up an endless series of possible worlds, in most ofwhich I can do little without embarrassment.

120 ,.",.':

Where does all of this leave us with respect to where we started, namely

with David Lewis and his conventions of truthfulness and trust in L? A pos-

sible answer is that for all of his miscombination of words in "Not-You," not

to mention the now legendary difficulry of his Poems as a whole, Prynne re-/

mains something of a realist with respect to the language in which he writes.

Birgitta lohansson, for example, says that for Prynne "language is a window

through which consciousness verbalises experiences in the world of available

reality, and that it is a means of uncovering the condition of being. The poet

formulates existential issues in endless combinations; 'the language of the

world' as Prynne terms it, is proper poetic diction."'g The phrase "living dabs

ofsky-colour" (:sS), after all, retains its "aboutness" despite its fragmentary

appearance. ln his "Letter to Steve McCaffery," Prynne is responding to some

of McCaffery's essays in Northoflntention-for example, "Diminished Reference

and the Model Reader" and, particularly, "Writing as a General Economy,"

which draws upon Georges Bataille's concept of ddpense, the nonproductive

expenditure of energy, which is an expenditure that cannot be utilized or for

which one cannot expect a return as uPon an investment-a gratuitous expen-

diture outside any economy of exchange- or use-value.'o It is predicated upon

a principle of loss rather than on the accumulation of capital. ln "The Notion

of Dd.pense" Bataille lists jewetry, religious sacrifice, kinky sex, gambling, art,

and (in particular) poetry as examples of free expenditure: "The term poetry,

applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of expression of

a state of loss, can be considered synonymouswith expenditutelddpense);itin

fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss'"'' ln a word'

"poetic expenditure ceases to be symbolic in its consequences": here words

cannot be exchanged for meanings, much less for things; instead they have

become events of communication, where the term "communication" means

contagion, as in "communicative disease"-something very different from

what David Lewis had in mind'prynne rejected this line of thought. of the language-centered poets whom

McCaffery is discussing, he writes: "None of them goes all the way to a general

economy of de-signification, not for lack of daring or will to testing extreme

but because I believe that language itself finally resists this singularity"-that

is (for prynne), language is a "pluralised system" whose operations are geared

to ,,energetic over-determination": not loss but excess of meaning. "More-

over,,, he adds, ,,there is scope for innumerable combinations within the

mapping projection of the language surface and its foldings; yet external ref-

erence is one of its stabilising axes, just as are also the internal enrichments of

1 2 1 .r ::..! ,::' ; r'i \:.1

indeterminacy, and of self-reference." Underdetermined texts, like Gertrude

Stein's, produce "eye-skid" and "mind-wilt.""But of course McCaffery's position is not that the poetry that he writes and

writes about is meaningless. He frequently cites Leon S. Roudiez's definition ofparagrammatic writing whose "organization of words (and their denotations),grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinite possibilities provided by let-ters or phonemes combining to form networks of significance not accessible

through conventional reading habits" (Nl, zo7). As McCaffery says, "Such fea-

tures of general economic operation as I've outlined do not destroy the orderof meaning, but complicate and unsettle its constitution and operation" (N I,

zo9). The idea (as in Lyotard's notion of phrasing) is to enlarge our concept

of meaning beyond the limits of the "logicaI and cognitive phrase regimens"

whose purpose is to put a stop to the proliferation of meanings that we ex-

perience in puns and anagrams, among other derangements of philosophicalreason.

Perhaps one could split the difference between Prynne and McCaffery, orbetween Wilkinson and the language poets, by invoking Alfred Jarry's 'Pata-

physics, the "science of imaginary solutions, " which seeks out the anomalousand the exception as against whatever belongs or fits in place.': Arguably Da-

vid Lewis's doctrine of possible worlds and his preference for the pragmaticas against the systematic is 'pataphysical just in the sense that for him real-

ity requires us to inhabit, or at all events to imagine or anticipate, alternativestates of affairs. McCaffery thinks of poetry as a movement from the nomic tothe ludic, from categories and distinctions to the singular and irreducible (thatwhich, as Adorno expresses it, is nonidentical with respect to itself). Prynne

thinks this is all very well but the nomic, the semantic, and the reference pointare ineliminable forces that, in any case, do not foreclose "innumerable com-

binations within the mapping projection of the language surface and its fold-ings." How, after all, would we recognize the anomalous and the exception

(the nonidentical) except in the form of"S is P except in the case ofy"? Anarchy

is only possible in a rule-governed space; or, as the poet Christian Bdk says,

"anomalies extrinsic to a system remain secretly intrinsic to such a system"-and thereby confound its operations and deform its results: "The onomalos is

the repressed part of a rule that ensures the rule does not work. ltis a dffirence

which makes a difference and is thus synonymous with the cybernetic definition ofi nterferential information-the very measure of surprise."24

lnterferentialis a pun that one mightwellthink of applying to Prynne's meth-od or practice o[ putting words together by keeping them apart-running

122 ,., ,. ., q$::rrtr]

them one after another, not as if by chance but as ifwords were running inter-

ference for one another, warding offcapture by the system ofthe sentence' ln

this respect one might say that Prynne extends or enlarges the conventions of

truthfulness and trust in language to include conditions offreedom that are

implicit in the very concept of possible worlds. Think of poetry in this event

as a practice of language that brings these conditions into play as part of the

candor of poetic or, for all of that, human experience'

The cure is won across twice, in glitter

patches so cheap they thrill to each bidder,

staring ahead to the empty room where

brightness is born and tagged; to beat

the windows of the dYingYear's fast

turn to a faction cut-back. Ever so

smiling at this sudden real candour,

what to shun of this set cure's topmost

retort: remember me: and give now over (P, 39o)

ANOMALIES OF DURATIONIN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Let us imagine a duration without any regular pattern. Nothing in itwould ever be recognizable, for nothingwould ever recur. ltwouldbe a duration without measure of any sort, without entities, withoutproperties, without events-a void duration, a timeless chaos.

-George Kubler, TheSha pe of Time

The poet Michael Palmer cites this passage from Kubler in "Period (Sense

of Duration)," a talk given in r98z whose topic is (roughly) "the inconstancy

and mutability of our measures" when it comes to our experience of sounds,

words, or constructions of any sort.' ln the background of his talk is the fact

that much of modern and contemporarywriting is an exploration of the con-

flict and interplay among temporal and spatial forms-perhaps most notably

in experiments in typography, collage, seriality, and line breaks. Palmer's talkis itself interesting because of the way it drifts or meanders, and one is led to

ask whether the drift or the meander isn't a way of defeating the measurement

of duration. Drift, after all, is lateral rather than linear: being at sea, it means

idling or sidling until a breeze develops. If meandering has a rhythm it is be-

cause it winds like a river or a snake, but its path is usually aimless or passive

t23

t124 f I ;j l-! i. ,i ":' ii : j:'r l! i

with respect to the surrounding terrain-etymologically "meander" is related

to "maunder," which is to move (or talk) mindlessly (wandering or rambling):

Well the hearts are-is-whereyou find'em

The coffee sPilled

all over the table

a calculus of variations

in itself

bears no requirement

as to number, form

This error we insist on

as we insist on

torn pockets, one

to each hiP

causing us to walk

somewhat differentlY

than before'

This unperiodic poem by Palmer is appropriately entitled "Multiples." lts form

is perhips reflected in the figure of spilling, another movement indifferent to

,n.rrur". Accordingly its cadences are irregular-in reading one is apt silently

orinvisiblytorewriteatleastoneofitslinestomakeitcomeoutright,.astoform or number," but this would deprive the poem of one of its two or three

pieces ofpunctuation, depending on how one reads the odd first line' Still'

ihe poernis divided neatly into three five-line stanzas. Given the context of

palmer's talk on duration, over which the number 7 mystically presides, one

could reflect on the numerical weight of 3 and 5, Particularly since the lines

are composed mostly of either three or five syllables-one of the exceptions

being the line that gives the poem its principal conceptual turn: "a calculus of

variaiions,, (interestingty, the most melodic line in the poem). (A "calculus of

variations,, is a branch of higher mathematics.3) lt is no accident thatthe poem

on the page facing,.Multip[es,, is entitled ,,Fractal Song,,,which is also a poem

about immeasurable durations:

I do not know where I will be in lulY

Sam said or said Sam

The sound so measured has no boundary,

is not triangle or square

125

We pass through it in false flight, relieved

to be there, to be bearing

once again at least

the tick ofthe cup at the Clarion

Clouds are not spheres we know

now and mountains not cones (6r)

I was taught (c. r95o) that poetry is Euclidean by nature-in school one learns

chiefly scanning and the names of figures-but Palmer is interested in turbu-lence and unpredictability, that is, singularities in which without warning a

sequence of something turns into something else (catastrophe). Timekeep-

ers (clock-keepers would be a more accurate term) keep or capture very little,almost nothing, of time, which simply unfolds and never gets anywhere (or,

like sound, it "has no boundary" but just dissipates). Meanwhile we are merely

passing through it "in false flight," idlers rather than refugees, stopping here

and there, say at one ofthe links in the chain ofClarion hotels that dot theearth where we run up the "tick"-that is, tab-at the bar. ln his brief glance

at "Fractal Song" the poet Albert Cook mentions that the last two lines are a

citation from the fractal king Benoit Mandelbrot.a "Sam said or said Sam" is (ifI understand) a geometric as opposed to a random fractal (fr. L. for fragment); at

any rate it is self-replicating, although perhaps not like a hotel chain.

Emphasis cannot but claim that our experience of duration is real. When

hours, minutes and seconds drain away in front ofus as this sequence

of nothings universalised into the measure oflife, then outworn iambs,

trochees and dactyls carry the promise of a real duration.*Simon

f arvis, "Prosody as Cognition"

Possibly a "calculus of variations" could be developed to measure Simon

larvis's The Unconditionql: Alyric, a poem of some 240 pages (in very small point

rype) that begins as follows:

Data float down; the own rote load doles out

a doubt-loud flow into the overload.

Facts, moping at their blindness diurn, tread

the light to dumb muck for cash in one line.

Hush dim glut nraking a linear red.

126 127

To describe the poem's prosody in terms of its metrics would be inadequate, forwhat it engenders in the reader's breast is far from the regularity and assuranceof Alexander Pope's numbers or from the stabbing and poking of a satirist likecharles churchill. when it comes to low-life novels it may be commonplace to talkoFa literary experience as a roller-coaster ride, butTheuncondirionol fully justifiesthe figure. Pages of impossibly headlong rhythm will be startlingly blocked, forexample, by three or more lines ending with the same monosyllabic word, andafter turning on this dime, will again charge off harum-scarum through a 3oo-word rhyme-propelled sentence. The poem transits between rhyming coupletsand blank verse, with these transitions often near-imperceptible; caesuras are ex-tremely rare and rhymes almost always monosyllabic, hence at once thumpinglymarking the lines' enjambment and rushing across such traffic calming measures.Here are iambics with the insistence of rap.z

Recall Kubler: "Let us imagine a duration without any regular pattern. Nothingin itwould be recognizable, because nothing it in would ever recu r." TheL)ncon-

ditionalis a poem of irregularities, but things do, in a manner of speaking, re-cur. There are, as Wilkinson notes, fragments of a narrative whose charactersare named, wildly, "=x.," "Agramant," "Qnuxmuxkyl," and "lobless." But liketime the narrative, if that is what it is, is a sort of road movie that doesn't goanywhere-randomness, contingency, interruption, singularities: these arewhat time (and the poem) is made of.8 Near the very end of the poem each ofthe characters is given a nine-line lyric in which, in some cases, there is thesound of winding down or wrapping things up:

AGMMANT

I join no chorus; I pretend no love,

My book is written and my bills are paid.

Iseal up all my legacy in packs

I rubberize my fingerprint

and label tersely first before I send

some to a lasting name and some to dust.

Then I increase my fold or print of mindburning all sectors which might hanker back

to any taste of origin or end. (TheUnconditional,46lT)

But otherwise The unconditionol is a prolonged middle that mirrors itself fromtime to time in jokes about horizonless places-"So this is whatAllegory, Ne-braska looks like" (rra)-and episodes that dissipate into cloudy air:

Light from a depressed angle swept far across the lake.

Small craft could over an expanse ofwater be seen

!:! 11 ;r i?} r': i i rj ,r' ;: i' il ir r {:i iit l;" ti i l* t: {} i: i ,.,1 -it! :j

Hush now to a mindless luckY smash'

lnfi nitesimatlY aPerture

the single seamless of the done told world

or prise the top offthe creep in one dull'

Now, last lowvocative of the ending-cult,

blow out the Pilot light.

Disintermed iate the vocoders.

Empty this Plea of efflcacitY.s

As the endnote to the poem advises, "This poem is metrical" (heUnconditional,

z4z); thatis, it is mostly iambic all the way to the end with variations from

three to ten feet, and virtually each line sets up its own echo chamber. Depend-

ing on one's ear, the poem also articulates the paratactic idiom of "Cambridge

poetry," whose Homer is l. H. Prynne, who writes as follows in "Her Weasels

Wild Returning":

At leisure for losing outward in a glazed toplight

bringing milk in, another fire and pragma cape

upon them both; they'll give driven to marching

with wild fiery streak able. (P, 4to)

with ,,prosody as Cognition" in mind one could say that larvis's lyrical aim in

The Unconditional is to retrieve meter from the oblivion into which so much of

modern and contemporary poetry is imagined to have cast it, and how more

dramatically to accomplish this than by writing a Poem that gives us, if noth-

ing else, the experience of time, both the footstep of its progress-"the own

rote load doles out / a doubt-loud flow into the overload"-as well as its in-

terminability? The poem begins in media res, and, although it stops eventu-

ally, it never really comes to a close: the last lines are a recitation of the initial

verse paragraph; the page that follows is a vast white space broken only by the

orthographical marks of closed parentheses))))); the next Page is blank; the

final page contains the endnote. Whatever the beating temporality of the in-

dividual lines, the whole work occupies what one could call, borrowing from

Maurice Blanchot (the Newton ofparentheses), a vast entretemps that separates

a past that never was from the indecisive Messiah who postpones his real exis-

tence, bewildering those of us in the "ending-cult" who refuse to believe there

is no end of history.6 This open-ended betr,veen-time is felt most strongly in

those pages whose lines are unpunctuated by any period. ln an extensive (and

indispensable) review of The Unconditionol the poet lohn Wilkinson provides a

description ofthe poem that can't be bettered:

t2B li i ill ili 1

Plying in apparently perfect contingency

Lines whose written total may not be summed or read

Forwhich purpose the pilots at Ieisure determined

Long courses from port to port as though intoning under the breath a

relieving

lnterval or an interposition or an episode in an incomplete [ong narrative whose

charm

ShadesinterstitiallyitschiefpleasureinacoolorshelteredtransitionorsubPlot

Disowning its own crimes as the necessary condition of their own final

effacement

lntoacertaingreythatuncertainlyislitwithaconcealedsun(heUnconditional,

153-54)

*r!;

ln giving his talk on duration Palmer played a tape of Louis Zukofsky reading

his-,.,A,_ir,,,which palmercalls.,harmonically one of the mostcomplex poems

in English" (Codeof Signats,2$).s Each line scans differently' and (as Palmer

notesj the combination of internal rhymes and end rhymes and uncertain syn-

taxproducesahighlyvariablemovement-"Theimageoftimesoproposed"'Palmer says, " is multi-directio nal" (Code of Signals' 254) ' Then there is "'A'-r4"

"

"beginning An," which starts out with four stanzas of one-word lines ("A"'

Tq:rS),afterwhich the poem expands to two- and then three-word lines that

continue for more than forty pages' One imagines duration to be horizontal

(despite the waterclock and hourglass)' How-given our Western conventions

of reading-to measure the movement of a vertical poem? Palmer himself

cites zukJfsky,s similarly vertical ,,(Ryokan,s scroll)" from l's (pronounced eyes),

andsaysthatthe*u"rrr.ofits"lines"dependsupon"thequantityofindi-vidual syllable s" (Codeofsignols,254))o Meanwhile Abigail Lang reminds us that

forzukofskythesinglewordratherthantheline,breath,orstanzaisthebasicunit of poeiry, and that, as Zukofsky said (to paraphrase)' each word is its own

,rrrng"..ni-a fact that, unfortunately, frequently falls beneath the thresh-

old of our attention." A poem of one-word lines suggests that a word is an ar-

rangementnotsomuchofsyllablesasofletters,andthatasinglelettercanbethearbiterofwhatwordaparticularwordbecomesasitarrangesitselfonthepage, which suggests in turn that the written or printed word is rather more

.ont"*t-fr.. than the spoken: the printed word "sea" is independent of the

predicate "he sees" in a way the spoken "sea" would not be'

q.ti

129 t:tlfJti:.- t1:'

To give this line of thought another screw-turn, recall Zukofsky's assertionthat a true poem expresses the condition of complete rest (presuppositions+, r3).One could say that in a poem of one-word lines each word is (musically) at rest,particularly when freed (as they almost always are) from any syntactical rela-tion with words above or below. The opening word lines of "' A' -t 4" seem com-parable in their objectivity and repose to the (rather more polysyllabic) wordsin 8o Flowers-one of my favorite being "Lavender Cotto n" (CompleteShortpoetry,

326). The poems in 8o Flowers are virtuallyverb-free and so are paratactic ratherthan syntactic in their measure; likewise they are free of the words "the" and"a" that elsewhere Zukofsky says are as substantive as nouns.,, Accordingly,and in keeping with the paratactic arrangement, syllables in 8o Flowers are pre-dominantly stressed, and to make things even more complex one could justas comfortably read each line backward as from left to right. The odd thing isthat the poem does not breakwith but rather gives a new turn to Zukofsky,s"Statement for Poetry," namely that the musicality of poetry has little to dowith prosody's melodic metrical arrangements but derives from the wordsthemselves. An ear for the nuances of duration is what makes the poet (preposi-

tions+, z3).': Zukofsky's one-word lines and the poems in 8o Flowers are experi-ments in a seriality in which each word, given its unique internal arrangementof letters or syllables, is an autonomous duration, that is, a duration that doesnot, strictly speaking, possess a before and after but is simply proper to itself:anentretemps or, in Kugel's terms, "a duration without measure."

Herewearenow atthebeginning ofthethird unit of the fourth large part of this alk.More and more I have the feeling that we are gettingnowhere.

*John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing"

Zukofsky's vertical poems suggest a comparison with the British poet TomRaworth's Ace (r97r):

for that

contest

llorrrarl

131130

has seen

the island

ends

he

she

iti

i

i

trinitywins

by length

he said

this line

has no beginning

no

end

for furniture

that

doesn't

breathe'a

This page of Ace seems more discursive, syntactical' than "'A'-t4"'but other

prg.r rf,r, rr. relatively free of nouns are more elliptical or listlike:

nothing

behind Poetrylooka

like

or is itan an

but

why

so

there

fore

because

maybe ifnow

might

well

for itlet

go

un

hand me

mygood man

i'ma

Meanwhile, as often reported, Raworth reads this poem very rapidly, produc-

ing the sound-poem effect of a verbal stream rather than the staccato of linebreaks suggested by the printed page.'s (lmagine a speedpoem.) One could say

that the verticality of the poem is compromised both by one's own reading ofit, which is geared to sentence-formation between left and right margins, and

by the poet's pell-mell performance. Relevant to this context are Raworth's

short-duration poems in Big Slipperc 0n: Fourteen Poems-" Attitude," for exam-ple, is a two-second poem ("Attitudes must be interesting"),"Belt" is five sec-

onds in duration; others range from fourteen to twenty-five seconds.'6 Com-pare the following from Raworth's Mouing:

8.o6 PM lune ro, r97o

Poeml7

Or recallAram Saroyan's one-word poems-

eyeye'8

-which cross the threshold into concrete poetry where simultaneity elimi-

nates the sense ofduration, or very nearly so: the peculiariry of"eyeye" is thatthe first three letters spell out the word "eye," as do the last three, but (as inWittgenstein's duck-rabbit) only if one's focus moves from the one "eye" tothe other, and back again. So "eyeye" could be said to possess a rhythm afterall.

Ace, for all its top-to-bottom arrangement, is a poem in four "movements":" in think," "in mind," "in motion," "in place," together with a fare-thee-well ("Bo-

livia: another end of ace"). In the first a nomad (or, more frequently, a"no Imad") has experiences like the following:

no

mad

awakes

132

we do not feel

strangeness

he wakes

in terror

from a dream [. . .]

he thinkalone

in the honey

combo[...]

see clearly

nomad

your name

nothing

new

see

as far as

yucatan [. . .]

no

mad on

grass

breathing

returns to his

senses [. . .]

In the second movement, in which

mr raworth

continues

to believe

every

thing

possible

,,nomad / meets ace," as if there were a narrative hovering somewhere (but

apparently there is not).19 As in Zukofsky, each word is a poem unto itselfl, even

when it momentarily stops to coin a phrase or crack a joke, as at the outset of

"inmotion":

butwhat

is happening

133

can also

mean

PAUSE

PAUSE

Pause: as in obdurqte duration or, as Clark Coolidge says, ")bdurotion. Hard

time"-thirtyyears to life in a sequence of caesuras.2o

Polyrhythms' spatialcounterpart, lack of (regular, traditional) closure as

generative, tensions restored. lt foregrounds an artificial, constructed

process, a denatured measure of kinetic shifs, registers of differentiation.This pluralism of incident, refusing all packages-not "cut to fit"-aluxu;iant anarchy, a ful ler flowering or speclficity of internal rhyth ms and

semantic red istributions.

-Bruce Andre ws, Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis

Steve McCaffery's "Beethoven Sonnets" is an arrhythmic poem about mu-sic. lt begins by breaking up a musical term (rollentando) meant to indicate thattime is gradually to be made slower:

ralletand o you wagon lit virtuosa vox humana in two notes the

gendarme on thecornerofopus z

where the provenance is the

symphony' s resumd the composer ofnaive styles is also the

compositor of ennui which ends

atl codas"

Naturally the question is: how to comprehend the temporality of McCaffery's

poem, which is a construction that requires us to measure (in pauses) thespaces that separate its words, syllables, and letters. But because the spaces

are irregular, one confronts the spaces without a scale to time them. And since

the words defeat syntactical arrangements, one's reading, supposing it to be

silent, produces somethingvery like a verbovocovisual poem. The poem turnslhe reader into a sound poet Iike McCaffery himself in the sense that one has

il"''.'.rli

134 ,t it .t) 1:t ,': i.: !'

to take the poem as a script to be converted into a kind oftheater, however

private: that is (like one of lackson Mac Low's poems), one has to perform the

poem in order to read it." The space-breaks urge a syncopated performance'

And mind the jokes as You go-

it was an ear lier song in

patois the tYmPani used suede the

ersatz finale wa s I acuna

d'amore die meistersinger [. . .]

ctapping on

violin and

his cactus Pant s

choral mausoleum

monoc hrome in the motherland in

communicado for strings and wind my

father's blue kite for ian

hamilton finla Y it was

no more tha n merelY

vowels from the violin via the

soiree (Seuen Poges, 83-84)

Except for its ludic character, this is not a representative poem of McCaffery's

butonly because no two of his poems look (or sound) alike. As McCaffery says,

he has "no steady poetics," rather he is Heraclitean or, as he prefers, "nomad-

ic,,: ..1 have a constant stream of feelings and ideas that constantly change,

modifi and carry into action as techniques for living. what I try to do is under-

stand this flux and develop for myself a thoroughly nomadic consciousness; a

mind in constant movement through stoppings and starts, with the corollary

of a language art in permanent revolution, contradiction, paradox, and trans-

form,, (seuen Pages, 35g). As per Kubler, his mind moves without any regular

pattern, producing turbulence, complexity, random forms'

A line is the smallest unit of a poem which might collect dust'

*Gerald Bums, "A Line Primer"

So at one end of the scale we have one-word poems, and minimalisms like

Robert CreeleY's "A Piece"

135

One and

one, two,

three.'3

-while at the other end are the long lines composed by poet, painter, magi-

cian, and circus clown Gerald Burns (d. 1998):

SURREALISM AT MENIL

is a dozen Cornell boxes including homages A ballet and the renaissance pinball,

broken

panes; all frames ached to have been found, exhibiting themselves like faces in

Dante's

hell's lambent light, blue or pale peach-rose liquids in apothecary bottles never

green or brightyellow,

specimens always white, tinted by pickle. ln an adjacent chamber nail fetishes,

verygood ones,

stood (vertically if littte men) furred with nails bigheaded and bent, a few blades,

rusted to one

tone like Gillettes in a built-in motel tile slot. We frame it all as art. . . .'+

The poem refers to an exhibition of modern and contemporary art at the MenilCollection Museum in Houston, Texas, particularly some of Joseph Cornell's

boxes, with their ballerinas and Medici portraits set among pinball machines,

among other found objects. Burns's poems are themselves filled with foundobjects, his idea being that anything can be a work ofart: all that is required is

that you pick it out from its surroundings-merely taking it up, as one woulda stone or an article at a yard sale, is a kind of framing or staging that recon-

textualizes the mere thing as an art object ("today in Goodwill / I saw a typed

hornbook text on a wood paddle, under plastic laminate with upholsterer'stacks" [Shorrer Poems,37)). One virtue of Burns's long lines is they can carry a lotofstuff:

FIREPLACE POODLES

What's (Cavell in Arrspace) a proper subject for philosophy, profound question

you might revise

to what is the difference between a proper subject for philosophy and ditto forart [. . .]

It shouldn't matter what a museum has in it-anything, your kitchen chair

(certainly mine, spray-painted black over black to repair the damage done by

rubber-base enamel,

136 i, r,. :1. al ; i.. i' rii ! :.i

the bentwood chairs Flora Searcy gave me when lwas poor in Dallas ditto, from

their green and yellow Pea

to catch us up to deco), our Hopi teacup on a bookcase in the living room as iffor

reference.

It's magical to turn and see things [. . .]

Anderson's exPort tea caddies Iike

three-leaf clovers translated up leaving a plasma trail, lobate body in pewter

suggests a shaPe

to a sculptor's already a sublect, exPloited in the act ofrecognizing it as a subject

(Shorter Poems,' 4t)'s

These lines, despite enjambments, sound like prose, but Burns says that they

are "mixed measures" that can be scanned. ln an essay titled " Lines as Entities"

he writes (of an earlier poem made of seven-beat lines): "You can describe iust

about any syllable-stress line ifyou allow a below-line caret [ ^

] for off-syllable

beats, the little cupshaped thinry [ "

] for light stress, plus acute [ ' ] and grave

[ .

] accents. My own is a measure occupying a felt duration" (AThing AboutLan-

guage, 4o). He cites a letter from Donald Hall, who says that he can't see or hear

anything metrical in Burns's lines-"'l don't call it meter. I would only call

meterthatwhich can be reduced to arithmetic"' (AThingAboutLanguage, +o). To

which Burns replies that a mixed measure is "anomalous by definition," but it

is nevertheless a system. "l realize that given Creeley Snyder Olson and always

pound that my favoring of a regular line at all is counter-Modernist. . . . [Never-

theless] I think making the line in that old Yeatsy classroom sense is still nearly

the best thing to be about" (AThingAboutLanguage, 4l-42).

ITSELF DEFINED

I sdw an 6ggshaped stdinless c6ntin6ntaI c6ffeemdker, orgdnic as this

p6ppershdker sh6wing

sdxifrage dppositif6tia, fivepetaled it seems, the risual fiit r6seleaf sh6pe, c6ming

to P6ints(the s6tt is bdrage, sdt before r6al ivy in wicker, unndticed becduse not p6rcelain)

and s6

we s6e the 0npredictabitity ofwhat c6nstitutes a sdt (5horrcr Poems,36)

Anomqlous meter sounds a bit like Williams's "variable foot," or say it sounds

about right: the anomaly or exception is extrinsic to the system of which it is,

as Christian Bok says, "secretly intrinsic."'6 And so, as Michael Palmer would

say, we see the unpredictability, or perhaps the immeasLrrability, of what con-

stitutes a measure, or duration.

NOMAD POETRY

ludic miscellany f nom steve mccaff ery

A nomadic consciousness welcomes the unsettled, the debrisured and

disintegrative and feels the need to experience incompatibles together

-Steve McCaffery, "Poetics: A Statement"

"The Abstract Ruin" (r97r-78) is one of Steve McCaffery's unfinished long po-

ems, only pieces of which have appeared in print. In a note to the poem Mc-

Caffery says that his work is not "a composition with words" but a weaving (notexactly together) of "found texts" (SPM, 372-:3).'To which he adds that thepoem is a serialwork-in-process that "is expanding non-developmentally and

crying out for tighter coherence. lt is self-generating towards a randomness

which may or may not be exciting in itself" (SPM, 372). Randomness (that is,

singularities):wanderingwords ratherthanwords fixed in place. "TheAbstractRuin" is, to all appearances, a "nomadic" poem-a poem made of variables

placed in a constant state ofvariation.'The part of the poem published in the second volume of McCaffery's Seven

Poges Missing, "on glossolalia" (SPM, 372), is something like an archaeologythat traces the Babel-like dispersal of languages from prehistoric times (and

places)-

I :l /

il138 {l}{!ir}t{il'l?i11,*

In the mouth ofthe cave, in sPeech

known as the Grotte du Renne, at Arcy sur Cure

in the valley ofYonne tvvo thousand postholes . . . (SPM, too)

-through classical antiquity-

From Kentum through the Satem

the end ofTocharian in the documents of Hesiod

Herodotus atAthens in an Attic branch

the four tesseras in lonian into the Koine

tilt the long migrations through the place names

pronouns in speech apart the bodies ofthe walkers

journeys through Cettiberian destroying Detphi,

Rome, the region of the Galatia. . . '

-into a northern European darkness:

abandoning the sites at

Rhine, Main, Melibokus and Worms

the Churwelsh heard in Rhaetia, forms of the tongue in

Breton, the Ogham sticks a melting down

into Germanic time ladders

warped northeastern shores ofElbe where speech cannot move the deich to the taihun. (SPM, to5)

"History," McCaffery says in his note to the Poem, "is essentially a linguistic

thing" (SPM, 37r), but perhaps not simply because it is filled with exotic place

names. Languages wander and split, as when lndo-European divides the num-

ber ten into lrish "deich and Gothic "taihun." lmagine the state of things ifnumbers could not survive the mortality of their incarnations.3

Likewise "The Abstract Ruin" is itself a dispersion of fragmentary epi-

phenomena-for example, "a sleep-inducing syntax" (SPM, ror). Which might

be a tautolory, since syntax is made of repetitions, or at all events it assimilates

words into rational and predictable formations. A syntax of surprises could not

proceed without interruption. Another fragment gives us "the word badbh /committed to writing" (SPM, roz). Badbh (from an Old lrish word for "crow") is

the name of an lrish goddess who can suck the warmth out ofyour body. Possi-

bly committing her name to writing is a magicaI form of self-defense. Or, again:

"a janiform tense / of pastoral declension" (SPM, ro3). Whatever is "janiform"

is two-faced. A pastoral declension might proceed as follows: bucolicus,bucolica,

bucolicum. Or it might be a vernacular refusal of courtly love. Meanwhile,

139

local archaicisms of escarpmentof farmsteads seen vertically still in situ

the bronze circle ofCarlisle inside a coin

beside magnetic

consonants of total weight. (sPM, ro4)

Carlisle is a city in cumbria in the north of England, and likewise the name ofa nearby castle, possibly memorialized on a coin, But what might.,magnetic /consonants" attract? (No doubt the attention ofyoung children passing by arefrigerator door to which magnetic m's and p's are attached.)

Recall the epigraph above-"A nomadic consciousness welcomes the un-settled, the debrisured [unhinged] and disintegrative and feels the need to ex-perience incompatibles together." Mccaffery is a nomadic contriver of verbalcatastrophes, not only the usual confusions of words and things, numbersand tongues (and occasional puns)-

Semantic fadings in South Africa blank spaces

cut out time appears in a specific number the word"thousand" said in seconds the symbol to conundrumcountless beavers letters on the faces ofwomenbodies of type implanted vowels for their movement

fading pictures in the phones a sequence losttoliveon...

-but especially the demonic inventions of acoustic verse:

hebdomenda ennenenta

yan tan tethera oethera pimp five

six sethera lethera hovera covera dik ten

eleven yan a dik tan a dik-bumpit fifteensixteen yan a bumpit-figitt twenty (SpM, ro6)

Not surprisingly, nomads appear in "The Abstract Ruin," practicing theirebb and flow-

They had never known a city

only page and shifting pronouns street gangs

through the utterances and times

when they were men with voices

limbs in common withhumanity

1 4 0 t:'r; l ;:, I.ii :, ii ; i. i:

but on the frontiers ofthe verbrhey stopped (StUt, ro5)

lmagine a philosopher saying, "The limits of my language are the limits of no

man's land," where words come to an end. The nomads, if that is what they

are, are elsewhere, maybe "on their way to language" (derWegzurSprache), or

waiting restlessly on a verbal frontier for some kind of Pentecostalevent:

They were the settlers here the pioneers

who took

page for their land. . . .

Their speech a common code

ofsneezes gargles

a curious wink ofthe eye.

They hold hands when they leave

and on the margins of some shorelinekneel for rninutes in a private speech.

lfa sky turns grey their hands

go cold and followtheir parents to the station.

When the grarnmar arrives they come back

in six weeks for three hoursat a time.

They stay outside wordsin warm ink or milkand soon l1yiys

at land or speech

or in America. (SpM, rog_9)

lmpossible to construct a narrative thatwould contain these (or any of the

poem's) lines, which are full of anomalies, as "When the grammar arrives ' ' '":imagine such an arrival-no doubt of a regiment (recall the famous etymol-

ogr of syntax). Or imagine arriving at speech, as if at a crossroads or crisis; or

at an American frontier, which requires one to begin all over again: itinerationbecomes itineration.

"The Elsewhere of Meaning" is the title of a brief essay by McCaffery on lappe-

ments d ls lune, a collection of eight short poems by the Quebecois poet and

playwright Claude Cauvreau Qgz5-7r), one ofwhich reads as follows:

n16m atila atiglagla 916 6mect tufachiraglau dgondz-apanoir tufirupipldthatgou-loumeirector ezdannz ezddoucrdmouacptteu pif-legoulem 6z nionfan nimarultaapiviavovioc tutul Iatranerre ddgwobz choutss striglanima uculpt treflagamon4

McCaffery describes this poem as "an unmediated inscription of the materi-ality of the letter" (Nl, r7r). This materialiry enhils the idea that none of theletters is to be spoken or heard as a phoneme but is just meant to be seen:"thelappements are decidedly not sound poems; they are texts to be understoodprimarily as a writing, a differentialorganization and dissemination of sound

under the specific conditions of inscription and within an extended theory ofthe image" (NI, r7r). "lmage" here is to be taken in the surreal sense of some-

thing retinal that has ceased to be ofanything. Gauvreau was a member of theautomatistes, a Canadian offshoot ofthe French surrealists, and he developed a

theory of the "explorational image," in which (as McCaffery figures it) "a totaltransformation of the elements occurs to such a degree that they are no longerrecognizable" (Nl, r73). Adorno's nonidenticalthing (ofwhich we do not knowwhat it is) is once more in play (AT, rr4).

The paradox that interests McCaffery is that letters that fail to combine intowords are nevertheless not meaningless, since it is impossible (or self-contra-dictory) for a letter to be unintelligible: we know it, whichever one it is, forwhat it is, if not always, given the odd context, what it is for. Thus/ oppements arenot just scribbles; rather, as McCaffery says, the letters "serve as graphic indica-

rions not entirely contained within the category of 'meaning' but constantlysuggesting it as a juxtaposed elsewhere" (Nl, r75). Recall Mallarm6's concep-

tion of the alphabet as a system that contains within itself the metaphysical

possibility of all book-an idea that lorge Luis Borges elaborates or parodies

in his story "The Libraryof Babel," where the universe is a "total library" whose"shelves contain all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthograph-ical symbols (whose number, though vast, is not infinite); that is, everything

that can be expressed, in all languages."s

Meanwhile the word " jappement" is onomatopoetic, beingthe sound a smalldog makes (yapping at the moon), but its English equivalent also refers to talkthat is not so much meaningless as idle or endless (going nowhere).6 Hei-

degger'sGerede comes to mind, "idle talk" being thatwhich everyone has heard

before because it is in everyone's mouth: buzz or chatter that is passed alongwithout thinkirrg./ ldle talk is perfectly intelligible, and utterly insignificant.

142

Heidegger says that it is "the possibility of understanding everything without

previously making the thing one's own" (Being andTime, zr3). Heidegger's dos

Mon is oblivious with respect to language, to which Dosein alone can give its ear.

Of course if we follow this line of thought the title of Gauvreau's poem be-

comes ironic, or-much to the same point-his poem becomes satirical with

respect to talk, whose distinctive feature is its transparency, its inability to

bring anyone up short; whereas Jappements dlqlune is, among other things, un-

speakable, not to say inaccessible except across an extended aesthetic distance

where it reposes sui generis-something other than even a Lettriste Poem, to

which it bears some resemblance without being a member of the family: in

other words, singular and irreducible, notwithstanding the fact that, as an 0u-

rhor's composition, it is entirely superfluous, since it already exists on one of

the shelves in Borges's universal library, where it would be virtually indistin-

guishable from among the vast number of typographical variants that would

naturally surround it.

McCaffery's "Three Stanzas" (rgZS) is worth citing in this context:

i.

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

ii.

aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic

ii i.

lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypot-

rimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikos-

syphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopelei-

olagooiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon (SP M, zzz)

It would take some practice to turn this into a sound poem, but doubtless

McCaffery could do it. Unlike Gauvreau's lappements, the letters that make up

"Three Stanzas" occasionally coalesce into words ("microscopic," "volcano,"

"vitriolic"), although the last stanza is headed elsewhere, perhaps toward a

possible world in which "traganopterygon" is a many-sided illusion.

McCaffery's "Apropriopriapus: Prefatory Notes on Stein & the Language Hy-

giene Program" 0gZz-lZ) calls our attention to a disorder known as "semi-

vision":

semivision is adjectival retinal illusion-a typographically indtrccd condition aris-

ingfromcontinuedexposuretothelangttagevirtrs. llowst('illw;tstltclirstperson

143

to recognize these viral capacities of language and to see how they were funda-mentally connected to the referring function of words when a word is granted thepower to signi! it's given the liberty to assume a role as active virus extending se-

mantically along a trajectory out of itself into exterior (nonverbal and thereforeuncontaminated) reality the world that it "verbalizes" becomes unwitting host tothe viral activity that will eventually destroy it. (SPM, r99)

The idea of a "language virus" belongs to William S. Burroughs. ln "The Ameri-can Non-Dream" 0S6S) Burroughs proposed that languages are essentiallyforms of social control, but some are worse than others. Modern syllabiclanguages are more insidious than earlier hieroglyphic ones, because, beingmore phonetic than visual, theyget inside us more easily and take us over morecompletely. "An essential feature ofthe Western control machine," Burroughs

writes, "is to make language as non -pictoriolas possible."s As ifthe transparency

of language made it more difficult to resist it, whence it would follow that thedestruction of transparency would be an achievement of freedom, or at anyrate a form of cure, which is what Burroughs soughtwith his dada-like practice

of cut-ups: breaking up texts and randomly recombining their elements.(Deleuze and Guattari: "Language is made not to be believed but to be

obeyed. . . . Words are nottools, yetwe give children language, pens, and note-books as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a powermarker before it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior sig-

nifications or to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite.lnformation is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmis-sion, and observation of orders as commands."e)

However, McCaffery introduces a modification into this line of thinking:language does not just infect the hosts who have internalized it; its predica-

tions consume the world of things (and people) as well. Recall Maurice Blan-chot's critique of Hegel's dialectic in which the naming of anything, even merereference to it, is likened to murder:

For me to be able to say, "This woman," I must somehow take her flesh-and-bloodreality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me

the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of thatbeing, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being-the very fact thatitdoesnotexist....lnatextdatingfrombeforeThePhenomenologyHegel...writes:"Adam's first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names,

that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures)." Hegel

means that from that moment on, the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and be-

came an idea as well. (WF, 323-24)

144 :;'

As carriers of language, we are the instruments of its devastation: "When I

speak," Blanchot says, "death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this

very momentdeath is loose in theworld, thatithas suddenlyappeared between

me and the being I address. . . . Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to

attain: it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning" (WF, 325)'

However-here is Blanchot's main point, and McCaffery's as well-we can

nevertheless save things from this work of negation, and ourselves from com-

plicity, by turning (in writing) against transparency:

My hope lBlanchot says] lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words

are things, too, are a kind ofnature. . . . Just now the reality ofwords was an ob-

stacle. Now, it is my only chance. A name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of

nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language,

abandoning the sense, the meaning which is all it wanted to be, tries to become

senseless. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape,

and then the paper on which one writes, the ink, the book. (wF ' 327)

Much of literature, to be sure, is "turned toward the movement of negation

by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be

known, subjugated, and communicated" (WF, 33o). Blanchot thinks of this as

literature that inhabits the light of day illuminated by Hegel's Spirit-most

novels, or any "meaningful prose" (WF, 332), or indeed the whole Aristotelian

line of mythos and mimesis. But poetry of a certain kind (Blanchot will men-

tion Ma[[arm6 and Francis Ponge) "allies itself with the realiry of language, it

makes language into matter without contour, content without form, a force

that is capricious and impersonal and says nothing, reveals nothing, simply

announces-through its refusal to say anything-that it comes from the

night and will return to the night" (WF, 33o)'

McCaffery says that Gertrude Stein "was the first to recognize these viral ca-

pacities of language"; she was in any case among the first to put into play the

"Language Hygiene Program," and she did so in a way that anticipated Blan-

chot. Her idea was to restore the singularity of things (and people) by eliminat-

ing (largely if not entirely) the use of nouns: "And so inTender Buttons and then

on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go

in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything is to go on

meaning something"("Poetry and Grammar" [WL, r+S]). As for prose, "Van or

Twenty Years After: A Second Portrait ofCarl Van Vechten" (r923) contains a few

nouns-

Twenty years after, as much as twenty years after in as t.ltttch as twcn ty years after,

after twentyyears and so on. lt is it is it is it is.

145

If it and as if it, if it or as if it, if it is as if it, and it is as if it and as if it. or as if it.

More as if it. As more As more, as if it. And if it. And for and as if it.

If it was to be a prize a surprise if it was to be a surprise to realize, if it was to be

if itwereto be, was itto be. Whatwas itto be. ltwas to bewhatitwas.And it was. 5o it was. As it was. As it is. ls it as it as. It is and as it is and as it is. And

so and so as itwas.

Keep it in sight all right.

Not to the future but to the fuchsia. (WL, zz8)

-but since the nouns are for playing rather than naming or portraying or say-

ing something of someone, the language virus is contained or dormant, and

Carl Van Vechten is saved. More radical is the later poem, Stcnzos in Meditation:

STANZA XXIX

What lwish to say is this of course

It is the same of course

Not yet oIcourse

But which they will not only yet

Ofcourse.

This brings me back to this of course.

It is the same of course it is the same

Now even not the name

But which is it when they gathered which

A broad black butterfly is white with this.

Which is which which of course

Did which of course

Why lwish to say in reason is this.

When they begin and I begin and win

Win which of course.

It is easy to say easily.

That this is the same in which I do not do not like the nameWhich wind of course. (SM, r8r-82)

Notice that a full-fledged noun, when it appears, suffers a kind of de-nomina-tion: "A broad black butterfly is white with this." White with what? you may

ask, but the this is, like the poem itself, a word-event, that is, not a functionalpointer but a singular word passing freely in a medium of white space, but al-lowing nevertheless for a certain ludic reading: "What I wish to say is this ofcourse," as opposed to thotof course. "lt is the same of course," this one and

on ly oFcourse, because not each ofcourse is identical to every other.

il146 {i${r+}r'*r,lti,t!ri

Here we need to consult Gertrude stein at one of her most philosophical

points: "l am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition" (WL, too).

Each "which" in "Which is which which of course" is different because each

receives a different emphasis (which of the two "whiches" is the "which" you

mean to say?). Speaking of her portraits she writes: "lf this existence is this

thing is actually existing there can be no repetition. There is only repetition

when there are descriptions being given of these things not when the things

themselves are actually existing and this is therefore how my portrait writing

began" (WL, roz). Stanzssin Medit0tion aPPlies this same principle of singularity

to words, and in particular to words other than nouns-although it is also true

that nouns for stein (as for her mentor, william James) are not to be thought

of as concepts or categories but as loose terms susceptible to shifting like pro-

nouns. ln any event, emphasis that changes from word to word (whatever the

word) breaks the routine of repetition. Moreover, emphasis is what replaces

syntax as the way to put words together. Thus language is freed from its preda-

tory function of predication-and so are we.

As a hygienic practice, McCaffery's Poems might be said to explore forms of

impossibiliry (supposingwe actually know what this word means, orwhat condi-

tions bringthe impossible into play). Agood textforstudy in this regard might

be McCaffery'sTheoriesofsediment (r99r), which contains a number of poems in

prose whose words are almost always, in various ways, at cross-purposes with

the sentences that combine them-for example, "Hegel's Eyes," whose first

segment ("The Code of System Four") begins as follows:

we entered a city consisting entirely of grey thursday mornings. But the verb en-

ter seems partly inappropriate plus appropriate itself seems wrong. So it would

be wrong to say the city itsetfcould be entered though all its thursdays are grey

and though grey itself consists entirely of its mornings. Today then is the morning

when the verb to enter will seem wrong. Today as the day plus all the inappropri-

ate parts themselves that still seem proPer.

So we can leave the city alone. Plus by ourselves. And having reached another

city on a day like any other day we can stoP to say we can drop in on a day whose

morning registers an off-white mood entirely. Plus we can say we have entered a

verb which seems wrong and wrong in the entirely correct sense of wrong. Wrong

being wrong and day being day. Hence tautological' Plus inappropriate' (TS, rr)

Assume this as a poetic principle: The breakdown of human beings is (variably)

tragic, pathetic, mental, mechanical, inevitable, atr<l so lortlr, l;ttt the break-

147

down of systems is invariably comic-or, as McCaffery would prefer, ludic (a

word, according to the 0ED, that was first used in English in r94r, in a diction-ary of psychiatric terms, and which refers to the pointless expenditure of en-

ergy;lunaticcomesquicklyto mind, alongof coursewith ludicrous);o Of course,

Samuel Beckett's dilapidated characters are canonically comical-they are,

after all, clownlike-but unlike one of Beckett's narrators the speaker in the

text above seems like one of philosophy's disengaged obsewers of "the pass-

ing show""-so disengaged as to be undisturbed by what passes (impossibly,

incongruously) for a fact, as when "Eighty-six windows show the noun to be a

house" (TS, z9). Characteristically, McCaffery's text is a fabric of category mis-

takes- "That then is the cheese you asked for in linguistics" (TS, :Z).Taking a cue from the poem's title, we could imagine a world in which

Hegel's system begins malfunctioning, so that instead of working dialecti-

cally to produce a coherent totality, words and things, concepts and events,

grammar and narrative, run afouI of one another. Each segment of "Hegel's

Eyes" seems to explore some version of misrule, as in "Collateral Mimesis withSubordinated Ambiguity," which offers us "Contradictory formats throughouteach semantic space":

Proper names: withheld. Prolepsis on demand at horizon analogue aperture.

Clinamen remains classic but developing hydro-concave algorithms as accredited

mutisms. SociaI systems accessed via prior deletions. Amalgamated sememes

incorporating zero referential certainty. Governing code word: Voltaire. Pronoun

connection: siamese. Errant synthesis as fo[[ows:

tough thea eaditor auph tie foughnotipickjolonal: Syrhh, eye obzewe yew proepeaux

two introwduice ay nue sissedem ov righting

bigh whitch ue eckspres oanly theigh sowneds

anned not thee orthoggrafey oph they wurds

butt igh phthink ugh gow to fare inn

cheighnjing owr thyme-onird alphahbeat (TS, r8)

Read these last seven lines aloud and you will notice that they comprise a let-

ter to an editor complaining against a project to introduce, in defiance of the

law of noncontradiction, a nonvisual form ofwriting.'' Perhaps such a project,

whatever it might look like (or not), would be meant to avert the following(" Discrete Taxonomic Focus") :

Entomologically a class of non-reliable bodies incorporating energy reversal

systems: puns, palindromes, chiasma, fissures, verbo-voco body traps through

148

ecophonesis, pragmatographia triggered to koiros ("il momento buono") concu-

binage of dissimilar lard-packs or polyptoton through teguments inducing tem-

porary cacosyntheton (TS, z4)

An energy reversal system would be, for example, a species of echolalia, as are,

in their different ways, puns, palindromes, chiasma, among other figures ofspeech (like polyptotons); and of course reverberations and repercussions

come to mind, as well as the endless cacophenomena that bedevil one's life

and times, and which pragmatographia (writing down actions and events)

would record-if possible. The difficulty is that the rule of identity that is said

to drive the Geistesgeschichte on its way has been suspended, whence identity is

indistinguishable from entropy:

Competitions of speed and the body of police coercive and compulsive, effica-

cious and effective, beginning at the same particular place and leading to the

monotonous, uniform, unchanged and identical same dot. Lines alongwhich the

people move do not begin and are said to end at the monotonous, uniform, un-

changed and identicaI same dot with the same weariness conforming to the same

rule unmodified undiversified sufferance and exhibition ofno change no fluctua-

tion from the previous state ofconsideration. (TS, z5)

To which a philosopher might respond that McCaffery's poetry reverses the

logicalenergy that holds together our conceptualschemes, turning thinglike

words loose in (on?) the world, producing an infernal (or maybe purgatorial)

chaos, as in the title poem, "Theory of Sediment":

Welked moons through portage flowing. Stone surged pestilence is singed. Foul

thicket's rabblement burnt in. There is a height a felness would affray. Waste mea-

sures tolled or bleak cast-logs on ground. Stretched foot to seeming head-craig

handiworks. Wine-wind trussed opened cleft from sea-deep angry leak. Root-stop

in mood and muled-swart suture. Head-hinders shouldering a heaved on-nape.

Down glow and pierce flank tributary lair. Flint-pan to ice. Shard cities sink. Each-

other once as eye poised hitl is set. Mustered by wile. Flood herded tread infran-

gible on nouns. (TS,93)

I described "Hegel's Eyes" as a "fabric of category mistakes." One could make

the case that the category mistake is the keystone of McCaffery's Poetics, par-

ticularly in the way that words and things exchange their modes of existence.

"Breakthrough Nostalgia" provides a compelling example:

A long and drawn-out rustle shakes the leaves and bottles. The oldest and most

stately boxes open up to make way for words which each of them contains. The

appearance of these words differs according to thc ap;rcrrrttcc;rnd character ol'

149

the boxes they represent. The word in the bottle "box" for instance is a pursey

stunted disheveled potbeltied gnome. The word for oak is tall lean and taciturn.Some emerge slowly from their boxes as from sentences. They can't be dcscribcd.

As they come out they stand in a circle around two children as near as thcy ciln

to the box in which they were born. Words smoking pipes. Words ad justing cye '

glasses. A word hobbling along in a pair of old wooden shoes. Onc nran is blirrtl.

Impossibilities. (TS, r66)

"Words smoking pipes. Words adjusting eyeglasses": categorica lly itrr possiblc.

The basic philosophical problem (or defect) of language, however, is tlrat itcanextendthelimitsofthepossibleasfaras-well,asfarasthclirnitsol Ilorg-es's universal library (limits that are evidently inaccessible). One olMcCal'[ery's

ways ofarticulatingthis fact about language is the concept ofparagrant that he

found in a footnote to lulia Kristeva's Reyolution in Po eticLanguage'. "A text is para-

grammatic, writes Leon S. Roudiez, 'in the sense that its organization of words

(and their denotations), grammar, and syntax is challenged by the infinitepossibilities provided by letters or phonemes combining to form networks

ofsignifications not accessible through conventionaI reading habits.""3 The

task of poetry (or anyhow McCaffery's task) is simply to expand these uncon-ventional"networks of significations"-these limits of the possible-in every

direction (until, at last, the limits give way).

"Poetry is the subject of the poem," Wallace Stevens says.'a A recent collec-

tion of McCaffery's, Slighdy Left of Thinking, contains a section entitled "Ghost

Poems," several of which are poems about poems that we cannot actually

read-not secondhand poems, exactly, but poems at secondhand;

This first poem occupies a single page; there are twenty-eight lines, u9 words, r6

commas, 8 full stops, z sets of quotatlons enclosing r7 words, and zr different al-phabetic characters. It seems to be a parody of Cicero's presentation on Academic

Skepticism, but it's only partly written in Latin. One line proposes clouds are ac-

tually contradictions o[the sky and that good deeds are best explained against a

background of evil. The poem's dominant sense is acoustic, closely followed by

the olfactorial and visual. l'm uncertain why the reference to Aristophanes fo[-lows a brief allusion to the geometric probabiliqr that hens'eggs can be naturallygeodesic, or why an unnamed subject tries to find two identical leaves in a forestbefore lunch in the Caf6 Pyren6es. My favorite line is the eighth that ends with the

word "indiscernible." My least favorite is the single line that reads "the square's

two sides." (SL, 39)

1 5 0 ,r: ;+ ,:i :.i: ;: i: i ;':, :: rr il

Of course, following the moral of "The Language Hygiene Program," to de-

scribe a poem is to kill it-hence (plausibly or possibly) the title: "Ghost Po-

ems." As if what we had in the text above were not a description but a destruc-

tion. Alternatively, "ghost" poems are conceptual poems, or poems in spiritonly: a conceptuaI poem, by definition, has only to be thought; a reading of itwould be superfluous, a failure of possibility, as all things are.

Recall one of the poems from Dan Graham's "Schema March 1966":

r adjectives

z adverbs

rrgz % sq. ems. area not occupied by type

337 % sq. ems. area occupied by type

151

maybe it just has something fishy about it, like the line about "the square's twosides." But perhaps in the possible world in which this poem exists, and in de-

fiance of Wittgenstein's famous remark about describing the smell of coffee,

odors can (literally) be committed to writing.Unfortunately no philosopher of possible worlds would admit such a pos-

sibility, since (theoretically) possible worlds can only be made of true proposi-

tions, meaning that in all possible worlds propositions must abide by the law

of noncontradiction-in other words, like married bachelors, no rwo-sided

squares are possible anywhere. But impossibilities of this logical sort are what

set Mccaffery's poetry in motion, taking us elsewhere. Let these lines, from"Teachable Texts," stand for the ludic whole:

Okay i'm wrong

but who are you?

in this respect seduction is potential

the Copernican shifter shifts at willsnip hocter prop with ferocity in traces

but i left speech in the corrida

supposing friends were me as entities in puzzle shapes

magna civitas magna solitude

the soul versus destiny in a sort ofacademic

sloppiness gone off.

A tiger is as flat as a page

in the precise way puce relates to Schoenberg

pages turn the way lions turn

and look at their prey. (CW, Bz)

1

o

nito

o

363

27

2

38

52

o

8%x5r7%x22%

offset cartridge

5

o

10 pt.

Press Roman

59

1

o

57

o

columns

conjunctions

depression oftype into surface ofpage

gerunds

infinitives

letters ofthe alphabet

lines

mathematical symbols

nouns

numbers

participles

Page

paper sheet

paper stock

propositions

pronouns

type size

type face

words

words capitalized

words italicized

words not capitalized

words not italicized'5

One could conceivably flesh outsuch a schema (de-conceptualize it) bywritingsomething to match its measures. McCaffery's poem is perhaps more concep-

tual or ghostlier than Graham's in virtue of its "olfactoria l" dimension, un less

of course this only means that the poem, being dca<|, has bcgutr to stirrk, or

adorhots aesthetic theonY

153

As little as art is to be identified by any other element, it is simply identical

with form.

-Theodor Ado rno, AestheticTheory

For no select category, not even the aesthetically central concePt ofthe

law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its products'

-Theodor Ad o rno, AestheticT heo ry

My ambition in what follows is to elucidate Adorno's conception of form-or,

failingthat, at least to examine the antinomy orcontradiction suggested by my

two epigraphs from Aestheri cTheory. Adorno leaves no doubt that form is a prin-

cipal concept of his aesthetics: art is, whatever else it is, "identicaI with form"

(AT, r4o).' But Adorno was, as we know, a dialectical rather than an analytic

thinker; that is, his practice was not to clarifr concepts but to put them into

play in a movement in which nothing is abte to appear except in virtue of what

it is not., And so form is never a concept that stands on its own; it is always

mediated-for example, by the artist's assorted materials of construction, or

by the artist's subjectivity, or for alI of that by the modern world in all of its

administered, commodified, not to say popular renditiotts (Kitsch, Adorno re-

llti)

minds us, "lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth"

fAT,239]). Form is the transformation of what is given into somethingother,

that is, something unreal, nonidentical, outside the grasp of concepts, cat-

egories, distinctions, not to mention purposes, functions, or positions in any

standing order of things. This radical exteriority is what Adorno means by the

autonomy of art. But the paradox of autonomy is that it leaves us with almost

nothing to say about what a work of art is. lt is possible that a purely autono-

mous work would be a nonentity, as if autonomy were a limit-concept rather

than a positive property of art. The end of art-"'To make things of which we

do not know what they are"' (AT, rr4)-is antinomic, like my two epigraphs.

This indeterminacy of art is, of course, the premise that initiates and, in-deed, regulates Adorno's AestheticTheory: "lt is self-evident that nothing con-

cerning art is self-evident anymore" (AT, r). The self-estrangement of the workof art (as we have known for more than a century) is the distinctive feature ofmodernism: nothing, "not even the aesthetically central concept of the law

of form, names the essence of art" (AT, 7). The modernistwork is precisely

that for which there is no general concept as to what counts as art, which

also means that there are no criteria that could exclude anything as a work ofart. The difficulty is that it is precisely the thesis of aesthetic nominalism (inwhich onythin g goes as a work of art) that Adorno wants to contest (perhaps

without hope of defeating it). Marcel Duchamp's name is nowhere mentioned

in AestheticTheory, but there is no doubt that Duchamp's role would be that ofAdorno's chief nemesis, precisely because what Adorno seems to reject is the

very idea that a work of art can simply be a "found object," that is, something

merely empirical or a mere social product, like the urinal of Duchamp's Foun-

toin. Hence Adorno's apparent complaint against the more extreme forms ofmodernism: "Actionpainting,l'artinformelle, and aleatoricaIworks [in which the]

aesthetic subject exempts itself from the burden of giving form to the contin-

gent material it encounters, despairing of the possibility of undergirding it,

and instead shifts the responsibiliry for its organization back on the contin-gent material itself. . . . [ln] its literalness fcontingent material] is alien to art"

(N, zzr).2

The notion of "giving form to the contingent material" is all very well, but

unfortunately what Adorno means by this is no more self-evident than is the

nature of art. What exactly is his idea of form, and-while we are at it-is there

anything in his theory that applies specifically to literary or poetic form? Be-

fore I conclude I want to take a look atAdorno's essay on paratactic form inHolderlin's late hymns, as well as his essays on two modern Cerman figures

scldonr studied outside of Germany, Rudolf Borchardt(r877-t945), an early or

ON THE GONUNDRUMOF FORM AND MATERIAL

r!r i

154

quasi-modernist poetwhose politics and poetics are Perhaps beyond clarifica-

tion, and Hans G. Helms (b. tg3z), a poet, musician, and avant-garde perfor-

mance artist who flourished after world war Il, and who also happened to be

one ofAdorno's students at Frankfurt. ln these essays, in contrast to Aesthetic

Theory, Adorno gives us some extended examples of the complex relationship

between form and materiality; that is, he addresses specifically the idea that

in poetry language is not made of concepts but is (relativgly) free of the forms

and conventions of discursive intelligibility, as if the task of form were to ma-

terialize language (and thereby free it from utility or systems of exchange). ln-

deed, Adorno never descended more deeply into darkest modernism than he

did in these essays (which show how wrong it is to think that Adorno accepted

only Proust, Kafka, loyce, and Beckett into his modernist canon).a As Adorno

puts it in the essay on Hcilderlin, in poetry language "becomes a constitutive

dissociation" whose paratactic forms "evade the logical hierarchy of a subor-

dinating syntax" (NL, z:t3o1t).lt is this insubordination or evasion of hierar-

chies (and therefore of totality) that is perhaps a key to Adorno's conception of

form.I have said that Adorno's way of thinking is dialectical (in its own eccentric

way) rather than analytic. What this means is that (among other things) his

conception of form is not formal, at least not in the classical or Aristotelian

sense of an artifact reposing in the uni{, integrity, and harmony of its dispa-

rate elements. On the contrary Adorno calls each of these classical terms (uni-

ty, integriry, harmony) into question, or perhaps one should say: he subjects

each of them to a dialectical reversal or determinate negation. Consider these

passages (where the emphasis in each case is mine):

What is heterogeneous in artworks is immanent to them: It is that in them that

opposes unity and yet is needed by unity if it is to be more than a pyrrhic victory

over the unresisting. That the spirit of artvyork is not to be equated with their im-

manent nexus-the arrangement of sensuous elements-is evident in that rhey in

nowa)t constitutethatgapless uniE, that type ofform to which aesthetic reflection has

falsely reduced them. (AT, 89)

Dissonanceisthetruthaboutharmony. . . . Art, whatever its material, has always desired

dissonance. (AT, tto)

Form is the nonviolent synthesis ofthe diffuse that nevertheless presewes it [the

diffuse] as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form

is actually an unfolding oftruth. A posited unity, it constantly suspends itselfas

such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other iust as the essence of

its cohe r ence is th at it d o es n ot coh ere. (AT, I 43)

155

Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyondformostotality ondintothefrag-

mentary. (N, Ul)

Artwork . . . that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their uni-ty; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging

disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it affirmsunity. . . .[Inmontagethe]negailonofsynthesisbecomesaprincipleofform. (AT, r5a-55)

And once more: "The articulation, bywhich the artwork achieves its form, also

always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form" (N , 46).The analytic thinker lives or dies by the law of noncontradiction. But not

Adorno. In his case dialectical thinking is governed by a rule of nonidentityand, as Hauke Brunkhorstsuggests, bythe transgressionorliquification ofbound-aries.s "To proceed dialectically," Adorno says in his Negotive Dialectics, "is tothink in contradictions," which is to say according to a "logic of disintegra-tion" that aims at the breakdown of every sort of totality; or, to put it in a

slightly different way, it is thinking whose goal is to avoid closure, resolution,or synthesis (ND, raa-a5).6 This is how I read him anyway: myAdorno is a serial

thinker (using the word "serial" in its poetic rather than twelve-tone musical

sense) whose desire is to stay in motion (that is, to keep pace with the historyof art).2 Adorno's motto, "The whole is the false" (MM, 5o), turns Hegel on his

head (and overturns Hegel's aesthetics, with its end-of-art thesis).

To gain some purchase on Adorno's paradoxes, we might begin by observ-

ing that, in keeping with dialectical procedures, the work of art for Adorno is

as much an event as it is an object; that is, it is somethingwhose mode of exis-

tence is fluid, dynamic, and irreducible to the thinglike condition in which itis nevertheless constituted as a work. And this is the case in at least two senses,

namely with respect to our relation to the work (that is, in our experience of it)but also objectively in terms of the work's relationship to itself.

For example, it is in the nature of the work (as a fact of its autonomy) toresist our efforts to objectifr it either empirically or conceptually, which iswhy nominalism can never be defeated (Adorno, to add one more paradox tothe inventory, is an antinominalist who says: "Art has no universal laws" [AT,

3o8]).8 ln the section of AestheticTheoryr on "semblance and Expression" (Schein

und Ausdruck) Adorno writes:

When artworks are viewed under the closest scrutiny, the most objectivated paint-ings metamorphose into a swarming mass and texLs splinter into words. As soon

as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of an artvyork, it dissolves intothe indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. This is the manifesta-

tion of aesthetic semblance in the structure of artworks. Under micrological study,

156

the particular-the artwork's vital element-is volatilized: its concretion vanish-

es. The process, which in each work takes objective shaPe, is opposed to its fixation

as something to Point to, and dissolves back from whence it came. (AT, tot)

As if itwere in the nature of the irftegrated work to disintegrate uPon contact.

What Adorno has in mind, of course, is that the work of art is not an intention-

al object in any phenomenological sense; that is, it is not strictly a phenom-

enon at all but is, on the contrary an illusion of objectification. This is what

"aesthetic semblance" means: "Artworks become appearances lErscheinung),

in the pregnant sense of the term-that is, the appearance of an other [eines

Anderen]-when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks

have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone,

and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and

sudden fPlittzliches). This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed

when faced with an important work. . . . Under Patient contemplation art-

works begin to move" (nf, Zg).As Brunkhorst has pointed out, "Adorno has a

strong predilection for romantic metaphors of fluidity and amorphousness,

of the diffuse and the impulse which overwhelms the ego" Qhe ActualiE of Ador'

n0,46).

However, this mobiliry or instability of the work, its epiphanic aPpearance,

is not just an event in our subjective experience; it is what the work is in itself:

The artwork is a process essentiatty in the relation of its whole and Parts. without

being reducible to one side or the other, it is the relation itselfthat is a process of

becoming. Whatevermoyintheartworkbecalledatotaliqisnotastructurethqtintegratesrhe

sum of itsparts. Even objectified the work remains a developing Process by virtue ofthe propensiti es ffendenzenf active in it. Conversely, the parts are not something

given, as which analysis almost inevitably mistakes them: Rather, they are centers

ofenergy that strain toward the whole on the basis ofa necessity that they equally

perform. The vortexofthis dialectic ultimately consumes the conceptof meaning.

(AT, r7B; my emphasis)

Of course-or, as one might say, asusuol-Adorno here is less than clear. It

is not just that the work of art is temporal rather than spatial in its constitu-

tion (although Adorno certainly inclines toward this view, since music is for

him-despite his rejection of hierarchies-the Prototype of allart [AT,122]);

it is rather that the work is constituted as an antinomy of objectification and

incompletion, closed and open form. Hence this (famously) paradoxicalstate-

ment: "That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what

matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, tes-

tifies to the precariousness of the thing-character in art, wltich docs not, how-

157 ii ,.! :1 :j i, ,i.l ,1i:, ili I i i:! lr

ever, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things.

For scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they are

more than simply instructions for them: they are indeed the thing itself" (AT,

roo). (To which one might add that for Adorno this superiority of the score is

emphatically so in the case of a work by Sch<inberg, which, as the saying goes,

no one knows how to interpret.)

However one figures it, forAdorno the modernistwork is one that is divided

against itself or, to put the matter dialectically, it is constituted as a struggle

between "the law of form" (AT, 3) or the "rationality of construction" (AT, 35)

and the anarchic resistance of material to any effort to bring it under control;

and the idea is not to resolve this struggle or overcome resistance but to reg-

ister it as the truth (the truth-content, or WahrheitsgeholQ of the work of art.

We could call Adorno's theory an aesthetics of resistance, but perhaps this is

not to say very much, since "resistance" is the one of the clich6s of modern-

ism, as Iohanna Drucker has recently argued.s Perhaps itwould be more apt to

think of it as an aesthetics of freedom, or of the agitated and unruly. The task

of art is to preserve what is refractory to the formal conditions that make art

possible-to preserve what resists the crueky of art ("The purer the form and

the higher the autonomy of the works," Adorno says, "the more cruel they are.

. . . What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses" [AT, 5o]). As Ador-

no says very early in Aestheti cTheory (in a passage that contextualizes the second

epigraph for this chapter):

In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrat-

ing thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this in-

tegration at the same time mointain what resists it and the figures that occur in the process of

integration. Integration as such does not assure quality; in the history ofart, inte-

gration and quality have often diverged. For no single select category, not even

the aesthetically central concept ofthe law ofform, names the essence ofart and

suffices to judge its products. Essential to art are defining characteristics that con-

tradict its art-philosophical concept. (AT, 7; my emphasis)

By "its art-philosophical concept" I take Adorno to mean (at least) the classical

ideal of unity that, for example, remains the centerpiece of Hans-Georg Ga-

damer's philosoph ical aesthetics (as in The Releu ance of the Beautiful). By contrast,

it is the breakup of unity, that is, the resistance of materialto integration into

a totaliry-the autonomy of parts with respect to the whole-that sets the

modernist work apart from the classics of tradition. lt is also what makes the

work oIart an allegory of critical theory, that is, a critique of a modernity forwhich integration into a totality gives the definition of order, rationality, and

things as they are. ln modernism (as distinct from moderniry) art confounds

the order of things by way of "the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed with-

out this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than

that art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that

concept" (AT, zg).As if the task of form were to articulate the materiality ofthe artwork in all of its heterogeneity and fragmentation.'o Hence another ofAdorno's mottos: "Only what does not fit into this world is true" (AT, Sg).

This is perhaps what Adorno means when he says that what characterizes

modernist art is a "crisis of semblance," which is something like the Russian

formalist (and also Brechtian) notion of estrangement or the disruption of il-

lusion (that is, the illusion that the work is not an artifact): "The strict imma-

nence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted . . . by a countertendency that is

no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the in-

ternal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesu-

ras that no longer permit the totality of the appearan ce fErscheinung]" (AT, 88)."

The caesura is a paratactic event, a break in the integrity of what is formed.

The point here is that the modernist artwork, in contrast to tradition, does not

form a hermeneutical circle, a subordination of parts to a whole; this is the

source of its enigmaticalness or Rritselch arakter (N , rr8), that is, its "fractured-

nesslAbgebrochenseinl" (AT, rz6), its repudiation of the concept of meaning (AT,

r5z), and its refusalofclosure: "Artthat makes the highest claim," Adorno says,

"compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight ofform is most emphatically manifest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art

forms to a conclusion; in music composers often speak of the problem of a

finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head

in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able

to end convincingly" (N, ul). Hence the definitive importance of open forms

like that of the cubist collage, with its dissociated surface of "found" materi-

als, as well as that of montage-"the sudden, discontinuous juxtaposition ofsequences" (AT, r5a): "all modern art," Adorno says, "may be called montage"

(AT, r55), which has its equivalent in the seriality of certain forms of modern

music as well as many examples from modern and contemporary Poetry, start-

ing perhaps with Pound's Contos and fanning out in all directions-from Louis

Zukofsky's "A" (tg78) and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems (r95o-7o) to Iack Spic-

er's Language (1964) and Lyn Hejinian's recentA Bord er Comedy (1994-97)-

I began all this months ago, years maybe-in lune, anyway, of t9g4

I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem that kept itself apart from me

And from itself

159

A short lyric of shifts

A page or two at most

A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts

lwould write a line or two

No more

And go away

And come back another day only to add something that would change everything

On the scale ofpoetry (BC, 63)

(Meanwhile, Adorno's Philosophy of New Music contains this intriguing foot-note: "The closed artwork is bourgeois, the mechanical artwork belongs tofascism, and the fragmentary work-in its complete negativity-belongs toutopia" [PNM, r83].'')

Here perhaps would be the place to refer at last to Adorno's essay titled"Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry" 0g6+), which aims to refute Hei-

degger's reading of Hdlderlin by treating Holderlin as an avant-garde poet forwhom "the category of unity, like that of the fatherland, is not central" (NL,

z:u9). What is central is the refusal of the hierarchical or architectonic formof the Ciceronian period in favor of something Adorno calls "subcutaneous

form" (NL, z:r3o). Subcutaneous form is an anarchic formation that cannot be

closed in a synthesis. Hcilderlin's late hymns, Adorno says, "may be constitu-tively incapable of completion" (NL, z:r38).'a Whereas discursive language "is

chained to the form of judgment and proposition and thereby the syntheticform of the concept," in poetry "aconceptual synthesis turns against its me-

dium; it becomes a constitutive dissociation" (NL, z:r3o)-in other words, a

paratactical "transformation of language into a serial order whose elements

are linked differently than in the fform of] judgment" (NL, z:r3r). Hence "the

anticlassical quality" of Hdlderlin's late poetry-"its rebellion against harmo-ny" (NL, z:r33), its fragmentation, and above all its displacementof the lyricsubjectonto longuageossuch (language freed from its function ofdiscursive sig-nification and the norms of semantic transparency):

Linguistic synthesis contradicts what Holderlin wants to express in language. . . .

Whether intentionally on H<ilderlin's part or simply by the nature of things, thisoccasioned the sacrifice ofthe period, to an extreme degree. Poetically, this rep-

resents the sacrifice ofthe legislating subject itself. lt is in Holderlin, with thatsacrifice, that the poetic movement unsettles the category of meaning for the firsttime. For meaning is constituted through the linguistic expression of syntheticunity. The sublect's intention, the primacy of meaning, is ceded to language alongwith the legislating subject. (NL, z:r36)

164

So Holderlin is the first modernist. Anyhow the idea that paratactic form dis-

places the writing subject onto language is one of modernism's most vener-

able doctrines, incarnated perhaps most perfectly in many of the writings of

Gertrude Stein (but one should also consult Maurice Blanchot on the theory

and practice of the fragment).'a The idea presupposes (that is, opposes) the

thesis, proposed by various versions of logic, linguistics, and philosophy of

language, thatthe subject is constituted bythe logical form ofthe proposition:

the ability to say " 1" and to recognize oneself as such is entailed in the power of

the predicate. The "1" is what is imPlicitly asserted in every assertion.'s But the

dissociation of fragmentary writing-the juxtaposition or, as Adorno might

put it, the constellation as against the interconnection of phrases-deprives

the subject of a place to present itself. There is no starting point, end point,

or any standpoint in between. As lean-Frangois Lyotard says ofparatax in The

D'rfferend: "Conjoined by and, phrases or events follow each another, but their

successiondoesnotobeyacategorical order(because;if,then;inorderto;akhough

. . .). Ioined to the preceding one by and, a phrase rises out of nothingness to

link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens be-

tween phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is

said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discon-

tinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defring it through its equally

constitutive continuity (or retention). . . . lnstead ofand, and assuringthe same

paratactic function, there can be a comma, or nothing" (D, 65-66). "Abyss of

Not-Being" is perhaps a bit of Gallic hyperbole, but the point is that paratax

is outside the logical and cognitive "phrase regimens" on which identity de-

pends, so nothing follows from the I think, just as nothing makes it possible.

Je estun autre, in Rimbaud's famous line, and so is everything else-including

language, which no longer operates in the service of meaning.

But then what is language when it is no longer in the service of meaning?

This, basically, is the question at work in Adorno's essays on Rudolf Bor-

chardt (1967) and Hans G. Helms (r96o). Not surprisingly, Adorno's answer has

Iargely to do with music, which means (for him) atonality. "ln everything he

wrote," Adorno says of Borchardt, "he made himself an organ of language'

. . . Language murmurs and rustles through him like a stream. . . . The speaking

gesture of almost every line he wrote is not so much the gesture of a person

speaking but rather, in its intention, the epiphany of language" (NL, z:t93)'

Hence the Rijtselcharakter of his poems: "They are not objects of contemplation,

especially by the criterion ofvisuaI concreteness, but linguistically they are full

ofsensuousness. . . . The speaking energy that holds language to its obiectifi-

cation in his poetry causes the poems to approxinratc tttttsit " (N l., z: r93 94)

not, however, in terms of the "music-like effects" that one finds in Rilke andTrakl, but rather in virtue of their dissonance: "ln Borchardt's work, reconcili-ation consists in giving artistic form to the irreconcilable. As poet, Borchardtvibrates between two poles and appropriates the antithesis as a formal law,,(NL, z:r99).

In fact, Borchardt's poems do not seem especially dissonant-MarjoriePerloff tells me (in conversation) that I should think of them as colloquial incomparison with Brecht, as in this genial apostrophe to the sonnet form:,6

ABSCHIED VOM SONETT

Sonett, als alle sagten, du bist tot,Sprach ich "steh aufl" Als sie dich beinern nanntenNahmst du mir Herz und Adern fort: da branntenDir Puls und Mund von neugeborner Not.

Sie schmdhlten: "Das ist alles? Das ist BrotFtir Durft?" Und dein strengen Arme spanntenSich doppelt und erschufes; die dich kannten,Hast du erndhrt, con Hand zu Hdnden bot.Dein Becher sich; den ich das letzte MalHeut frille: es ist aus. Musik und eualDer grof3en Zeiten ward dir vollgemessen:

Der gief3e nichts Cemeinres in das MaB,

Drau sich die Minne trank: was ich besessen

Ward in dir ewig: Gcitter, nehmt das Glas.,z

Helms is another thing entirely. The work to which Adorno proposes to in-troduce us in his essay on Helms is unpronouncably entitled FA: M'AHNIES6w0W(1959), is at once a concrete or visual poem made of orthographic and typo-graphical constructions, with large helpings of white space, and is a work ofsound- or acoustical-poetry (Lautpoesie) in the tradition of the German Hlrspieleor "hear-plays" that have flourished on German radio since the r95os (Helms'spublished text is accompanied by a ten-inch disk recording). The text (a ,oyce-like mulligan stew of skewed languages-cerman, French, English, Latin) be-gins as follows:

r) Haud ego terrerbar, sed mater mea tassam coffeae effundibat. Tat, quaelamentation infibatr Mais non-; da mi livae mille, mater o tam magnanimamea, sic ut posit cylindriculos herbarum nicotianarum emere. Hoc delicatumeral ita simili: terque vita mihi ante acta (PRAETERITA) in facultate recordantenrea [ormulat hodie, par me donc, nec splendordivinus nec regina caelitum

rtirl

i

L

llri

illic est, tror mig. Ma cosi un'argentum habebande, more than ego, real'n

armum VAUVOW, dej cHffit innerte taschum schajtis er dande.

z) Was wird er den machen? Wenn ers macht, macht ers fein, lieb Michaelilein

Krummndschenbohr, ein tauwer sottive im Herzen der Bltischen

gtugluhicksodorhiiiit (h); studierimek trirkiyimac indiliiftikugg approtzikaq

ohrnientallistikick?

3) "Gellltl" her midde Penunse, barraufn Tisch oder Ware zurlick. Betriiger?

Neiin, nie, nur Suhmklein philanthropikuss: herrrr-: nuja bittischeen ei'-

dankrifiil - pflegeh....'8

Perhaps understandably, Adorno himself does not cite, much less analyze,

any "passages" from FA: M'AHNIESGW0W; instead he restricts himself to the

statement of some "Presuppositions (Vornsseuungen)" (the title of his essay),

the first ofwhich is that the concept ofverstehen, understanding, has no ap-

plication to such a work: "Essential to such a text is the shock with which itforcibly interrupts communication. The harsh light of unintelligibility that

such a work turns toward the reader renders the usual intelligibility suspect

as being shallow, habitual, reified-in short, preartistic. To translate what aP-

pears alien in qualitatively modern works into current concepts and contexts

is something of a betrayal of the works themselves" (NL, z:95).

To be sure, as Adorno says, "language cannot completely dispense with its

significative moment, with concepts and meanings. . . . Even a stammered

sound, if it is a word and not a mere tone, retains its conceptual range, and

certainly the internal coherence of a linguistic work, without which it could

not be organized as a linguistic unity, cannot dispense with the conceptual el-

ement" (NL, z:98-99). Gertrude Stein made the same pointwhen she said that

one has to write in English; poetry is not labberwocky. But in FA: M'AHNIESGW0W

the materialof language (letters, phonemes, morphemes, words) is organized

serially rather than discursively, which enables Adorno to link Helms to mod-

ern (or modernist) music. With respect to poetics Adorno seems very much

to follow PaulValdry, who solidified the poetry/music analogy introduced by

Mallarm6 (and by Walter Pater somewhat earlier and perhaps to less effect),

except of course that Adorno has a very different theory of music; one can't

imagine what Val6ry would have made of Adorno, much less of Helms. At any

rate this is how Adorno describes the form of Helms's work:

The whole is composed in structures, Put together in each case from a series of di-

mensions, or, in the terminologr ofserial music, parameters, that appearautono-

mously, or combined, or ordered hierarchically. A model may help to clari! the

affiniq/ of this procedure with the serial techniquc irr nrusic. Ihc crisis o[meaning

163

as a phenomenal whole perceptible in the texture of its parts did not lead serial

composers to simply liquidate meaning. [Karlheinz] Stockhausen retains mean-

ing, that is, the immediately apperceptible context, as a limit value. A continuum

extends from this to structures that renounce the customary mode of hearing

meaning, namely the illusion of a necessity linking one sound to another. These

structures can be grasped only in something like the way the eye surveys the sur-

face of a picture as a whole. Helms' conception stands in an analogous relation-

ship to discursive meaning. Its continuum extends from quasi-narrative portions

intelligible on the surface to parts in which the phonetic values, the Pure expres-

sive qualities, completelyoutweigh the semanticvalues, the meanings. (NL, z:ro4)

ln other words, in keeping with the concept of form developed in Aesrhedc

Theory, the parts are autonomous and in motion with respect to the whole,

thus breaking with "the illusion of a necessity linking one sound for word, orletter] to another." Not surprisingly, Helms was a great admirer of John Cage,

whose recourse to chance operations in the composition both of sounds and

texts seems to be one of the principal models on which FA: M AHNIESGWOW is

based-as much Cage as loyce's FinnegansWake (to which, to be sure, Helms

pays tribute with some obvious parodies):

Mike walked in on the : attense of Chlazzus as they sittith softily sipping sweet

okaykes H-flowered, purrhushing'eir goofhearty offan-on-beats, holding mois-

turize'-palmy sticks clad in clamp dresses of tissue d'arab, drink in actionem

fetlandi promoting protolingamations e state of nascendi; completimented go

Iscene of hifibrow 'n' teasuckers tits slips peeptwats enthralled, all that snifflin'e-van beshmoosed kinda; lus'bearinnanals figs fags rue-sodomighties, gomor-

rhoeae, trip-blades nymphridgs painseederastless, senily hardchancryote apper-

civerts, her-mac-pros'a-dishts faetishits snarks chromosollipsists. . . .

-and so on, for a full page, before breaking into new or different configura-

tions of noise.

It appears to be a common practice among Adorno scholars to fold Aesthetic

Theory back into his earlier writings on modern music, as David Roberts does

when he writes that "the elaborations of the late AestheticTheory add nothing

essentially new. . . . Not only is AestheticTheory incapable of going beyond the

limits of the earlier construction, it even retreats from its logic to circle end-

lessly, inconclusively, in the empry space of a modernism which has lost all

historical contours, has been evacuated of all historical events and figures

merely as a backdrop to the invocation of the exclusive pantheon of authentic-

ity"--namely, Kafka, Beckett, and so forth (Artond Enlightenment,5g). Likewise

the recent CambridgeCompanionto Adorno contains several entries on Adorno's

thcories of music but none on AestheticTheory, which generally is mentioned

164

only in passing throughout the volume.'e By contrast, I think it's importantto attach the example of Helms to AestheticTheory as a reminder that Adorno'sgreat abstract work, arguably the most important work of philosophical

aesthetics since Kant and Hegel, is also very much an expression of its time,

namely that of the turbulent European and North American art worlds of the

r95os and r96os-John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, Guy Debord and the situ-

ationists, Henri Chopin and acoustical poetry, the "verbovocovisual" poems

of the Brazilian Noigandres group, Fluxus, the Vienna Aktionists and otherperformance- and body-art figures, minimalism and the various Conceptual

Art movements, the New American Poetry and the New York School of Poets,

particularly lohn Ashbery's poetry, among many other examples of formalan-archism. (Here I would recommend a very provocative essay by Mary Caputi

entitled "Theodor Adorno and the Performance Art of Cindy Sherman."'o) lnhis essay on Helms Adorno writes: "The moment of the absurd, which is con-

stituent of all art but has hitherto been largely hidden by the conventional mo-ment, has to emerge and express itself. The so-called unintelligibility of legiti-mate contemporary art is the consequence of something peculiar to art itself,

Its provocativeness carries out the historical judgment on an intelligibilitythat has degenerated into misunderstanding" (NL, z:97-98). Likewise in Aes-

theticTheory he writes that "art is now scarcely possible lwithout] experiment"(N,ZZ), particularly as this means thatthe production of the work is not underprogrammatic control and thatwhatwill emerge cannot be foreseen.

The argument here seems to be that the work of art, if it is art at all, should

be in advance of our capacity to receive it. "Works are usually critical in the era

in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because ofchangedsocial relations. Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy" (AT,

zz8). (Recall the artist Lawrence Weiner's remark: "When mywork is assimilat-

ed into the art context, itwill change something. I hope itwon't be considered

viable living art in ten years. . . . As what I do becomes art history the minute

culture accepts it, so it stops being art. "'') But more than this it appears that the

work of art always constitutes a limit of philosophical aesthetics, that is, a lim-it of the explanatory power of aesthetics, and that the experience of this Iimitis part ofwhat constitutes an experience ofart: "The better an artwork is un-

derstood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level, the more obscure its constitu-tive enigmaticalness IRritselhafies] becomes. lt only emerges demonstratively in

the profoundest experience of art. lf a work opens itself completely, it reveals

itself as a question and demands reflection: then the work vanishes into the

distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelm-

ing them for a second time with the question: 'What is it?"' lcin zwoites Mul nit

165

demWssistdaszuiiberfallenl (AT, rzr). ln other words, the work of art provokes

aesthetics by producing things "of which we do not know what they are." In

this respectAestheticTheory is a determinate negation of aesthetics as a positive

theory, as if it were Adorno's thesis that, contra Hegel, the movement of the

history of art always and repeatedly brings the philosophy of art to an end.

This seems at any rate to be the upshot of Adorno's "Draft lntroduction" to

AestheticTheory, which begins by saying that the task ofaesthetics is self-critical:

"Art does not stand in need of an aesthetics that will prescribe norms where itfinds itself in difficulty, but rather of an aesthetics that will provide the capac-

ity for reflection, which art on its own is hardly abte to achieve. Words such

as material, form, and formation, which flow all too easily from the pens ofcontemporary artists, ring trite; to cure contemporary language of this is one

of the art-practical functions of aesthetics" (AT, 34r). It seems to me that one

achievement of Adorno's theory is to defamiliarize the traditional concePts

of aesthetics-unity, integrity, harmony, but also form and material-and to

give us in their place an aesthetics of the fragment, arguably the once and fu-

ture formal category of modernism.

A modernist aesthetics, like modernist art and music, is under a standing

obligation to reinvent itself as it goes along-a phenomenon that one sees

in contemporary poetry, with its strong commitment to poetics (writings on

poetry by poets) as a way oftracking or even initiating the changes in form

and materiaI that keep the practice of poetry from becoming self-evident in

its procedures and results. In one of his later essays, "Vers une musique in-

formelle" (r96r)-in part a polemic against the rigid use of the twelve-tone

system of musical composition-Adorno recurs to the term" musique informelle"

"as a small token of gratitude towards the nation forwhom the tradition ofthe avant-garde is synonymous with the courage to produce manifestos. ln

contrast to the stufry aversion to 'isms' in art, I believe slogans are as desir-

able now as they were in Apollinaire's day. Musique informelle resists definition

in the botanicalterms of the positivists. If there is a tendency, an actual trend,

which the word serves to bring into focus, it is one which mocks all efforts at

definition" (QF, z7z). Musiqueinformelle is "athematic music," a "free atonal-

ity": "What is meant," says Adorno, "is a type of music which has discarded all

forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way"

(QF , z7z). It is an instance of open form-"music whose end cannot be fore-

seen in the course of production" (QF, :o:). "From this point of view musique

informelle wou[d be the idea lVorstellung] of something not fully imagined [uor-

4cstelltl. lt would be the integration by the composer's subjective ear of what

sirrrply cannot be imagined at the leveI of each individual note, as can be seen

166

from Stockhausen's'note clusters' lTontrauben). The frontier between a mean-

ingless objectification which the composer gaPes at with open mouth and

closed ears, and a composition which fulfills the imagination by transcending

it, is not one that can be drawn according to any abstract rule" (QF, 3c6.-0.Here perhaps one could begin to imagine aesthetics as a kind of negative the-

ology: that which in the end does not actually predicate anything of the work

of art-as, for example, in the case of one ofAd Reinhardt's "Black Paintings,"

which Reinhardt describes as follows:

A square (neurral, shapeless) canvas, 5 feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man's

outstretched arms (nor lorge, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composirion), one hori-

zontal form negating, one verticaI form (formless, notop, nobottom, directionless) three

(more or less) dark (lrghtles$ noncontrasting (colorles$ colors, brushwork brushed

out to remove brushwork, a mat flat, free-handpainted surface (glossless, textureless,

non-lineor, nohard edge, no softedge)which does not reflect its surroundings-a pure,

abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, distinter-

ested painting-an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, tran-

scendent, aware of no thing butArt (obsolutely no onttart)."

One wonders what Adorno would have made of this. lf we follow the dialectic

of AestheticTheory, Reinhardt's work is a purely antinomic artifact, an iconoclas-

tic icon: in other words, a perfect work of art.

PREFACE

Jean-Frangois Lyotard and .lean-Loup Thebaud, lust Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, r985), r6.

So Clifford Ceertz trumps Claude Ldvi-Strauss. See Geertz'sThe lnterpretation ofCul-

rures (NewYork: Basic Books, 1973), esp.3-3r.

Cited by loseph Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy," in Conceptual Art: ACritical Anthology,

ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999),

165.

Philosophicallnvestrgorions $67-68, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (NewYork: Macmillan,

lg::f),32-33.

"Program for Literary Criticism," trans. Walter Livingston, in Walter Benjamin:

SelectedWritings,ll:rgzl-t934, ed. Michael W. lennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary

Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), z9o.

r : WHAT ARE POETS FOR?

The anecdote foreshadows Duchamp's LargeGlass, of which Duchamp once said:

"Ycs, and the more I look at it the more I like it. I like the cracks, the way they fall.

t(;1

168

You remember how it happened in 1926, in Brooklyn? They put the tvvo panes

on top ofone another on a truck, flat, not knowing what they were carrying, and

bounced for sixty miles into Connecticut, and that's the resultl But the more I

look at it the more I like the cracks: they are not like shattered glass. They have a

shape. There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically

arranged and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra-a curious in-

tention that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words,

that I respect and love." TheWritings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and

Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, rg73), tz7.

See William A. Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics

intheContextof rgr7," inMarcelDuchamp:AnistoftheCentury,ed Rudolf Kuenzli and

Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, t98fl,64-94.

ln "The Creat American Novel," Williams writes: "Here's a man wants me to re-

vise, to put in order. My God what I am doing means just the opposite from that.

There is no revision, there can be no revision" (lmaginations, 176). See Gerald L.

Bruns, "De tmprovisatione: An Essay on (oro in Hell," in lnventions: Writing,TextualiE,

andUnderstondinginLiterary History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, r98z),

t4;-5g; and Stephen Fredman's chapter on Koro in Hell in Poet's Prose:The Crisis in

AmericanVerse, znd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, r99o), rz-54.

Adorno'sAestheticTheory begins famouslywith the statementthat "it is self-evident

that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore" (AT, t), and later he adds:

"Art responds to the loss of self-evidence not simply by concrete transformations

of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own

concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art" (AT, 16). See Arthur Danto's treat-

ment of this paradox, "Works ofArt and Mere RealThings," inTheTransfigurationof

theCommonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, r98t), t-32.

See Fredric f ameson's discussion of "aesthetic nominalism" inLate Marl.ism: Ador

n o, o r, Th e Persisten ce of th e Di alecric ( Lo nd on : Verso, r 99 o), esp. t 57 -6 4.

On conceptual art, see loseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," in Conceptual Art: A

CriticalAnthology, ed. AlexanderAlberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1999), t58-77, esp. 164: "The event that made conceivable the realization

that it was possible to 'speak another language' and still make sense in art was

MarceI Duchamp's first unassisted readymade. With the unassisted readymade,

art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said.

Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to

a question of function. This change-one from'appearance' to'concePtion'-was the beginning of 'modern' art and the beginning of 'conceptual' art. All art

(after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."

See Marjorie Perloffl, "Marcel Duchamp's Conceptual Poetics," inzrst-Century Mod-

ernism:The"New"Poerics (London: Basil Blackwell, zooz), ll t20.

10

1l

169

See M. Mitchelt Waldrop, Complexiry:The Emerging science at the Edge of Choos (New

York: Simon & Schuster, r99z).

ThePoemsofMarianneMoore, ed. Grace Schulman (New York: Penguin Books, zoo5),

135.

"f erboas, Pelicans, and Peewee Reese: Marianne Moore," inSelectedProse' ed' Eu-

gene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, zoo5), 8z'

After retiring from years ofteaching at the Brooklyn Polytechnic lnstitute Zukof-

sky turned (like Candide) to gardening. There does not seem to be a flower he

and his wife, Celia, could not identifr. See Zukofsky's "Eighty Flowers," inComplete

ShortPoetry (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, r99l).

"Poetry and Grammar," inLecturesinAmerico (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1975), zto.

However, this taboo applies chiefly to the writing of prose' In poetry the business

of nouns is more complex: "Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with

losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adorning with replacing

the noun" (z3r). Consider the austerity ofnouns instanzasin Medirotion:

She may count three Iittle daisies very well

By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen

Or she can be well mentioned as twelve

Which they may like which they can like soon [ . . . ]

Or they can attire where they need as which say

Can they call a hat or a hat a day

Made merry because it is so. (SM, 3t-32)

See Stephen Fredman's discussion of Three Poems in Poet'sProse, rct-35.

This is the thesis, interestingly, of the first part of Martin Heidegger's "The Origin

of the Work of Art," which celebrates the way the singularity of things escaPes

the grasp ofpropositionat thinking: "The unpretentious thing evades thought

most stubbornly. Or can it be that this self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-

contained independence, belongs precisely to the nature ofthe thing? Must not

this strange and uncommunicative feature of the nature of the thing become in-

timately familiar to thought that tries to think the thing? If so, then we should

not force our way to its thingly character." Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. Albert

Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, r97r), 3t-32.

r4 On the problem of form in Ashbery's poetry, Particularly in the early poems, see

Marjorie Perloff, "'Mysteries of Construction': The Dream Songs of lohn Ash-

bery," in The Po eticsoflndeterminaE:Rimbaudto Coge (Princeton, N.l.: Princeton Uni-

versityPress, r98t),248-BT. lnarecentPaper,"LaGrandePerrnission:lohnAshbery

in the zrst Century" Perloff gives us something of a retrospective on Ashbery's

work, meanwhile bringing us uP to date on "the self-contradiction of Ashbery's

poetics" (unpublished ms. cited by permission, 4).

r5 "On the Treatment of Complex Entities," in When Music Resisrs Meaning:The Maior

t2

13

il

l6

170

17

Writingsof HerbertBriln, ed. Arun Chandra (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-

sity Press, zoo4), z5o.

See Daniel Kane,All PoetsWelcome:TheLowerEastsidePoetrySceneinthery6os (Berke-

ley: University ofCalifornia Press, zoo3), t87-zot.

See http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette-Experiments.html.

A revised and abridged version of"Experiments" appears in Bruce Andrews and

Charles Bernstein, eds., The L:A=N=G=U=A=G=EBook (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1984), 8o-83. References here are to the online version. Compare

Charles Bernstein's "Experiments List," http://wvvr,v.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/

experiments.html.

r8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). See Gilbert Adair's translation, A Void (London: Harvill,

lss4).

19 Warren Motte lr. has assembled an anthology of Oulipian "poetics" in oulipo:

APrimer of PotentiolLiterature, trans. Warren F. Motte |r. (Normal, lll.: Dalkey Ar-

chive Press, r99B). See especially Marcel Benabou's contribution, "Rule and

Constraint": "All these obstacles that one creates for oneself-playing, for ex-

ample, on the nature, the order, the length, or the number of letters, syllables,

or words-all these interdictions that one postulates reveal their true function:

their final goal is not a mere exhibition of virtuosity but rather an exPloration ofvirtualities" (qr-qz).lnterestingly, Mayer's inventory of experiments contains a

variation on one ofOulipo's signature procedures, N+7: "Take a traditional text

like the pledge ofallegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is

seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the

word 'honesty'would be replaced by'honey dew melon.' Investigate what hap-

pens: different dictionaries will produce different results." http://www.writing

. upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette-Experiments. html.

zo (Ioronto: Coach House Books, zooz), rz.The Mahabharotl is not likely to have

been sung by a "skald." lt is a Sanskrit poem (4th c. BCE) of nearly nvo million

words.

zr "French Oulipianism," inPataphysics:ThePoeticsoflmaginaryScience (Evanston, lll.:

Northwestern University Press, zooz), 65.

zz See Lewitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology,

r4-r5. Compare Paul Val6ry's idea that a work of art is great to the extent that itdefies "all practice." "Memoirs of a Poem," inTheArtof Poetll, trans. Denise Fol-

liot(Princeton, N.l.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 147-48. See Lucy Lippard,

SixYeors:TheDematerializationoftheArt1bjectfromry66totgT2(Berkeley: Universityof

California Press, r973); and Lucy Lippard and.lohn Chandler, "The Dematerializa-

tion ofArt, " in Conceptuol Art: A Criticol Anthology , 46-50 .

z3 "General Aims and Theories," inTheCompletePoemsandSelectedLettersofHortCrone,

ed. Brom Weber (New York: Anchor Books, r966), zzt.

25

"Sporting Life, " inThe Colleued Bools of lockSpicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Santa Rosa, Ca-

lif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), zr8. See also My VocabularyDidThisro Me:TheCollected

Poemsof )ackSpicer, ed. PeterCizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan

University Press, zoo8),3p. On dictation, see Spicer's "Vancouver Lecture, l: Dic-

tation and a'Textbook ofPoetry,"' inTheHouseThotJackBuilt:TheCollectedLecturesof

lackSpicer, ed. Peter Cizzi (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), r-48,esp. z: "instead oFthe poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the

current tor itself,, did everything for itself . . . instead there was something fromthe Outside coming in. . . . I think the source is unimportant." See Peter Gizzi's

"Afterword," r87: "Radio offers the simplest analory for Spicer's practice of dic-

tation as it literalizes the actual transmission of words from elsewhere throughtechnologr and reinforces the notion that language itself is an alien medium."See also Robin Blaser, "The Practice of the Outside," inTheCollectedBoolsof )ackSpicer, z7t-329.

The poet Charles Bernstein writes: "Poetry is turbulent thought. . . . lt leaves

things unsettled, unresolved-leaves you knowing less than you did when you

started." See "What's Art Got to Do with lt" (MW, 42-$).Compare Robert Cree-

ley's idea that poets and artists "have a much higher tolerance for disorder than is

the usual case." "A Sense of Measure," inWasThataReol Poem E ?therEssays (Bolinas,

Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, ry79), 14.See Michael Davidson's discussion

of Spicer in The San Francisco Renaissonce: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, t989), r5o-7r; and Ron Silliman's "spicer's

Language," in The NewSenrence (New York: ROOF Books, tgSg), t47-66.

Goldsmith is the founder and curator oIubuweb.com, a site devoted to contem-porary experimental poetry. His Trilogy has been published in three separate vol-umes byMake Now Press (LosAngeles). See Marjorie Perloff, "Conceptual Bridges

/ Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith's Traflc," in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by ltherMeans in th e N ew Century (Chicago : U niversity of Ch icago Press, zo r o), r 46-6 5.

(New York Granary Books, zoor), r5. Also available at http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith.html. See "A Silly Key: Some Notes on Soliloquy by Ken-

neth Goldsmith," OpenLettert2,no.T (Fall zoo5): 65-76. This is a special numberof 1penLetter on "Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetry" ed. Lori Emerson

and Barbara Cole.

The text of "Being Boring" is available on Goldsmith's webpage at Buffalo'sElectronic Poetry Center, http://www.epc.buffato.edu/authors/goldsmlth/gotdsmith_boring. html.

"Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing," 0penText 72, no.7 (Fall zoo5): ro8. Gold-smith, true to his poetics, is plagiarizingSol Lewitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual

Art": "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" (Conceptuol Art: ACrirical An-

thology, tz). See lohanna Drucker, "The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art,

z6

21

3o

172

the ldea of ldea, and the Information Paradigm," in Conceptual An:Theory, Myth,

andPracrice, ed. Michael Contis (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, zoo4),

z5r-68; and "Un-visual and Conceptual," )penLetter o, no. 7 (zoo5): t38.

Marjorie Perloff rejects the Sisyphusian thesis and reads Trffic as a book about

the absurd incoherence of New York traffic rePorts. See Unoriginal Genius, esp.

r57-6t.

See Kenneth Goldsmith, "A Conversation with Kenneth Coldsmith," with Mar-

jorie Perlof[, Jockerzr (February zoq),http:lliacketmagazine.com/zr/perl-gold-iv

.htmt. "f could have easilykeptFidgetas potential Iiterature by issuingthe instruc-

tion 'Record every move your body makes for a day.' But if I hadn't gone through

the rigorous process of actualizing it, the writingwould have been very different.

I certainly could never have invented feeling so fed up with doing the exercise

that I couldn't help fgetting] drunk!"

Virginia QuarterlyReview 38, no. 4 (Autumn ry62):597-613.

Wott (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 165-68. See l. Alane Howard, "The Roots ofBeckett's Aesthetic: Mathematical Allusions in Watt," Papers in Languoge and Litera-

ture 30, no. + (tggg): 346-56.

See Johanna Drucker, TheVisibleWord: ExperimentalTypography and Modern Art, ryo9*r9z3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); lean-Paul Cuttay, Letterism and

Hypergraphics: The tJnknown Avont-Garde, ry45-tg&5 (New York: Franklin Furnace,

1985); and Mary Ellen Solt, ed., ConcretePoetry: AWorld-View (Bloomington: lndiana

University Press, 1968). See also Kaldron On-Line, which has a large archive ofvisual poetry: http://rwvw.thing.net/-grist/l&d/kaldron.htm. A valuable recent

study is LizKotz,WordstoBeLookedAt:Languagein rg6osArt(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, zooT).

35 SeeAppel, wordless(poems) (NewYork Press Rappel, zoog), and Gaze'sAsemicmag-

azine, whose first number provides the image in Figure t.

36 Media Poetry: An lnternational Antholog, ed. Eduardo Kac (Chicago: Intellect Books,

zooT),:-3't.

37 See Eduardo Kac, HodibisPotox:PoetryAnthology (lvry-sur-Seine: EditionsAction Po-

etique, zooT).

38 Films o[ Kac's holopoems can be found online at ubuweb.com. See especially

"Adhuc," at http://www.ubuweb.com/fi lm/kac-Adhuc. html.

39 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, r99B), 3zo. See chapter 6, "After

Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries," 14r-67.

4o See facques Derrida, "Khora," in0nthe Nome, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David

Wood, John P. Leavey lr., and lan Mcleod (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Universiry

Press, r995), 89-t28.

33

34

173

3

4

2 : SHOULD POETRY BE ETHICAL OR OTHERWISE?

See (in chronological order) Krzysztof Tiarek, lnflecred Language:Toward a Herme'

neutics ofNearness in Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, ond Celan (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,

rgg+); fill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999); Peter Nicholls, "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George

Oppen," inThe 1bjectivist Nexus: Essoys in Cukural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis

and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 240*53;

Michael Eskin, "A Survivor's Ethics: Levinas's Challenge to Philosophy," Dialectt

calAnthropology 34 0999): so7-So, esp. 44-28; Steve McCaffery, "The Scandal ofSincerity: Toward a Levinasian Poetics," in Priorto Meaning: Protosemantics andPoetics

(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, zoor), 204-29; G. Matthew len-

kins, "saying Obligation: George Oppen's Poetry and Levinasian Ethics," /ournol

of American Studies 37, no. 3 @oq): 407-33; Tim Woods, The Poetics of theLimt Erhics

andPoliricsinModernandContemporaryPoerry (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Press,

2oo3); Matthew Sharpe, "Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas's Sh adow," Colloquy:Text,Theo-

ry,Critique, g (zoo5); zg-47;Timothy Clark, The Po eticsof Singularity (Edinburgh: Edin-

burgh University Press, zoo5); Leslie Hill, "Distrust ofPoetry: Levinas, Blanchot,

Celan," MIN rzo (zoo5): 986*roo8; Xiaojing Zhou, The Erhics ondPoeticsofAkerityin

Asian American Poetry (lowa City: University of lowa Press, zoo6); Robert Kaufman,

"Poetry's Ethics: Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic lllusion

and Sociopolitical Delusion," NewGermanCritique33,no. t (zoo6):73-trB; Marshall

Brown, "The Case forVertical Ethics," Boundaryz,34,no.3(zoo7):16r-88; G. Mat-

thewfenkins, PoeticObligation:Erhicsin ExperimentalPoetryafterry45 (lowa City: Uni-

versity of lowa Press, zoo8).

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the lJnderstanding ofEvil, trans. Peter Hallward (Lon-

don: Verso, zoor),28.

TimesLiterlry Supplement, no. 5494 (luly r8, zoo8), tt.

See especially the chapter "substitution" in Emmanuel Levinas, OtherwiseThan Be-

ingorBeyondEssence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, t98t),

99-102.

See Emmanuel Levinas, TotaliE and Infinity: An Essoy on Exterioriry, trans. Alphonso

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universiry Press, 1969), 43: "We name this calling

into question ofmy spontaneity by the presence ofthe Other ethics. The strange-

ness of the Other, his irreducibility to the l, to my thoughts and my possessions,

is precisely accomplished as a ca[[ing into question of my spontaneity, as ethics."

See 0therwiseThan Being,5-9, esp. 5-6: "saying is not a game. Antecedent to the

verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmer-

ings, a foreword preceding languages. lt is the proximity of one to the other, the

commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signiflingness [stg-

nificonce\ of signification. . . . The original or pre-original saying, what is put forth

174

10

in the foreword, weaves an intrigue of responsibility. It sets forth an order more

grave than being and antecedent to being. By comparison being appears like a

game. Being is play or d6tente, without responsibility, where everything possible

is permitted."

Othervtisethan Being, 48.To which Levinas adds: "The subject in saying approaches

a neighbor in expressing itself, in being expelled, in the literal sense of the term,

out o[any locus, no longer dwelling, not stomping any ground. Saying uncovers,

beyond nudity, what dissimulation there may be under the exposedness of a skin

laid bare. lt is the very respirorion ofthis skin prior to any intention" (C8*qg).

See lavant Biarujia's inventive discussion of this "poetic play," "Charles Bern-

stein: Creating a / Creative Disturbance," Boxkite #3 (Australia zoo6), http://www

.pepc.Iibrary. See also lerome McGann, "Private Enigmas and Critical Functions,

with Special Thanks to the Poetry ofCharles Bernstein," inThePointlstoChongelt:

Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (Tusca Ioosa: University of Alabama Press,

zooT), g8-r24.

Feeling and Form: ATheory of Art (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, r953). 5ee McCaf-

fery, "Scandal of Sincerity."

" No ldentity, " in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alp honso Lingis (The Hague :

Martinus Nijhofl rg87), t46.

Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, The NudeFormalism (Los Angeles: zo Pages, r989),

n.p.

ProperNames, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

tgg6),4o-46.

Compare lohn Felstiner's translation ofthese passages (SPP, ao8-9), where the

poem is said to be speaking "in its very selfmost cause" and "in the cause oftheOther." It has to be mentioned that speaking "in behalfof'or "in the cause of"an Other (in ein Anderen Sache zu sprechen) is not exactly vocative but is rather more

like a form ofrepresentation, taking up the cause or res (Soche) ofanother, as in a

legal proceeding. See also lerry Glenn's translation, which appears as an appen-

dix to facques Derrida's Sovereignties in Question:The Poetics ofPaul Celan, ed. Thomas

Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, zoo5), r8o-8r.

See Bernard Fassbind, Poetik des Dialog: Voraussetzungen dialogische Poesie bei Paul Celan

und konzepte von lnrersu (Mtinchen: Fink, r995).

See "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," trans. Douglas Scott, Existence and Be'

ing (Chicago: Henry Regnery, $49),304-5; or, more recently, Martin Heidegger,

Elucidations of Hdlderlin's Poet,y, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities

Books, zooo),56-59.

See James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolverl Conversorion (Balti-

more: lohns Hopkins University Press, zoo6).

11

12

t3

L4

r5

r6

175

t7

There are a number of useful discussions of "Der Meridian," among them: Da-

vid Brierley, "Der Meridian": Ein Versuch zur Poetik und Dichtung Paul Celans (Frankfurt:

Peter Lang, rgSq); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Catastrophe," in Poetry asExperi-

ence, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999),

4r-7o; f acques Derrida, "Majesties, " in Sov ereignties in Question, r o8-34; Dennis l.Schmidt, "Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language," inReadingsofPaulCelan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press,

tgg4), tro-zg; Nicholas Meyerhoff,, "The Poetics of Paul Celan," Twenrieth-Century

Literature, 27, no. 1 (t98t):72-85; Helmut Mriller-Sievers, "On the Way to Quota-tion: Paul Celan's'Meridian'Speech," NewGermanCritique,y(zoo4): r3t-5o; Ray-

mond Ceuss, "Celan's Meridian," Boundary 2,33, no.3 (zoo6): zto-26. I devote

some pages to Celan's speech in "The Remembrance of Language," the introduc-tion to Gadamer on Celan: "Who am I andWho areYou?" and )ther Essays, trans. Richard

Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (A[bany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), r*5r.

"On the Addressee," in ComplereCriticalProse, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance

Link (Dana Point, Calif. : Ard is Publishers, 1997), 43-48, esp. 47.

See the poem "Blume [Flower] ," fromsprachgitter, with Felstiner's translation:

Der Stein.

Der Stein in der Luft, dem ich fotgte.

Dein Aug, so blind wie der Stein.

Wiewaren

Hinde,wir schcipften die Finsternis Leer,

wir fanden

The stone.

The stone in the air, which I followed.Your eye, as blind as the stone.

We were

hands,

we scooped the darkness empty,

we found

das Wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: the word that ascended summer

Blume.

Blume-ein Blindenwort.Dein Aug und mein Aug:

sie sorgen

fi..ir Wasser.

Wachstum.

Herzwand um Herzwand.

bldttert hinzu

Ein Wort noch, wie dies, und die

Himmer schwingen im Freien.

(CWl, r6a)

Flower.

Flower-a blindman's word.

Your eye and my eye:

they take care

of water.

Growth.

Heartwall by heartwall

adds on petals.

One more word like this, and the

hammers will be swinging free

(SPP, ro5)

r9

See Rochelle Tobias, The Discours e ofNaturein thePoetry ofPaulCelan:TheUnnaturalWorld

(Baltimore: lohns Hopkins Universiry Press, zoo6).

See "The Nature ofLanguage," in 0ntheWaytoLanguage, trans. Peter Hertz (New

York: Harper & Row, r97r), 75-76. For an example of how poetry's "ground-level

nrode of responsibility" looks in practice, see G. Matthew lenkins's reading of

il177 ;lj176

Susan Howe's poetry, "The Nearness of Poetry: Susan Howe's Nonconformist's Me-

morial," in Poetic )bligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poerry after 1945 (lowa City:

University oflowa Press, zoo8), t59-8t.

zo On Celan's compound words, see, for example, "herzschriftgekrtimelte" (GWIl,

r74), which Pierre Joris translates as "the heartscriPtcrumbled" (TC, r59), while

Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh translate it as "broken / into heartscript,"

Glottalstop:rotPoems (Hanover, N. H.: Wesleyan University Press, zooo), 62. ln theirnote to this poem Popov and McHugh have this to say:

Here and elsewhere Celan's idiosyncratic compounds (herzschriftgekriimek,

Zilndschltisselschimmer) pose an intractable problem. In English compounds are a

poeticism redolent of the r89os. Even in German where compounding is a com-

mon language pattern, and where there is a tradition of Baroque compounding,

Celan's compounds are exorbitant; one might even suspect his excesses ofvindic-tive intentions. His compounds often destroy reference as such and focus on what

makes it possible for Ianguage to exceed its instrumentaI and/or utilitarian uses.

It is, ofcourse, possible to follow Celan to the letter and do excessive compound-

ing in Engtish (we have G. M. Hopkins), but that leads nowhere because transla-

tion changes the ground from and against which Celanian compounding derives

its power and inventiveness. Compounds thus leave a choice between bad and

worse solutions. Most translators (into English and, especially, into French)

choose to render Celan's compounds as genitives, such as (the) A ofB. We, too,

have had to resort to that solution more often than we'd like. Q3o)

zr Thereisatranslation(ofsorts)of"Kalk-Krokus"bytheNewZealandpoetlackRoss:

CHALK-CROCUS at

daybreak your

multidimension/[ocational WANTED

poster vitaI statistics

stop

bombs

smile atyouthe dent ofDaseinhelps the radar outthe Manukau

silts up the vaults.

The poem is available online at http://titus.books.online.fr/Percutio/Percutio.htm

#Celan.

zz The title of a small collection of poems, illustrated by his wife, Gisele Celan-

Lestrange (Frankfurt: Suhrkampl rSSo).

z3 See Charles Bernstein, "Celan's Veils and Folds," Textuol Prrtclicc, rB, rro. z (zoo4):

zor: "Celan provides little comfort for those who scck;t tttorlt'l lot spiritual ot

z6

27

29

3o

24

25

31

z8

transcendentaI lyric." Bernstein proposes thatwe read Celan, not in isolation (as

we almost always do), but in the context of contemporary North American po-

etry, with its attention to the materialiry of language and the seriality of form.

Compare Felstiner's:

Etched away by the

radiant wind ofyour speech

the motley gossip ofpseudo-

experience-the hundred-

tongued My-

poem, the Lie-poem. (SPP, za7)

See Paraji Risdnen, Counterfigures-An Essoy on Antimetaphorical Resistance: Paul Cel'

an'sPoetryandPoeticsattheLimitof Figurality (Helsinki: Helsinki Universiry Printing

House, zooT). See also Harold Rhenisch, "Anti-Lyric: Translating the Chost ofPaul Celan," available at http://www.haroldrhenisch.com/translation.html.

See Shira Wolosky's discussion of this poem in "The Lyric, History, and the Avant-

garde: Theorizing the Poetics of Paul Celan," PoericsToday,22, no.3 (zoot): 65t-68.

"A Certain lmpossible Possible Saying of the Event," trans. Gila Walker,inTheLate

Derrida, ed. W. T. l. Mitchell and Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, zooT), z3r. See also Derrida, "To Forgive: The Forgivable and the Impre-

scriptable," QuestioningGod, ed. lohn D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael l. Scan-

lon (Bloomington: lndiana University Press, zoor), zr-5r. See FranEois Raffoul,

"Derrida and the Ethics ofthe lmpossible," ResearchinPhenomenology, 38 (zoo8):

27o-9o.

"From Anguish to Language" (tgq), FauxPas, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford University Press, zoor),3.

Transition, no. 5 (1949):98.

"The Fragment Word" (lC, 3o8). Compare "The Absence of the Book": "The more

the Work assumes meaning and acquires ambition, retaining in itself not only

all works, but also all the forms and all the powers of discourse, the more the ab-

sence of the work seems about to propose itself,, without, however, letting itselfbe designated. This occurs with Mallarmd. With Mallarm6, the Work becomes

aware of itself and thereby seizes itself as something that would coincide withthe absence o[the word: the latter then deflecting it from every coinciding withitself and destining it to impossibility" (lC, aza).

I devote two chapters devoted to Blanchot and Celan in MouriceBlanchot:TheRefusal

of Philosophy (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, rg97),8r-ror, ("Blan-

chotiCelan: Unteruegssein [On Poetry and Freedom]"), and 45-72 ("Blanchot/

Celan: Driseuvremenr [TheTheory ofthe Fragment]").

Sun (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 35.

178 179

15

16

17

6

7

8

3: VOICES OF CONSTRUCTION

On self and alterity in Howe's work, see Nicole Marsh, "'Out of My Texts I Am Not

What I Play': Politics and Self in the Poetry of Susan Howe," College Literature 24,

no. 3 (Spring, ry97): rz4-37; and Marjorie Perloffi "Language Poetry and the Lyric

Subjecl Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo," Criticallnquiry 25, no.3(Spring 9gg): 4o5-34. Howe "rarely speaks in her own person," preferring in-

stead "the voices ofothers."

See Susan Howe, "lnterview with lon Thompson," FreeVerse 9 (Winter zoo5):

http://www.english.chass. ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter-zoo5/interviews

/5_Howe.html; and Kaplan Harris, "Susan Howe's Art and Poetry, 968*t974,"Co nte mporary Liter ature 47, no. 3 (zo o6) : 4 4o-7 1.

On the spatial-visual character of Howe's poetry, see Atan Golding, "'Drawings

with Words': Susan Howe's Visual Poetics," inWeWhoLovetoBeAstonished:Experi

mentalWomen'sWriting and Performance, ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tus-

caloosa: University of Alabama Press, zooz), rsz-64; Craig Dworkin, "'Waging

Political Babble': Susan Howe's Visual Prosody and the Politics of Noise," Word

EImage: AlournalofVerbol/Visuallnquiry n, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 389-4o5. See also Hank

Lazer "'singing into the Draft': Susan Howe's Textual Frontiers," in 0pposing Po-

etries, z: Readings (Evanston, I [[. : Northwestern University Press), 6o-69, esp. 65:

"Howe's work represents a revisualization of notions of field-composition. As

with similar writings by Olson, Williams, and Duncan, or more recent work by

Tina Darragh, Howe expands the notion of field to a composition with the page as

unit of composition, not a line or a syllable-count or a sentence." Kathleen Fraser

offers a number of examples of "visual poetics" in "Translating the Unspeakable:

Visual Poetics, as Projected through Olson's'Field'onto Current Female Writing

Practice, " inTransloting theUnspeokable: Poetry ond thelnnovotive Necessig/ (Tuscaloosa:

University of Alabama Press, zooo), t7 4-zoo.

Agnes Martin, "Answer to lnquiry," in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Arr

inAmerica55, no.4 (r967): 55.

Brian Reed, "'Eden or Ebb ofthe Sea': Susan Howe's Word Squares and Postlinear

Poetics, " P ostmo der n Culture 1 4, no. z (zo o 4) : n.p.

"lnterview with Lynn Keller," Co ntemporary Literature 36 (tgg5): 5.

"The E nd of Art," Ar chiv es of American Art I ourn al t 4, no. 4 (rg7 4) : z.

"For Wallace Stevens," in Prepositions+:TheCollectedCriticalEssays (Hanover, N.H.:

Wesleyan University Press, zooo), z4-38.

Compare the interviewwith lanet Ruth Falon, "speakingwith Susan Howe," ln-

terviewwith lanet Ruth Falon,Diffrcukies3, no. z (1989):3s-42, onwhata painting

ofoneof Howe'spoemswould looklike: "Blank. ltwould beblank. ltwould bea

white canvas. White" (az).

ro I eanne Sieg el, Amuorlds: Discourse on the 6osond 7os (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UM I Research

Press, 1985),25.

11 On Howe's use of chaos theory, see Ming-Qian Ma, "Articulating the lnarticulate:

Singularities and Counter-method in Susan Howe," Contemporary Literature 36, no.

3 (Autumn 1995): 466-89.

o lnTheMidnightHowecitesThomasSheridan'sACompleteDictionaryoftheEnglishLan'

guage,bothwith regardro SOUND and MEANING;One main objectofwhich is, to establish o

ploinandpermanenrSTANDARDofPRONUNCIATI0N. "The lrish lexicographer's princi-

palworrywas the deplorable state to which the pronunciation ofwritten English

had sunk in his time. He yearned for the days of the reign of Queen Anne when

he believed the language was spoken 'in its highest state o[perfection.' lona-than Swift's pronunciation (Gulliver'sTrovels was proofed for the press at Thomas

Sheridan senior's chaotically shabby country house in Quilca, County Cavan) was

for him the supreme example of elocutionary excellence" (M, 5t-52). See also

Howe's interview with lanet Ruth Falon: "Having an Irish mother and an American father, I have a special feeling for the English language. Each spoke it differ-

ently and well." To which she later adds, ofher experience in the Irish theater as a

young girl: "lwas enthralled, happy, and at the same time not really lrish. I knew

there was no way I could be so clever, I knew I was a foreigner. I couldn't change

myvoice" (4r).

r3 "Transcending Words: Concerning Word-Erasing," trans. Didier Maleuvre, Yole

F rench Studies h (r992) : r48.

See William Butler Yeats, "The Circus-Animals' Desertion," in Poems, ed. David

Albright (London: Dent, 199o), 395. Compare "Ego Dominus Tuus," in Poems, zrz,

where the poet summons

the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge ofthe stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of alI imaginable thingsThe most unlike, being my anti-self.

Anatomy ofCriticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 196r), 96.

Dfficulties3, no. z (1989): zo.

See Steven Collis, Through Words of )thers: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholosticism (Vic-

toria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, zoo6); Marjorie Perloffi, "'Collision or Co[-

lusion with History': The Narrative Lyric of Susan Howe," Contemporary Literature

3o, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 518-33; Ming-Qian Ma, "Poetry as History Revised: Susan

Howe's'scatteringas Behaviortoward Risk,"'AmericanLiteraryHisrory6, no. a(Win-ter r994): 716-37; Peter Nicholls, "Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and

American History," Contemporary Literature 37, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 586-6or; Paul

Naylor, "Susan l-lowe: Where Are We Now in Poetry?" inPoeticlnvestigotions:Study-

180

in g the Holes in History (Evanston, I ll. : Northwestern U niversity Press, 1999), 43-7o;

and Elizabeth Frost, "'UnsettlingAmerica': Susan Howe and theAntinomianTra-

dition," inThe Feminist Avdnt-Garde in American Poetry (lowa City: University of lowa

Press, zoo3), 105-35. I would emphasize the antiquarian character ofHowe's his-

toricism rather more than these writers do.

18 See Robert Baker's review ofThe Midnight, "Ghosts," AmericanBookReview 25,no.3

(March/April z o o 4): r8-zt.

r9 Lionel Gossman, "Anecdote and History," History andTheory 42, no. z (zoq): ryr-52.

4 : A POEM ABOUT LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING

See "The Rejection ofClosure": "Language is one ofthe principal forms our cu-

riosirytakes. lt makes us restless" (Ll, qg); "Language itselFis never in a state of

rest" (Ll, 5o); "Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem frenetic with activ-

ity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as definition, example,

and amplification" (Ll, 5t).

"A Poetics of the Frontier," a talk Kenner delivered at the University of ldaho

in 1975 but, to my knowledge, never published. The idea is that a poetics ofthe

frontier would be modernist in its amnesiac relation to the past-starting liter-

ary history over again (almost) from scratch.

"Parataxis," Hejinian writes, "is significant both of the way information is gath-

ered by explorers and the way things seem to accumulate in nature. Composition

by juxtaposition presents observed phenomena without merging them, preserv-

ing their discrete particularity white attempting also to rePresent the matrix of

their proximity" (LI, r55). Likewise: "The popularity of the explorers' writings was

due, at least in part, to the narrative tension that was established between Per-

ceptualty immediate details (events) and the suspenseful deferral of complete

comprehension" (Ll, t57).

Time and Narrarive, trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Uni-

versity ofChicago Press, r984).

ln fact, the magician later performs a hat trick (and turns into a Pun on imagin-

ation):

Then with a stage wink the magician's assistant hands her the hat

The magician looks into it, removes her glove, reaches in, and gently removes a

spider

With the allegoricaI practice that magic demands

And sets it on a surface that's either glass or a lens

As the imagination's assistantwaves the wrinkled scarf and signs

CAUTION STEPS

ANIMAL XING (BC, to5)

6 Compare the following:

Or again, a human tells a story to another human being, beginning, "A certain

gentleman.. ."

Which two dogs under the table overhear

The human story promPts one of the dogs to tell a story of its own (BC, 7t)

7 "A Textbook of Poetry," inThe Collected Books oflackSpicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Santa

Rosa, Calif.: BlackSparrow Press, r975), r76.

8 How the first-person singular works in A Border Comedy is an oPen question: the

"1" sounds sometimes like it must be the poet herself-"1 too have been too self-

expressive, self-exposed" (BC,:r); "But I should explain how l've written this"

(BC, ro8)-but more often it is as mutable or protean as the language:

Silently the word dives

Fantastica[[y spent

"l" am time after all

With the usual confusion of identities

Leading to absurd consequences

And the carrying out ofdeath (BC, 88)

Or, again:

Friend, familiar, self rumored

Running

ln rubber shouts

Applying estrangements

Willing to smash it, "1" . . .

t..."|',,,,I

But that's just wordptay (BC, rg)

A sentence from My LifeintheNineties sPrings to mind: "l 'talk to myself' and as my-

self,, too, notyet knowing what I myself (or better, selves) will say, what the rules

are and will become, first thought flowing in imitation of a previous thought of

a previous self one could say with equalaccuracy scrawling or sPrawlingwithout

limit, and yet that's not right" (MLN, 46). The moral perhaps is that no one can be

contained within any pronoun.

g StoriesandTexrsprNothing (New York: Crove Press, tg67), trr.

ro Seelean-FrangoisLyotardonphrasing:"Theparadoxofthelastphrase(orofthelast silence), which is also the paradox ofthe series, should give x not the vertigo

ofwhat cannot be phrased (which is also called the fear ofdeath), but rather the

irrefutable conviction that phrasing is endless. For a phrase to be the last one,

another one is needed to declare it, and it is then not the last one" (D, rr).

r r "Short Review of Lyn Hejin ian's A Bo rder Comedy," Boston Review 28, nos. 3-4 (zoo3):

59.

182 183

12

13

14

"Found objects," in Prepositions+:The Collected Criticol Essoys, ed. Mark Scroggins

(Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, zooo), 168.

It is important to notice thatA Border Comedy concludes with an extensive bibliog-raphy ofsource-texts (and conversations). So (as ifit were possible) we need toread or re-read the poem as a vast collage ofquotations.

See Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," in 0n theWay to Language (New

York: Harper & Row, r97r), 57-uo; and lacques Derrida, "Proverb: 'He thatwouldpun . . .,"' in l. P. Leavey lr., 6lossory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),

77-20.

Here is the poet as a creature of memory:

I Iike to work every day

After a number ofdays have gone by, I am able to establish a set ofdemands-beckonings, prompts

Which I regularly update, maximize, and then allow to intensifr in the course ofseveral hours into absolute imperatives

Which llongto followAnd what is a prompt if not something in itselfWhich gives way

The selfitselfNow Iooking back

To remember

What it will say (BC, tz5-26)

Compare this to "Comments for Manuel Brito" concerningWriting Is on Aid to

Memory: "1 do remember that the momentum of the cadence, with its departures

within arrivals and arrivals within departures, was intended to push time in both

directions, 'backward' toward memory and also forward toward 'writing,'which

is always (for me) indicative of future unforeseen meanings and events." To

which Hejinian adds, anticipatingthe last four Iines just cited: "Writinggives one

something to remember" (LI, r9z).

See My Lrp in ihe Nineries: "Shall we do some ungendering, shall we gently cross-

dress" (MLN, 4r). See also "The Strangeness": "ln dreams, the opposition be-

tween objectivity and subjectiviry is a false one. ln fact, the dream's indepen-

dence from binarisms like form-content, male-female, now-then, here-there,

large-small, social-solitary, etc., is characteristic and makes polarity irrelevant

or obsolete" (Ll, t4o-4t). Recall that the border landscape is like the dream

landscape-unstable, incomptete (Ll, 327).

lnTheFatalist"One's fate is what has happened to one, notwhat is going to hap-

pen" (F, 59). It can only be experienced in retrospect-except by those in a posi-

tion to know better:

Like other comic poets

I should point out here

15

r6

j

17

r8

r9

That tragic writers have merely to let their characters announce who they are forthe audience instantly to know everything

Whereas comic writers use original plots

And start from scratch

Shifting points ofview with uninterrupted sincerity as in dreams (BC, 78-79)

(London: Routledge, zooz), esp. to7.

On of the riffs in A Border Comedy is a series of citations on xenophobia, startingwith Stendhal ("Sometimes you just start feeling it" [BC, rz8]) and concludingwith Virginia Woolf: "The presence of strangers may silence it, but when alone

together the group of friends, with their clear complexions, sound teeth, 'tun-

able voices,' and plain way of speaking, grows merry in the fun of judging, admir-

ing, condemning, approving, commending, ridiculing, and deriding" (BC,tzg).

See Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, "On Wit and Humour," inCharacteristicsofMen,Manners,)pinions,andTimes (r7rr), ed. lohn M. Robertson,43-

99 (lndianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, rg6+). lt was Shaftesbury's idea that the great

man is one who is undisturbed by being laughed at. Socrates at the hands ofAris-tophanes is the classic example.

Powers of Horror : An Essay o n Abjecrion (New York: Colu mbia University Press, r g8z), 3.

Cf. "The Person": "But is it aggressive to be old / ls it pitiless, incited" (CPH, 16o).

One of the source-texts Hejinian frequently cites is lalal Toufic, (/ampies): AnUn-

eosy Essay on the U ndead in Film (Barrytown, N.Y. : Station H il t Press, 1993).

5 : AMONG THE PACANS

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York Vintage Books,

196z),473*74.

See Steve McCaffery, "Phrase Propulsion in the Writing of Karen Mac Cormack,"

in Prior to Meaning: Protosemantic and Poetics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University

Press, zoor), esp. 154-57.

lust Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

r985), 16.

See Marjorie Perloff, "After Free Verse:The New Nonlinear Poetries," inPoetry0n

8 off the Page: Essays for Emergent occdsions (Evanston, I ll. : Northwestern University

Press, r998), 14r-67.

EmptyWords:Writings'p:78 (Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press, r979),

137.

The last line of the poem explains the title: "inwez3 the z3 is typed by the same

fingers, in the same manner, as the word we" (VR, 57).

21

22

23

185184

6: THE ROCUE POET'S RETURN

For an account ofAlexander l(erensky's years at Stanford, see Bernard Butcher,

"A Doomed Democrary," Stanford Magazine (lanuary/February zoor), http://www'

stanfordalumni.org/news/ma gazinelzootlianfeb/features/kerensky. html.

See, forexample, "The Next Hundred Years," BulletinoftheMidwestModernLanguage

Association 1o, no. l (1977): t-ro ("The following is a variation in writing of the Bi-

centennial Lecture which Professor Kenner presented on November 5, ry76, at

the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of MMLA in St. Louis, Missouri").

ThePoundEra (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, r97r), 3-4.

TheCantosofEzra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1948), XXXV, zz. See Carroll F.

Terrell, A Comp anion toThe Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993), 139: "Mr. Corles: Alfred Perlds, Austrian-born writerwhom Pound

met at a restaurant in ry34. During lunch Perlds told the anecdote about his

World War I experience as a line officer lPai, z-3, 4rr-r4)."

"Anecdote and History," History andTheory 4z(May zoq):43-68.

Pdter Hajdu, "Hungarians' National Feryour for Anecdotes," Neohelicon 32, no. 1

(zoo5): tzt-27.

See Brooke Bergen, "A Gathering of Proper Names: The Onomastic Poetics of

f ohn Matthias, " inWord, Play, Place: Essays on the Poetry of )ohn Matthias, ed. Robert Ar-

chambeau (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, r998), r33-53. Bergen emphasizes, quite

rightly, the prominence of place-names in Matthias's poetry. Anecdotes, however, have usually more to do with persons than with places orthings-althoughsee Matthias's forthcoming poem, "Cafd des Westens: Kurfurstendamm," where

Berlin is the name of a carriage (LaBerlinorrltdedanslanuit) and Berlinerthe name ofa doughnut.

See, however, Mumar Prasad Mukherji, The LosrWorld ofHindustoni Music (New York:

Oxford University Press, zooT).

See Anton Z. Capri, who writes serious histories of physics, but who is also the

author of Quips, Quotes, and Quanta: An Anecdotal History ofPhysics (New York World

Scientific Publishing, zooT), where seriousness would be seriously out ofplace.

(New York Harcourt Brace, r94o). See also Bruce Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia:

Twentieth-Century Soviet ond Russia n History in Anecdotes (New York: Routledge, zoo5).

The bibliographical note to Crossings reads similarly: "l am indebted, as in Turns

and Bucyrus, to an odd assortment ofbooks and authors for facts, fancies, passag-

es ofverse or of prose, translations, information, scholarship and scandal which

I have had occasion in these poems to quote, plagiarize, wiltfutly ignore, tact-

fully modifr, stupidly misconstrue, or intentionally travesty" (C, rzr)' The poet as

Hermes, or thief.

"Karl Kraus" (r93r), trans. Edmund lePhcott, in Waltt'r llt'tri,rtttitr, Sclcrtrrl Writ-

ings,ll: rgzT-rg34, ed. Michael W. lennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cam-

bridge, Mass. : Harvard U niversity P ress, rggg), 442.

r3. A translation ofthe chapter that details the execution is available online at http://

www. bhutto. org/lastmoments. htm.

See Maurice Blanchot, TheSpaceofLiterarure, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press, rg8z), esp.237-38. Compare Georges Bataille's depiction ofthe poet: "The poet frequently can use words only for his own loss; he is olten

forced to choose beflveen the destiny ofa reprobate, who is as profoundly sepa-

rated from sociery as dejecta are from apparent life, and a renunciation whose

price is a mediocre activity, subordinated to vulgar and superficial needs." "The

Notion of Expenditure lDdpensel," in Visions of Excess; Selecred Writings, tg27-tg3g,

trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, t985), rzo.

See Matthias's essay "Places and Poems: A Self-Reading and a Reading of the Self

in the Romantic Context from Wordsworth to Parkman," in which he remarks

on his relation to Suffolk, England-his wife's "place": "l arrived in Suffolk, after

all, unconsciously seeking 'a refuge or escape from an unmanageable or unlov-

able society or nation' [leremy Hooker]. And I didn't live there like a native of the

place-whether a farmer, a craftsman, a doctor, or a teacher-but as a relative

and friend of natives and a writer who, though he might experience and describe

the place in fresh and unfamiliar ways, would never be fully integrated with its

life unless he stayed and worked there. I was more than a tourist but less than

a citizen ofthe place." Reading1ldFriends: Essoys, Reviews,andPoemsonPoetics,rgT5-

r99o (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, r99z), 53.

IfItDie: An Autobiography, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage Books, rg6g), s.

In an unpublished poem, "Caf6 des Westens: Kurflirstendamm," Matthias writes:

Did you know I wrote an honors thesis

at Ohio State on lsherwood?

Yes and met him once or twice. Flakey don'tyou know

but helped me out a lot and introduced me

to his more important friends.

More important any-lvay than he was.

"Epic and Novel," inTheDialogiclmagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael

Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, tgSt), z4-26.

Balletmicaniquewas never performed as originally conceived until the r99os when

the composer PauI Lehrman produced a version electronically, which is available

on YouTube in tvvo versions: as the restored soundtrack to Fernand Ldger's ry24film of the same name, and as a "robotic" performance at the National Gallery

of Art in zoo4, both produced by Lehrman. See http://www.americancomposers

.org/antheil/lehrman.htm for Lehrman's account of his digital reconstruction ofAntheil's work.

t4

3

4

15

5

6

l1

to

r6

t7

r8

19

*

12

186

20. An account of their invention, for which they received a Patent in ry42, is avail-

able online: http ://inventions.org/culture/female/larmarr. html.

zr Claire's lines describe a scene from L'lnhumaine;

It's me, it is l, on the screenl

They catt me the austere Mademoiselle Claire Lescot.

I'm some kind of cubist cotd fish, the girt

without any mother born a machine who can nevertheless sing

and I stare down those rioting plebs at the Champs Elysdes

alive in the intervalA absconditus diminished

howeveryou tike (WP,8)

zz Antheil,andtheTreatiseonHarmony (Chicago: Pascal Covici, rgzT),5t-52. See William

Carlos Williams, "George Antheil and the Cantildne Critics: A Note on the First

Performance of Antheil's Music in New York City (April ro, ry27)," inlmaginations

(New York New Directions, tgZo), :S:-SZ.

z3 See " From the Prehistory of the Novel, " inThe Dialogic lmaginotion, 5S-59.

z4 To which Matthias adds a lengthy endnote comprising twenry-six Iines of permu-

tations. A couple ofexcerpts:

g84z: . . . of the decoherence of the kedging

9843: ofthe quantum ofthe zero ofthe one ofthe watcher

of the disambiguating of the decoherence

9844: ofthe end ofthe quantum ofthe zero ofthe one

of the watcher of the disambiguating

9845: ofthe beginning ofthe end ofthe quantum ofthe zero

ofthe one ofthe watcher

9846: ofthe law ofthe beginning ofthe end ofthe quantum

ofthe zero ofthe one

9847: ofthe laughter ofthe law ofthe beginning ofthe end

ofthe quantum ofthe zero. . . .

9858: ofthe virus ofthe tool ofthe groin ofthe depth

ofthe surface ofthe language

9859: ofthe hand ofthe virus ofthe tool ofthe groin

ofthe depth ofthe surface

986o: ofthe foot ofthe hand ofthe virus ofthe toolofthe groin ofthe depth

986r: ofthe squeeze ofthe foot ofthe hand ofthe virus

ofthe tool ofthe groin

9862: ofthe toe ofthe squeeze ofthe foot ofthe hand

ofthe virus ofthe tool (K, 175-76)

ti

I

i

t

I

I

I

I

187

I

2

7 : ADDINC GARBACE TO LANCUAGE

Cited by Prynne (P,38r).

ln his long "ovewiew" of Prynne's work that appeared in Jocket z4 Kevirr Nolrn

proposes the final couplet ofShakespeare's sonnet r45 as the source oI l)ryttttc's

title: "'l hate,' from hate away she threw, / And saved my life sayirrg'trot you."'

Other possibilities include Samuel Beckett's mouth-play, Nor l.

The epigraph is taken from Thomas Nagel, Equoliry and Panioliry (Oxtbrtl: OxlorlUniversity Press, r99r), rzr. The problem underdiscussion is what ntotivates l)eo-ple in an egalitarian society that is also market-driven:

Each ofthe hundreds or thousands ofparts that go into a washing nrach i ne or

a truck or a ball-bearing factory has to be motivated by economically expresscd

demand. They are not going to do it as a form ofselFexpression, and even iftheywanted nothing better than to contribute to the well-being of mankind, this

would nottell them what to make in their semiconductor plant.

Benevolence is not enough. Even love of semiconductors is not enough. Among

those who have to think ofnew things to do and new and more efficientways to

do them, there seems no substitute for the market as a source of information

(tzr-zz; my emphasis).

The epigraph from Nagel might be related to the fact that there is, as elsewhere

in Prynne's work, a good deal of industria[-technological-economic vocabulary

in "Not-You," as in the following:

Lights go forward to flight assessment checks

up to roof limit, will rake up the card fornew scores in anti-trust recita[. A timid start

for integer placing, spurred on by incessant

false alerts at re-entry: diagnose and record

atthe same overlay. (P, aor)

ln a valiant (and ground-breaking) essay on "Not-You," the poet Iohn Wilkinson

observes: "The sum of the lines of the middle suite and the sum of the lines ofthe two suites of eight poems with epigraphs, are equal to t49." See "Counterfac-

tual Prynne: An Approach to Not-you," Parataxis: Modernism and ModernWriting, no.g (rg96): 196. A counterfactual is (loosely) a state of what might-have-been, orwhat could be, given a different set of conditions, which Wilkinson associates

(rightly) with David Lewis's arguments in favor of possible or alternative worlds.

An alternative world is what, for Wilkinson, the second epigraph, "Love of semi-

conductors is not enough," refers us to, namely the formalized world of digital

interactions (as opposed to the social order ofspeech-acs) that make possible

algebra-like transactions that, on Wilkinson's reading, hold "Not-You" together.

Wilkinson's essay is reprinted in his recentvolume of essays,TheLyricTouch:Recon-

srrucrions (Cambridge: Salt Publishing , zooT),5-2o. See Robin Purves's response

188 189

to Wilkinson, "Apprehension: Or, I. H. Prynne, His Critics, and the Rhetoric ofHis Art," 6ig, no. z (March 1999): 45-6o, esP. 58-59: "lt is nevertheless the case

that the features whose foregrounding constitutes poetry as Poetry are features

which, in their subordination of communicable meaning to visual and acoustic

patternings, to semantic and syntactic ambiguities, by definition must gener-

ate a surplus of variable, complementary and contrasting meanings along the

course oFeach reading, a surplus which increases in line with the relative density

of those patternings and ambiguities." This seems on the mark: indeterminacy is

not a loss but a gain in determinability. See also a whimsical essay on " Not You, "

entitled "Knot-You!" by Ben Watson, writing under the name of Out to Lunch

(a frequent contributor to Parataxis: Modernism and ModernWriting), pubtished in

lnvolution 22, no. 4 0Sg6): r-g, which approaches the poem as a series oftexts

whose spatial and visual features form a graph that "variously resembles: a tran-

scendent experience (drug-triggered, psychic or sexual) followed by a period of

depression before resuming'normality'; the comPuter'blip'of a heartbeat; the

lie detector's response to the voice calling Carlsberg 'the best lager in the world.'

Using this graph as a'map,'the language of the poems becomes less discursive

efflorescence than wordplay under duress, commenting on the structure as itboth forms it and beats against its limits" (5).

Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), r94. See Stephen

Sch i ffe r, "Actua l- Lan guage Relatio ns, " Philo sophical Perspectiv es 7 (1993) : 4r-58,esp.23z-3g ("Lewis on the Actual-Language Relation").

Phitosophical Popers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), r:167. The essay is

atso widely anthotogized, as in Heimir Geirsson and Michael Losonsky, eds.,

Readin gs in Lan gua ge and Mind (Oxford : Basi I B lackwe I [, I 996), t38.

ln his essay on "Not-You" Wilkinson writes: "A catastroPhic collapse in the

conditions of trust is a given in contemporary cultural commentary" (t94). For

Wilkinson this collapse is one of the implications of Prynne's title-a reiection

of social conditions (and therefore of Lewis's actual-language theory)-in favor

of computational languages of artificial intelligence, among other forms of rule-

governed discourse, including various versions ofstructuralist linguistics against

which Prynne had aimed his arguments in his Birkbeck lectures, Stars,Tigers, ond

the Shapes ofWords (London: Birkbeck College, 1993).

David Lewis is famous for his arguments in support of possible worlds with vari-

able and even bizarre truth conditions that are (somewhere) as actual as the one

we inhabit, which answers more or less to the laws of scientific reason and the

propositional style of philosophical reasoning. Our universe is only one among

an infinity ofalternatives, and the same goes, as he says, with our languages: "l

agree that L+ is not used by P, in any reasonable sense, but I have not seen any way

to avoid conceding that L+ is a possible language [thatl might really be used-and

11

that there does prevail in P a convention oftruthfulness in L+, sustained by an

interest in communication" (r87). It is possible that there is a L+ whose sentences

are garbage in t (the language used, for example, by you and me, or P) but which

is nevertheless usable somewhere as a language, that is, able to satis! the "con-

vention of truthfulness . . . sustained by an interest in communication."

On the question ofgarbage, see Ben Watson, "Garbage: A Discussion ofValue,"

Pores:AJournalofPoeticsResearch, no. r (October zoo3), http://www.bbk.ac.uk/pores/.

See Prynne's Stars,Tigers, and the Shapes of Words, r "Does the form of the written

word have a sense-bearing relation to its meaning? Does the sound of the word

express, or modifi, or in any way contribute to, its sense?" An answer of sorts is

given on page r8:

Literary uses oflanguage, and literate ways ofreading and interpreting the effect

ofsuch language, are a challenging test to this hypothesis [that language is a

selFregulating system ofdifferences more or less refractory to the uses made

ofitl, because the forms and devices ofliterary discourse bring forward withespecial prominence a range ofmaterial effects (echo, repetition, sound-devices

and positionaI patterns) which seem conspicuously arbitrary. At the same time

the distinctively literary nature of the literary text marks it for reading with a

heightened sense ofthe accumulated layers and aspects ofassociation which

form the significatory resonances ofprevious usage: the whole prior history ofthe language-community can be tuned to allow and invite the vibrations of sense

and suggestion and historical retrospect. lt is not the lexicon which carries these

data so much as the encyclopaedia and the historical thesaurus and some ide-

ally synoptic dictionary ofquotations: to the functions of language as code and

framework have been added those ofdep6t-inventory and memory-theatre.

In "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" Stanley Cavell makes the pointthat there is no way we can make modernist art (for example, serial music) co-

herent with traditional concepts of what counts as art. In order to come to terms

with modernism, he says, we need to change-to "naturalize ourselves to a new

form of life, a newworld." MustWeMeanWhatweSay? (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versiry Press, 196g), B+.

In contemporary poetics parataxis is often cited as the principal technique ofcollage, metonymy, open form, and so on to no definite term. Gertrude Stein's

Tender Buttons (r9rz) is the locus classicus. Recall, for example, Lyn Hejinian, "The

Rejection ofClosure" and "strangeness" (Ll, 4o-58, 135-6o). See also Rosmarie

Waldrop, "Thinkingof Follows," in Dissonance(ifyouareinteresred) (Tuscaloosa: Uni-

versity of Alabama Press, zoo5), esp. zro-rr. For a brief polemic against "open-

ness," see lohn Wilkinson, "Tenter Ground," inTheLyricTouch, zr-32. The idea

seems to be that open forms are all very well but one should not read too much

into them, much less suppose that "anything goes" with respect to what we can

say about them. ln Wilkinson's view, open forms encourage altogether too much

12

190 r,; ii J !r: .,; i i1 r:; :; :.: * i: 191

special pleading, as, for example, in behalf of pointless egalitarianism and the

body as the last remnant of authenticity. See, however, page 154 on "mestastasis"

as a process of poetic composition. Compare Prynne's "A Letter to Steve Mccaf-

fery," dated lanuary z, ry89, reprinted in 6ig, no. 7 (November zooo)'. 4o*46, a

dense and gnarly complaint against the idea that in poetry "the text is released

from its fixed displacement out of a function-relation, its tokenised status as

fetish, by beinggiven overto readers as a class ofindividuals actively installed

in the position of controlling the choices of their own consumPtion, to be re-

named as production: the open text, the inventive, selective teader, free to opt for

useful waste or wastefuI utility" (41).

13 See Charles Attieri, "An Aspect of Prynne's Poetics: Autonomy as a Lyrical ldeal,"

Gig,no. ro (Decemberz oot):42-43: "Autonomy for Prynne is nota matteroFmas-

tering the reaI nor ofcreating an adequate self-referential alternative to the real.

Rather it is a way of defining one's strength precisely by the degree to which one's

poem can encompass the semantic dispersal created by the effort to match lan-

guage to experience. . . . Autonomy is what poems accomplish as linguistic struc-

tures, not what selves can use as mirrors for their own imaginary projections."

r4 See Ren6Thom, StructuralstabiliryandMorphogenesis:An lutlineofaGeneralTheoryof

Models, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading, Mass.: W. A. Benjamin, 1975).

r5 The NewSentence (New York: ROOF Books, r9B7), 8t-82.

16 Inafineessay,"lnterlocatingl.H.Prynne,"DavidPunterwrites: "Letmesuggest

that Prynne's poetry is a poetry of ruins. lt is a Poetry that realises that meaning

is not something to be coherently constructed; on the contrary, it is a continual

process of falling down, and the most that can be done is to attempt to prop up

bits ofthe collapsing landscape, to seek form in the very process ofthings melt-

ing away or prodigiously multiplying." CambridgeQuarterly 3r, no. z(zooz): rz5-26.

r7 Wilkinson constructs a rather interesting model of systematic operations linking

the phrases that make up the first eight lyrics of the poem:

Poem r: Transaction: in/decision lntension: to thread-out, to whack, to break Direction:

ahead, over Durarion: at femur length Quonrio,: double, twins, alternative, two

Poem z: Tronsaction: promise lnrention: to praise, to please Direction: inside, together

Duration'. time rate Quantiry: fifty more, poly

Poem 3: Transocrion: choose lntention: to observeDirection: end-up, in front Durorion: to

length Quonriry: everything, more or less, nothing

Poem 4: Tronsocrion; in decision, intent Inrention: to reach back Direction: on the low

side, lifting, altitude, next Duration: be ready Quanriry: the amount

Poem 5: Transoction: the best we took it Intention: to step Direcrion: front, back, beneath

Durotion: by the hour, quite slowlyQuontity: one, one

Poem 6: Transcction: pay-out lntention: to play, to eqtral, to brcak l)irt'rtion: hack, rises

r8

19

Durqtion: nextmonthQuonriry: one, a bundle

Poem 7: Tronsocrion; market Intenrion: to pitch, to packDirecrion: turning, falling

Durqtion: so soon, no more Quontigl: too high, lesser

Poem 8: Tronsoction: won, bldder lnrention: to beat, to shun Direction: ahead, over

(c/f poem r) Duration'. cut-back, dying year Quanti4r twice (c/f poem r) ("Counterfactual

Prynne," r98)

It would be churlish to complain about the complexity of Wilkinson's system-invoking, like a dreary schoolmaster, the iron rule Occam's razor-because the

system forces one to attend closely to the words of the poem, which do seem to

be governed by some echo principle. Whether the system turns garbage into a

garden will depend on how patient one is with the workings of the system. As forreading Prynne as if he were a language poet: there are certainly family resem-

blances, and the paratactic form of Prynne's sentences would likely prove posi-

tive in any DNA test.

(London: Heinemann Medical Books, 196z).

TheEngineering of Being: An7ntological Approachtol.H. Prynne (Ume5, Sweden: Swedish

Science Press, r997), r7o.

N o rth of lntention : Criticol W riti n gs, 1gt S-tg 86 ( New Yo rk: ROO F Boo ks, r 986), r 3-29,20t*2t.

VisionsofExcess; SelectedWritings, lgzl-tg3g, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Uni-

versityof Minnesota Press, 1985), rzo.

Gig, no.7 (November zooo): 45.

See SelectedWorls of Alfred larry, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (New

York: Crove Press, 1965); and Christian Bok,'Pataphysics:ThePoeticsofanlmaginary

Science (Evanston, Il[.: Northwestern Universiry Press, zooz).

Bcik, 'Parophysics, 9, 38. The word "interferential" means: "Of, pertaining to, oroperating by, wave-interference: spec. belonging to interference of light waves"

(oED).

8: ANOMALIES OF DURATION IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Codeof Signals:RecentWritingsin Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley, Calif.: NorthAtlantic Books, r983), 244.

Michael Palmer, FirstFrgure (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 60.

See l. M. Gelfand and S. V. Fomin, AColculusofVariations, trans. Richard A. Silver-

man (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).

"After Olson and Celan: The Breadth and Twist of the Referent," AmericanPoetry

Review 24, no. 4 (luly/August r995): 9-16. See Alice Fulton, "Of Formal, Free, and

22

23

24

2

3

192

5

6

7

B

Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Electric," in Feeling as a Foreign Language:The Good

Strangenessof Poetry (St. Paut, Minn.: Crapvolf Press, 1999), 43-6o.

(London: Barque Press, zoo5), 5.

In "The Creat Refusal" Blanchot speaks of impossibility as a dimension of time

in which time is "the dispersion of a present that, even while being only passage

does not pass, never fixes itselfin a present, refers to no past and goes toward no

future: rheincessont" (lC, 45).

"The Unconditional," ChicagoReview 52, nos' z-4 (Autumn zoo6): 37t.

See Tom lones's review of the poem in Jocket 3r (October zoo6): "The poem is

constituted by an account of its own accidental relations in coming into being,

an awareness ofthose contingencies oflanguage, script, and print that make up

the relational landscape of poetry." http://www.iacketmagazine.com/3r/jones

-jarvis.htmt. Early in the poem these lines appear:

Iwrite whatgets taken into my mouth.

lust as it is I can and do affirm,just as it undelimitably is,

just as a single affirmation sings

the tunelessest selected tesserel

or Age ofProse like no prose ever heard

age not ofprose but rather ofa dim

laborious deafness as the condition oF-just as it is or just as it is not-

as at some point I false first person must

gutter to drop the outsided double me

so this parenthesis wilI never close. (The Unconditionol, zg-3o)

Here the reader should consult'A" (Berketey: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978),

rz4. (Copyright restrictions prevent me from citing passages from Zukofsky's

work.)

rc CompleteShorrPoer,y (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press,rggT),2o3.

n See Abagail Lang, "The Remembering Words, or 'How Zukofsky Used Words,"'

Jacket3o (luly zoo6), http://www.jacketmagazine.com/3o/z-tang.html; and Louis

Zukofsky, "An Objective," in Prepositions+, ed. Mark Scroggins (Hanover, N'H':

Wesleyan University Press, 20oo), 13.

rz See "Poetry: ForMySonWhen He Can Read," in Prepositiot'ts+, to'

r3 on the fate of meter in contemporary poetry see Douglas Messerli, "The Rhythms

ofthe'Language' Poets," Paper presented atthe rgBz annual meeting ofthe Mod-

ern Language Association, http://www.greeninteger.blogspot.com/roo8/o9/

rhythms-of,language-poets.html. Referring to the poetry of Charles Bernstein

and Ted Greenwald, Messerli writes: "l am only speculating that the rhythms of

such poets may have prosodic roots in traditions othcr th;ln spccch an<l song.

r4

193

The notion that most ofcontemporary poetry has abandoned issues ofprosody

. . . may not only be mistaken, but fails to recognize the narrow way in which

modern and contemporary critics define prosody" (ro). One should also consult

the chapter titled "Rhythms" in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London:

Faber & Faber, r95r; repr., Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Book, 1985), ro9-r8.

(Washington, D.C.: Edge Books, zoor), n.p. A fact aboutTom Raworth that is fre-

quently cited is that he was one ofthe first people to undergo open-heart sur-

gery, and that he suffers from cardiac arrhythmia (his heart-rate can vary from

twenty to hundreds of beats per minute). See, for example, Marjorie Perlofl"Filling Space with Trace: Tom Raworth's 'Letters from Yaddo,"' in Differentiols:

Poetry,Poetics,Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, zoo4), zz\-zg.5o naturally one asks-as did Charles Bernstein in an interview-whether there

is any connection betvveen his heart condition and the irregularity of his poetic

line (Raworth answered, "No."). See "Tom Raworth, Conversation with Charles

Bernstein on Close Listening, March 13, zoo6," http://www.writing.upenn.edu/

Pennsound/x/Close-Listening. php.

Peter Middleton gives an account of Raworth's reading of Ace at Birbeck College,

London, in zoo3, in "How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem," 1ralTradition zo,

no. r (zoo5), 7*34, esp. r7-zt.

16 Bigslippers 0n is also available at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/

Raworth.html.

(London: Goliard Press, r97r), n.p.

Aramsaroyan (NewYork Random House, 1968), zo. See Curtis Faville's review ofSaroyan's Complete MinimalistPoems, "stone Cutting All the Way," )acket34 (October

zooT), http://lvww. jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml.

However, Iohn Wilkinson does not think the poem is quite so abstract. See his

essay, "Tripping the Light Fantastic: Tom Raworth's Ace," in Removed for Further

Study:ThePoetryofTomRaworth, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto:The Gig,zoq),45*6o,esp. 153-54; and also in this volume, Tom Orange, "Notes for a Reading ofAce,"

r6r-69.

See Clark Coolidge, "From Notebooks (r976-tg8z)," inCodeofSignals, t74.

seuen PogesMissing,l:SelectedTexts, 1969-1999 (Toronto: Coach House Book, zooo),

83.

See Mac Low's performance directions for his "Asymmetries": "fhe duradons ofsilences (or instrumentaI tones) are dt leasr those of single words or word strings

that might be printed in equivalent spaces, as they would be spoken aloud by

the individual reader. That is, the reader is silent or prolongs sounds at least as

long as it would take him to speak such space-equivalent words. However, one

may, in performance, extend these durations whenever one feels that the total

15

t7

r8

r9

20

21

195194

23

24

25

26

performance would be 'better' if one remained silent or continued to prolong

the sound one is making." RepresentativeWorks, 1938*1985 (New York: ROOF Books,

tg86), zo7.

Selected Poems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, t976), 5o.

ShorterPoems (Normal, lll.: DalkeyArchive Press, 1993), 93'

A tea caddy is a (frequently silver or pewter) container for tea leaves. "Lobate"

means "having or characterized by lobes" (0ED). Plasma is "a green variety ofchalcedony, a semi-precious stone, and formerly used for carving into intaglios

[engravings]" (0ED).

'Pataphysics:ThePoeticsof anlmaginaryScience (Evanston, Il[.: Northwestern Univer-

sity Press, zooz),8.

9 : NOMAD POETRY

McCaffery's method is not exactly citational but work as a kind of erasure. In an

essay titled "lackson Mac Low: Samsara in Lagado," McCaffery notes that "Mac

Low's writings are produced only atthe expense ofthe lossofonorhertext" (PM, r96)'

See Gilles Deleuze and F6[ix Guattari on "nomadology" inAThousandPlateaus:Capr

talismandschizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: universityof Minne-

sota Press, tg87),369.

lf one follows that quintessentiaI nomad, Walter Benjamin, one would say that

"deich" and "taihun" are merely adumbrations of the "pure language" in which

whatwe call "ten" reposes in immobile, unspeakable serenity. ln "TheTask ofthe

Translator" Benjamin writes:

Whereas in the various tongues that ultimate essence, the pure language, is tied

only to tinguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted

with a heavy, atien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the

symbolized itsetf, to regain pure language fully formed from the linguistic flux,

is the tremendous task of translation. ln this pure Ianguage-which no longer

means or expresses anything but is, as exPressionless and creative Word, that

which is meant in all [anguages-all information, sense, and all intention finally

encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.

SelectedWritings,l: 1913-19z6, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.

lennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), z6t. One might say

that McCaffery's poem traverses this stratum in which "all information, sense,

and all intention" are finally "extinguished."

Cited by McCaffery (Nl, t7t).

lorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, t96z),

83.

4

5

;

l

l

ll

l

ff

9

10

Meanwhile ioppementsdlalune is also the title of a musicalwork (for mezzo-sopra-

no and nine instruments) by the contemporary Canadian composer Christopher

Butterfield.

BeingandTime, trans. lohn Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper &

Row, 196z), zu-r4 (section 35).

WordVirus:The Willionr S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and lra Silverberg

(NewYork Grove Press, zooo),289.

" Postulates of Linguistics, " in AThousand Plateaus,76.

Georges Bataille's concept of ddpense, or the nonproductive expenditure ofen-ergy, wealth, words, work, and so forth, is essentially ludic. See "The Concept

of Expenditure," in Visions ofExcess: SelectedWritings, r9z7-rg3g, trans. Allan Stoekl

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), tr6-29. See also McCaffery,

"Writing as a GeneraI Economy" (NI, zor-zt).

See W. V. O. Quine, Word and )bject (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 196o), z:

Aware of the points thus far set forth, our philosopher may still try, in a spirit ofrationaI reconstruction, to abstract out a pure stream ofsense experience and

then depict physical doctrine as a means ofsystematizing regularities discernible

in the stream. He may imagine an ideal "protocol language" which, even if in

fact learned after common-sense talk of physical things or not at a[[, is eviden-

tially prior: a fancifully fanryless medium of unvarnished news. Talk of ordinary

physical things he would then see as, in principle, a device for simplifring that

disorderly account ofthe passing show.

See the Czech poet Ladislav Nebesky's "Non-written Words," http://www.thing.

net/-grist/ld/czech/Nebesky. pdf.

Trans. MargaretWaller (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1984),256.n85. The

citation is from Leon S. Roudiez, "Twelve Points fromTelQuel," L'EspritCreateur4,

no. z (Winter r974):3oo. See McCaffery, "The Martyrology as Paragram" (NI, 63-66).

"The Man with the Blue Guitar," inThe Collected Poems of Wallace Steuens (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 176.

Art-Longuoget, no. r (1969): t4.

1O : ON THE CONUNDRUM OF FORM AND MATERIAL

Perhaps not many will agree that form is a key concePt for Adorno. Lambert

Zuidervaart touches on form only in passing inAdorno'sAestheticTheory:TheRedemp'

tion oflllusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, r99r), esp. rz3-25, rz8-3o, 166-68 (see

note 2 below). Christopher Menke, meanwhile, think that form and material

are "borderline" concepts. See AestheticTheory: AexhericNegativiE in Adorno ond Der'

rida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1gg8),74.Shierry Weber Nicholson attaches

more importance to the question of form in Exoctlmagination,LateWork:OnAdorno's

ll

t2

t3

15

q

I

I

J

197

Aesrhetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), ro3-35 ("ConfigurationaI Form in

the Aesthetic Essay and the Enigma of AestheticTheory"), where configurational (or

constellational) form is paratactic, like the form ofAesthericTheory itself. See Ninhi

Kinya, "Form Should Not Be Tautological: Hegel and Adorno on Form," Japanese

lournol of Aesthetics 47, no. r (1996): 2536.1am indebted to l. M. Bernstein's discus-

sion ofAdorno's aesthetics in TheFateofArt: AestheticAlienationfromRonttoDerrido and

Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, r99z), esp. 197*2o6.

"Art," says Adorno, "can be understood onty by its laws of movement, not ac-

cording to any set of invariants. lt is defined by its relation to what it is not. The

specificatly artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone

would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its

specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of: its law of movement

is its law of form. lt exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that tran-

spires with its other" (AT, 3).

Actually, I think Adorno could find a place for Duchamp in his aesthetics by ob-

serving that the readymades are not just pund objects but have been staged, that

is, recontextualized and, therefore, implicitly conceptualized as art. Founrdin may

be, empirically, a urinal, butwith its signature, "R. Mutt," and its displacement

from the world of commodities to the exhibition, gallery, studio, museum, or

history of art, it has been transformed into something other. See Marjorie Perloff,

"The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp," inztst-Century Modernism;The"New"

Poetics (Oxford : Basi I B lackwe I l, zo oz), 7 8-tt 4.

See David Roberts, ArtandEnlightenment:AestheticTheoryafterAdorno (Lincoln: Uni-

versiry of Nebraska Press, r99t), gz.

See Hauke Brunkhorst, "lrreconcilable Modernity: Adorno's Aesthetic Experi-

mentalism and the Transgression Theorem," trans. Colin Sample, inThe Actualiry

of Adorno:CriticalEssaysonAdornoandthePostmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany, N.Y.:

SUNY Press, rggT), q-il, esp. 46. See also Susan Buck-Morss, TheOriginofNegative

Dialectics:TheodorW. Adorno,Walter Benjamin, and the Fronkfurr Instirure (New York: Free

Press, r977),63-8r ("The Logic oIDisintegration: The Object").

lndeed, as l. M. Bernstein says, the aim of dialectical thinking is not to resolve

contradictions but to experience them reflectively. See Bernstein, "Negative Dia-

lectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel," inThe Cambridge Companionto Adorno, ed. Thomas

Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, zoo4). 19-50, esp. 35-39.

See foseph Conte, "seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem," Sogetrieb u,

(Spring/Fall rygz): 35-45, esp. 37: "The series describes the complicated and

often desultory manner in which one thing follows another. lts modular forrn

-in which individual elements are both discontinuous and capable o[recombination-distinguishes it from the thematic development or narrative

progressionthatcharacterizeothertypesofthelongpocnt. Iltcst'ricsrcsistsa

systematic or determinate ordering of its materials, preferring collstarr t t lr.t trlit'

and even accident, a protean shape and even aleatory method." see also ( ()lrl("\

book on serial form, unending Design:The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (lthaca, N.Y.:

CornelI UniversitY Press, r99r).

In the section of AestheticTheo6r on "Universals and Particulars" Adorno writcs:

"That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art op-

poses them, is to be understood in terms of art's likeness to language. For lan-

guage is hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue. Language

mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the uni-

versal, but it does justice to its own universals onlywhen they are not used rigidly

in accord with the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to

the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed" (AT, zo4)'

I Adorno's is, to be sure, a "negative aesthetics" in lohanna Drucker's sense of

this term in her critique of the snobbery of academic theory, which (like Ador-

no) wants to keep the work of art separate from the social order (mass culture,

consumer culture, the art market), and which "has rigidified into predictable

categories of thought, each identifiabte by their characteristic vocabulary of the

'abject,' the'subversive,' the'transgressive,' the'resistant,' or other negative

keyword." see sweet Dreams: contemporary Art and Compliciry (chicago: university of

chicago Press, zoo5), xv. ButAdorno's aesthetics is also negative in the sense in

which his dialectical thinking is negative, namely that he conceives the modern-

ist artwork as an expression of the struggle of form and material-in contrast say

to the classical or humanist (or Yeatsian) aesthetic ofspreaachura, where the idea

is to conceal the Iabor of art-making.

ro See Zuiderv aart, Adorno's AesrheticTheory , 67-68: "The best works ofart respect the

unique identity ofthe nonidenticaI and do not force an identity ofform and con-

tent. They achieve a peaceful fragile reconciliation ofthe one and the many. In

such works, artistic form is a nonviolent synthesis Preserving divergent and con-

tradictory impulses, somethings even susPending itself for the sake of disparate

content. Adorno thinks of artistic form as an identity that makes the nonidenti-

cal less alien but lets it remain distinct. " Cf. r99: "For an artwork to be successful,

its form must preserve traces ofthe amorphousness that form tends to repress."

See also f ames Martin Harding, Adorno and "AWriting of the Ruins": Essays on Modern

AexheticsandAnglo-AmericanLiteratureandculture (Albany, N.Y.: sUNY Press, 1997),

z6-47 (" AestheticTheory and Fragmenting the Unities of Negation")'

Ir See Thomas Huhn, "Adorno's Aesthetics of lllusion," lournal of Aesthetics and Art

criricism 44, \o.3(winter 1985): t8r-8g. See also Fredric lameson's discussion of

the"crisisofschein" inLateManism:or,AdornoandthePersistenceoftheDiolecric(New

York: Verso, r99o), t65-76.

rz Recall Adorno on the essay as form: "Even in its manner of its presentation, the

199

13

essay may not act as though it had deduced its object and there was nothing left

to say about it. lts self-relativization is inherent in its form: it has to be construct-

ed as though it could always break off at any point. lt thinks in fragments, just as

reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through the breaks and not by

glossing them over" (NL, r:16).

Compare this to what Adorno says in his essay "schcinberg and Progress": after

complaining that the twelve-tone method is simply the working of a "self-pos-

ited system of rules," he goes on to observe the ways in which in his late work

Schonberg would interrupt the system. ln particular: "The need to finish works

was unknown to him." Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, zoo6), 94.

See Blanchot, "The FragmentWord (ltorole de fragment)": "A new kind of arrange-

ment not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconciliation, but that accepts

disjunction or divergence as the infinite center out ofwhich, through speech,

relation is to be created: an arrangement that does not compose but juxta-

poses, that is to say, leaves each of the terms that come into relation ourside

one another, respecting and preserving this erterioriry and this distance as the

principle-always already undercut-of all signification. luxtaposition and in-

terruption here assume an extraordinary force ofjustice" (lC, 3oB)

ln his Negoriue Dialectics Adorno writes: "Except among heretics, a[[ Western

metaphysics has been peephole metaphysics. The subject-a mere limited

moment-was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all

eternity to punish it for is deification. As through the crenels ofa parapet, the

subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star ofthe idea, or o[Being, is said to

rise. And yet it is the verywall around the subject that casts its shadowon whatev-

er the subject conjures: the shadow ofreification, which a subjective philosophy

will then helplessly fight against" (ND, t39-ao).

See Ulrich Plass's discussion ofAdorno on Borchardt inLonguageandHistoryinThe-

odor Adorno'sNotes to Literature (New York Routledge, zooT), 73*87.

Gedichte, ed. Cerhard Schuster und Lars Korten (Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotta,

zoo3), tto.(Koln: M. Dumont-schauberg, 1959), l, n.p.

The CambridgeCompanionto Adorno: see the entries by Robert Hullot-Kentor ("Right

Listening and a New Type of Human Being"), Max Paddison ("Authenticity and

Failure in Adorno's Aesthetics of Music"), Lydia Goehr ("Dissonant Works and the

Listening Public"), and Andrew Bowie ("Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of

Music"). With one or two exceptions, there is Iittle close readingof AestheticTheory

in Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., TheSemblance ofSubjecriuiry: Essays

onAdorno'sAestheticTheory, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, r997)--see particularly

ShierryWeberNicholson,"AestheticTheory'sMimesisofWalterBenjamin"(ss.)z);

and Heinz Paetzold, "Adorno's Notion ofNatural Beauty" (213-36).

Ren6e Heberle, ed., FeminisrlnrcrpretationsofTheodorAdorno (University Park: l\'rrrr

sylvania State University Press, zoo6).

Quoted in willoughby Sharp, "Lawrence Weiner in Amsterdam," Avokrulrc 4

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"Art as Art," ArtNews 65 (September ry66):72. See also "The Black-Sqtlarc l)ainl-

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Adorno, Theodor W., zo, 32, tz4, 143,

r9on4, r96nz, r97-98nrz, r98nr5; on art-

works, 155-58, 163-68; on form , $2-54,r97n1o; on the fragmentary, r55, r58-60,

ry7-98ntz; on language, r6o-63, r97n8

anecdotes, 5o-55, 58-59, 9tj6, roz, to4,

r84n6

anomaly, 3*5, 8-9, r8, u3, tzr, t36, rgo

Appel, Rosaire, r4

Ashbery, lohn, +-8, 164; "CrazyWeather,"

5-6; on Marianne Moore, 4; "No Way ofKnowing," 7-8; "Scheherazade," 7 ; "The

System," 7

Badiou, Alain, r8-r9Barnes, Diuna: Nightwood, 72-7 4, 77, 8t

Bataille, Ceorges, rzo, r85nr4, r95nro

Beckett, Samuel, 32, 6t, ro7, t47, l87nz;

Texs for Nothing, 6; "Three Dialogues," 3z;

Watt, t2*13

Benjamin, Waltet, 97, ry4n3Bernstein, Charles, 2, zo-23, rc4, vont7,

qtnz5, q 4n8, r76-77n23, t9z-93n8,r93nr4; "The Age ofCorreggio and the

Carracci," zt; " Dark City," zz; "Fragments

from the Seventeenth Manifesto of Nude

Formalism, " z3; Poeticlustice, zo-ztBion, W. R., u4Blanchot, Maurice, 32-3j, 98-gg, tz6, t6o,

q7nz8, y7n3o, r85nr4, r9zn6, r98nr4;

on fragmentary writing, 53, t6o, t98nt4;

on impossibility ofwriting, jz-3i; on

"language virus ," 143-44; on materiality

oflanguage, r44

Bok, Christian, g, tzt, 136, tgtnz3, 191n24;

Eunoio, g

220 221 ['

Borchardt, RudolI r53, r6o-6r

Borges, forge Luis, 96, 141-42,149

Brunkhorst, Hauke, 155-56

Burns, Gerald, r34; "Fireplace Poodles,"

r35-36; "ltself Defi ned," r36; "Surreal-

ism at Menti[," r35

Burroughs, William S., 5, 14

Cage, fohn, Sl,6q,8q-BS,94, tz9, t63*64

Caputi, Mary, 164

Celan, Paul, tB, 24, z7-34, q 4m3, q5nt6,q5nr8, q6nzo, q6nzr, t76*77n23,

r77nz4; "Blume i' :71ng; "Deine Frage,"

z9; "Die Abende," 3r; "Die Fleissigen,"

z9-3o; " Der Me ridian," z4-25, z8;

"Kalk-Krokus, " z7 -28; " Krokus, z5*26;"Weggebeizt," z9; "Wer herrscht," 33*34

complexity (chaos theory), 3-5, 7, 12, 31,

42,75,77,82, rz5, tz7, r34

conceptual art, z, ro, t64, 68n6,17P72n29

Coolidge, Clark, r33

Cooper, Anthony Ashley, r83nzo

Crane, Hart, ro

Creeley, Robert, 134-35, rTrnz

Danto, Arthur, 168n4

Davidson, Michael, r7rnz5

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Cuattari, 46-47

48,t43,ry4n2Derrida, facques, 3r, 64, yzn4o, q7nz7,

t8zrr4Drucker, lohanna, 157, t7t-7znzg, vzn34,

197n3

Duchamp, Marcel, r-2, r53, r67-68nr,

r68n6, r96n3

ethicaliry, 1g-2o, 23-24, z6-27, 3t-gz

fragmentary writing, 2, 7, n, 26, 32-34, 37,

39*q8,16-18, ro6, rn*r3, r38, t59-6o,

r77n3o, t98nt4Fredman, Stephen, t68n3, r69nz

Frye, Northrop,46, 96

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 27, r57

Gavreau, Claude, t 4t - 4zGaze, Tim, 4-1S,l-72n31Ceertz, Clifford, 79, fi7 ntColdsmith, Kenneth, rr-r3, r7tnz6, rytnz7,

t7 tnz9, t7 t -7 znz9, 77 2n3tGossman, Lione[,53,93

Graham, Dan, t5o-5r

Guattari, Felix. see Gilles Deleuze

Heidegger, Martin, 24, 25, z7*28, 64, 83,

r 4r.* 42, t5g, fi gnq, ry 4m 4, ]3zm 4Hejinian, Lyn, 56-7r, 158-59, r8o-8rnr,

t8on3, t8o-8tnr5, r8znr6, r83nt9,

r83nzz, rB9-9on p; "fhe Fatalist,"

$z-$nt7; My Life in rhe Nineties, r8tn8,

r8zn6

Helms, Hans G., r54, t6o, t6t-64Hotderlin, Friedrich, 154, 159-60

holopoetry, r4-r7

Howe, Susan, 35-SS, rygng; "Articulation

of Sound Forms inTime," 4z;"TheDe-fenestration of Prague," 44-45; " Eikon

Basilike," 39-42; Hinge Picrure, t6-gl;TheMidnight,48, 50-55; My Emily Dickinson,35,

37-38; "118 Westerly Place," 38

impossibility, 3r 13, 146

lsou, lsidore, r3

Iawis, Simon, D5-28, tg2r.8

Kac, Eduardo, r4-r7Kenner, Hugh, rz-r3, 53,57,59,92 93,

18on2, r93n13

Kosuth, loseph, r68n6

Kristeva, lulia, 69, r49

Kubler, George, D3,127, t34

Langer, Suzanne, zz

language, arrarclrir, .,7 .,lt; lltrirl v. syst('lIl'

atic, t2-73, 56, 77, tzo-zt, 46, r54-6t'q6nzz,r8ont, r88n4; found, tr-rz,22, 48-So, 8 4-go, :36-40; as garbage,

ro8-u, r88-89n8; "language virus,"

t4z-4s;"of theday," 3*6; and Proxim-ity, z6-z9, t73-74n6; as social practice,

ro7-B; visual, r3-t7

laughter, 65-68,7t

Levinas, Emmanuel, 1g-2o, 22, 23, 26'29'

33, 43- 44, q 3n4, q 3n5, t7 4n7

Lewis, David, to6-to, tt 4-r5, tzo-zt,

r87n4, r88n7 t88n8

Lewitt, sol, 10, r.71n29

Lyotard, f ean-FranEois, 62, lS-ll' tg' 82,'

t1o-17, 127, 16o, lBrnro

Mac Cormack, Karen, 72-9o; At lssue,

83-8+; " EMANCI-PATIO," 83 lmplexures,

8q-88; QuirlcsandQuillets, 8r-83; "Re-

union the Reproduction," I 4-lS; " Sleep

ls lncurable in Our Lifetime," 77'78;Von-

i0/ Releose, 88*9o

Mac Low, f ackson, Sl,6q,8q,t6q'193-94n22, r94n1

Mallarm6, Stdphane, g, z8-29, r4t' 144,

762,777n3o

Mandelstam, osiP, z4-25, z8

materiality, 1t-17, 23, 52, 9c., 141-44' 154'

t58, t77

Matthias, lohn, 9r-ro5, 184n2 185n15,

r85nr7 r86nzr, t86nz4; "Alexander

Kerensky at Stanfotd," g't; "Automys-

tifstical Plaice," ror-4; "Bakunin in

Italy," g5-g6; "A Civil Servant," 97-98;"Christopher lsherwood Stands on

His Head," roo-r; "Laundry Lists and

Manifestoes," ro4-5; "A PAINTER,"

g+-g5; "POST-ANECDOTAL," 99; "TH REE

SONGS FOR U. P.l.I' g6-St; "Tunes for

lohn Garvic," 94

Mayer, Bernadette, 8-to, t7ont9

McCaffery, Steve, 1o4, 173,120-27,

133 -34,137-51 "The Abstract Ruin,"

r17 4o; "Approprioptl,tptt'.," t4r 4t"l|('cthovenSonncts," I lt t/l, "lll!,llt

throtrgh Nostalgia," t48 4r1; "(,lro'.t

Poems," r49-5o; "Hegel's Eycs," r4tr ,17,

"Three Stanzas," 142

open form, t7,6t-69,88, t37-4o, t56-58,

r65, r89-9on rz, ry6n2, t96-97n7' $7nt o

oulipo, g

Palmer, Michael, 24, tz3-25, tz8

Paragram, 121,149

parataxis, zt, 3o, 38, 59-6o, 7 4*77, tto-l6,12g,154, 158*6o, r9tnr7 r96nt

Perloff, Marjorie, 14, t6t, r69n4, qzn3o

phrase, 5, 8-g, 62,75*84, tro-tg, rzt, 16o,

r8rnroPound, Ezra, 3, 92-93,96, loz, r58

Prynne, l.H.,to6-zz, rz6, t87n3, t88n7

r89nro, tgonrz

Quine, W. V. O., r94ntt

Raworth, Tom, D9-33, $3il 4

Reinhardt, Ad,39, t66

Saroyan, Aram, 131

Silliman, Ron, rtzsingulariry, 6, 42, 52, 112-13, 125' 127,137'

t44-46,r69m3sound, 4z-46, t4r-42

Spicer, lack, B, 14, 47, 59-6o, t59' qtnz4:.

"sporting Life," ro-rlStein, Gertrude, 6, t7, 57, 65, lyl q' n' lg'

86, tzr, t4z-t46,16c,162i "A Little Called

Pauline, " 7 4; Stonzas in Meditotion, 45;"Van orTwenry Years After: A Portrait of

Carl Van Vechten," 144-45

Stevens, Wallace, 2,38, t49

V:ilery, Paul, t6z, t7 onzz

visual poetry, 11-17, 36-42voice, zr, 35-36, 45-53, 8r, 85, r7gntz

x