Fables of representation essays 047209856X, 0472068563, 9780472098569, 9780472068562, 9780472026012

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
The New Millenium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture......Page 10
Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry......Page 13
Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey......Page 35
Stark Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler......Page 65
The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam......Page 82
Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School......Page 85
Upper Limit Music (Counted Verse)......Page 137
The New Modernism......Page 145
A Score for Undetermined Moments......Page 154
The Poet in His Skin: Remembering Paul Carroll......Page 172
Last Chicago Days: In Memory of Ted Berrigan......Page 181
Journals of Addiction......Page 184

Citation preview

PAU L H O OV E R

Fables of Representation Essays

Fables of Representation

POETS ON POETRY David Lehman, General Editor Donald Hall, Founding Editor

New titles Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language Paul Hoover, Fables of Representation Philip Larkin, Further Requirements Karl Shapiro, Essay on Rime Charles Simic, The Metaphysician in the Dark William Stafford, The Answers Are Inside the Mountains Recently published Thomas M. Disch, The Castle of Perseverance Mark Jarman, Body and Soul Philip Levine, So Ask David Mura, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto Stephen Yenser, A Boundless Field Also available are collections by A. R. Ammons, Robert Bly, Philip Booth, Marianne Boruch, Hayden Carruth, Fred Chappell, Amy Clampitt, Tom Clark, Douglas Crase, Robert Creeley, Donald Davie, Peter Davison, Tess Gallagher, Suzanne Gardinier, Linda Gregerson, Allen Grossman, Thom Gunn, Rachel Hadas, John Haines, Donald Hall, Joy Harjo, Robert Hayden, Edward Hirsch, Daniel Hoffman, Jonathan Holden, John Hollander, Andrew Hudgins, Josephine Jacobsen, Weldon Kees, Galway Kinnell, Mary Kinzie, Kenneth Koch, John Koethe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Kostelanetz, Maxine Kumin, Martin Lammon (editor), Philip Larkin, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, John Logan, William Logan, William Matthews, William Meredith, Jane Miller, Carol Muske, Geoffrey O’Brien, Gregory Orr, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Ron Padgett, Marge Piercy, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, James Tate, Richard Tillinghast, Diane Wakoski, C. K. Williams, Alan Williamson, Charles Wright, and James Wright

Paul Hoover

Fables of Representation essays

Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper 2007 2006 2005 2004

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoover, Paul, 1946– Fables of representation : essays / Paul Hoover. p. cm. — (Poets on poetry) ISBN 0-472-09856-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-472-06856-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Poetry. I. Title. II. Series. PS323.5 .H58 2004 811⬘.509—dc22 2003015076 ISBN13 978-0-472-09856-9 (cloth) ISBN13 978-0-472-06856-2 (paper) ISBN13 978-0-472-02601-2 (electronic)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Lehman for his helpful editing, which resulted in the writing of “Fables of Representation” and other important manuscript changes. I am also grateful to Nathaniel Mackey for his comments on “Pair of Figures for Eshu”; Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., for inviting me to participate in the Interarts Studies Seminars of the Center for Black Music Research; and David McCartney, Archivist at University of Iowa Library, for locating the Michael Palmer essay “Counter-poetics and Current Practice.” My gratitude also to the editors of the publications in which these essays appeared: Charles Henry Rowell and Paul Naylor (Callaloo), Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (An Exaltation of Forms), David Bonanno (American Poetry Review), Chad Faries and Jayson Iwen (Cream City Review), Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle (The Mechanics of the Mirage), Bin Ramke (Denver Quarterly), Neil Shepard (Green Mountains Review), Larry Kart (Chicago Tribune), Anne Waldman (Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan), Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Lenox Avenue), and Devin Johnston (Chicago Review). As always, I am indebted to Maxine Chernoff for her love and support.

Contents

The New Millennium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture

1

Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry

4

Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey

26

Stark Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler

56

The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam

73

Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School

76

Upper Limit Music (Counted Verse)

128

The New Modernism

136

A Score for Undetermined Moments

145

The Poet in His Skin: Remembering Paul Carroll

163

Last Chicago Days: In Memory of Ted Berrigan

172

Journals of Addiction

175

The New Millennium Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture

(Agree or Disagree) 1. The word “consumer” has replaced the word “citizen” in most forms of discourse. 2. Traditional culture is the enemy of consumerism. 3. Media culture collaborates with consumerism to destroy traditional beliefs. 4. Postmodern theory was created to confuse and intimidate the average literate citizen. 5. Avant-gardes are a necessary aspect of late capitalism. 6. Poetry has the same connection to social class that it had under aristocratic social orders. 7. The erotic allure of narrative lies in the courtship of author and reader, usually involving the courtly deference of the former to the latter. The eroticism of nonnarrative lies in the shared refusal of normal relations. 8. The mind can only conceive of uncertainty as a certainty—in other words, as an image. But images are of interest only when they communicate an uncertainty. 9. Poems are entirely factual. 10. The list, or series, is the major organizing principle of writing. 11. The out-of-sequence series is the organizing principle of most avant-garde writing. 12. The “new” in art is always imported from another culture. 13. Annihilation is the sincerest form of Battery. From Chicago Review 43, no. 4 (1997): 3–6.

14. There is more difference between one and zero than one and one million. 15. Poetry is a rumor told by the truth. 16. Even at their most fantastic, our thoughts are based on the world with which we are already familiar. All metaphor, therefore, is homely at base. 17. In photographs, the pose confronts the camera like a camera. 18. Photographs are by nature momentary (they are slices of time), dramatic (they are staged), and elegiac (they fade); in this, they resemble poetry. 19. Creativity is a sentimental concept. 20. The Alm script is the primary literary genre. 21. Choose one: (1) The names of things have more power than the things themselves; (2) The actuality of things is more expressive than language; (3) Things like oranges have tremendous presence, but are invisible without their names. 22. Writers, like actors, require personae. 23. The “new” is always strangely familiar. 24. The politics of language appears Arst in the preposition. 25. Relativism and pluralism are forms of absolutism. 26. Irony is closer to the truth than direct statements of fact. 27. Simple things like armies can be understood by pointing. 28. Postmodern dispersion is a form of irony, using multiplicity to arrive at a “new realism.” But it is a form of irony that lacks irony. 29. Language poetry is a sign sung by a seme. 30. Do writers feel pain, or are they too dishonest? 31. Fame is the truest form of transcendence. 32. Thought is sexless, but its subject matter is gendered. 33. Art is a form of social control. 34. Theory is Action with only one character. 35. Erasure is its own reward. 36. To know the future of an art, examine the most ridiculed and marginalized form of its current practice. 37. A sentence is never innocent. 38. Only actors have souls. 39. Transgression is a form of postmodern worship. 2

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

The past is still under construction. All literature is ultimately narrative. All narrative aspires to the chase scene. Only poetry approaches the speed of truth. The speed of reality is faster than the speed of attention. Nature Alls the gaps that authors leave. Dignity requires a history of suffering. Avant-garde poetry is nostalgic for tradition. Modernism has yet to complete its mission. Postmodernism is sentimental about the future. Because there is no belief, there is no millennial fervor.

3

Murder and Closure On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry

Where there is belief, there is millennial fervor. But belief is in retreat. Among postmodern unbelievers, the approaching millennium has been greeted with a yawn. There has been no resurgence of An de siècle temperament beyond Camille Paglia and no outcry about cultural exhaustion despite Jerry Springer. The romantic resurgence of midcentury, as exhibited by the Beat poets and confessionalism, remains in sight mainly for its nostalgia value. Despite the prominence of poets like Sharon Olds and Li-Young Lee, the free-verse confessional poem is not the dominant force that it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, other inBuences such as the New York School, language poetry, and spoken word poetry have already affected mainstream practice in ways that did not seem possible at the turn of the last decade. None of these inBuences has any quarrel with the apocalypse. The end of the second millennium invites no thematic ardor and no call for new categories. Language poetry, performance poetry, and expressions of multicultural identity, which constitute the “new,” have been around since the 1970s. Historically, moreover, they can be seen as aftereruptions of the 1960s rather than signal forces. Thus we approach the end of a thousand-year period not with a fear of historical closure but a fetishizing of poetic closure by the new Presented at an international conference on postwar American poetry at the University of Liege, Belgium, March 3, 1999; subsequently published in Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, ed. Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle (Liege: University of Liege Press, 2000).

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formalists (return to traditional forms) and language poetry (methodical and often whimsical Oulipian applications and the forever-closing “new sentence”). Despite their obvious differences, both movements are enamored of artiAce and method. In its preference for the part over the whole, irony over lyric ardor, and wit over belief, language poetry represents a neoclassical revival with a Marxist letter of introduction. The bridge between these left and right formalisms is Oulipo. In Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, Warren F. Motte, Jr., gives a brief history of the Ouvroir des Litteratures Potentielles, a group of French intellectuals who met in September of 1960 to establish “a new defense and illustration of the French language” and to create new literary forms. Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Raymond Queneau’s sonnet sequence Cent mille milliards de poemes (One hundred trillion poems), and Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic novel A Void (La Disparition) are prime examples of the Oulipo method. Calvino’s novel consists of the beginnings of several different novels but has no middle and no ending. Queneau’s sequence consists of ten Shakespearean sonnets with the same end rhymes. Since the rhymes make the lines interchangeable, mathematically as many as one hundred trillion sonnets, or ten to the fourteenth power, have been written by writing the Arst ten. (The interchangeability of parts owes its existence, by the way, to Henry Ford, democracy, dada, and Gertrude Stein.) The Perec novel is a lipogram, an invention of Oulipo that requires the elimination of a letter or letters from a piece of writing, with the result that there is no letter e in A Void. Motte writes, “La Disparition, received as resolutely avant-gardist, is in fact merely the most recent manifestation of a venerable literary tradition that can be traced back to the sixth century b.c.” (5). In his essay “History of the Lipogram,” Perec mentions the Greek writer Nestor of Laranda, third century a.d., who rewrote The Iliad but disallowed the letter A in the Arst canto, the letter B in the second, and so on until the entire alphabet was exhausted (Motte, 101). Other historical practitioners of the lipogram include an American sailor named Vincent Wright (1872–1939) who published the novel Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words without Using the Letter E (106). Oulipo is eccentric and vanguardist. It is also traditional in its distaste for 5

inspiration, self-expression, and other trappings of romanticism. Oulipo is highly methodical. “The only literature is voluntary literature,” wrote Raymond Queneau (Motte, 6). “All writing is a demonstration of method,” adds Charles Bernstein in his essay “Writing as Method” (Content, 226). There is a tradition of experimental formalism that includes writers like Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy; John Ashbery, whose interest in minor poetic forms like the sestina, pantoum, villanelle, cento, and noel helped revive their recent use; and, most recently, the language poets, whose distaste for the poetry of personal epiphany leads in the direction of processual composition and formal gamesmanship. Ron Silliman’s book-length prose poem, Tjanting, is built on the mathematical constraint of the Fibonacci number system, with the result that the number of sentences in each paragraph equals the number in the preceding two paragraphs. The poem develops arithmetically toward inAnity. Lyn Hejinian’s prose poem sequence My Life, written when she was thirty-seven, counted thirty-seven sentences to the section. She rewrote the poem at the age of fortyAve by adding eight sentences to each poem in the sequence. My Life and Tjanting display important features of Oulipo practice: the use of formal constraint, the devaluation of inspiration, and the use of mathematics in the development of constraints. Because the Fibonacci number sequence is also to be found in nature—for example, on fern fronds and snail shells—and because Hejinian uses a mathematical code personal to her own experience, their work can also be considered romantic formalism. As the new avant-garde, language poetry proposes method rather than madness. We live in an age of software, not hardware, process rather than product. Channel surAng and web crawling are process metaphors that also describe our current concept of the mind in action. In Oulipo and language poetry, the medium is the product. Is it the avant-garde or Panasonic that’s “slightly ahead of its time”? And what are we to make of an avant-garde that adopts the performance urges of dada cabaret, the compositional scatter of Mallarmé’s Un coup de des (ca. 1898), and Gertrude Stein’s “recreation of the word” and calls it the postmodern? Is everything late in the century tainted with nostalgia for earlier avant6

gardes and “new” mainly in its opposition to the recently old, like projectivism, the aleatory method, and the organic poem? Now that a purple patch from Kerouac’s bohemian-as-everyman novel On the Road has been used to sell InAniti automobiles, what does the baroque have in store? Wit, ambiguity, formality, irony, complexity? Imagine Night of the Living Dead with a cast of William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and the Fugitive poets. That’s the furious ghost of Laura Riding up-attic. In his essay “American Nostalgias,” Sven Birkerts writes of his own late-in-the-century, middle-aged nostalgia for a more perfect past when the American small town, as represented by his favorite Actional character, Harry Angstrom of John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run, deAned the moral universe. Caught in “time sickness” and a sense of rupture with his own past, Birkerts’s American “is increasingly susceptible to eruptions of elegiac fondness, not just for his past, but for a whole way of life that he sees fading before the chaotic excitements of late modernity” (27). The cause of our hero’s malaise is a “large-scale experiential shift, moving from a largely unconscious to an ever more conscious—even ‘hyperconscious’—relation to reality. We have . . . shifted from a simple, direct, unmediated sense of reality to one that is complexly mediated, saturated with information and the possibility of information” (27–28). What Birkerts describes is a “shock of the new” more intense than the modernist encounter with nonAgurative art. It is loss of one’s sense of reality, therefore of identity. The standard markers by which the self was mirrored—community, family, earth, church—are erased by the more illusory markers of (commodiAed) virtuality. “Something slippery has interposed itself between us and our neighbors,” Birkerts writes. “For the real we are substituting the virtual” (28). This is the same Birkerts, incidentally, who attacked John Ashbery’s Selected Poems at “that forlorn codex, garden of branching paths, termite tree of the late Millennium” (142). As admirers of Ashbery’s poetry, we may have reason to doubt Birkerts’s judgments about history, for he can apparently locate the real only by narrative means. “I have moved my eyes and felt the slow dispersion of my sense of self,” Birkerts wrote in his review. “I have been Bung back into the boredom and rage of childhood, and the whole world seemed to rear up against me, not 7

to be had or understood” (142). It must be a powerful poetry indeed to alter the reader’s identity. Nevertheless, Birkerts’s use of the word “slippery” is accurate. By means of the remote control device and computer mouse, we can slip into virtual worlds with ease and escape them with difAculty. In the realm of the erotic, we are strongly aware of the physical reality of Besh. But the slipperiness of media is enthralling. It allows us to imagine other realities and to assume powers that are natural only to desire. In a recent case, the Supreme Court judged that limits can indeed be placed on computer software, since one program provides for the head of some child of your acquaintance to be scanned onto the body of a child porn actor, who is then ordered to have relations with another virtual Agure. A San Francisco man twice convicted of tax evasion and fraud has established a virtual country, Melchizedek, with its own citizens, laws, and privileges. A strip of coastal land surrounding a green harbor, Melchizedek’s unreal estate can be viewed on-line. Presumably citizens of this new country will not have to pay taxes. The easy relation of language and desire derives from their virtuality. When desire inhabits and activates the “empty” symbolic system of language, sovereign states of meaning come into existence, each with a green harbor, gardens, a citizenry, and a tyrant. Virtuality has always been with us in the form of myth and Action, for literature offers both representative experiences and words as experience. The real includes the virtual. Under the postmodern aegis, reality is shifting and multiple in perspective. Birkerts however seems to rely on an Edenic concept of experience, which any removal or distance betrays. Yet poetry by its nature is intimacy at a distance, as Ashbery’s poetry reveals. Walter Benjamin writes of art, “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. . . . The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility” (220). Thus when art meets with mechanical reproduction, which began with Gutenberg, the “aura” of the work of art “withers.” Benjamin sees the work of art as inhabiting a shell, which may be pried open, thus destroying its aura. As things lose their aura, all objects are equal. In reading Ashbery, Birkerts is in horror of this 8

perceived loss of aura, which seems to prize the contingent and the arbitrary. Worse yet for Birkerts, Ashbery has a genuine affection for simulacra. In his embrace of the contingent and the “false,” he achieves some of his Anest lyricism: “Yet I cannot escape the picture / Of my small self in that bank of Bowers: / My head among the blazing phlox / Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. / I had a hard stare, accepting / Everything, taking nothing, / As though the rolled-up future might stink / As loud as stood the sick moment / The shutter clicked” (Ashbery, 28–29). In Ashbery as in most avant-garde poetry, traditional values such as lyricism often lie in hiding, to be unveiled by further reading or changes in literary fashion. But when Ashbery blushes, as he often does, its force can knock you down. Gertrude Stein commented, “After all, to me one human being is as important as another human being, and you might say that the landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the same value as a tree. Because the realism of the people who did realism before was a realism of trying to make people real. I was not interested in making the people real but in the essence or, as a painter would call it, value” (Haas, 16). Stein recognized what Benjamin calls “the universal equality of things” at the level of the word. As the material fact of language, words are given to artistic use. Of her method, she said, “I began to play with words then. I was a little obsessed by words of equal value. . . . You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth Century, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word [my italics], And out what it meant and act within it. . . . I began then to want to make a more complete picture of each word. . . . I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense” (Haas, 17–18). This “recreation of the word” was a radical move, creating a new realism based on the material fact of words rather than rhetorical unities. The literary work is based therefore on surface relation rather than psychological depth or the transcendental signiAed. “Nothing follows nothing except change,” McLuhan wrote in 9

Understanding Media. “So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly” (12). Birkerts’s identity is threatened with dissolution because he is a citizen of the old, lineal reality, while Ashbery is a postcubist citizen of a new tribal culture for whom change, multiplicity, and simultaneity are facts of life. With the “recognition of curved space in 1905,” McLuhan wrote, “the Gutenberg galaxy was ofAcially dissolved. With the end of lineal spacialisms and Axed points of view, compartmentalized knowledge became as unacceptable as it had always been irrelevant” (Gutenberg, 253). But the massive invasion of electronic media also means a shift from local loyalties such as one’s community, church, region, and nation to (tribal) consumer loyalties: I buy, therefore I am; I buy Armani, therefore I transcend. When even your old granny wears Nikes and says, “Just do it” with libidinous glee, the rule of desire is totalized. It is exactly the ruthlessness of commodity rule that makes a recent independent Alm by S. R. Bindler, Hands on a Hard Body, so dramatic. Set in Longview, Texas, it is a documentary about a contest in which a car dealer offers a brand-new pickup truck to the last person to remove his hands from it. Because the pickup truck is an economic tool of vast importance in Texas, necessity drives the drama, and we are reminded of Greek tragedy. We may also be reminded how protected from necessity we are by the comforts of advanced culture. In the same February 4, 1999, New York Times, an article, “Nerds in Gilded Cubicles,” describes the perks at Silicon Valley companies, which include executive chefs, company-subsidized gourmet cafeterias, Atness centers, free lattes, and, at Sun Microsystems, an “on-call lactation consultant.” With a $2,500 corporate adoption stipend, Sun Microsystems’ corporate diversity manager, Vicky Yee, “went to Guangzhou, China, to adopt her daughter” (Poole, D7). There is a vast difference between the reality of the diversity manager and the uses of pickup trucks in Texas, between the Silicon Valley executive driving a BMW with a “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm” bumper sticker and the primeval lives of three aged brothers in the documentary Alm Brother’s Keeper. 10

A new reality means a new poetry. Since consciousness is strongly inBuenced by the communication models of electronic media, it would be reasonable to examine language poetry and performance poetry for their connection to new technologies. W. Terrence Gordon offers a summary of Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: Printing was the mechanization of writing. It promoted nationalism and national languages, because international Latin did not have enough scope to provide markets for the printers. Print also fostered a sense of private identity (by making copies available to individual readers in such large numbers) and imposed a level of standardization in language that had not prevailed until then, thus making “correct” spelling and grammar a measure of literacy. Print culture intensiAed the effects of the older technology of writing. Before writing, mankind lived in acoustic space, the space of the spoken word, which is boundless, directionless, horizonless, and charged with emotion. Writing transformed space into something bounded, linear, structured, and rational. . . . Transformed into writing, speech lost the quality that made it part of the culture of acoustic space. (186–87)

The introduction of electronic media—radio, television, and now the multimedia computer—has brought a return to acoustic space and the privileging of the spoken word (performance poetry) and processual methods of composition (language poetry). In Understanding Media, in a chapter titled “The Spoken Word,” McLuhan saw the “potential of electronic technology for recreating the Pentecostal experience in the global village” (Gordon, 304). As Gordon notes, “Fire is the ancient symbol of becoming, of the process of transformation, of transcendence, and so of the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of a medium, combined at Pentecost in language” (304). At the same time, “The computer is the extension of the central nervous system. It offers the possibility of extending consciousness without verbalization, of getting past the fragmentation and the numbing effect that makes the Tower of Babel the counterpart to Pentecost” (Gordon, 305). In performance poetry, we have a 11

secular version of the verbal Are of McLuhan’s Pentecost. It seems transformative, it is amusing, and it is communal. But its moral message is Anally the righteousness of the medium on which it is transported. The prophecy turns out to be a rap poem by reg e. gaines about his Air Jordans. McLuhan sees the audile-tactile model of performance poetry in writers as diverse as Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce (especially Finnegans Wake), and Gertrude Stein. “It is strange,” he writes, “that modern readers have been so slow to recognize that the prose of Gertrude Stein, with its lack of punctuation and other visual aids, is a carefully devised strategy to get the passive visual reader into participant, oral action” (Understanding, 83). With writers like Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Bernstein, therefore, we see literariness joined with the performance model of oral culture. Despite the Robert Grenier pronouncement, “I hate speech,” so often cited by San Francisco language poets, much language poetry is not written for the page but rather to be spoken. In his essay “Voice in Extremis,” language poet Steve McCaffery joins the wordless dada sound poems of Hugo Ball to “cross-cultural glossolalia” and to the “Jewish automatic speech known as ‘maggidism’” (Close, 164). Roland Barthes writes of the vocal performance in terms of “pulsional incidents, the language lined with Besh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony” (163). Because of the unifying and characterizing force of speech, even the most polysemic texts take shape when given voice. But larger issues are presented by the ideological battlegrounds of realism and mimesis. It would be useful, therefore, to look at kinds of realism since William Carlos Williams. As an imagist, Williams asserted that “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” In other words, both poems and human perception depend on the Agural relations of the observable world. The familiarity and reliability of such objects are part of their authenticity. But the poem further demands the authenticity of form, which appears in the use of counted verse (a given number of words to the line), the juxtaposition of modifying words (“glazed 12

with rain”) in the Arst line of each stanza followed by the noun modiAed (“water”) in the second, and the assonance of glazed/rain and beside/white. Williams is asserting that as much depends on the form of the poem as on its contents. The poem’s mode is therefore not realism but polemic. Indeed, many of Williams’s poems are persuasive and rhetorical rather than realistic: “These / are the desolate, dark weeks / when nature in its barrenness / equals the stupidity of man.” Thematic and rhetorical poetry is a major mode for most poets. Poems are not acts of attention, as Robert Creeley has noted, as much as acts of epistemological assertion. Williams’s “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” is however written in full, frontal realism: “There were some dirty plates / and a glass of milk / beside her on the small table / near the rank, disheveled bed.” Like many poets for whom form matters, Williams changed modes as the poem demanded. “The Sea-Elephant,” “The Botticellian Trees,” and the wonderful section IX of Spring and All beginning “What about this writing? / O “Kiki” / “O Miss Margaret Jarvis / The backhandspring” are hardly realism in the conventional sense. Their sinuous complexity announces the poems as constructions. Yet they are as enamored of the world as they are of their constructedness: “Sick / of April’s smallness / the little / leaves— / Flesh has lief of you / enormous sea— / Speak! / Blouaugh!” Charles Bernstein’s poem-essay, “ArtiAce of Absorption,” calls for ambivolent switching, which I am so fond of, between absorption & antiabsorption, which can now be described as redirected absorption. The speed of the shifts ultimately becomes a metric weight, & as the pace picks up, the frenzied spiral focusing / unfocusing enmeshes into a dysraphic whole—not totality—an alchemical

“overlay and blending” (Poetics, 78) 13

Despite the similarities between Williams and Bernstein on the level of shifting voices and points of view, despite their sharing an “audile-tactile” world common to the electronic age, the focused drive in Williams toward a thematic object such as a sea-elephant is different from the language poets, whose themes are expressive of theory. In language poetry the medium of language, not the external world, is the subject of the poem. Unsteadiness and mosaic organization were features of modernist poetry, too. But language poetry actively privileges this act of “mis-seaming,” placing more emphasis on the stitch or transition than on the materials mis-conjoined. Nathaniel Mackey uses a folk metaphor of the Dogon people, “the creaking of the word,” to express the “misAt” between words and objects that is so central to contemporary concepts of meaning. It’s not that the world, as represented by the sea-elephant, has disappeared. The avant-garde has simply lost interest in reality’s metaphorical power. Poetry that attempts diegesis, or illusion-making, is therefore suspect to the postmodern mind intent on its interruptions. The power of remote control is never depth but rather instantaneous access and surface speed: channel surAng as its own pleasure. The subject politely withdraws. But if this interruptiveness is inspired by electronic mass media, which is controlled by powerful capitalist interests, how is such a literature revolutionary? Or does the avant-garde exist to introduce to the larger public the styles and jargon of new technological realities? Is interruptiveness a sentimental rhetoric of the new realism? According to McLuhan, “the real ‘abstract’ art is that of realism and naturalism based on a separation of the visual faculty from the interplay of the other senses. So-called abstract art is, in fact, the result of much sense interplay with varying dominance of ear and touch” (Gutenberg, 65). In other words, illusionmaking is a product of print culture. Other realisms are possible based on audile-tactile perception. The breakthrough appeared to come with cubism: “By giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back and front and the rest, in two dimensions, [it] drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole” (Understanding, 13). Dada sound poems

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and cut-up poems offered a further break with illusion. But surrealist collage, by emphasizing the syncretism of cut-ups in dreamlike conjunction, turned in the other direction, toward the “absolute” and mythic realism. Benjamin writes, “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in Alm” (237). More important for postmodernism is what Benjamin describes as the “relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production” (237–38). In A Semiotics of the Cinema, Christian Metz writes, “One of the most important of the many problems in Alm theory is that of the impression of reality experienced by the spectator. Films give us the feeling that we are witnessing an almost real spectacle— to a much greater extent . . . than does a novel, a play, or a Agurative painting. Films release a mechanism of affective and perceptual participation in the spectator (one is almost never totally bored by a movie). They spontaneously appeal to his sense of belief—never, of course, entirely, but more intensely than do the other arts. . . . They speak to us with the accents of true evidence” (4). Metz’s comment explains why Alm has replaced Action, poetry, and other forms of literature as the most popular “authored” art form. Yet Alm is also endearing as the most commodiAed form of contemporary expression. As a mechanical rather than digital production (this is changing), Alm also makes us nostalgic about the click and whir of the projector. The questions for poetry are many in an electronic age, but foremost among them is whether poetry, which can only occupy the comparatively abstract medium of language, should strive to create “an impression of reality” at all. Of the literary arts, poetry is the most compressed, least given to narrative dominance (therefore least visual), and most artiAcial. But an impression of reality can be created by emphasizing the visual element. Allen Ginsberg’s list poem “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels” does so by skillfully governing point of view. The reader becomes a sweating, thinking camera moving through the poem’s scenes. The poem’s language is as “objective” and neutral as the world of things:

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a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet tights, one muscular smooth skinned man sweating dancing for hours, beer cans bent littering the yard, a hanged man sculpture dangling from a high creek branch, children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks. And 4 police cars parked outside the painted gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

While the scene may evoke an image of Ginsberg as a well-known observer and participant in midcentury culture, its reliability is due to the familiarity of the world it presents. In this sense, the poem is photographic realism. As an imagist catalogue, “Hell’s Angels” has little poetic rhetoric. Thus its “camera movements” are the primary evidence of authorship—if the point of view shifts, someone must be shifting it. The work is transparent and seeks to be so. Thus it is easy for a reader to understand on Arst acquaintance. Easiness and diegesis would seem to go hand in hand. The poem contains carnivalesque action, but no one is heard to speak. Yet the poem is far from silent. There is the impression of incidental sound throughout, from the people dancing at the party, to the hanged man sculpture, to the sleeping children, to the leaves above the police cars, which have the potential for noise. As watchers of the poem, we invest it with imaginative aural life. In a play, the verbal element is central and the artiAce of the stage overwhelmingly unreal. In this respect, plays resemble poems. Of cinema, on the other hand, Metz writes, “Whatever one may say about it, Alm dialogue is never entirely diegetic . . . the verbal element is never entirely integrated into the Alm. It sticks out, necessarily. Speech is always something of a spokesman. It is never altogether in the Alm, but always a little ahead of it” (54). At the same time, “the cinematic image is primarily speech. It is all assertion. The word, which is the unit of language, is missing: the sentence, which is the unit of speech, is supreme. The cinema can speak only in neologisms. Every image is a hapax” (69). Joseph Vendrys claims that the following statement contains Ave cinematic sentences: “You see that man / over there / he’s sitting on the sand / well, I met him yesterday / he was at the station” (66). 16

The great difference between poetry and cinema (there are many) is that in Alm, according to Metz, “the image is always actualized” (67). In poetry, actualization occurs on many levels at the same time including the sound of the words and phrases, the timing of the sentences, the formal relation of the parts, the intellectual demand placed by the poem as thought, and the obvious underlying fact that poems are in words, while Alms rely primarily on images. Because imagist poems are so constrained by phanopoesis, Pound’s term, they are in the long run foreign to what poetry does best, which is to display the complex privacy of thinking, and the emotional announcement that is poetic rhetoric. Any attempt to abolish rhetoric in poetry will ultimately fail. Rhetoric is central to the poem’s emotional “push” even when that intention is ironic or muted, as in language poetry. Related to photographic and cinematic realism in poetry is mythic realism, which can be found in the work of Charles Simic and Sylvia Plath, among others. Simic’s “Interlude” Arst appeared in Austerities, 1982: A worm In an otherwise Red apple Said: I am. It happened on a chipped China plate, At a table With twelve empty chairs. The rightful owner Of the apple Had gone into the kitchen To get a knife. She was an old woman Who forgot things easily. Dear me, She whispered.

Metz writes, “Everything is present in Alm: hence the obviousness of Alm, and hence also its opacity . . . .The relationships in praesentia are so rich that they render the strict organization 17

of in-absentia relationships superBuous and difAcult” (69). In Simic’s poem, we have a narrative procession of images with the calm logic of Jean Vendrys’s cinematic “sentences.” The images are alternately of absence and presence, with much of the poem’s power residing in what doesn’t happen. Because the knife that isn’t retrieved, the assertive Cartesian worm can live safely in the “room” of the apple. Meanwhile, the apple’s rightful owner has gone into a neighboring room to possess an absence. The impressive table with its twelve chairs remains empty. Only an old woman is there to remember a time when the chairs were Alled. As her memory fades, only the cocky little worm has its wits about it. The poem is mythic because it concerns the essential and the inevitable; also, it is noticeably a metaphysical Action. In the postmodern view, nothing is sacred but change. In mythic realism, the most singular change is death, which resonates strangely from the most ordinary events. In Simic’s poetry, the soft but heavy step of an old woman into the next room is weighted with that knowledge. This is not processual poetry written in honor of consciousness and the new technologies; it is a processional poetry written in knowledge of the “meathook realities” of life, to quote Hunter S. Thompson. Rather than confront this darkness in its banal actuality, Simic chooses the timeless metaphysical stage. The metaphysical requires the diegetic technologies of narrative and image, which it converts to essential Action through metaphor. By seeing the disjunctive contrast of the old woman, the worm, and the twelve chairs, we hear the vacancy in her whisper. Disjunction, dysraphism, surrealist collage, the creaking of the word, what’s the difference? As the real is invaded by the possible, there is rupture all the same. Because scene-making and narrative are employed, our Arst impression is of a uniAed, steady discourse. But like Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” Simic’s poetry shows that the powers of absence are active presences in our lives. If Simic’s hymn is to death and disbelief, the postmodern hymn is to indeterminacy. Belief in the uncertainty of knowledge leads to a new metaphysics of disunity. It is also a major source of “language realism,” an interruptive rhetoric in which the dis18

junctive series, or list, is prominent. Its favorite device is the “new sentence,” which Ron Silliman claims to be found “more or less exclusively in the prose of the Bay Area” (Sentence 63). He Ands precursors for the new sentence in a prose poem by Mallarmé entitled “The Pipe,” William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, and in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. A new sentence is, according to Silliman, “a sentence with an interior poetic structure in addition to interior ordinary grammatic structure” (90). It is not “the systematic distortion of the maximum or highest order of meaning, as in surrealism. Rather, each sentence plays with the preceding and following sentence” (90). Silliman makes the foundational claim that Barrett Watten’s poem “Chamber Music,” in his collection Decay, is the Arst known use of the form. Silliman’s strongest claim follows: “The new sentence is the Arst prose technique to identify the signiAer (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signiAed . . .” (93). As indeterminacy becomes the house style of postmodernism, the tyranny of the material signiAer is also possible. What about the relationship of language poetry to realism, that old nemesis of the avant-garde? “Language, Realism, Poetry” is the title of the introduction to In the American Tree (1986), Silliman’s anthology of language poetry heavily emphasizing West Coast practice. It contains the following: [Barrett] Watten and [Robert] Grenier were by no means the only young poets in 1971 who sensed the claustrophobic constraints of a poetics with which they nonetheless largely identiAed [projective verse and more generally the “New Americans” of Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry], and who thus sought other avenues, new methods that might lead to a more open and useful investigation, hopefully to renew verse itself, so that it might offer readers the same opacity, density, otherness, challenge, and relevance persons Cnd in the “real” world. (xvi; my italics)

The goal is to expand realism into other areas than the “normative.” Such realism is possible because the world itself reBects opacity, density, and otherness. A difAcult world, in other words, 19

requires a difAcult literature. Later in the introduction, Silliman writes: These are not to be underestimated. The nature of reality. The nature of the individual. The function of language in the constitution of either realm. The nature of meaning. The substantiality of language. The shape and value of literature itself. The function of method. The relation between writer and reader. Much, perhaps too much, has been made of the critique of reference and normative syntax inherent in the work of many of the writers here, without acknowledging the degree to which this critique is itself situated within the larger question of what, in the last part of the twentieth century, it means to be human. (xix)

The nature of reality and the individual, to which Silliman appeals, is central to liberal humanism. The means to this humanism is a “revolution of the word” as darkly utopian as surrealism and perhaps as naive, for it arrives in an era when the search for the absolute locates only the contingent. A difAcult realism is part of language poetry’s moral agency—the refashioning of meaning to reBect the technological, perceptual, and moral remaking of post-Vietnam society. By occupying an eternal present of this, this, this, the new sentence avoids the pitfalls of point of view, lyricism, plodding narration, and the excesses of poetic rhetoric. It seeks what Shklovsky called Verfremdung, or estrangement, an effect which reminds us, as Fredric Jameson writes, “that the objects and institutions you thought to be natural were really only historical: the result of change, they themselves henceforth become in their turn changeable” (58). But estrangement needs the ballast of the real. Perpetual estrangement becomes that which it opposes, an “eternity of the present” that is undisrupted, unopposed, and normative. Perhaps this is why the new sentence, as practiced by Silliman and Hejinian at least, makes use of conventional realistic modes including the autobiographical and diaristic. Here are the opening paragraphs of Silliman’s Tjanting: Not this. What then? 20

I started over & over. Not this. Last week I wrote “the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I could barely grip the pen.” When then? This morning my lip is blisterd. Of about to within which. Again & again & again I began. The gray light of day Alls the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease had spilld on the stove top. Not that either. Last week I wrote “the muscle at thumb’s root so taut from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp.” Not so. What then? Wld I begin? This morning my lip is tender, disAgurd. I sat in an old chair out behind the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.

Narrative stability is provided by the Arst-person point of view, the author’s constant judgment of what will sufAce in the construction of the work at hand (“Not this. What then?”), and in scene-making details like the grease on the stove, the rump roast, the old chair behind the anise, and the gray light in a yellow room. The everyday nature of the poem’s observations are reminiscent of the New York School quotidian, Frank O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” mode transformed into “I write this, I write that.” Erich Auerbach refers to the representation of daily life in Homer and the Bible as “domestic realism” (22). Thus O’Hara is a cosmopolitan domestic realist and Silliman a Marxist domestic realist recounting the everyday life of the material signiAer. Silliman’s voice as Arst-person narrator is low-key and personist, at least in the paragraphs quoted. But this casualness is controverted by the staccato nervousness of the shorter sentences, the poem’s refusal to proceed thematically, and sentences like “Of about to within which” which do not refer outward. When familiar references appear, such “I cld barely write ‘I grip this pen,’” it is to remind us that narrative and atmospheric “build-up” will not occur as the reader perhaps expected. A plausibility. Analogy to “quick” sand. Mute pleonasm. Nor that either. Planarians, trematodes. Bookd burglar. What water was, wld be. Last week I cld barely write “I grip this pen.” The names of dust. Blue butterBy atop the green concrete. Categories of silence. Not so. Articles pervert. Exactly. Ploughs the page, plunders. What then? 21

Because Tjanting is so long—213 pages of fully justiAed prose in the 1981 edition—we have the impression of being surrounded by, or packed in a container with, granular particles of verbal matter: the fullness of the real as quantity. In its announcement of plenitude, the poem replicates the chaos of being. It does not represent or interpret reality so much as attempt to reenact it. We are thrust onto a grid of pieced and plotted thisness (the cover design of Tjanting and Steve McCaffery’s book-length prose work Panopticon present Agures against a gridded background) that communicates both expansiveness and containment. InBuenced by minimalism in painting and sculpture, the new sentence refuses illusionism, idealism, and the curved line. There is an accretion of minims but never the rising and falling of mood that comes with poetic rhetoric. As a massive catalogue of moments of attention, the book resembles a dictionary more than an epic poem (an epic includes history); it lends itself to be read in parts rather than as a whole. The text is opaque to the reader by its own intentions, but gains transparency when read aloud in reasonable amounts and when it introduces normative sentences (“A desert by the sea is a sight to see”). In such writing, the reader is the guard inside the panopticon tower, and the text is a multiplicity of prison cells, each with its own history and plans for escape. In a discussion of Chanson d’Alexis, a verse romance of the eleventh century, Erich Auerbach writes, “The attitudes reBected in this text are different entirely from those of the Chanson du Roland. But it exhibits the same paratactic and rigid style, the same narrowness, indisputability, and Axity of all categories” (Mimesis, 111). Language poetry is such a radical break with traditional mimesis that it risks establishing its own Axed position. To adopt Marshall McLuhan’s concept of reversal, in demanding freedom from traditional structures it can reduce the poetic modes to varieties of disjunction; in its radical search for openness it can locate the closed; and in its call for interruptiveness it can become spellbinding. Hejinian’s My Life places much more pronounced emphasis on autobiography, the bourgeois subject, and domestic realism. Here is an excerpt from the “A pause, a rose, something on paper” section of the book: 22

A moment yellow, just as four years later when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple—though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of prenecessity. The better things were gathered in a pen.

In contrast with the pulse of difference in Tjanting, adjacent sentences approach narrative relation. Far from predictably narrative, however, the poem allows for the interplay of modes rather than the dominance of one mode over another. Such mode shifting is a feature of Charles Bernstein’s early poems like “The Klupzy Girl” and “Island Life.” It is also an element of Bernstein’s style that links him to John Ashbery. As a model of the interaction of modes, or aesthetic realism, I offer Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Pre & Con, or Positions & Junctions,” the opening section of her recent book, Split InCnites. The serial poem consists of twelve sections in which lyric and narrative passages are interrupted by conjunctions and prepositions—thus the title “Pre & Con.” Neutral words like “and,” “of,” “when,” and “with” are stained with presence by more conventionally poetic words like “lovers,” “shadows,” “repose,” and “craving.” At the same time, the overripe rhetoric of love poetry is muted and balanced. Here is the Arst section of the poem: The sun’s light and is compounded and lovers and emphatically and cast long and shadows of and a look and on the and face of a girl waiting for and the night and with imperfect repose and secret and craving 23

and bodies operate and upon one and another and blue may differ and in depth

In “ArtiAce of Absorption,” Charles Bernstein writes of an “interruptiveness / that intensiAes & prolongs desire, a postponement / that Ands in delay a more sustaining pleasure” (Poetics, 72). In “Pre & Con,” postponement exists in balance with desire. By refusing to fetishize delay, Waldrop allows the poem— and also desire—to come to fulAllment. It is also a pleasure to see an experimental poetry relieved from the battle with “phantom objectivity” (Lukács, in Hartley, 54). As Bob Perelman writes in his poem “Things”: “ReiAcation won’t get you out of the parking lot.” Because Waldrop’s devotion is not to theory but to the poem, contrasting materials are brought into dramatic agreement. The word “and” circulates in a “recreation of the word” while maintaining cadence. Such aesthetic realism is all that art requires: the Batted note next to the resonant chord, the smeared face of the otherwise realistic portrait. works cited Ashbery, John. Some Trees. New York: Corinth Books, 1970. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. Birkerts, Sven. Review of Selected Poems, by John Ashbery. Sulfur 19 (spring 1987): 142–48. Bernstein, Charles. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. Content’s Dream. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986. ———. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Gordon, W. Terence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Haas, Robert Bartlett. A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

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Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Kennedy, Randy. “It’s a Film about Winning a Truck? Yes, but More.” New York Times, February 4, 1999, B2. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGrawHill, 1964. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Motte, Walter F., Jr. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Perelman, Bob. The First World. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1986. Poole, Gary Andrew. “Nerds in Golden Cubicles.” New York Times, February 4, 1999, D1–D7. Silliman, Ron. Tjanting. Berkeley: The Figures, 1981. ———. In the American Tree. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. ———. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987. Waldrop, Rosmarie. Split InCnites. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1998.

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Pair of Figures for Eshu Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (38)

In Du Bois’s view, Emancipation brought to the American Negro a “dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect” (41). But with the birth of self-consciousness, the former slave sees his own soul “darkly as through a veil,” with only “some faint revelation of his power, his mission” (41). Du Bois’s “double consciousness” inevitably brings to mind Lacan’s “mirror stage” of consciousness. Seeing itself in the social mirror of white America, the ex-slave enters a complex diPresented at Integrative Studies Seminar, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, on January 31, 1998; published in Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 5 (1999): 3–20 and Callaloo 23, no. 2 (2000): 728–48.

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alectic of identiAcation, creating an imago of self that is partly a construction of the nonblack other. Lacan writes: Indeed, for the imagos—whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efAcacity—the mirror-stage would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one’s own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its inArmities, or its object-projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested. (3)

Consciousness is double—and to a degree “veiled”—for all people in the Lacanian scheme. For the socially marginalized, it is dizzyingly multiple. Frantz Fanon writes, “Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (110–11). A black person is “dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes,” and thereby “Cxed” (116). Doubleness is a feature even of the format of The Souls of Black Folk. Each chapter begins with a passage of European or American poetry and notated black music. In the Arst chapter these consist of “The Crying of Waters” by British poet Arthur Symons and the Negro spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Moreover, Du Bois’s use of “second sight” and “veil” relates to African-American folklore. In the words of editors Blight and Gooding-Williams, “a child born with a caul, a veillike membrane that sometimes covers the head at birth, is said to be lucky, to be able to tell fortunes, and to be a ‘doublesighted’ seer of ghosts. In some West African folk traditions, a child born with a caul is thought to possess a special personality endowed with spiritual potency” (Du Bois, 197). In Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Werner Sollors discusses the double consciousness of the American ethnic writer, who must negotiate with what James Weldon Johnson called the problem of the “double audience.” Characteristics of authorial double consciousness lie in (1) “a superior narrator explaining to a reader, whose values he presumably 27

shares, some inside information”;1 (2) the use of dialect as a formal strategy to accommodate double audiences—for example, Langston Hughes’s Semple stories or Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley Says; (3) the comic and ironic use of the unreliable narrator, a technique that conBates modernist and ethnic self-consciousness in a forest of mirrorings—examples given are Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the latter narrated unreliably by a native of Zembla, a Actional country that combines Russia and the United States, Nabokov’s own “home” lands (250–52). Sollors also remarks on the “ethnic tranvestitism” of writers like Daniel James, an American writer of Irish descent who wrote “Chicano” stories under the name Danny Santiago (252). The wearing of ethnic masks is peculiar to the United States, where the proximity of ethnic groups and their dialogic interaction inevitably result in crosscultural inBuence. Doubleness is also inherent in the Yoruba trickster god Eshu. John Pemberton III comments on a pair of Agures from the Igbomina Yoruba region of Nigeria. Constructed of wood and ten and eleven inches high, respectively, they depict the phallic hairstyle, the playing of a Bute, and the gourds of powerful medicine (oogun) . . . distinctive features of the iconography of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god. They tell of Eshu’s power. He is the messenger, the herald of the gods, who announces their presence . . . as he races through the streets, the marketplace, and even into the king’s palace. He appears so unexpectedly, moves so rapidly, plays so wildly or softly, all the while dancing like a spinning top, that men see and do not see, hear and do not hear him. Pointing his gourds of medicine, he confuses the arrogant, deceives the careless, and trips the powerful. . . . This disturber of the peace is also the keeper of ashe on earth. Ashe is the divine power with which Olodumare, the High God, created and now sustains the world. As its custodian, Eshu uses the power to release or withhold the blessings and the angers of the gods (orisha) and to control such malevolent spirits (ajogun) as disease and death. . . . Eshu, the bearer of sacriAces, is the mediator, the master of exchange. Although Eshu is always thought of as male, he is often associated with paired male 28

and female Agures. The Agures stand for the tension and creative possibilities of human sexuality and reBect Eshu’s power. (98)

Yoruba theology sees sexuality as a mediating force with the ability to overcome opposition. It is a “gracious power that cannot be forced” (98). Each partner contributes equally in the creation of life. The depiction of Eshu as paired Agures, male and female, shows the complexity and wisdom of Yoruba theology. As one of the key orisha, Eshu has the ability to mediate between men and the gods. In his invisibility and speed, he is a trickster whose duplicity is moral, keeping the people, kings, and other gods off balance and therefore on moral center. In this respect, Eshu is an emblem of the poet and artist, a priest and ironist who mediates between the worlds of the sacred and the mundane. Also known as Eshu-Elegbara, Elegba, and Legba, he has the ability to make all things happen and multiply. According to Robert Farris Thompson, Eshu is associated with crossroads and other crucial points of intersection. He even “wears” the crossroads as a cap, “colored black on one side, red on the other, provoking in his wake foolish arguments about whether his cap is black or red” (1984, 19). Eshu is then the master of “potentiality” and manyness. Ever multiplying and guilty of gluttony as a young god (he consumed his own mother and threatened to consume his father, the god of divination, whereupon his father hacked him to pieces now represented by laterite icons called yangi), Eshu is also the god of generosity (21). In his several names and guises, Eshu is linguistically and ritually double. Using the theology of West Africa, the theme of doubleness, and the importance of features such as gesture and posture, color, unity and diversity, and narrative, I will examine some recent paintings by Kerry James Marshall and the writings of poet Nathaniel Mackey, especially Bedouin Hornbook, a comic novel of ideas based on jazz. Born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, Kerry James Marshall moved to Watts in 1963, where his family lived in a newly constructed housing project, and to South Central Los Angeles in 1965. Having desired to be an artist since the age of Ave, when a 29

kindergarten teacher showed him her scrapbook of old Christmas cards, Marshall got his B.F.A. degree from Otis Art Institute in 1978 and moved to Chicago in 1987, where he now lives. In a review of four paintings from “The Garden Project,” a series of works depicting scenes from housing project, critic Michael Kimmelman (1995) writes, “His Agures are stiff and stylized: almost stereotypes, yet touching. The buildings they live in are cardboard backdrops, as if Mr. Marshall were calling attention to the falseness of the scenario: the projects’ false utopianism and perhaps our own false, narrow image of life in them.” In a review of earlier work, Stephen Westfall (1993) writes, “In the shallow, stagelike spaces of Kerry James Marshall’s large unstretched canvases, black men and women pose and turn with a majestic sense of inner stillness. Their faces are wide-eyed and solemn, even when they are smiling. The air around them buzzes with signs: voodoo hex symbols, musical staves and snatches of song lyrics, and the Bames of votive candles, all hovering like ghosts of cultural memories.” Westfall goes on to write that Marshall’s work “moves on a level far deeper than even that of empathy for the African-American psyche. There’s something about the Agures themselves, their knowingness. As in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, these Agures appear consciously to inhabit their own fate.” Edith Newhall (1993) writes that Marshall “explores the mystique of blackness from a psychological distance. His mysterious writing and symbols recall Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings and his Bat, stylized Agures bring to mind both Renaissance and Haitian art. . . . His painted images are so powerfully archaic, it could be argued that they’re really enhanced by their deliberately crude surfaces. Although Marshall’s subjects vary, certain aspects of his art are consistent: the monumental size of his unframed canvases; the use of stylized Agures, often somewhat stiff or sculptural in appearance; the depiction of African-American subjects and places; the use of irony, sometimes overtly political as in NatShango (Thunder) and almost always disquieting; the frontality of his portraits, in which the gaze of the Agure, in its coolness, appears to combat the gaze of the viewer; the indigo color of his Agures’ skin, which announces them as symbolic and totemic but also reminds some commentators of Robert Colescott’s “wide-eyed, big lipped Negroes” (Kennedy 1995); the related 30

motif of the Agures’ strikingly white eyes, set in dramatic contrast to their skin color; and, perhaps most notably, the lack of affect on the faces of the Agures, who neither smile nor frown but keep an attentive reserve. I will argue that many of these characteristics can be traced to Yoruba theology, especially the Agure of Eshu. At the opening reception of a 1995 show, a fellow artist asked Marshall why his Agures are so black. “I painted them to heighten their function as rhetorical Agures,” Marshall responded. “That’s how we identify ourselves, as black. It’s going to that extreme that we accumulate our power. I also wanted to heighten their visual impact as social and political Agures. They do Birt with that tradition of derogatory images, but where the humor lies in my work has nothing to do with those Agures” (Kennedy 1995). The rhetoric of blackness, like many other elements of Marshall paintings, has more than one side. On the one hand, it emphasizes blackness as power and cultural unity. Heightened by the general lack of contour of the Agures’ faces, this power suggests the refusal of the white gaze. On the other hand, indigo coloration may serve to remind the black viewer that color is as much rhetoric as reality. Many “black” people are not indigo in color. To portray them as they are—in varying shades of color—would send an entirely different message, politically and visually. Marshall’s Agures are therefore not realistic; they are symbolic. The most important inBuence on Marshall’s choice of indigo coloration probably lies in the Yoruba concept of mystic coolness (itutu). According to Thompson (1984, 12), “The sense of certainty, which character and ashe (spiritual power) confer, is enriched by mystic coolness, whose emblematic color is often blue or indigo or green.” Indigo coloration gives Marshall’s Agures the certainty associated with good character. His use of indigo is more than a political message of black solidarity; it also represents the spiritual state of the human Agures, which have the self-conAdence, or coolness, of gods. In Den Mother (1996), Marshall portrays a young woman who stares directly at the viewer as she formally and stifBy “poses” for the portrait. Her clothing is that of a den mother: a bright yellow shirt buttoned all the way up, a blue and yellow Cub Scout 31

tie, and a red-and-white patch on the left shoulder with the number 47, above which a second half-oval patch depicts a sailboat crossing in front of a red sun. Behind the den mother’s head, there is an aura or sunburst of white light, set against a background with the same coloration as her face. No older than eighteen years of age, she possesses a head that is too small for her body, which is that of a mature, full-breasted woman. Held in front of her stomach, the woman’s Ast is also outsized—almost as large as her head. Like her gaze, the Ast is directed toward the viewer. Held in reserve and located at the painting’s bottom margin, it still has tremendous impact on the painting. Den Mother is full of contradiction. The sunburst aura is annunciatory and triumphant in the manner of cartoons or Christian iconography (Marshall apparently attended parochial schools). It seems to suggest, along with the brightly colored uniform, that the woman has achieved some special status or enlightenment, but the context of this enlightenment is Scouting, an activity associated with traditional (white) authority. The den mother is “sainted” by this authority and wears its uniform, but as a black woman she has the iconic status of the dispossessed. The fullness of her body suggests maternity and maturity, yet she is apparently adolescent. Moreover, her Ast contradicts the message of social comfort established by her uniform and aura. In Yoruba belief, to open the hand is an act of generosity. For a woman to hold a bowl or her open hands at the level of the womb suggests the “giving of children to the world” (Thompson 1984, 13). In African vodun when a female bo Agure places her hand on her stomach, it denotes purity and a clean conscience: “Here is my open stomach” (Blier 1995, 165). The den mother’s closed Ast therefore denotes barrenness and sexual refusal as well as, more conventionally, a muted “black power” emblem. Complexity also resides in the Agure of the sailboat. A singlemasted ship intended for recreation, it is not recognizably a slave ship. But the rhetorical power of the woman’s blackness makes us consider the possibility of both meanings. The sailboat also suggests that the Scout has earned a merit badge in sailing, an activity associated with wealth and cultural dominance. The den mother’s affectless countenance has two meanings as well. On Arst view, it sends a message of social discomfort in 32

the garments of power. The second view, which Marshall probably intends to coincide with the Arst, is strongly inBuenced by the importance of body posture in Yoruba life and art.2 A village elder told Robert Farris Thompson, “Constant smiling is not a Yoruba characteristic” (1984, 13). Sealed lips are a “sign of seriousness” and imply the “coolness” of the image, coolness being a major sign of good character in that culture: Like character, coolness ought to be internalized as a governing principle for a person to merit the high praise “His heart is cool” (okan e tutu). In becoming sophisticated, a Yoruba adept learns to differentiate between forms of spiritual coolness: (1) direct sacriAce (ebo), the cooling of the gods by the giving of cherished objects—such as the proffering of a ram to the thunder god; and (2) propitiation (irele), the utterance of conciliatory words or acts to hardened or angered deities. (13–15)

One of the major ceremonies in honor of Eshu is the pouring of cool water at a crossroads, the god’s ruling site. Eshu Agures, constructed of laterite, wood, or concrete and frequently inset with cowrie shells, are regularly anointed with water or palm oil at the gate or doorway of a home. Not to anoint them is to invite the anger of a potentially devouring god. One keeps cool, in effect, by insuring the god’s coolness. The den mother’s coolness is therefore more than social discomfort. A totemic Agure, she may be seen as the female component of a pair of male and female Eshu icons. Her iconic status is compromised, however, by the banality of her position as a “ceremonial” functionary (den mother) in American culture. Of a Yoruba terra-cotta head now located in a Berlin museum, Thompson writes, “In the elegant conception of the head, perhaps representing a person of status or a most important spirit, can be seen the signs of spiritual alertness (the searching gaze) and self-discipline and discretion (the sealed lips), which suggest, in Yoruba symbolic terms, the conAdence of the people’s monarchic traditions, and the complexity and poise of their urban way of life” (4–5). Both the searching gaze and sealed lips may be found on virtually all of Marshall’s human Agures. 33

The eyes are a consistently powerful presence in Marshall’s paintings. Always alert, frequently glancing to the side to directly meet the gaze of the viewer, the eyes are penetrating, especially when set in the indigo “mask” of a Axed expression. To become possessed by the spirit of a Yoruba deity, which is a formal goal of the religion, is to “make the god,” to capture numinous Bowing force within one’s body. When this happens, the face of the devotee freezes into a mask. . . . persons possessed by the spirit of a Yoruba deity are believed to speak of things yet to come. . . . They look about grandly with Axed expressions, with eyes sometimes wide and protuberant. The radiance of the eyes, the magniAcation of the gaze, reBects ashe, the brightness of the spirit. (Thompson 1984, 9)

The Lucumi (Yoruba in Cuba) have a myth in which, at a crossroads, the young Eshu comes across a pair of disembodied eyes shining in the dark shell of a coconut. He tells his parents, the king and queen, about the eyes, but his reputation for telling lies is so great that they don’t believe him. Because he fails to honor the eyes, he dies a mysterious death, and because the members of the court do not offer sacriAce to the Aercely burning eyes, the world suffers a series of disasters. Divination priests And the crossroad where the eyes had been, but because they have not been tended to they have faded away. Only when the priests pour Buid over a certain stone does the spirit of Eshu come to live within the stone (Thompson 1984, 20–21). Thus, the brightness of Eshu’s eyes is related to the fortunes of the world. The eyes in Marshall’s Agures reveal their alertness, wariness, and self-conAdence. Their whiteness shows that they possess the “Bash of the spirit.” In African vodun, according to Blier, the use of cowries for the eyes of bo represents the ye (spirit) of the Agure. The white of the cowries is meant to suggest the white of the eyes (302). The coolness of Marshall’s Agures may also reBect a refusal to clown for the white folks, that enormous social mirror in which black people are forced to see themselves. Miles Davis (1989, 83) says in his autobiography:

34

As much as I love Dizzy and loved Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, I always hated the way they used to laugh and grin for the audiences. I know why they did it—to make money and because they were entertainers as well as trumpet players. They had families to feed. Plus they both liked acting the clown; it’s just the way Dizzy and Satch were. I don’t have nothing against them doing it if they want to. But I don’t like it and didn’t have to like it. I come from a different social and class background than both of them, and I’m from the Midwest, while both of them are from the South. So we look at white people differently. Also I was younger than them and didn’t have go through the shit they had to go through to get accepted in the music industry. . . . I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn’t call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good.

In “acting the clown,” Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong wore a social mask partly constructed by the white gaze, a product, therefore of negative double-consciousness. In terms of Eshu iconography, they surrendered control of their own faces, thereby the “self-discipline and discretion” associated with sealed lips (Thompson 1984, 4–5). As misplaced as she may appear in her Scout uniform, the den mother retains control of her own being and thereby of her spirit. Among Marshall’s best-known paintings are his “garden” series in which black housing projects such as Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens are portrayed with Edenic idealism. Bluebirds carry banners in their beaks; Bowers grow in the foreground; and the human Agures, usually children, carry on with normal activities such as playing or walking arm in arm. The buildings in which they live are located at the far background and communicate stability rather than menace or discomfort. In Watts 1963 (1995), Nickerson Gardens, where Marshall lived as a child, is dominated not by buildings, which are nearly invisible in the distance, but by a broad expanse of grass, two towering palm trees, and yellow Bowers that are beginning to obscure from view the somber housing authority sign. The background of each garden painting contains a sunburst (cf. Den Mother) that may suggest what critic Ken Johnson

35

(1995) calls “a mock-naive vision of a Norman Rockwellian paradise.” In Better Homes Better Gardens (1994), the foreground is dominated by domestic detail such as a coiled garden hose, a yellow-and-white croquet ball, and a shufBeboard court, on which two teenage lovers walk hand in hand, lips sealed and eyes alert. The banality of such detail is set in contrast to a prominent sign that announces “Welcome to Wentworth Gardens” and, in large, seemingly stenciled letters, “IL 2–8,” the ofAcial designation of the public housing site in the state of Illinois. The former is an emblem of the state’s “ill” possession of the site. Images of decorative spoliation in the form of dripped paint also lie over the painting’s surface like grafAti. In Watts 1963 (1995) three children occupy the foreground—one standing, one kneeling, and one lying in a fetal position—in a narrative that may be of African derivation. The standing Agure is conventional in Marshall’s oeuvre and relates, as we have seen, to Eshu Agures. The kneeling Agure suggests supplication. But the reclining Agure is emblematic of fatality if only because the Agure, a teenage boy, lies in an ominous pool of shadow. Not only does each Agure have a large shadow (it is sundown or sunrise), but the shadow of the kneeling Agure falls in the wrong direction, toward the sun. Moreover, two unidentiAed shadows, presumably of human Agures, fall in a third direction from the right margin, a detail probably inBuenced by the work of presurrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, especially The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914) and The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). Because the reclining boy is the oldest of the three children, we may choose to interpret the narrative to mean that life in the projects results in numbness or death at an early age. It is also possible to interpret the other Agures as having risen from his fetal state. A kneeling Agure is also to be found in Untitled: Altgeld Gardens (1995). Occupying the center foreground, the adolescent boy seems to be in transition between reclining and rising. Resting on his knees and hands on a purple blanket, he has apparently been sitting on the grass at an elevated distance from the housing project, and has turned to face the viewer. To one side is a crossroads, to the other a sundial with the letters AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and an enormous white 36

chimney with sinister red stains. As in other of Marshall’s paintings, the Agure is “sainted” by the aura of a rising or setting sun. But his posture may also suggest movement away from the site, the crossroads behind him, parallel with the painter’s history as a former resident of a housing project. Located at the line of demarcation between Altgeld Gardens and the viewer, the boy is therefore a gatekeeper between the worlds of past and present, housing project and art gallery. The bluebirds in the garden series—they appear in Watts 1963, Better Homes Better Gardens, and Untitled: Altgeld Gardens—are worthy of attention. As an Americanism, they are the bluebirds of happiness, the “bluebird on my shoulder” of which Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus sang in Song of the South, or the banner-carrying bluebirds of nineteenthcentury commercial design. As an Africanism, the birds may represent the Yoruba “bird of the mind” (eiye ororo). According to Thompson (1984, 11), “the image of the descent of the bird of mind fuses with the image of the coming down of God’s ashe.” Birds also represent the power of the older women of the Yoruba village, “a force capable of mystically annihilating the arrogant, the selAshly rich, or other targets deserving of punishment” (7). Seen in this way, the bluebirds connote the coming down of spirit and the mindfulness of the children as also seen in their alert eyes. As tokens of “the mothers,” they are mementos of adult moral authority. The banners they carry in their beaks have banal, but also ironic, phrasing such as “more of everything” and “better homes better gardens.” The banners may also suggest vodun Bags, which herald the coming of a god or goddess. “Unfurled and paraded in vodun rites, they stand at the boundary between two worlds” (184). The Bags had their source in the Kongo, where the ritual unfurling of Bags or squares of cloth opens the door to another world (185). Another of the Scout series, Cub Scout (1995) is a close portrait of a young black man wearing the traditional blue uniform and yellow tie. His cap, consisting of alternating blue and yellow wedges, is not traditional to the Scouts and may suggest Eshu wearing the crossroads as a cap of two colors. Formally posed, the Cub Scout regards the viewer with the same indifferent gaze as the den mother. Like Den Mother, the countenance is at odds with the sunburst aura behind the Agure’s head. In Cub Scout, 37

however, there is the additional interest of the nose and lips, which are poorly painted, as if to call attention to their existence as constructions. In the cult for Orisha Oko (god of the farm) in Yorubaland, a pilgrimage is made to the village of Irawo, in which devotees wear a double rectangle on their foreheads. According to Vogel (1981, 96), “One rectangle is male and shaded white with chalky paste; the other is female, shaded red with camwood paste. The white is ‘semen,’ the creative essence of man; the red is ‘blood,’ the blood of menstruation, which the Yoruba associate with the making of children.” Red and white are used with erotic signiAcance in Marshall’s Could This Be Love (1992), which depicts a man and woman undressing in a bedroom. The woman’s bright red dress has just been pulled over her head to reveal her nudity. Directed toward the viewer, her eyes are visible just beneath the dress, which remains elevated. The man, who wears a pair of white briefs, also confronts the viewer. His left hand is tucked beneath the waistband of the briefs, while the hand of the right cups the genitals. The poses are erotic and yet restrained; the eyes emanate the “Bash of the spirit” associated with Eshu. The whiteness of the man’s garment suggests semen; the redness of the dress represents blood. The same colors are to be found in two disks on the wall of the room, one half indigo and half red, the other half white and half indigo. Indigo and red are the colors of Eshu’s cap of the crossroads; indigo and white would seem to blend the spirit of coolness with that of male sexuality. It is important to note, however, that in vodun belief, “red also invokes ideas of danger and desire” because of its connection to blood (Blier 1995, 268). White in vodun is the color of astral light and cosmic equilibrium; it also suggests coolness and happiness (269). A constellation of objects on the woman’s side of the room, as well as her position at the painting’s center, suggest that it is her room rather than the man’s. These objects include an ebony icon of a woman holding her hands over her head, a double of the woman herself; a white necklace tossed casually onto the Boor; her slippers, which face the bed; a framed photograph also containing the image of a black woman; and, on the symbolic plane, a yellow star Bying horizontally to the left as it leaves a trail 38

of stardust behind it. On the painting’s right margin, a leafy vine ascends to the ceiling of this Eden. As an emblem of earth and fertility, it complements the star’s message of romance and timelessness. At the same time, Herskovits reports the Fon account of Legba teaching his Arst gbo acolyte to turn a vine into a snake by throwing it on the ground (quoted in Blier 1995, 85). Just above the broad white expanse of the marriage bed is the powerful icon of the Sacred Heart, set in an aura reminiscent of those in the Scout series of paintings. A banner consisting of bars of music unfurls itself above the lovers’ heads, the lyric of which is “I’ve got two lovers and I love them both.” Save for the presence of a document which lies on the Boor between the man’s legs, the mood is not discordant but one of sexual agreement and cultural unity. On the whole, the painting reminds us that black experience exists beyond the pressures of double consciousness. Yet there are hints of white presence in a small framed photo in the lower left corner. Portrayed are a black woman seated slightly to the rear of a smaller white Agure, possibly a child. Despite its smaller size, the white Agure dominates the frame of the snapshot, just as she dominates the painting as a whole. In his book of essays, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, CrossCulturality, and Experimental Writing, Nathaniel Mackey (1993, 19), coined the term discrepant engagement in reference to “practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signiAcation, accent Assure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect At between word and world.” The word discrepant has its derivation from the root meaning, “to rattle” or “creak” and relates to a weaving block used by the Dogon of West Africa. The base on which the loom sits, the weaving block is called “the creaking of the word” by Dogon weavers. Discrepant engagement is therefore the joining of things that don’t At, a concept that contemporary theory gives the name of aporia, or rift. The term also relates to the dynamics of cross-culturality: the cry of the social “misAt.” As a black poet, scholar, and novelist who draws inspiration from black cultural sources such as vodun as well as from postwar avant-garde writings of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Amiri Baraka, Mackey is twice an outsider, by birth and by 39

choice. The “creaking of the word” therefore has great potency for him. Discrepancy becomes moral value, a reminder that “not Atting” is morally preferable to a too-easy creolization; it also reminds us that truly creative work tends to be done at the artistic and cultural margin, where “the new” offers resistance to received notions of meaning. It is the point at which Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk offer “noise” rather than music, where the language poets offer dispersive strategies rather than traditional syntax, where Marcel Duchamp offers found objects rather than the artisanship of art. Mackey (1993, 20) writes: Open form (itself a discrepant, oxymoronic formulation, not unlike Williams’s “variable foot,”) is a gesture in the direction of noise. Baraka’s valorization of “honking” by rhythm and blues (R&B) saxophonists, [Clarence] Major’s “remarkable verb of / things,” Duncan’s invocation of “disturbance,” Creeley’s bebop-inBuenced deviation from expected narrative accents, Olson’s insistence that things “keep their proper confusions,” his advocacy of “shout” as a corrective to discourse, [Edward Kemau] Braithwaite’s “calibanisms,” and [Wilson] Harris’s “language as omen” all in their distinctive ways validate noise. (20)

Quoting Leonard Barrett on the music of the black Caribbean, Mackey reveals a theme central to his thought, that “we detect in the lower beats deep structural dissonance which mirrors the social conBicts within the society” (20). Dissonance is therefore inevitable and even necessary to the advancement of a culture. It is open to the honk and the shout, to processual composition as seen in jazz and experimental poetry, and to the “obliquity and angularity” of Baraka’s poetry and the music of Thelonius Monk and Eric Dolphy (43). Those who express this “deep structural dissonance” are its musicians, poets, and priests. Mackey writes that “Baraka hears a spirit of interrogation and discontent in the most moving of black music, especially that of John Coltrane, whom he calls ‘the heaviest spirit’” (43). In Black Music, Baraka notes another heavy spirit: “The hard, driving shouting of James Brown identiAes a place and image in America. A people and an energy, harnessed and not harnessed by America. JB is straight out, open, and 40

speaking from the most deeply religious people on this continent” (Jones 1968, 185). John Coltrane and James Brown are described, in effect, as members of a priesthood, their sacred status preAgured by the ring shout ritual. In The Power of Black Music, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., credits the ring shout (which involved song, dance, and aspects of African ancestor worship) with helping to preserve the elements we have come to know as the characterizing and foundational elements of AfricanAmerican music: calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms, and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations; interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetitions of rhythmic and melodic phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand clapping, foot patting, and approximations thereof; apartplaying; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all AfricanAmerican music. (6)

Because music has a powerful place in black culture, because drums and other instruments are often heard to speak as voices, and because of the communal nature of the ring shout, the musician, singer, poet, and priest are joined as messengers of spirit possession. This is exactly the multidisciplinary approach of Mackey’s comic epistolary jazz novel-of-ideas, Bedouin Hornbook, which tells the story of a contemporary jazz group that calls itself the “Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus,” the “East Bay Dread Ensemble,” the “Mystic Horn Society,” and Anally “Flaunted Fifth.” Changes in the group’s name represent the discrepancy, or creakiness, that occurs when two cultural inBuences, the European and African-American, are joined. “N.,” the novel’s narrator, says, “We thought ‘Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus’ sounded a little stilted, Euro-cerebral, or (the word Penguin, our oboe player uses) ‘deracinated,’ so we called ourselves the East Bay Dread Ensemble. We also didn’t want people [in Oakland, where they were playing] to know that we were from L.A.” 41

(Mackey 1986, 4). Like the many names of Eshu-Elegbara, multiplicity is a feature of the group, nowhere more evident than in the character of Heidi, also known as Aunt Nancy, who plays violin, congas, and tuba. The name Heidi is perhaps the ultimate in northern European signiAers. Aunt Nancy is a pun on anansi, which means spider in Ghana, as well as the Anancy stories popular in Jamaica known for “introducing a snatch of song at crucial moments” (Roberts 1972, 121). Aunt Nancy even plays the violin like a spider: The horns . . . conceded the lead voice to the violin throughout the piece. As Aunt Nancy’s bow stroked the air (possessed of a bizarre, brooding assurance that it was only a myth one lamented, nothing more), I was struck by the spiderlike dexterity with which she maneuvered its avoidance of the strings. What she did, one might say, is emphasize the dance in the word “avoidance,” wrapping all who would listen in the progressive windings of an eventual cocoon. . . . My back stiffened as I sat there, more than slightly alarmed at Aunt Nancy’s transformation from buzzing, airborne By to enticing, equally airborne spider. (Mackey 1986, 121)

Like most of the other instruments the group plays, the violin is of European origin. But Aunt Nancy plays it in a way that transports the music and herself to the realm of African myth. In this, she mirrors the history of African-American music, which has had to negotiate between European instrumentation and scores and African cultural intentions. The song that Aunt Nancy wraps the audience in is, appropriately, “Embraceable You.” The narrator’s identity also shifts. Addressing each chapter of the epistolary novel to “Dear Angel of Dust” (a name suggesting the angel of death; the muse; the band’s North African singer, Djamilaa, whose voice is haunted by wind and dust; and possibly Ifa divination, an Eshu observation in which dust is employed), the narrator signs each chapter as “N.” (narrator) but is also identiAed as Jarred Bottle, JB (James Brown and a brand of Scotch), Djarred Bottle (a name which pairs him with his lover, Djamilaa), DB, and Flaunted Fifth, also the Anal name of the band. The name Jarred Bottle relates to the Kongo-derived tradition of the bottle tree, used to protect households by in42

voking the dead (Thompson 1984, 142). The acronym DB links the narrator to Damballah, the Haitian Creole name of the Dahomean “good serpent of the skies” known by the Fon as Da, Dan, and Dan Bada (Thompson 184, 176). Flaunted Fifth, a pun on Batted Afths, or blue notes characteristic of blues and jazz, is one of the book’s many signiAcant word pairings, which Mackey calls homologies. The Batted Afth calls attention to itself, Baunts its discrepancy as a product of cultural difference. I will show the thematic importance and extent of these homologies later. The plot of Mackey’s novel is simple, but its thematic patterning and use of motifs are as thick as Aunt Nancy’s musical cocoon. BrieBy, the plot concerns the travels of a newly formed band that, through practice, Anally learns to speak as one, or communally, in an ecstatic, literally earth-shaking performance of the song “Bottomed Out.” Following this climax is a denouement describing a lecture, “The Creaking of the Word,” delivered by Jarred Bottle, DB’s European name, at an academic conference. But this denouement also contains its own climax in which DB mystically and erotically joins Djamilaa, albeit at a physical distance from her. “The Creaking of the Word” is therefore part lecture and part erotic mystical experience. As academic discourse containing expressions like “adequation” and “ventriloquistic truth,” the Anal chapter is Euro-cerebral; as the joining of the twined male and female snakes that comprise Damballah, it depicts the resurrection of one of the “heavy spirits” of Dahomean mythology. The two main structural patterns in the novel are circularity and coaxiality, the ouroboric circle and the crossroads. Laid over one another, the circle and the Greek cross create the Kongo cruciform sign of the cosmos called Yowa that signiAes “the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting lines” as well as “the everlasting continuity of all righteous men and women” (Thompson 1984, 108). The crossroads, or “turn of the path,” is “an indelible concept in the Kongo-Atlantic world, as the point of intersection between the ancestors and the living” (109). In the Abakua script known as anaforuana, a modiAed crossed circle of this kind is the signature of God (Thompson 1989, 113). DB plays saxello and contrabass bassoon; Penguin, also known 43

as Peixinho, plays oboe; Lambert plays alto and tenor saxophone; and Djamilaa sings in a “sand-anointed voice.” However, the instruments they play, like their identities, are constantly subject to change and are described as undergoing rotation. Rotation also describes the pattern in which the band plays DB’s series of “Compressed Accompaniments”: I’ve provided Ave of them, one for each member of the band, though the assignment of pieces to speciAc individuals is by no means Axed. The way it works, in fact, makes it so each player gets to recite all Ave of the Accompaniments in the course of the composition. We’ve developed a modular approach to improvisation which we call Modular Rotation, an approach which makes use of a number of stations (Ave in this case) marked off at various points around the playing area. . . . In the course of the performance each player moves from station to station, at each of which he or she recites the particular Accompaniment which “deAnes” that station. (Mackey 1986, 29–30)

The stations may suggest stations of the cross in Roman Catholic observance. More importantly, Mackey has established a motif of circularity that joins the rainbow god Damballah, by which Djamilaa and Djarred Bottle are erotically joined; ouroboros, the worm of death and time that eats its own tail; the group’s song “Opposable Thumb at the Water’s Edge,” associated with primate dexterity and the making of the Cga Ast by black slaves in Brazil to ward off spells cast against them (48); and a primeval Egyptian creation myth surrounding Temu, known as “The Father of the Gods,” who creates the world through an act of masturbation. In the following passage, several of these motifs are conjoined: Throughout his solo he made abundant use of circular breathing, which in a self-reBected aside he called “an old snakecharmer’s trick” at one point, making mention of one K. Gopalakrishna Ouroboros, a nagaswaram player of some repute. (The nagaswaram, he noted, is a South Indian oboe, a double-reed horn just short of three feet long. Its name, translated literally, means “snakepipe.”) (45) 44

Circularity also joins with creation myth when the narrator recalls a seven-day romance he’d had with a woman in a distant part of the world. He recalls the romance while playing an old standard, “Body and Soul,” on a bass clarinet with a group called the Crossroads Choir, whom he is instructed to meet in a secret location. Informed by sorrow and at an emotional crossroads, his playing is especially fruitful: the last day we’d seen one another now returned, but with a new sense of lingering access—once a day of parting, now a day of repose. I relaxed into such a sense of it, deepening its consolation with a meditation on the number eight. “Upright inAnity,” I whispered into the horn. It occurred to me now, as though I’d never seen it before, that the eighth note of every octave is a return to the Arst, both end and beginning. It made me think of Lebe, the last of the eight Dogon ancestors, also said to be the oldest, which would make him the Arst. I reBected on his having died and become a snake, a fact I referred to with his circular breathing in a run which also brought Ouroboros to mind. (106)

It is through music and memory that the mystical is achieved in the novel’s complex thematic Aguration. In joining with Djamilaa through sexual fantasy as he holds his “middle leg” or “Afth limb” (193) in the Anal chapter, DB brings the story full circle by completing the myth of Damballah and recreating the masturbatory, ouroboric circle by which Temu created the world. Such meditative circularity is parallel to the trance of possession into which lovers, vodun priests, and musicians enter. As she stands at her window, Djamilaa can feel the incestuous touch of her father’s hand on her hip. Thus, DB’s desire for Djamilaa is received in terms of Djamilaa’s own projections, and a “rainbow bridge” suggestive of twined serpents is constructed. As Thompson (1984, 176) observes: Another animal present in Dahomean art—Da or Dan, the good serpent of the skies—appears not only in Haiti but also in Cuba, and, in mixture with the Yoruba rainbow deity, Oshumare, in Brazil, that is, wherever the Fon and their neighbors arrived as captives. . . . Da combines male and female aspects, and is sometimes represented as a pair of 45

twins. Many are his avatars, but principle among them is Da Ayido Hwedo, the rainbow-serpent. . . . In one Dahomean myth . . . Da Ayido Hwedo set up four pillars cast in iron at the four cardinal points of the earth. He did this to hold aloft the sky. And then he twisted around these columns in brilliant spirals of crimson, black, and white to keep the pillars upright in their places.

Damballah, the Haitian word for the serpent of the sky, corresponds with “the Ki-Kongo word for Batheaded rainbowserpent, ndamba” (177). Ndamba is a word for sleep that puns on the ecstatic lovemaking of a pair of male and female serpents, “who wrap themselves around a palm tree to carnally unite” (178).3 It is characteristic of Mackey’s irony that DB is arrested for public exposure despite the fact that his erotic dream relates to a sacred cosmology. Coaxiality in Bedouin Hornbook also occurs as a series of linguistic events (homonyms, puns, and homologies) in which one word is crossed with another like the snakes of Dahomean myth, as follows: Ascent and assent. “What I’m proposing is that we hear into what has up to now only been overheard (if I can put it that way), that we can awaken resources whereby, for example, assent can be heard to carry undertones or echoes of ascent (accents of assent)” (Mackey 1986, 19). The word assent concerns social agreement in this context, both on the broader social level and among the players of the Mystic Horn Society. Ascent in the context of their music alludes to ecstasy, possession, and Bight. Ascent therefore tends to result from a degree of assent among the band’s members, their unity in difference. To this dialectic is added the word accent, which applies equally to speech, musical texture, and Mackey’s own prose emphases. Lifted and lofty. This homology emphasizes the potential elitism of the band’s “nouveau” music and sources of spiritual inspiration such as “the widespread age-old stilt-dancing traditions of West Africa, where mask-wearing, dancing Agures mount a pair of stilts as much as Afteen feet high” (67). The band’s “liftoff” or Bight into the ethereal has a double nature, one in lofty intellectualism and the other in folk tradition. 46

’Ni tan and n’itan. The Yoruba words ’ni tan and n’itan, mean, respectively, “related to each other” and “at the thigh.” The band has been playing a song called “Meat of My Brother’s Thigh,” which reminds the narrator of a Yoruba proverb meaning “Kinship does not mean that, because we are entwined, we can thereby rip off each other’s thigh” (92). The word entwined and its relation to Damballah iconography is later echoed in an analysis of Rastafarian drumming, in which it is argued that the sound from a particular drum is related “to the noise made by the animal from whose hide the drum’s head is made” (113). One drum of a pair, called the repeater, is made from the skin of a female goat; the accompanying bass drum is made from male goatskin. This dialectic extends to African polyrhythmic drumming, which according Roberts (1972, 186), tends to weave (like Aunt Nancy/Anansi the spider) duple and triple rhythms: “Another fundamental aspect of West African music-making, also widespread in Afro-America, is . . . present in the blues and in jazz. This is the tendency to use triple and duple rhythms at the same time, which is arguably the reason for the extensive use of triplets in both blues and jazz.” Desert and dessert. Of the band’s playing of “Bottomed Out,” their climactic song, N. writes, “It was a pregnant, polysemous triad we three had enacted, compounded of a technical-ecstatic appetite for drought (pronounced ‘dez-ert’), a technical-ecstatic blending of abandonment and merit (pronounced ‘de-zurt’) and a technical-ecstatic jellyroll sense of an ending (pronounced ‘di-zurt’)” (Mackey 1986, 167). The dialectic is at full triangulation. Desertion is echoed in the book’s frequent references to orphans (Djamilaa is one), as well as Mackey’s essay “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol”: Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous relationship with the things it ostensibly refers to. This is why in the Kaluli myth [of Papua New Guinea] the origin of music is also the origin of poetic language. (Mackey 1993, 234)

The desert is associated with Djamilaa as a native of Mauritania, but it also relates to the quality of her voice: “She dug deep into 47

her desert roots to come up with a desolate, forlorn yet Aercely devotional sound” (Mackey 1986, 173). But when she opens her mouth to sing, there is no sound. It is as if “her voice were now anointed in sand” and “she’d been deserted by the future she proposed” (174). The word dessert is in antithesis to the other parts of the dialectic; it suggests the pleasures of hearing Djamilaa’s pain-haunted voice. The words technical and ecstatic occupy their own dialectic. Could and cud. In playing “Aggravated Assent,” the left side of Penguin’s face bulges at the beginning of each run: “Tied to it as by an umbilical cord of obsession, one stared at the bulge and saw it was made not by Penguin’s tongue but by a certain cud his Bedouin ‘someone’ had left him with. Though one saw this one heard it more as ‘could’ than as ‘cud,’ rocked or swayed by the enabling proportion of one’s umbilical stare” (171). Later, the audience and band alike chew a “collective ‘could’” as they share the music’s possibilities. Thrown and throne. The crossroads of this homonym is that of postmodern dispersion, which Mackey practices as a poet, and erotic authority. Mackey would argue for the necessity of dispersion and difference in attempting juncture; indeed, this is the basis of his theory of discrepant engagement. The distance of DB from Djamilaa in the Anal chapter, “The Creaking of the Word,” makes his connection with her all the more desirable: It was as though Djamilaa, even while playing the horn, threw her voice by way of a boomerang trickster thread. This trickster thread, moreover, was a telepathic tether which tied the two of us to one another, a roundabout, circulatory “soul serenade.” . . . She was my Bung partner it seemed, made to By away from me only to be pulled back once she’d gone as far as our stretched arms would allow. This dance, the mimed ingestion of separation we enacted, made for a thrown, dislocated intervention. . . . a punning sense of far-Bung investiture: thrown = throne. Djamilaa was clearly my Bedouin Queen. (187)

Even the source of Mackey’s use of linguistic doubles is coaxial. The Arst source is the presurrealist writings of the French eccentric Raymond Roussel, including the novels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa, the latter written entirely without beneAt of 48

having traveled to that continent. Roussel (1975, 3) revealed that his method of writing depended on choosing “two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams)”: For example, billard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases. In the case of billard and pillard the two phrases I obtained were: 1. Les lettres du blanc sur les bande du vieux billard . . . [The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table . . .] 2. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard . . . [The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer . . . ] In the Arst, “lettres” was taken in the sense of lettering, “blanc” in the sense of a cube of chalk, and “bandes” as in cushions. In the second, “lettres” was taken in the sense of missives, “blanc” as in white man, and “bandes” as in hordes. The two phrases found, it was a case of writing a story which could begin with the Arst and end with the second. Now it was from the resolution of this problem that I derived all my materials.

A metagram changes the meaning of a word by changing one letter in it. Mackey has done virtually the same thing in his coupling of ’ni tan and n’itan. Moreover, his chapters are thematically constructed from such nexuses rather than by means of plot and character. Mackey (1986, 39) quotes an ex-slave on one of the Georgia Sea Islands, circa 1894, as he spoke to a white folklorist: “Notes is good enough for you people, but us likes a mixtery.” Mixtery is the strategy of polyrhythms, cultural assimilation and cross-cultural inBuence, jazz improvisation, the modernist fragment in collage, and Bakhtin’s dialogism. True to his interest in the “technical-ecstatic,” Mackey also hears the word as “mystery.” Bedouin Hornbook also has some resemblance to René Daumal’s surrealist novel Mt. Analogue. Subtitled An Authentic Narrative and A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Mt. Analogue describes the physical 49

search for an entirely symbolic mountain. Mackey’s book, too, proceeds more analogically than narratively. This parallel is especially evident in the shifting position of the Berkeley bar in which the band played its most effective song: We looked about and saw that the surroundings weren’t the same as when we’d come in. Finally Lambert walked to the corner, took a look at the street sign and came back. We were on Ninth, not San Pablo, it turned out. The Scarab had moved east a block while we were inside. The move had occurred, we knew at once, during “Bottomed Out.” (Mackey 1986, 179)

The cover of the 1971 City Lights edition of Mt. Analogue depicts a mystic whose face is overlaid with a translucent pyramid, at the top of which is a (third) eye. In the “Bottomed Out” chapter of Mackey’s novel, N. writes: “I for one couldn’t help thinking of Jarred Bottle, Anding that on doing so the bits of glass or of broken cowrie shells embedded in my brow came together like a third eye, a unicorn’s horn and the lamp on a miner’s lamp rolled into one” (178–79). As I have suggested earlier, cowries are used to decorate Eshu Agures, or yangi (Thompson 1984, 25). The other source of Mackey’s linguistic “mixtery” may be the use of wordplay in African vodun. According to Blier (1995, 107): In Fon bas-reliefs, a Ash (hue or huevi—the Arst syllable pronounced in a lowered tone) often will serve as a visual signiAer for time or history (huenu, the Arst syllable pronounced in the middle tone). Mikhail Bakhtin refers to comparable forms as double-voiced words (i.e., words in which new semantic orientations are added to that which already exists). In contexts of bo and boci linguistic punning and creative verbal-visual wordplay are deAned by similar multivoiced linguistic signiAers. . . . Thus, because the Fongbe word bo (pronounced with a fricative or guttural g preAx and a dulled o, as in gbo) designates “goat,” it is this animal that serves as primary symbol for bo . . . in divination and rituals.

Other pronunciations of the word bo, Blier reports, can designate “mire,” “mud,” “clay,” “soft,” and “relaxed” (109). Roberto Pazzi 50

indicates that there is an important link for the Fon, Evhe, and Aja people between the word bo and cultivated forest clearings, seen as a place of “heightened mystical power” and “as a crossroads between the human world and the realm of the supernaturals” (quoted in Blier 1995, 109). Naming is powerful in West African lore. In Mackey, the crossing of words cuts a cryptic path to the mystical. According to Roberts (1972, 101), the “cryptic vocal” associated with shouts, hollers, and ultimately scat singing, is African. But there is also a good deal of the cryptic in the works of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, for whom the literary puzzle is a major source of amusement and wisdom. The word shout, incidentally, was traced by linguist Lorenzo Turner to the Wolof word saut, meaning “to dance before the temple” (162). Consciousness in Mackey and Marshall is multiple and paradoxical. In Mackey’s discussion of the falsetto in black singing, for instance, “Flaunted Fifth was suddenly haunted by having once written that the use of the falsetto in black music, the choked-up ascent into a problematic upper register, had a way, as he’d put it, of ‘alchemizing a legacy of lynchings’” (1986, 201). Associated with the shout and holler of earlier black music, the falsetto isn’t false; it is a traditional and characterizing cry. Both Marshall and Mackey shrewdly and systematically conBate white and black cultural icons. Rather than suffer double consciousness, they turn its complexities to artistic advantage, playing the trickster for moral purpose. As Mackey’s N. puts it in a discussion of concealed meanings, the artist as trickster may be “everyone’s clown, but nobody’s fool” (7). The ethnographer James Clifford (1988, 15) sees the poet Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the negritude movement and author of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, as a “practitioner of ‘neologistic’ cultural politics” who reconceives “organic culture” as “inventive process or creolized ‘interculture.’” In this process, “the roots of tradition are cut and retied, collective symbols appropriated from external inBuences.” Culture and identity are subject to reinvention and do not have to derive entirely from a folk basis. Moreover, in the highly mediated and interactive modern world, it is problematic to rely on judgments of cultural authenticity. Culture and identity therefore “need not take root in ancestral plot; they live by pollination, by 51

(historical) transplanting” (15). According to Clifford, an example of this pollination can be found in the ending of Césaire’s highly experimental Notebook, as translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith: I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea rise sky licker and the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown it is there I will now Ash the malevolent tongue of the night in its motionless veerition!

Clifford (1988, 177) interprets the coinage veerition as a daring indeterminacy which opens the semantic Aeld at the very moment in the poem where cultural authenticity would seem to demand wholeness and closure. The word veerition, like Mackey’s homologies, is meant to be undecidable, suggesting, in the words of the translators, “Bick,” “swirl,” “to sweep,” “to clear a surface,” and “to scan.” The “veering” is “motionless,” an oxymoron. In Tracées (1981), René Ménil writes: It can be said that our West Indian consciousness is necessarily parodic, since it’s caught in a game of doubling and redoubling, mirroring and separation, in the face of a French Colonial consciousness embodied in ruling institutions and mass media. For this kind of divided, worried consciousness, naivete in art is forbidden. This is the source of those dissonances in our art that, as Baudelaire said in the nineteenth century, are agreeable to modern ears. (Quoted in Clifford 1988, 179)

Cultural dialogism erupts any easy claim to racial essentialism. At the same time, Clifford (1988, 131) acknowledges his own leanings as an “ethnographic surrealist” who “delights in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms.” The chief compositional mode of surrealism was disjunctive collage, the joining of foreign materials on a foreign plane. The surrealist model of beauty was Arst established in Chants du Maldoror by the comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) as “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” (Rubin 52

1968, 19). An example of “surrealist” cultural dialogism can be found in Roberts (1972, 244): “I have on tape an old 78 rpm record in Venda, a South African language, that is a lift from Jimmy Rogers, the white American singer of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The language is Venda, but the vocal tune and the guitar style are pure Rogers.” Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey delight in the creaking disjunction between two cultures. In their work, syncretism and dissonance blend. In Blues People, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes: “The ‘ring shouts’ or ‘shufBe shouts’ of the early Negro churches were attempts by the black Christians to have their cake and eat it: to maintain African tradition, however veiled or unconscious the attempt might be, yet embrace the new religion” (1963, 42–43). In Marshall and Mackey, there is no attempt to disguise black cultural icons by overlaying them with white models of consciousness. There is instead the conscious decision to play one kind of cultural vision against another, resulting in heightened awareness not only of identity but also of the power of the syncretic act. Double consciousness becomes “second sight,” a virtue of panoramic imagination. notes 1. Sollors quotes Jules Chametzky’s From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (1977), 49. 2. The dialectic of Marshall’s paintings is reminiscent of Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, in which two equal contraries, innocence and experience, created a synthesis of uniAed being which Blake called “radical innocence.” Both innocence and experience are necessary to the development of character. Marshall’s dialectic also seems to require the acceptance of equal contraries. 3. Thompson credits Wyatt McGaffey with this insight.

works cited Blake, William. 1977. Songs of Innocence and Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1995. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Césaire, Aimé. 1983. The Collected Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chametzky, Jules. 1977. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Daumal, René. 1971. Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Trans. Roger Shattuck. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Davis, Miles. 1989. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Touchstone. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. David W. Bight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1982. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. Reprint, New York: Evergreen Books. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1995. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Ken. “Back to the Garden.” Art in America 83, no. 11: 106–7. Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow. ——— 1968. Black Music. New York: William Morrow. Kennedy, Lisa. 1995. “Flower Power: Kerry James Marshall’s Garden Project.” Village Voice, October 10, 86. Kimmelman, Michael. 1995. “Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman Gallery.” New York Times September 29, sec. 3, p. 18. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. Mackey, Nathaniel. 1986. Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington, Ky.: Callaloo Fiction Series. ———. 1993. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ménil, René. 1981. Tracées: Identité, négritude, esthétique aux Antilles. Paris: R. Laffont. Newhall, Edith. 1993. “Kerry James Marshall.” ARTnews 92, no. 5: 137. Roberts, John Storm. 1972. Black Music of Two Worlds. New York: Praeger. Roussel, Raymond. 1975. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Trans. Trevor WinkAeld. New York: Sun Books. Rubin, William S. 1968. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sollors, Werner. 1986. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage. ———. 1989. “The Song That Named the Land.” In Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Vogel, Susan, ed. 1981. For Spirits and Kings: African Art from the Tishman Collection. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Westfall, Stephen. 1993. “Kerry James Marshall.” Art in America 81, no. 10: 132.

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Stark Strangled Banjos Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., identiAes Eshu as the most powerful of the Yoruban gods because of his powers of interpretation. A “divine linguist,” Eshu is represented in Yoruba sculptures as holding a calabash in his hands: In this calabash he keeps ase, the very ase with which Olodumare, the supreme deity of the Yoruba, created the universe. We can translate ase in many ways, but the ase used to create the universe I translate as “logos,” as the word as understanding, the word as the audible, and later the visible, sign of reason. Ase is more weighty, forceful, and action-packed than the ordinary word. It is the word with irrevocability, reinforced with double assuredness and undaunted authenticity. This probably explains why Esu’s mouth, from which the audible word proceeds, sometimes appears double; Esu’s discourse, metaphorically, is double-voiced. (7)

It is his double voicedness, rather than his physical powers, that enables Eshu to control both humans and the gods. Gates sees Eshu as kin to the Western god Hermes, who was likewise a messenger and interpreter for the gods and the source for our word hermeneutics. In Gates’s view, Eshu is a Agure of the black critic, but in his doubleness, which connects him both to heaven and to earth, he is also a Agure of the priest and poet (8–9). From Lenox Avenue 5 (1999): 71–85 and Denver Quarterly 36, nos. 3–4 (2002): 68–82.

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Eshu transmitted some of his powers to the god Ifa, his friend, when he taught him to read the patterns of the sixteen palm nuts that are thrown in the Yoruba divination ritual (11). As Gates explains, Ifa “can only speak to human beings by inscribing the language of the gods onto the divining tray in visual signs that the babalawo [priest] reads aloud in the language of the lyrical poetry called ese” (12). Thus, the gods are linked to man by chance, divination, poetry, and hermeneutics. Taking into account the powerful doubleness of Eshu as linguist and interpreter, I would like to focus on visual and verbal punning in the artworks of David Hammons, the complex overlaying of Sappho, Gertrude Stein, and the blues in Harryette Mullen’s long poem “Muse & Drudge,” and cultural double voicings in rap music and the songs of Al Hibbler. Gates remarks on the connection between the Standard English signiAer signiCcation and the black cultural practice of signifyin’: The relationship that black “SigniAcation” bears to the English “signiAcation,” is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity. That, it seems to me, is inherent in the nature of metaphorical substitution and the pun, particularly those rhetorical tropes dependent on the repetition of a word with a change denoted by a difference in sound or in a letter (agnominatio), and in homonymic puns (antanaclasis). These tropes luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference (be that apparent difference centered in the signiAer or in the signiAed, in the “sound-image” or in the concept) yield in either an aural or a visual pun. (45)

In his choice of the word Signifyin(g), Gates himself creates a homology and cultural palimpsest in which black and white meanings communicate through the same signiAer. Gates intends to conBate difference and similarity in his use of the term; indeed it is through agnominatio that critic Jacques Derrida created the key term of deconstruction, différance, which combines the French words for to differ and to defer (Gates, 46). Nathaniel Mackey’s novel Bedouin Hornbook contains an extravagant use of such homologies. Mackey is aware of the implication of what is over and under in such acts of overwriting. “What 57

I’m proposing,” the narrator says, “is that we hear into what has up to now only been overheard (if I can put it that way, that we can awaken resources whereby, for example, assent can be heard to carry undertones or echoes of ascent (accents of assent)” (19). Here the crossroads of meanings is triple rather than double. The accents of assent lead politically to ascent. What about the accents of racial difference? The concept of the “twoness” of African-American experience has been central since W. E. B. Du Bois announced the concept of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk: “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (38). The critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to the “double-voiced word,” which Gates deAnes as “a word or utterance . . . decolonized for the blacks’ purposes ‘by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has—and retains—its own orientation’” (50). Thus, the African-American usage “signifyin’” and the Standard English “signifying” are disruptive of each other as identical nonidentities. As Gates’s palimpsestic “signifyin(g),” the two words remain divided at the same time that they approach moral relation. A cultural lesson is learned when the echo of black voice is heard within, over, or under its Standard English counterpart. In other words, “signifyin’” signiAes on “signifying.” A black-and-white photograph of the artist David Hammons, Cat in the Hat (1982), appears on the frontispiece of the book David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, a study of his work. Wearing a black suit, black shirt, polka-dot bow tie, neatly trimmed saltand-pepper beard, and sunglasses, the artist gazes at the camera with an impassive look. The most dramatic detail is Hammons’s knit cap, which towers over his head. Of African fabric and possibly of Rastafarian reference, it otherwise resembles the hat worn by the title character in the Dr. Seuss children’s book The Cat in the Hat. As a black man, Hammons is a “cat” in hipster jargon of the past. The sunglasses heighten the effect of hipness even as the festive bow tie, neatly trimmed beard, and somber suit suggest sartorial conservatism. Because the trickster god Eshu is depicted as wearing a phallic hairstyle or, in related iconography, with vertical projections emerging from the top of

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his head, the height of the hat connects Hammons to the gods. Playing upon identity expectation, Hammons constructs a pun of surprising complexity. In controlling his own image, Hammons also controls our means of cultural seeing. In Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), a site-speciAc work of performance art, Hammons took up a position in New York City’s Cooper Square next to a street vendor. Wearing a winter coat and a hat, Hammons also presented himself as a vendor, albeit of a variety of snowballs of differing sizes presented in perfectly round shapes on a colorful rug. Because of the problematic value of the snowballs, the piece offers a critique of art as commodity. Standing at the crossroads of poverty and wealth, blackness and whiteness, the material and the ideal, Hammons erupts any easy assumptions about the value of art. What does the “wealth” of the blizzard bring to the streets? How is the vacant, albeit poetic, signiAer of snow affected by its presentation by the artist as black man? The book David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble contains a photo of Hammons negotiating with two white, apparently middle-class buyers, who evidently are in the process of deciding on which snowballs to purchase (Hammons actually sold his product). Behind them are the unevenly laid out goods of Hammons’s rival vendors, which consist primarily of old shoes. The “purity” of Hammons’s product lies in poetic contrast with these revalued castoffs. Are snowballs of perfect shape worth more than a pair of used shoes? It depends on how happy you are with your shoes. Are the large snowballs worth more than the smaller ones? Should I buy one of each? Hammons’s Anal joke as conceptual artist occurs when the buyer walks away with his or her purchase. Removed from the site of discovery and negotiation, the snowball is hollowed out as a signiAer. Now the art collector holds only snow in his hands. Neither a real snowball (unless it is thrown against a wall) nor genuine art collectible (it must be kept refrigerated), it becomes the souvenir of a decision in value. The most monumental visual pun in Hammons’s work is Higher Goals (1986). Here is Kellie Jones’s description of the work from her essay “The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic”:

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The piece was on view from April through October [of 1986], on a small strip of green—part of the larger Cadman Plaza Park—facing the court buildings in downtown Brooklyn, New York. It consisted of Ave twenty to thirty foot high telephone poles topped with basketball hoops complete with backboards and blanketed with thousands of—mostly beer—bottlecaps. Some of these regal obelisks carried diamond, zigzag, and chevron designs on their mosaic-like surfaces, their tight conAgurations reminiscent of snakeskin, Islamic decoration, African textiles or even the patterns on Hammons’ earlier hair quilts. . . . Hammons constructed the piece in situ for the Arst six weeks, methodically nailing and stringing thousands of bottlecaps. The process was an integral part of the piece, as was the interaction with the judges, lawyers, clerks, downtown shoppers, residents and even police who contributed to and redeAned the work’s meaning. (28)

The Africanism of Higher Goals is evident in how the poles are decorated, like the setting of cowries on laterite cones representing the god Eshu. We are also reminded of Simon Rodia’s monumental (and multiple) Watts Towers, which was similarly decorated with bottle caps. Only gods such as Michael Jordan are likely to score on a goal twenty-Ave feet high. Hammons has said of the work: “It’s an anti-basketball sculpture. Basketball has become a problem in the black community because kids aren’t getting an education. They’re pawns in someone else’s game. That’s why it’s called Higher Goals. It means you should have high goals in life than basketball” (Jones, 29). Yet Hammons has also commented, “The issue is, I was deprived of a basketball career by being too short” (29). With undecidability comes mystery and pleasure. Because the meaning of Higher Goals is so pointed, it loses some interest. A more recent work, House of the Future (1991), has the complexity of the undecidable. As the work consists of the artist’s construction of an old house in Charleston, South Carolina, the title is ironic. If this half-painted, weather-beaten house is the house of the future, what future people will live in it? Or is it in fact the house of the past? Moreover, it is not an entire house but rather the cross-section of one. No more than Ave feet wide, 60

it has a full roof, windows, a door, and external stairs to a long, railed porch upstairs. A frame house of old wood, it appears to have been partly painted blue over its original white color. The blue is attractive and “new,” therefore a sign of hope. Yet the painting is unAnished, and the house itself is impossible to live in. The house’s loss of utility transforms it into an art object, as well as a “slice” of American history. In “On the Ideology of Dirt,” Tom Finkelpearl creates a list of “dirty” and “clean” artists in dialectical pairings. Thus, just as practice is the dirty version of theory and Edward Keinholz is the unsanitized Andy Warhol, David Hammons is rubble’s version of Jeff Koons (62). Both depend on visual humor, but Koons’s giant puppy, which is constructed of live Bowers, earth, wood, and steel, takes up its site in front of a French provincial mansion with a mansard roof. Hammons’s characteristic site is on the streets of New York City. Harryette Mullen’s fourth book of poetry, Muse & Drudge (1995), is a single work containing four quatrains to the page. Eighty pages in length, it contains no punctuation. According to critic Kate Pearcy, “Each page of the book . . . seems to represent some kind of discrete poetic unit since in performances of Muse & Drudge Mullen rarely breaks a page itself but moves the order of the pages around entirely, reading initially pages which appear at the back of the book, continuing a few pages on, then perhaps reading pages which appear in the middle or wherever” (1). Pearcy goes on to comment that “the phoneme often dominates, availing itself by way of both overt rhyme schemes and avoided rhyme, and there’s a lot of homophonic punning and word play. Reading possibilities are therefore highly provisional and proliferate along several different axes at once, and perhaps might again alter on other occasions” (2). Mullen has referred to her poem as a conBation of Sappho, Gertrude Stein, and the blues: “There’s the blues on the one hand and lyrical poetry on the other hand, and where they intersect or overlap. Thinking of this poem as the place where Sappho meets the blues at the crossroads, I imagined Sappho becoming Sapphire and singing the blues. . . . The writing of the poem is inBuenced by compositional strategies of the 61

blues, because blues verses are actually shufBed and rearranged by the performer, so new blues can be composed on the spot essentially by using different material in different orders” (Bedient, 654). Critic and poet Calvin Bedient believes that, in using such a method, Muse & Drudge offers “postmodernism with a memory” (655). Without writing epic as such, Mullen achieves epic range of reference. She also creates a coaxial relation between oral and written and white and black cultures. Her desire is to “compress together things that come from very different registers or different lexicons; they jostle each other so there’s more tension. Yet there’s more elasticity in the utterance” (657). Mullen’s preference for the word shufDing doubles textual indeterminacy with the racist term “shufBing Negroes.” Slaves “shufBed” in cofBes. The shufBe is also part of African-American dance history. According to Black Dance by Edward Thorpe, “The soft-shoe shufBe was an ideal dance for the minstrel to portray the fallacious image of the simple, happy, indolent Negro servant, and the dances were frequently accompanied by songs that reinforced such a stereotype” (47). Mullen’s shufBing of pages also suggests the shufBing of cards in a poker or Tarot deck. It therefore invites comparison to Ifa divination, in which sixteen cowries or palm nuts are cast on a tray in an act of prophecy. Based on the number of cowries falling face up, a poem is selected from the Ifa canon of 256 poems (the number sixteen squared), which is then recited for a fee by the babalawo or priest. The poem will contain the answer to the supplicant’s problem or question, but the priest himself offers no further interpretation. Thus, the answer to the supplicant’s problem is Anally his, by “reading” the poem presented. Because the god Ifa learned his powers of divination from Eshu, the entire process originates with this trickster and master of interpretations. As Gates puts it, “Ifa is the god of determinate meanings, but his meaning must be rendered by analogy. Esu, god of indeterminacy, rules this interpretive process; he is the god of interpretation because he embodies the ambiguity of Agurative language” (21). Although the connection is probably coincidental, Muse & Drudge has striking numerological similarities to Ifa divination. 62

Each interchangeable page contains sixteen lines, and the number of pages in the book is eighty, a multiple of sixteen (by Ave). According to Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, there are “Ave kinds of good fortune selected simultaneously in Ifa divination: long life, money, marriage, children, and defeat of one’s enemy” (Bascom, 8). Of Osanyin, Yoruba god of healing, art, and ventriloquism, Robert Farris Thompson writes, “Ifa says there are sixteen styles of the Osanyin wroughtiron staff. One kind carries a single ‘head’ (a single bird poised at the summit of the staff), while another carries two heads and still another displays three heads and so on until the highest number is achieved, sixteen birds in iron. The last is especially prestigious, ‘for the highest people calculate their power by sixteen’” (44–45). Here are two consecutive pages of Muse & Drudge as presented in the published work, before any performative act of shufBing: keep your powder dry your knees together your dress down your drawers shut a picture perfect twisted her limbs lovely as a tree for art’s sake muse of the world picks out stark melodies her raspy fabric tickling the ebonies you can sing their songs with words your way put it over to the people know what you doing curly waves away blues navy saved from salvation army grits and gravy tried no lie relaxation 63

some little bitter spilled glitter wiped the Boor with spilled sugar back dating double dutch fresh out of bubble gum halfstep in the grave on banana peels of love devils dancing on a dime cut a rug in ragtime jitterbug squat diddly bow stark strangled banjo

According to the author, the phrase “stark strangled banjo” is a homophone for “star spangled banner” (Bedient, 663). Thus, although much of the energy of these two pages comes from their panoramic glimpse of black life in the United States in the twentieth century—double dutch, ragtime, jitterbug, grits and gravy—double meanings including homophones, puns, and other ambiguities punctuate the poem with the politics of cultural difference. Since the banjo was of African origin and has largely passed into the hands of white bluegrass musicians, a “strangled banjo” is one choked to silence or forced to play. Both interpretations comment on the position of black music historically. The lines quoted here are rife with double meanings. In the line, “keep your powder dry,” for instance, Mullen puns across gender. An older woman offers admonitions to a young girl to ensure her social success. To keep your knees together suggests both how to sit and how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The latter meaning is heightened by the line “your drawers shut.” But “keep your powder dry” is also a male admonition relating to the conduct of war. Thus, male and female references are joined, with the Anal emphasis on the conduct of love in terms of a military campaign. In the second stanza, an anticipated noun following “a picture perfect” is missing. This empty signiAer becomes the subject of “twisted her limbs,” a phrase suggesting coercion. The line 64

“lovely as a tree,” which modiAes her limbs, quotes Joyce Kilmer’s famously mediocre poem, “Trees.” Because of its camp value, the reference to Kilmer’s poem adds an element of humor. The line “muse of the world” is reminiscent of the Sapphic fragments, but the melodies picked on Sappho’s lyre are “stark,” a word repeated only a page later in “stark strangled banjos.” To tickle the ebonies is to amuse or provoke black people, as well as to play the piano’s black keys. Essential to the metaphor of the keyboard is that its black and white elements work in harmony despite their evident separation by color. In one trope, therefore, Mullen opens a world of social commentary. The most important stanza thematically is the fourth: “you can sing their songs / with words your way / put it over to the people / know what you doing.” The “you” is black people, who sing the songs of white people their own way (giving them black meanings and inBections), as has been seen in jazz and other expressive arts. The black singer “disrupts” a standard song, as will be seen later in the example of Al Hibbler’s version of “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me,” recorded with Roland Kirk on A Meeting of the Times. But this disruption adds to our understanding of the song rather than detracting from it. Indeed, it may be argued that, when two cultural and speech communities interact, disruption is entirely necessary on both parts. The black speaker’s inBections are altered by the tide of white speech around him, just as his own speech alters the course of the dominant idiom. Moreover, the minority speaker is conscious of the power of his disruptions. Of particular interest in this respect is the preposition “to” in the line “put it over to the people.” To put it over to means to communicate, to convert the signiAer into the signiAed. But Mullen has also overwritten “on” with “to.” To put one over to black people, by means of coded or inBected cultural messages, is also to put one over on the dominant (white) speech community. As the overwritten, “on” makes itself present as meaning despite its illegibility. This illegibility replicates the relation of social underclasses to the more visible groups “above” them. There are additional hidden and double meanings in the passage quoted. The 1950s rock song “Blue Navy” lies hidden in “curly waves away blues navy.” The musician Bo Diddly is to be 65

found in the line “jitterbug squat diddly bow.” The lines “halfstep in the grave / on banana peels of love” doubles the dance called the halfstep with the popular cliché “one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel.” The suggestion is of an older man, one foot in the grave, having a love affair with a younger woman. Thus, while the organization and style of the poem are postmodern, the content is grounded in black experience. The use of irregularly rhyming quatrains doubles the ballad stanza, with its abcb rhyme scheme and coupling of story and song, with blues lyrics. Mullen’s quatrains are purposely unsteady and indeterminate in meaning, but employ consistent Aelds of reference, much of it relating to African-American orality. Asked about the “mongrel aspect” of her poem, Mullen responded, “I would say that, yes, my text is a deliberately multivoiced text, a text that tries to express the actual diversity of my own experience living here, exposed to different cultures. ‘Mongrel’ comes from ‘among.’ Among others. We are among; we are not alone. We are all mongrels” (Bedient, 651). Even the title Muse & Drudge resulted from homophonic wordplay on the Zora Neale Hurston title Mules and Men. When Bedient asked Mullen, “Who are the mules and who are the men?” her response was: “If you think about black and white, then the black people are the mules and the white people are men. If you think about the black community, then the women are the mules and the men are the men. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the grandmother says the black woman is the mule of the world. I changed that to muse of the world” (666–67). The overwriting of one kind of music with another is a notable feature of rap music. In Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, Houston A. Baker, Jr., traces the origin of rapper Tony Smith, later known as Tone-Loc: Smith’s nom-de-stage became Tone-Loc (pronounced with a long “o”) when his voice was discovered and marketed by two young white businessmen name Mike Ross and Matt Dike. Ross and Dike knew the techniques of and had a passion for rap. What they lacked was a representative voice; they found that voice in Tony Smith. Sampling Van Halen for guitar riff, they took the phrase “wild thing” from Fab Five Freddy and 66

Spike Lee. (See Rolling Stone, June 1, 1989, p. 31). Then they contracted Young MC (an LA-based rapper) to write lyrics. They put the resultant mix at the disposal of Smith’s raspy voice. Lo and behold! A mega-hit called “Wild Thing” was born. Tone-Loc became a contender. The Wall Street aspect of this collage of youthful energies—this West Coast bricolage—is the fact that “Wild Thing” quickly became the second-best-selling single since 1985’s “We Are the World.” The follow-up success of Loc and company’s “Funky Cold Medina” (also written by Young MC) helped the album Loc’ed after Dark become the Arst album by a black rapper to hit number one on the charts. (48–49)

On the one hand, the white producers Ross and Dike have pierced the veil of racial authenticity we expect and, in fact, demand of rap music. They appropriated black voice for proAt. Yet as true fans of the music, theirs is a reformation of black mastery, to take liberties with Houston Baker’s expression. Tony Smith’s is an authentic black voice; Young MC is a genuine songwriter in the rap style. Does it really matter that the rapper’s identity was a white creation? One of the central techniques of hip-hop is the sampling of other music. Russell A. Potter describes how rapper Ice Cube and his group Da Lench Mob sampled the racist phrase of a Los Angeles police ofAcer, “It was straight out of Gorillas in the Mist,” used to the describe the aftermath of the Rodney King beating (77). The cover art depicts the group “wearing black ski masks and carrying automatic riBes (= guerillas)” as they stand in a “dense forest with a heavy undergrowth of ferns (= gorillas)” (78). Thus Da Lench Mob constructs a powerful visual pun worthy of David Hammons, although a good deal less gentle. “In the title cut,” Potter continues, “Ice Cube SigniAes on the political doubleness this homophonic/visual slippage enacts: Fuck Grape Ape and Magilla I’m a killa, Magilla Gorilla ain’t a killa, white boys swiped Godzilla from my supa nigga named King Kong Played his ass like ping-pong1 (Potter, 78) 67

The visual pun on the album cover depends on the homonymic pun of “gorillas” and “guerillas.” In effect, Da Lench Mob conjoins the visual and linguistic strategies of David Hammons and Harryette Mullen. Potter also describes how Public Enemy, on their album Apocalypse 91: The Empire Strikes Black, “mix in painfully distorted but recognizable samples of bluegrass and country music; the outof-phase banjo invokes not only an image of racist Southern whites, but the minstrel’s banjo that was made to enact a seemingly endless jollity” (79). Given David Hammons’s use of recycled materials such as old bottle caps and even shavings of his own hair, it is also worthy of note that, according to Potter, “African-American cultures have mobilized, via a network of localized sites and nomadic incursions, cultures of the found, the revalued, the used—and cultures moreover which have continually transAgured and transformed objects of consumption into sites of production” (108). Even when he makes a performance-art video, Hammons’s work is inexpensively produced. His seven-minute video Phat Free (1997) consists Arst of the sounds of a man rhythmically kicking a bucket and then the sight of him doing the same thing. Meaning lies largely in the work’s title. The phrase “phat free” puns on “fat free” (the bucket is empty) and the suggestion that someone has “kicked the bucket,” or died. But the word phat is also jargon for something that is emphatic in the best sense—a beautiful woman, for instance. Inexpensive found objects are also essential to Two Obvious (1996), an artwork in which cowrie shells spill from a broken piggy bank. Cowrie shells were used in West Africa as units of exchange, or money. They were also employed in sacred Eshu Agures and, among some African groups, as part of Ifa divination practice. Cowries are themselves multiple in meaning. To depict them spilling from a sacred piece of middle-class Americana is to display black wealth, both material and spiritual. Al Hibbler’s recording of “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,” on the 1972 album A Meeting of the Times (Atlantic 1630), blends black and white vocal phrasing. In the Arst verse, the phrasing is normal except for a plosive “why” in the lines “Why people 68

tear the seam of anyone’s dream / is over my head.” But in the lines “If you should take the word of others you’ve heard / I haven’t a chance,” the word “of” is presented as a great sagging bass note, followed immediately by the arch upper-class British phrasing of “I haven’t a chance.” Together, the interruptive and jazzy “of” and the parodic hauteur of “Oi ha! vent” amount to a cultural palimpsest. The same thing occurs in the third verse, quoted here in its entirety: True I’ve been seen with (uh-uh) someone new But does that mean that I’ve been [“Oi’ve bean”] untrue. Though we’re apart the words in my heart Reveal how I feel about you.

The interruptive “uh-uh” of the Arst line contrasts with the equally interruptive upper-class phrasing of “Oi’ve bean.” A similar conjunction appears in the fourth verse, where the archly phrased “may hold” in the line “and other arms may hold a thrill” is followed by the strongly attacked, even growled, Arst word in “But please do nothing till you hear it from me.” After a long saxophone solo by Roland Kirk recapitulating the musical theme, Hibbler sings two more verses. The penultimate verse is a restatement of the third in a less-emphatic style. In the Anal verse, the words “my memory” are growled in one of the song’s strongest emotional statements. A similar growl is to be found in the song’s Anal words, “and you never will.” Why Hibbler makes use of “white” dialect is unclear. His purpose may be political (the “other” satirized), formal (he enjoys the balance of speech kinds, much as a painter enjoys the contrast of shades or colors), surrealist (dialect difference in a striking sound collage), or sociolinguistic (he sang in different colors depending on the audience). Whatever the cause, dialect shifting is constant throughout the songs on A Meeting of the Times. In “Daybreak,” Hibbler repeats British inBections in the line “I daydream [“Oi die-dream”] of you.” In “Lover Come Back to Me,” he uses a clipped phrasing reminiscent of Cary Grant in the line “I remember everything you used to do.” Such consistent use of vocal color points to an idiosyncratic personal style rather than political commentary. As a blind man and a singer, Hibbler was 69

extraordinarily sensitive to sound, but he was also extremely elegant in his personal style, from his dress to his manner of speech. Richard Long of Emory University has suggested in conversation that Hibbler was in fact parodying the vocal style of Billy Eckstine. According to jazz critic and former Down Beat editor Art Lange, also in conversation, Hibbler, like Eckstine and Herb Jeffries, was strongly inBuenced by the crooner sound of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1999, the “Jazz ProAles” show on National Public Radio reported that, on leaving the Arkansas School for the Blind (he was raised in Little Rock), Hibbler started singing the blues in roadhouses but “wanted to sing soft sweet ballads like crooners Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby” (Merrill, 1). Although Hibbler had a major popular success with his recording of “Unchained Melody” in 1955, his work has been poorly attended to critically. A major listing of criticism in music journals shows only two entries for Hibbler, a brief record review in Down Beat of For Sentimental Reasons, his 1986 collaboration with Hank Jones, and a review of the album Unchained Melody in Music Journal (January 1958). Duke Ellington, with whose band Hibbler sang from 1943 to 1951, describes the singer in Music Is My Mistress: Hib’s great dramatic devices and the variety of his tonal changes give him almost unlimited range. His capabilities are so many, but I should mention Arst his clear, understandable enunciation. He can produce a whispering, conAdential sound, or an outburst that borders on panic [italics added]. He will adopt a nasal tone at just the right word and note, or affect a sudden drop to what sounds like the below-compass bass. Cries, laughs, and highly animated calls—he uses them all to make the listener see it as he sees it. (Ellington, 223)

According to Hibbler, the song “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me” was in fact written by Ellington especially to suit the range and intonation of his voice (Merrill, 2). Ellington’s ability as a songwriter to “read” the voice of Al Hibbler—and thereby sing through it—is a striking example of double voicedness in its own right, although not as a question of cultural difference. In Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality, Aldon Nielsen comments, “Race is excessive and unruly. To reread the racial 70

signiAcations of America’s literary texts is to engage in a double reading, to differ with texts and to differ from ourselves” (17). Like David Hammons and Harryette Mullen, Al Hibbler places himself squarely at the crossroads of meaning and culture. As Eshu Agures, the three artists wear multicolored hats that give them alternate identities depending on the viewer’s position. “We are not born as white or black subjects,” Nielsen insists. “We must be taught to act as white or black agents” (21). Through various doublings and double voicedness, Hammons, Mullen, and Hibbler reveal the complexities of racial identiAcation. Jacques Derrida has written of the new face of Europe, “What is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself” (9). Through cultural ventriloquy, we learn who we are by hearing the voices of those we are becoming.

notes 1. “Guerillas in the Mist” (Ice Cube, W. Hutchinson, G. Clinton, W Collins, B. Worrell, Mr. Woody; Gangsta Boogie Music, adm. by Warner Bros. Music Inc. (ASCAP), from Guerillas in the Mist, Street Knowledge Records 792296-2, © 1992 Atlantic Recording Corp.

works cited Bascom, William. 1980. Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1993. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bedient, Calvin. 1996. “The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Calvin Bedient.” Callaloo 19, no. 3: 651–69. Cannon, Steve. 1991. “David Hammons’ New York: Twenty Years, RetroIntrospection.” In David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 38–58. Cambridge: MIT Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. David W. Bight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: ReDections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ellington, Duke. 1973. Music Is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo Press.

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Finkelpearl, Tom. 1991. “On the Ideology of Dirt.” In David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 61–89. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Kellie. 1991. “The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic.” In David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 15–37. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mackey, Nathaniel. 1986. Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington, Ky.: Callaloo Fiction Series. Merrill, Joan. 1999. Jazz ProCles. National Public Radio. http://www.npr .org/programs/ jazz proAles/hibbler.html. 8/18/99. Mullen, Harryette. 1995. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 1994. Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pearcy, Kate. “A Poetics of Opposition? Race and the Avant-Garde.” Paper presented at the Conference on Contemporary Poetry: Poetry and the Public Sphere, Rutgers University, April 24–27, 1997. http://english.rutgers.edu/ pierce.htm. 10/14/98. Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit. New York: Vintage. Thorpe, Edward. 1990. Black Dance. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press.

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The Postmodern Era A Final Exam

True or False/Multiple Choice (two points each): 1. Art of the postmodern period is: a. minimal b. mystical c. mannerist d. postliterate e. all of the above 2. The Alm script operates at the speed of attention, novels at the speed of history, poetry at the speed of myth, and myth at the speed of time. 3. The past is conditional, the future absolute, the present open to negotiation. 4. The past is ungendered, the future impotent, the present having an operation. 5. Transgression is sentimental. 6. The closer writing comes to theory, the more narrative it becomes. 7. Without language, the world would vanish. 8. Nature is bored with the truth. 9. Photography relies on the unfamiliar. 10. Polaroid photos of snow are more poetic than snow itself. 11. Poetry tells fewer lies. 12. Irony is the best disguise. 13. Apples can no longer be understood. From Chicago Review 45, nos. 3–4 (1999): 108–11.

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14. Music at its most social resembles literature; literature at its most hermetic resembles music. 15. There is no difference between a censorate and an aesthetic. 16. Bad art is central to the concept of pleasure. 17. There is no tyranny like that of “the new.” 18. The best poets of the avant-garde are those who most betray its mission. 19. Poetry is the science of the irrational. 20. “The inarticulate voice makes a real place disappear” (Greil Marcus). 21. “The brand-new arrives already worn out” (Vincent Canby). 22. The answer to America’s problems is: a. corporate enrichment poverty programs b. corporate diversity whitewash spokesmen c. holistic cappuccino overdose remedies 23. Obsessional repetition assumes classical proportions—the music, for example, of Philip Glass. 24. Mothers are transparent, fathers opaque. 25. The future is bright for dead white men. 26. The moon’s authority is on the wane. 27. Which is more true? a. “The source of all writing is boredom” (Marguerite Duras). b. The source of all boredom is writing. 28. Imagination is voyeuristic. 29. Nothing is less mimetic than a mirror. 30. Equality of mediocrity has been achieved. 31. Choose one: a. “An image is a stop the mind makes between two uncertainties” (Djuna Barnes). b. A photograph is a pause between two eternities. 32. The deepest point of postmodern attention is the pause button on a VCR. 33. Watching television is a pastoral experience. 34. The beauty of trompe l’oeil, like life, is when it starts to decay. 35. Pomposity is necessary to any aesthetic. 74

36. “There is no great idea that stupidity cannot put to its own uses” (Robert Musil). 37. The greatest writers have the worst characters. 38. The future isn’t what it used to be. 39. America lacks a folk culture. 40. Things are useless without their metaphors. 41. Theory has completed its mission. 42. Scientists and engineers are the poets of our time, the poets its cultural technicians. 43. The speed of attention is altered by language. 44. Everything “new” in today’s literature had its exact precedent in 1898. 45. Banality was once an original concept. 46. The only way of “proving” a poem is to test it on one’s nerves; in this, it resembles sex. 47. Only the poor have gods; only the rich achieve redemption. 48. Multiculturalism is the white woman’s burden. 49. Every force restrains a form. 50. Disjuncture heals all wounds.

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Fables of Representation Poetry of the New York School

Since discovering Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire in a Chicago classroom in 1971, I have been drawn to the poets of the New York School. From its Joe Brainard cover design to the sonnet “Nothing in That Drawer,” which consists entirely of the title line, the book promised something quite different from the Thomas Kinsella, Theodore Roethke, and Sylvia Plath poems that I had been reading in the Chicago Public Library. Great Balls of Fire contained a parody of the Stephen Crane poem “A Man Saw a Ball of Gold”; a parody of the Duchamp artwork In Advance of the Broken Arm (“After the Broken Arm”); one of the shortest poems I’d ever read (entitled “December,” its full text was “I will sleep / in my little cup”); the almost illegible poem “Y . . . r D . . . k,” consisting entirely of words that had been partly erased; and “Some Bombs,” which contained lines like “I ray you stop me pour the garter outdoors” and “On Intends Creek.” Later I discovered the impulse behind some of this compelling madness. It lay in dada, surrealism, and the work of the Arst generation of the New York School, especially Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. The apparent silliness of some of the poems was astonishing to me; it was also a great relief. At the same time, my greater admiration remained with work such as “Wonderful Things” and “Strawberries in Mexico” that joined humor and everyday observation with the lyric mode: Anne, who are dead and whom I loved in a rather asinine fashion I think of you often From American Poetry Review, July–August 2002.

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In the midst of the steadiness and gravity demanded by elegy, Ron Padgett places the tonally interruptive word “asinine,” which does, after all, depict love’s irregularities. The word extends the poem’s tonal range and lyric attitude, making possible the further playfulness of “Seriously I have this mental (smuh!) illness / which causes me to do things / on and away.” Anyone who doubts the sincerity of “Wonderful Things” needs only to read its ending movement, “a tuba that is a meadowful of bluebells / is a wonderful thing / and that’s what I want to do / tell you wonderful things” (81). I begin with the early work of Ron Padgett because it reBects the breadth of New York School practice. On one pole is the radical denaturing of the sentence as seen in “Some Bombs” and the work that undoubtedly inBuenced it, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On (a line of exploration that includes Clark Coolidge’s early identiAcation with the New York School, John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, and contributes to the foundation of language poetry). On the other extreme is the personal lyric associated with Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, a mode inBuenced by the directness of William Carlos Williams’s domestic chronicles such as “This Is Just to Say” and “The Eyeglasses,” and Apollinaire’s poetic narratives of walking the streets of Paris, “The Musician of Saint Merry” and “Phantom of the Clouds,” with their technique of offering the dates and times of events being observed: “It was the day before July 14 / About four in the afternoon / I went out to see the acrobats” (Apollinaire 1971, 161). A third major style to develop out of the New York School is the “abstract lyric,” to be found primarily in the work of Ashbery, Barbara Guest (especially Fair Realism and books to follow), Marjorie Welish, Ann Lauterbach, and numerous other poets of the 1980s and 1990s. Blending philosophical “distance” with lyric immediacy, the abstract lyric was Arst practiced by Wallace Stevens as the “American Sublime.” Given postmodern direction by Ashbery, it is a mode in which thought remains in balance with song. Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” is a good example of abstract lyric, as is Auden’s periphrastic “In Praise of Limestone.” Although the two poems differ rhetorically, both announce themselves as discourses on a given subject. In the case of the Stevens poem, it is the change 77

wrought on nature by a man-made object; more importantly it deals with the impact of an artistic decision of placement and, axiomatically, the possibilities of substitution. What impact would a jar have on the “slovenly wilderness” that “sprawled around”? In the Auden poem, one of several subjects is the very manner of the poem itself as “voluble discourse”: accustomed to a stone that responds, They have never had to veil their faces in awe Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be Axed.

Volubility is a poet’s condition, especially a young poet’s; he or she can only enact it, like desire. Even in traditional forms, it is as indeterminate as the Bow of lava. The “abstract” quality of such poems also suggests their mystery; like the work of Samuel Beckett, they confront unresolvable complexities of existence. In Stevens and Ashbery especially, these complexities are expressed through fables of representation. In such work, a metaphysical stage is created for the enactment of meaning. Resolution is not a desired part of the process but rather representation’s tangle of fact and imagination. Such fables as Stevens’s “The Snow Man” are therefore both difAcult and entertaining. I would argue that the apparent obscurity of such works is due to their realism—their understanding that contradiction, puzzle, and oracle accurately depict the complexities of the metaphysical. Our pleasure in them results from the same source as our misunderstanding.

Volubility Kenneth Koch’s book-length poem When the Sun Tries to Go On was written in 1953 but not published as a book until 1969 by Black Sparrow Press. With illustrations and cover design by Larry Rivers, the volume is a beautiful and soothing object to hold in the hand. Tom Orange calculates that the work Arst saw print in 1960 in Alfred Leslie’s magazine The Hasty Papers. Here is one section of the poem, which consists of 109 pages of similar twenty-four-line pieces: 78

Mew. R. We’re blood patents that weird pink Tea—fro, runs “Silo, Bill; tea” Madam steer, shower Of wear-me-out-in-the-feet-aspirin, satin Trireme shoe statue might Himalayas its Tramway scene-box. Hill-dog, pay! Grab The fennel bee of the hollow Macon Subway New, cockroach of faded ilk, deceased rosemary London, pens ‘draped “golly,” and, over Pied sheep, damn upstairs I see sigh “No umpire Shovels, Lambeth.” Orange magic, sensibility February amid the strawberries! Raspberries Mutation moth of a deceptive hillbilly’s Luminous, snow, Cossack, waited, tree. Sense had Shakes, ovary along, beach, true Fringe of I May den chlorine clockwise raspberries’ Hindrance loop of water Pindar-dependencies’ Snow Sam-a-top of wondrous Thrace Of if of of of shy’s blessings “whin” a cold Houses of deserted aspirin, cell-less rosemary! Cinder, hollow, China roseberry Rune shelves, a merest baby council chamber Motto: Sistine Chapel, “fair weather, fewer deserted Anywhere comma rosaries, limetree ovaries In quiet subway, hooray, ‘Sue’ to deceiving umpires.”

A nasty review of Koch’s 1953 pamphlet Poems contained a criticism that might be considered true of When the Sun Tries to Go On: “Mr. Koch, it seems, has a rare combination of words rattling about in his skull, but it is difAcult to call any of his word combinations the bric-a-brac of poetry” (Roskolenko 1954, 233). Frank O’Hara’s defense of his friend’s work appeared in Poetry a few months later. It included the assertion that “Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive, and within the limited scope of this Arst volume, indicate a potentially impressive variety” (O’Hara 1955, 349). The quick-wittedness of the poet is clearly indicated by the passage above; the naturalness of his phrasing is not. In fact, it is the very artiAciality of the project that gives it interest. The poem’s Arst sounds (“Mew. R.”) prepare the reader for a poetry beyond the sentence, phrase, and syllable, at the purely phonetic level of “oos” and “arrs.” Such mouth joy is as natural as the velvet “uthe” in “mother.” Given 79

Koch’s later work beginning with Thank You, the poem’s packed syntax is a little unexpected. The poem “Spring” in that volume makes use of normative syntax such as “Let’s take a walk / In the city / Till our shoes get wet” while maintaining some of the exuberance of When the Sun Tries to Go On: “Let’s make music / (I hear the cats / purply beautiful / Like hallways in summer / Made of snowing rubber / Valence piccalilli and diamonds.” Koch has always had dash and bounce, or, as O’Hara wrote in his defense, “He has the other poetic gift: vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull” (350). But even in such radically innovative work, we feel the pull of tradition in the capitalized left margin, the tortured ghost of the iambic pentameter line which he constantly exceeds; the lure of literary references and high culture such as Lambeth, Pindar-dependencies, and Coleridge’s lime-tree bower; and the “aspirin, satin” internal rhyme that reminds me of the lush, baroque, in-extremis style of Hart Crane: Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its Bow, Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant. You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet Sere of the sun exploded in the sea

Koch’s poem, like much of Crane’s poetry, is an anxious representation of the great works that have preceded it. It shreds and masticates those early works in order to build its own papiermâché of them; to become, thereby, a “seer of the son exploded in the sea.” Like many romantic works, the poem contains the announcement of its poetic ambition, to become a source of volubility and resourcefulness. The self that has been given birth (by a hurricane) congeals into a shape through the further inBuence of light and time (afternoons). The same urge is apparent in When the Sun Tries to Go On, the very title of which introduces the son’s generative need. Yet the process of revelation is akin to a rune (“Rune shelves, a merest baby council chamber”), which is deAned as “any obscure or mystic song, poem, verse, or saying.” The work of Jackson Mac Low, an older contemporary, was 80

never an inBuence on Koch. It is more likely that Gertrude Stein’s democracy of sentences was an inBuence on both. But there is an interesting resonance between When the Sun Tries to Go On and some of Mac Low’s computer-generated works such as “Antic Quatrains”: Along a tarn a delator entangled a dragline Boasting o’ tonnages, dogies, ants, and stones As long as Lind balled Gandas near a gas log As it late lit rigatoni and a tag line.

Commonality is to be found in isolation of the word within syntax—that is, its domination over it; the parodic “look” of an iambic pentameter line; its use of found materials, in Mac Low’s case a computer printout “phase” of his own poem “A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos” and in Koch’s a variety of sources; and its antic use of this antiquity. Mac Low arrives at the antic through a laborious and methodical process of winnowing language with computer programs such as Travesty and Diastex4; Koch is more the spontaneous wit. But both seek irony and the burlesque mode. We seem to be in the presence of an insane speaking machine. “Antic Quatrains” was drawn systematically from a three-thousand-line computer printout of word groups which were themselves based on partial anagrams of the name Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos, a process that results in recurrent use of the letters t, n, g, and l, among others, often to alliterative effect. The packed quality of the poem contributes to its antic tone, its linguistic thickness, and its mystery. Beneath its runic nature, however, lies the establishment and maintenance of a narrative. A tarn is a small mountain lake. A delator is an informer, accuser, or spy. Lind is a proper name, as in Jenny Lind; so also is Gandas. A tag line is a refrain of a song or poem, a catchword, or cue. Rigatoni is a cylindrical form of pasta. Once these words are understood, a narrative emerges of a spy entangling a dragline near a mountain lake, searching perhaps for a drowning victim as he boasts of all the things he’s hauled out of the water. And so on. Because of the structure of sentences (subject, verb, object), it is difAcult to avoid the stability of subject matter, narratives 81

however brief, a degree of characterization, and therefore tone. Sentences are worlds. Because of the directedness of the parts of speech and the intentionality of the writing act, difAculty in language usually offers the code to its own unraveling. Nouns name and verbs enact. This is a clarifying relationship even if “Lind balled Gandas near a gas log.” Among the most directive parts of speech are prepositions, which offer relation in time or space: “near a gas log,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun.” But relationality is all over language. Even the modernist breakage into fragments invites relations across rifts, a distance that makes association all the more powerful. Such bridges likewise exist in postmodern texts. No matter how broken or distant it may appear, language is always amorous and desires connection. Because of the intentionality of the speaking voice, difAcult texts often become clear at the moment of their performance by the poet. My own understanding of the work of Clark Coolidge began with a reading he gave in Chicago in the early 1980s. The furious pace of his sentences made everything clear and was itself a subject of his poetry. The pace was akin to that of a drum solo as wave on wave of phrasing rushed through acoustic space. On the other hand, Wallace Stevens’s enunciation was glacially slow and full of pauses that emphasized individual words: “She . . . was the maker . . . of the song . . . she sang.” Readers of the text will not understand Stevens’s intentions until they hear the momentum of his silences. Intention and signature are often disguised by the printed text. All poetry is ultimately performance poetry. In a review of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditations, John Ashbery wrote: These austere “stanzas” are made up almost entirely of colorless connecting words such as “where,” “which,” “these,” “of,” “not,” “have,” “about,” and so on, though now and then Miss Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an Albert to remind us that it really is the world, our world, that she has been talking about. The result is like certain monochrome de Kooning paintings in which isolated strokes of color take on a deliciousness they never could have had out of context, or a piece of music by Webern in which a single note on the celesta sud82

denly irrigates a whole desert of dry, scratchy sounds in the strings. (1957, 250)

Stein’s plan would seem to be to reduce language to the banality of life itself, which is full of noise and gray incident through which now and then a colorful bird Bies. Indeed, Ashbery himself acknowledges little difference between such work and life: As we get deeper into the poem, it seems not so much as if we were reading as living a rather long period of our lives with a houseful of people. Like people, Miss Stein’s lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, Bowers, weather, and names. And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them. (1957, 251)

The review displays an attitude toward language which I call “language realism” (see the essay “Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in Contemporary Poetry”). The chief objective of such writing is to erase the distinction between art and the world. Art can take on the ordinariness of everyday events, as well as its plenty, without seeking the heroic, the dramatic, or especially the lyric. Denied its distinction as art, art becomes a democracy of attention in which basic binomial patterns of sameness and difference are key: birdcall, Simonize, nitid, fee. In “The New Realists” exhibition catalogue of 1962, Ashbery wrote, “Today it is possible not to speak in metaphors, whereas in the 1920s such a poet as Eliot couldn’t evoke a gasworks without feeling obliged to call the whole history of human thought into play. In today’s violent reaction to threadbare intellectualism the artist has brought the gasworks into the house” (1989, 82). A belated dadaist, John Cage explored the relation of silence and music, intention and accident in a way that invites comparison to Stanzas in Meditation, When the Sun Tries to Go On, the “New Sentence” of the language poets, and Ashbery’s most radical work, The Tennis Court Oath. Discontinuity is not new; it was a major feature of modernism. In postmodernism, we see the installation of dadaist methods such as the cut-up, sound and 83

performance poems, and the enshrinement of the fragment as a necessary means of organization. We might also point to the related issue of processual composition, with its ultimate in postmodern clichés, that it’s the process rather than the product that counts in a work of art. For Ashbery, Stanzas in Meditation and Henry James’s late novels “are ambitious attempts to transmit a completely new picture of reality, of that real reality of the poet which Antonin Artaud called ‘une realite dangereuse et typique.’ If these works are highly complex and, for some, unreadable, it is not only because of the complicatedness of life, the subject, but also because they actually imitate its rhythm, its way of happening” (1957, 253). Such writing seeks to be purely generative or, to use a term familiar to this essay, voluble. Unfortunately, presentational immediacy is never pure because the world does not write itself. Even the world’s fullness is the romantic projection of an author. Ashbery’s own involvement with the Stein inBuence is minimal because, unlike the author of Stanzas in Meditation, he makes use of his entire formal and rhetorical arsenal. Stein’s poetry is almost never lyrical; Ashbery’s is insistently so, even in poems like “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher” and “Leaving the Atocha Station” which otherwise present discontinuity and discordant imagery. Here are the Arst lines of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (1956) and Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath (1962): Stanzas in Meditation stanza i I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it. But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet In a kind of a way they meant it best That they should change in and on account But they must not stare when they manage Whatever they are occasionally liable to do It is often easy to pursue them once in a while And in a way there is no repose They like it as well as they ever did 84

But it is very often just by the time That they are able to separate In which case in effect they could Not only be very often present perfectly In each way which ever they chose. The Tennis Court Oath What had you been thinking about the face studiously bloodied heaven blotted region I go on loving you like water but there is a terrible breath in the way all of this You were not elected president, yet won the race All the way through fog and drizzle When you read it was sincere the coasts stammered with unintentional villages the horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . . I worry

Both excerpts extend a narrative promise of subject matter, a set of characters, and the use of time (“I go on loving you like water” and “I caught a bird which made a ball / And they thought better of it”). Actions are deAnitive and the point of view secure. In the Stein work, we even have the reactions of characters (“they”) to the excerpt’s key event: they thought better of it. But here the similarity ends. Stein is able to work comfortably in a neutral world of “they” and “it” in which events are general and reactions to them indistinct. The environment is social, but sociability is limited in its report. We get only the general outline in a language close to legalese (“in which case”). The push of the language is entirely horizontal, toward nothing. The only metaphor occurs in the Arst line, and its promise of visual information is not fulAlled by lines to follow. This vacancy creates mystery and interest for a few lines then begins to test the patience of patient readers. The tease of Stein’s narrative is weak and the author’s conAdence unforgiving. Moreover, the freshening of language through subject changes, paragraphing, and word and rhythm patterns (such as we see in Tender Buttons) is not apparent. We lurch eagerly toward words like “mutinously” in Stanza II that have color and eventfulness. One has 85

the sense of a story involving “they” that refuses to be told. The stanzas are not poetic in the usual sense. However, we do feel the pinch of syntax toward poetic measure at many points: In which case in effect they could Not only be very often present perfectly In each way which ever they chose.

The imperfection of the measure is part of its interest, as is the unusual word order. In each line a superBuous phrase interrupts the directness of a statement: in the Arst line, “in effect”; in the second, “very often”; and in the third “which ever.” Stein’s impulse is toward fulAlling the line’s optical rather than acoustic measure. But perhaps the ongoingness of language is the point, to be “present perfectly.” People have been invited to a party, and they have attended. There was a lot of noise and much of the conversation could not be overheard. Perhaps they will come again. Ashbery is not just comfortable with poetic rhetoric; he revels in it. He is too sophisticated to plod directly toward a narrative’s conclusion. Rather, he offers enough narrative outposts in person, place, and time to make lyric possible. While the information offered is often whimsical (“You were not elected president, yet won the race”), the race is existential (“All the way through fog and drizzle”) and the poem’s direction is toward lyricism rather than away from it. The poem’s discontinuities act to heighten its tone rather than to exhaust attention, and there is a sense of Anality to the poem’s last two lines: “They could all go home now the hole was dark / lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you.” As in much of his work, oddness of detail gives authority to what seems a tired or conventional rhetoric. The Bat or banal line is a way of teasing his own (and the reader’s) attention. It is the comedy of the purposely awkward dance; like Beckett and Keaton, it’s done with a straight face. Ashbery loves to dazzle the reader with clichés and empty sentences such as: “Behind this weather of indifference is of course a concern for the real qualities that inform our continuing to see each other about a lot of things” (1972, 38). Also, like Nabokov in his love of poshlust (sentimental bad taste), he likes 86

a good frolic with a swan now and then. When Ashbery began teaching for the Arst time, at Brooklyn College in the 1970s, he would sometimes ask students to write the worst possible poem of which they were capable. On the other side of bathos, ornate diction, and ridiculous Agures the divine lies in wait. Ashbery’s is a new kind of lyricism in which the rifts are sometimes just rifts and sometimes laden with ore. Ashbery’s difAculties are of another order than the SteinZukofsky-language poetry line of modernism. Like Beckett, Ashbery fondly expresses the existential condition. There is no fetishizing of the nonsequence but rather a delight in the misjoined parts of the whole. Yet The Tennis Court Oath and the sardonic elusiveness of Ashbery’s style generally have inBuenced the work of Charles Bernstein such as Islets/Irritations (1980), Controlling Interests (1986), and Dark City (1994). Here is a passage from Bernstein’s “Matters of Policy” from Controlling Interests: On a broad plain in a universe of anterooms, making signals in the dark, you fall down on your waistband &, carrying your own plate, a last serving, set out for another glimpse of a gaze. In a room full of kids splintering like gas jets against shadows of tropical taxis—he really, I should be sorry, I think this is the (“I know I have complained” “I am quite well” “quit nudging”—croissants outshine absinthe as “la plus, plus sans egal” though what I most care about is another sip of my Pepsi-Cola. Miners tell me about the day, like a pack of cards, her girlfriend split for Toronto. By the ocean, gripped in such an embrace—these were blizzard conditions & no time for gliding— she promised to keep in touch.

The Ashbery inBuence can be found in the poem’s antic disposition, indeterminate and apparently shifting identity of the speaker “I,” its parodic anecdotalism, and the willingness to 87

create settings such as “a broad plain” on which local events such as “signals in the dark” stabilize the reader’s sense of place. But once a reference or place is established, it is quickly subject to change or is falsely investigated in the Arst place, like the description of Guadalajara in Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual.” The italicized I announces the dilemma of egoic Arstperson epiphany among postwar poets. The conversational interruptiveness of “he really, I / should be sorry” passage is another nod toward that concern. Most important is the poem’s willingness to dwell in points of view. We are constantly seeing through a different set of eyes. Nevertheless, the views and language we inhabit as “I,” “we,” and “you” have an authority of report that is less typical of Bernstein’s work of the 1990s, a period in which burlesque, doggerel, and other parodic modes also associated with the New York School become more dominant. In order to emphasize this difference, I’d like to compare a later excerpt of “Matters of Policy” with a poem from Residual Rubbernecking (1995): At last the soup is piping hot, the decks washed, all appurtenances brushed aside. Across the parking lot you can still hear the desultory voices of the men chatting about the dreary “affaires de la monde” that they seem to And so interesting. You take some white Bowers out of the vase, the one you postured that you no longer cared about but which is as close to your heart as that chair from which you wistfully stare at the charming Boral tableau, & bring them into the kitchen where you Ax yourself a bowl of ice cream. The Dog Is Dead A friend of mine named Rudy Loop Says time’s the noblest thing I think I know better when I say I prefer soup to stew

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The sandpiper knows not where to nest A bee can And no bone The baby never stops crying But I must have my lunch

The “Matters of Policy” excerpt presents a false idealism intended to be funny. But the parody of bourgeois aestheticism is gentle and, as in the work of Ashbery, half allows us to believe that the white Bowers are “close to your heart.” We are also allowed the steady habitation of the persona’s consciousness. Thus, even as we are kept at bemused distance, we are permitted sympathy with this latter-day Prufrock. The same cannot be said of “The Dog Is Dead,” a poem so given over to doggerel that the persona’s psychology is not a consideration. Both poems have the Ashbery feature of inspired awfulness, as can be seen in “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox”: So my youth was spent, underneath the trees I always moved around with perfect ease I voyaged to Paris at the age of ten And met many prominent literary men

In such burlesque, the avant-garde abandons its dream of difAculty and joins with popular culture, producing poems such as Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” and “You Were Wearing” and the purposely “dumb” works in Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan’s collaboration Bean Spasms (1967). DifAculty, dumbness, and the overt use of cliché, one of Ashbery’s favorite devices, share their refusal of the established literary standard and ultimately provoke a richer poetry on the other side of outrage. Ellipticism, recently invented by the critic Stephen Burt as a school of innovative halfmeasures, will never catch on for exactly this reason. Nothing in it is outrageous, difAcult, or dumb. What ellipticism really represents is the Anal absorption of the Ashbery style into mainstream poetics. Volubility Ands a different expression in the work of Kenward Elmslie, the librettist and songwriter whose Arst full-length book

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of poetry, The Champ, appeared in 1968. A single long poem in quatrains, the poem has some of the slapdash interruptiveness of Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go on: Two aeroplanes. Nod. Tote. Late. Sass the daughter of the chef. Nod. Coo. Burn. On the bank, a statue with pubic hair, and in the distance, a bunch of agents. The same sadness Inside the apartment, a holiday atmosphere prevailed. The poverty-stricken “O” phone circles, hitting the black tableau.

Born in 1929 and a contemporary of the Arst generation of the New York School, Elmslie has been generally more associated with the group’s second generation. The publication of his poetry was delayed by the success of his lyrics for the song “LoveWise,” a 1959 hit recorded by Nat King Cole, and his opera libretti The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956), Miss Julie (1965), and Lizzie Borden (1966). In addition to the book and lyrics for the Broadway show The Grass Harp (1971), he has written the libretti for The Seagull (1974), Washington Square (1976), and Three Sisters (1986). As would be expected, the lyricism of Elmslie’s poetry often relates to musical theater; his poems are written to be sung. Because he also performs his work in a handsome baritone voice, it is difAcult to distinguish the lyric poet from the performer and composer of lyrics. “Bang-Bang Tango” is one instance: Me and my giant orangoutang doll. And now you. Me and Jim-Merv-Val, The Poil of the Palais Blau Taj Mahal. And now you. Tango zat Bang-Bang Tango, Zat Bang-Bang Tango, Bang-Bang

This is lyricism of a different order than “Fly Me to the Moon” or “My Papa’s Waltz.” Begging to be ferociously performed, as it 90

was by Estelle Parsons on the recording Kenward Elmslie Revisited (Painted Smiles Records 1982), the lyrics read as performed volubility (“The Poil of the Palais Taj Mahal”), as “Wallace Stevens’ surface of ‘glittering nonsense’” (Bamberger, 195), and as surrealist pop art (“Me and my giant orangoutang doll”). As volubility, such writing reaches toward nonsense and the uncontainable; as song lyric, it reaches with sociability toward an audience that can make claim to its plain sense. Elmslie writes of his process as lyricist: When I’m making up tunes for a “chunk,” I hear semi-tunes or sometimes overt actual hummable tunes inside my head, tunes that grow out of the “state” the character is in. I sing my own words internally, letting the tune dictate the size and shape of the stanzas, stanzas the composer sets in his own way, naturally—which is one of the major bonuses in being a librettist, being truly surprised by what happens to one’s words when they’re set to music and sung. Make-believe inner singing helps weed out awkward-sounding and heavy-literary syllables and sounds. Mini-confession: even after I cut and cut, pare down to the bone, my “chunks” are still too long and a bit over-written— actually a bonus for the composer, who has some leeway to cut and shape on his own. (1982, 204)

There is a tug in Elmslie’s writing toward the “over-written” that is comparable to the packed verbal and metaphysical surfaces of Hart Crane, Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” some surrealist writing, Ashbery and early Koch, and language-centered poets like Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge, and Bruce Andrews. On the other hand, his work is measured by a “makebelieve inner singing” that gives proportion and balance. But this harmony would be useless without the outward swing (volubility) of Elmslie’s verbalism.

The Personal Lyric The “I do this I do that” poems of Frank O’Hara such as “The Day Lady Died” are among the best-known work of the New 91

York School, and for many readers provide the deAnition of the group’s practice. Ashbery will make personal references, for example in the third section of “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” but he usually invests himself secretly or through more general erotic or elegiac movements. It remained for O’Hara to make direct use of the “I” in the context of the urban quotidian, thereby creating a new kind of personal lyric. All this occurred, naturally, in the context of a generation’s larger rejection of T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality and the cult of New Critical “objectivity” that grew up around it. This rejection was to spread broadly across the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s and include poets as otherwise diverse as Allen Ginsberg (“To Aunt Rose,” arguably the best confessional poem), Robert Lowell (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”), Sylvia Plath (“Daddy”), Theodore Roethke (“My Papa’s Waltz”), James Schuyler (“Korean Mums”), Denise Levertov (“The Ache of Marriage”), and even, I would argue, Charles Olson, Aerce opponent of “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Olson, 24). The Maximus Poems (1960) is a work of monumental ego. Nor did Olson hesitate to record his dreams and jealous fears in poems like “The Librarian.” Frank O’Hara was not always the personable boulevardier of The Lunch Poems. The easygoing persona of the “I do this I do that” poems was preceded by the comparatively conservative and well-made “To the Harbormaster”; the self-consciously “dumb” poem beginning “At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump”; the ambitious lyric sweep of Odes (1960), which takes on an heroic tone unexpected from the author of “For Janice and Kenneth to Voyage”; and the impenetrable surrealist-inBuenced thickets of “Second Avenue” (1953), which according to Larry Rivers was written in his plaster garden studio “overlooking that avenue” while O’Hara posed for a sculpture (O’Hara 1972, 529). The opening sentences of “Second Avenue” offer little hint of the personist poems to come: Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours, celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures, as if proximity were staring at the margin of a plea. . . .

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This thoroughness whose traditions have become so reBective, your distinction is merely a quill at the bottom of the sea tracing forever the fabulous alarms of the mute so that in the limpid tosses of your violet dinginess a pus appears and lingers like a groan from the collar of a reproachful tree whose needles are tired of howling.

Here again is volubility and poetic ambition, a largeness and ongoingness that insists on extension and refuses silence. As Keats understood, silence and slow time lie at the heart of lyricism. “Second Avenue,” however, is an agglomerative, allconsuming engine. There is none of O’Hara’s famous charm because there is no calm. O’Hara has not yet grown into his own literary persona. Commenting on the making of “Second Avenue,” O’Hara remarks, “The verbal elements are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reBective and self-conscious. Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it” (1972, 497). O’Hara’s comment relates to his personal poems and how they differ from the great body of personal (or domestic) lyric that has developed into the dominant practice of the last halfcentury. The word “wet” suggests sentimentality: “Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears)” (O’Hara 1972, 498). But the words “reBective and self-conscious” suggest that such characteristics are foreign to O’Hara’s writing when they clearly are not. A highly wrought and overdetermined language like that of “Second Avenue” makes self-consciousness inevitable. Indeed, it is through the self-consciousness of his darkly baroque literary language that O’Hara objectiAes his work as art. It’s confusing therefore that he creates a polarity between “high and dry” as positive value and “wet, reBective, and self-conscious” as negative values. O’Hara seems to suggest that,

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as in surrealist automatism, he has created a “natural” language (perhaps of the unconscious) that lacks self-consciousness. While “Second Avenue” is too guided for automatism, it has the urgent sloppiness of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. The frame is packed and the inventions frequent—too frequent for many readers—and the sentences are reluctant to end. Moreover, the work is too weighted with objects and events to be so sentencereliant. The discontinuity in Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On is preferable because its isolate parts do not seek connection. But “Second Avenue” is as much the real O’Hara as “Leaving the Atocha Station” is the real Ashbery; moreover, aspects of their “difAcult” styles can be located in their more forgiving writing. The appeal of the “I do this, I do that” poems is based on the easygoing everydayness of their situations and language, their narratives of casual discovery involving a walk around New York City, and the creation of silence and slow time through the merging of elegiac tone and quotidian report. All occur in “A Step Away from Them,” written in 1956 and later included in Lunch Poems (1960). A Step Away from Them It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are Bipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A 94

Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks : he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks : it is 12:40 of a Thursday.

The poem is a collection of scenes, some of them cinematic. One scene is reminiscent The Seven-Year Itch in which Marilyn Monroe’s skirt Bies up as she stands on a subway grating. Another sets the author himself against the background of a (cinematic) smoke-blowing sign. Another staging, which alone involves four camera angles, involves a black man who is attracted to a beautiful blonde. Everything seems suddenly to be alive (“honk”). But it’s an average Thursday in New York City. A lot is going on and also a lot of nothing. Interest lies in the very casualness of the poem’s information and the deliberate pace of its telling, made possible through the skillful use of enjambment. In nearly every line there is a held breath as a noun or verb is “over-rove” to the left margin. Only two lines in the excerpt conclude a sentence; in both cases, the end-stop is heightened by the conclusion of a verse paragraph. The deliberate pace suggests that something important is about to happen, but then nothing dramatic does occur, at least in public space. The real drama occurs internally, in the unexpected announcement that Bunny died (the playwright Violet “Bunny” Lang), then John LaTouche (composer and lyricist of Cabin in the Sky and Baby Doe), and Anally Jackson Pollock. Even though the walk continues and the reBections are casual, the tone of the poem has changed and sobered: But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. 95

A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

Like William Carlos Williams, O’Hara uses idiomatic language and faces his subject directly rather than through metaphor and symbol. Urban rusticity is key, a quality that was to inBuence Ted Berrigan almost to the point of fetishization in “Living with Chris,” “Many Happy Returns,” and the numerous “Things to Do” poems. Here is such a work in its entirety: Resolution The ground is white with snow. It’s morning, of New Year’s Eve, 1968, & clean City air is alive with snow, it’s quiet Driving. I am 33. Good Wishes, brothers, everywhere & Don’t You Tread On Me.

“Rusticity” because Berrigan, even more than O’Hara, chooses the everyday over the heroic. This is a sophisticated poetry, democratic in its sympathies. It’s ironic therefore that in poet Dean Young’s class at University of Indiana a student objected to elitist references (Gauloises? Bonnard? Brendan Behan?) in “The Day Lady Died.” O’Hara’s Irish ancestry and Kenneth Koch’s Jewishness made them Agures of the “outside” at Harvard in the 1940s, but their characteristic blend of high and low poetic styles is probably more an aesthetic decision than a political statement. Such contrasting elements can be found in the poem “Song,” located in Lunch Poems on the page facing “The Day Lady Died.” It begins: Is it dirty does it look dirty that’s what you think of in the city does it just seem dirty that’s what you think of in the city you don’t refuse to breathe do you

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Here urban rusticity joins with the traditional, but rarely used, form of the rondeau. But the rondeau form, which would suggest lightness and formality, is disguised by the bluntness of O’Hara’s idiom. The immediacy of the poem results from its rusticity; the poem’s formality emerges on further study. O’Hara’s objectivism lies in his refusal of the “Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.” He presents the thing as is, unsentimentally. We never feel that O’Hara projects himself a poet of “the still, sad music of humanity” or even of his own sufferings. Indeed, it is on the issue of self-presentation that personism Ands an unbridgeable difference with confessionalism, which insists on the “I” as heroic sufferer. M. L. Rosenthal, the critic who Arst identiAed confessionalism, wrote the following of Robert Lowell’s Arst confessional book, Life Studies (1959): To build a great poem out of the predicament and horror of the lost Self has been the recurrent effort of the most ambitious poetry of the last century. Lowell’s effort is a natural outgrowth of the modern emphasis on the ‘I’ as the crucial poetic symbol, and of the self-analytical monologues of the sensibility which have helped deAne that emphasis from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Miss Rukeyser’s Elegies. It is also an outgrowth of the social criticism that has marked almost the whole sweep of poetry of this century. From this fact they derive (given Lowell’s abilities) an authority not quite present in the post-Byronics of The True Confession of George Barker or in any other works in which the speaker thrusts himself to the fore mainly as an interesting person. It is important, I think, to remember one implication of what writers like Robert Lowell are doing: that their individual lives have profound meaning and worth, and that therapeutic confession will lead to the realization of these values. (Rosenthal 1965, 237)

While Rosenthal’s assessment is dated in its reference to the long-faded career of George Barker, it raises valuable points about the “the horror of the lost Self,” “the emphasis on the ‘I’ as the crucial poetic symbol,” and poets’ individual lives having “profound meaning and worth.” While such features are still

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characteristic of the work of Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, David Wojahn, and others who value self-dramatization, there was never such emphasis in the personal lyrics of O’Hara and Schuyler. While O’Hara complies with the romantic polarity of absence and presence (Wordsworth’s “The things which I have seen I now can see no more”), he philosophically opposes all of Rosenthal’s characterizations of self. O’Hara’s self is simply another actor in the world, along with a blonde chorus girl and cats playing in sawdust. There is no “horror of the lost Self,” no struggle in Freudian shadow, and no use of the “I” as the “crucial poetic symbol.” Nor do the poems present their author as a particularly interesting person; they do, however, place him in situations of interest, such as the discovery of Billie Holiday’s death. The push is always toward actuality rather than mythology of self. Such dailiness was institutionalized by the New York School’s second generation but found difference in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (1964) by joining the everyday with cut-up procedure and the sonnet form. In sonnet XXXVI, Berrigan quickly sets himself beyond O’Hara’s grasp by the force of his own personality and his transparent acknowledgment of O’Hara as his model: XXXVI after frank o’hara It’s 8:54 in Brooklyn it’s the 28th of July and It’s probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I’m in Brooklyn I’m eating English mufAns and drinking pepsi and I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is New York city too how odd I usually think of it as something all its own like Bellows Falls like Little Chute like Uijongbu

The stir of the familiar is not O’Hara’s Gauloises but rather English mufAns, Brooklyn, and Berrigan’s often-declared love of Pepsi. (The references to Pepsi-Cola, absinthe, and croissants, like the parodic anecdotalism in Charles Bernstein’s “Matters of Policy,” spoof certain features of the New York School as a relocated Parisian bohemianism.) 98

In sonnet XV, Berrigan adds to the formal jumble of the cutup method by offering a secret structure reminiscent of Oulipo procedures. The poem can be read in two ways: straightforwardly, which is to say jaggedly, since line 2 does not comfortably follow line 1, or shuttle-fashion, line 1 followed by line 14 followed by line 2 until the poem arrives at its conclusion with line 8. XV In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor. Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth whiteI am truly horribly upset because Marilyn and ate King Korn popcorn,” he wrote in his of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage Doctor, but they say “i love you” and the sonnet is not dead. takes the eyes away from the gray words, Diary. The black heart beside the Afteen pieces Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie washed by Joe’s throbbing hands. “Today What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures does not point to William Carlos Williams.

The poem is only distantly elegiac of Marilyn Monroe because Berrigan’s report is of other reports: Joe Brainard’s collage and diary. The “I do this I do that” is therefore largely Brainard’s. Moreover, the sonnet is itself a collage. The poem’s interest is not in self but rather how art is made, of sixteen ripped pictures and fourteen rearranged lines of poetry. The personal element is casual and lies mainly in Berrigan’s own acquaintance with the artist and writer Joe Brainard (1942–1994). The work of James Schuyler is more openly sentimental and more personally revealing than that of Frank O’Hara. This is especially true of the book-length “The Morning of the Poem”: There is not one store in this good-sized village that will deliver. Guess I’ll have to call a cab: while I ate my oatmeal and read the Courier Express 99

(that Areman who’s been doing it with adolescent girls got twenty-Ave years: “Sodomy in the Arst degree; sodomy in the second degree: sodomy in the third Degree”: what’s that all about? and a theater group is putting on a show called Bullets in the Potato Salad) it began heartily to rain: not in drops, In liquid shafts driving into the lawn and earth drilling holes, beating up The impatiens, petunias, lilies (whose cock-like buds are turning orange) and The bluey-purple Bowers like larkspur only not so nice (there is a bowl Of everlasting on my dressing table: I’d like to dump it out: I hate the feel Of their papery stiff petals: why feel it then? Can’t help myself, feel, feel) Rain! This morning I liked it more than sun, if I were younger I would have Run out naked in it, my hair full of Prell, chilled and loving it, cleansed, Refreshed, at one with quince and apple trees.

Schuyler is important for his extension of the “I do this I do that” mode in the direction of intimism, his shrewd ear (the best of all poets of the New York School), and the precision of his observations. He is the least experimental of the group and, as a commentator on traditional themes like mutability and friendship, the most effective. His literary persona combines sweetness of character and coldness of insight. Schuyler also understands social space, as can be seen in “Korean Mums” and his “I do this I do that” masterpiece “Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum?” Key to the New York School philosophy are the Arst two lines of “Letter to a Friend”: “All things are real / no one a symbol” (Schuyler 1988, 85). The point was originally Ezra Pound’s, in “A Retrospect”: “I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use ‘symbols’ he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbols as such, to whom, for in100

stance, the hawk is a hawk” (1968, 9). For Schuyler, shantung silk is shantung silk. He does not herd his objects toward the transcendent; nevertheless, he creates relations among objects that haunt them. Here is a minor poem from Hymn to Life (1974) which has a minimal vocabulary and consists of simple declarative statements: October Books litter the bed, leaves the lawn. It lightly rains. Fall has come: unpatterned, in the shedding leaves. The maples ripen. Apples come home crisp in bags. This pear tastes good. It rains lightly on the random leaf patterns. The nimbus is spread above our island. Rain lightly patters on unshed leaves. The books of fall litter the bed.

The success of the poem depends on the similarity of books and fallen leaves. It’s a conventional trope, yet the poem itself is fresh because Schuyler’s attention is so strong. Stanza 2 is especially effective in its use of time. Both “The maples ripen” and “Apples / come home crisp in bags” concern events that are characteristic or develop over time. The next two sentences, however, are completely immediate in sensation, being here and now. The line on which the emotion of the poem turns, “This pear tastes good,” is especially effective in drawing the reader close to the moment even though it is a straightforward statement of fact—in contrast to the poetic rhetoric of “The nimbus is spread / above our island,” for instance. The lowering and heightening of poetic diction is characteristic of the New York School and is often for the sake of humor or bathos. But “This pear tastes good” is an almost thrilling freefall of the 101

ordinary. Like William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow,” the simplicity of the poem’s language disguises its formal complexity. It consists of envelope form in which the Arst and last lines are nearly identical, hinged at the work’s exact center by the poem’s most declarative statement and the only one that fully acknowledges the speaker as an actor in the world. The poem is sewn through with word relations such as “litter” and “patter,” “patterned” and “ripen,” “random” and “nimbus.” Moreover, the words “litter,” “bed,” “rain,” “leaves,” “lightly,” “shed,” and “fall” appear in both the Arst and last stanzas. At a level beneath the word, many other sound patterns emerge, such as “imbus,” “ightly,” “atter” and “itter” in relation to the word “island.” Unlike the poems produced by the technically inventive Oulipo group, Schuyler’s work has emotional intelligence, a quality that, with a few exceptions such as Lyn Hejinian, will divide the language poets from the New York School. (In poems like My Life, Hejinian uses experience as the basis of composition, but she has little interest in the rigid anecdotalism through which experience is often communicated. Hers is a blinking view of her own history; memory is not memorialized. Nevertheless, the persistent references to her own family history have emotional weight, however objectiAed. For many other language poets, the domestic narrative turns toward theory, its mad uncles and stressful occasions.) The formalism of the New York School belies any suggestion that it is an improvisational speech-based poetics. Rather, it is a poetics in which idiomatic elements are a formal feature. One of the major sustainers of personal lyric is Alice Notley, whose How Spring Comes (1981) stands as an important work of the New York School’s second generation. While her work has a free-Boating associational movement, it is insistently grounded in personal experience and observation and makes no appeal to the external glamour of postmodern theory: Poem You hear that heroic big land music? Land a one could call one. He starred, had lives, looks down: windmill still now they buy only 102

snow cows. Part of a dream, she had a long waist he once but yet never encircled, and now I’m in charge of this, this donkey with a charmed voice. Elly, I’m being sad thinking of Daddy. He marshaled his private lady, did she wear a hat or the other side? Get off my own land? We were all born on it to die on with no writin’ on it. But who are you to look back, well he’s humming “From this valley,” who’s gone. Support and preserve me, father. Oh, Daddy, who can stand it?

The poem takes place in her hometown of Needles, California, shortly after the death of Notley’s father, who owned a car parts store in that desert town. Elly is presumably her sister, who shares in the grief of the father’s death and the existence of his “private lady,” who has apparently made a legal claim to the land that is threatening to his other heirs (“Get off my own land? We / were all born on it to die on / with no writin’ on it”). The heroic big land music is the country and western music the father would have enjoyed; this includes “From This Valley,” an appropriately elegiac song of his own era. The father “starred, had lives, looks down,” conventional metaphors for his largeness both in life and death. But the poem’s “back story” contains difAculties and is not by any means a straightforward report, especially the line “windmill still now they buy only / snow cows.” This is the kind of line that made Notley seem, for a brief period in her history, as much a daughter of Gertrude Stein as of William Carlos Williams, her major inBuence. The report is opaque in its local reference. But the general outline and texture of elegy is clear. Like the work of her Arst husband Ted Berrigan, an important part of Notley’s production is elegiac in mood; it ranges from a weighty poem on the death of Jack Kerouac (“Jack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice”) to the discovery in California of her own childhood bookshelf (“A California Girlhood”), with its implicit nostalgia 103

for readings and lives past. Notley documents the personal—she sings of it—but her wry unexpectedness of detail and tone sets her apart from recent confessional poetry. This is the case even though she has repeatedly written poems on the subject of Ted Berrigan’s death and produced at least two collections, At Night the States (1988) and Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) that are dominated by his presence. “The Howling Saint T-Shirt,” collected in Mysteries of Small Houses, is a good example of the insouciant gravity of her report: Children don’t come from deep inside one they were always outside and, I dream, wear their own saint T-shirts as I do mine’s saint image is faceless, howling. They have smiling bodies friendly asses “Give you Everything the Arst seven years,” Ted says they bear no relation to your self, not a haunt that shakes loose not a seed pod not a part of the body not you; it’s harrowing to stop being the child yourself but “child” is not real spiritually as classiAcation as I change with experience lose conAdence and truth and must And out everything from them now.

While confessionalism presses toward the heroic and mythic, Notley’s approach to the personal lyric sets importance within the frame of actuality; that is, within the countertendency of smallness. As noted in the discussion of O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, the seeming smallness of the actual has moral implication in refusing to monumentalize experience—as happens, for example, in Sylvia Plath’s “Colossus.” Notley’s sons have “smiling bodies” and “friendly asses.” She sees herself as a faceless howling saint of grief (one thinks of Munch’s painting The Scream) but in the context of a T-shirt.

The Abstract Lyric Lyrical poetry began its dominance with romanticism and the rise of the bourgeois ego. We conceive of that development as 104

“democratic” even though it possesses its own exclusionary ideology. Even romantic epics such as The Prelude and Song of Myself were works of personal consciousness revealing “the growth of a poet’s mind.” But romantic poetry is problematic for the same reasons that it grew in popularity: its cult of the middle-class self and its insistence on a lyric basis of expression. The Anal turn of the screw was the institutionalization of free verse as the accepted norm, which drew the emphasis away from musicality and toward the urgent statement. This was roughly the situation in the early 1970s when books like Gregory Orr’s Burning the Empty Nests contained poems like the following: Nakedness I am this tree whose bark is fur and whose wood is salt. There is a shirt that devours me. It is the rain.

InBuenced by the deep image practices of James Wright, Robert Bly, and Bill Knott, who in turn were inBuenced by Spanish surrealism, the poem consists almost entirely of metaphors of identity. The “I” is extended by its comparison to a tree; the bark is extended by its comparison to fur; and wood is extended (fancifully rather than realistically) by its comparison to salt. In the second stanza, the same pattern continues. The rain is a shirt that “devours” the “I,” another fanciful metaphor. In addition, the entire poem is a blazon on the subject of nakedness. In a poem of four lines, we are offered Ave metaphors, each of which tests the ingenuity of the others and none of which is ingenious in the least. These are the utterances of a tongueless Prometheus. The poem is tuneless yet “lyrical” in its brevity and urgency of expression. As confession, the poem communicates the agony of a self stripped bare and embraced only by a devouring rain. The poem’s metaphysical Action is as overblown as its story of self is underdeveloped. One need only compare Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Plath’s “Fever 103” to see how unrevealing of experience “Nakedness” is. In such poetry, lyricism comes to a dead end. In trying so hard to be expressive, the poem lacks expressiveness and also 105

range of expression. Because it lacks poetic rhetoric, it lacks both modulation and beauty of language. For all the limits of rhetoric, its rise and fall brings gradation of tone. Most importantly, the poem is just plain dumb. The best lyric poetry is written in shrewd relation not only to experience but also to the lyric tradition, which, being always at the brink of exhaustion, is in constant need of reinvention. Ron Padgett’s “December” (“I will sleep / in my little cup”) is neither minimal nor dumb because its meaning keeps expanding like an especially effective bedtime rhyme. This is also true of Berrigan’s “Telegram” (to Jack Kerouac): “Bye-Bye Jack. / See you soon.” Its lyricism has only one note but strategically opposes the grandeur of elegy and confession. O’Hara’s poem beginning “Lana Turner has collapsed,” written on the Staten Island Ferry on his way to a reading, achieves its lyricism by playing dumb. The same is true of “Why I Am Not a Painter,” O’Hara’s shrewd poem on the everyday mysteries of creation. But Orr’s poem is too dumb to know that it’s dumb, which is fatal. Abstract lyricism, on the other hand, is self-aware and philosophically suggestive. Here is an example from an early Ann Lauterbach collection, Before Recollection (1987): Platonic Subject Momentum and wash of the undeAned, as if clarity fell through the sieve of perception, announced as absence of image. But here is a twig in the form of a wishbone. Aroused, I take it, and leave its outline scarred in snow which the sun will later heal: form of the real melts back into the ideal and I have a twig.

This is really a poem of two parts: (1) the complex rhetoric of the Arst sentence, which announces the themes of absence and presence, thing and perception of thing and (2) a fable of representation that begins with “But here is a twig.” The Arst sentence expresses the Platonic dilemma in general terms that are also poetic—that there is an undeAned and unknown world beyond perception. What we “know” is that amount of this 106

world which falls as clarity through “the sieve of perception.” We would expect that clarity to involve sharply deAned things, but Lauterbach focuses on absence of image as a thing in itself. As philosophy, the poem reaches its conclusions by the end of the Arst sentence. The rest of the poem consists of a fable that dramatizes the same issues. For many readers, it is the “real” poem since it contains the emotion of discovery (“Aroused, I take it”), the paradox of absence and presence as it develops over time (“which the sun will later heal”), and the reiteration of the Platonic theme in “form of the real melts back into the ideal.” But the poem’s most powerful conclusion lies in the line “and I have a twig.” After all the stir of rhetoric and thought, the twig as twig has the Anal word. Yet the twig would also lack interest without its fable of representation. The poem is a comedy of relations between the twig, its shape in snow, and the speaker’s perception of both things. Like Schuyler’s line “This pear tastes good,” Lauterbach’s “and I have a twig” anchors the poem phenomenonally. The fall in rhetoric from the Arst sentence of “Platonic Subject” to its last line lends amusement to the proceedings. The rise and fall of rhetorical levels reminds us of the constructedness of poems and, as intended bathos in Ashbery’s poetry especially, offers a fable of representation in its own right. In constantly awakening us from the nap of belief, Ashbery allows for more conscious and self-aware suspension of disbelief. In the essay “Murder and Closure,” I refer to such behavior as aesthetic realism. We are called to an awareness of aesthetic presence and device; that poems consist of the act of depiction (the world) and the depiction of depiction (technical device and our larger consciousness of authorship). In The Last Avant-Garde, his critical biography of the New York School of poets, David Lehman puts it this way: “From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making—that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem—and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement” (1998, 3). René Magritte’s paintings are often fables of representation. In La Condition Humaine (1933), for instance, an oil painting of a landscape stands on an easel at a window that frames this same 107

landscape. The easel painting is on such a scale that it coincides or joins perfectly with the landscape it depicts: the painted cloud sharing an outline with the real cloud, the painted grass Bowing unhesitatingly into the real grass, and so on. We view these things from the interior of a room. The frame presents the room’s wall of dark eggshell color, its heavy brown drapes and carpeted Boor, the window frame, and a meticulously painted black marble sill. The wall and drapes reveal the artist’s brushstrokes, which announce their paintedness and therefore the hand of the painter. Illusionism is cruder, even broken, in that part of the painting. But of course the comedy of relations is based entirely on illusionism. The black marble sill with its white threading, the wellpainted easel, and the shiny leaves of a garden bush are the only objects that maintain the aura of the real; all lie at the painting’s center. The painting reminds us that paintings are made of paint rather than the things they depict. The third level of reality—the “real” grass, easel, and drapes—is important because the world is important. But what matters to the painting is depiction itself; that is, the depiction of depiction. La Condition Humaine is an amusing title because it suggests the grim realism of a Zola novel, an approach to the real not to be found in Magritte’s paintings. Magritte’s realism chooses to see how we see. The poetry of Barbara Guest, especially Fair Realism (1989), frequently touches on matters of representation. Here is a passage from “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights”: I take from my wall the landscape with its water of blue color, its gentle expression of rose, pink, the sunset reaches outward in strokes as the west wind rises, the sun sinks and color Bees into the delicate skies it inherited. I place there a scene from “The Tale of Genji.” An episode where Genji recognizes his son. Each turns his face away from so much emotion, so that the picture is one of proAles Boating elsewhere from their permanence, a line of green displaces these relatives, black also intervenes at correct distances, the shapes of the hair are black. 108

Black describes the feeling, black is recognized as remorse, sadness, black is a headdress while lines slant swiftly, the space is slanted vertically with its graduating need for movement, Thus the grip of realism has found a picture chosen to cover the space occupied by another picture establishing a Bexibility so we are not immobile like a car that spends its night outside a window, but mobile like a spirit. I Boat over this dwelling, and when I choose enter it. I have an ethnological interest in this building, because I inhabit it and upon me has been bestowed the decision of changing an abstract picture of light into a ghost-like story of a prince whose principality I now share, into whose conAdence I have wandered.

Like Magritte’s painting discussed above, “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights” concerns the depiction of depiction. The poem opens with the description of a local setting: “Parking / lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings / with their escapes overlooked by lights.” The speaker, who is Guest herself, quickly begins to alter her local landscape (and its modernity) with a scene from the medieval The Tale of Genji. Thus the Genji story (antiquity) and the glare of parking lot lights (modernity) impact each other on the stage of a third presence, Guest’s own mind. She places there a scene, much as Wallace Stevens placed a jar on a hill in Tennessee. She assigns the values of remorse and sadness to the color black. Fully aware of the power of her ability to layer one reality with another, she even offers a discourse on her role: “Thus the grip of realism has found / a picture chosen to cover the space / occupied by another picture.” This Bexibility of placement means we are not immobile or Axed by our local realities (parking lot lights, an episode from The Tale of Genji), but are selective in our choice and manipulation of them. Possessing mobility, Guest Boats over her dwelling artistically even as she inhabits it actually. Mobility is also characteristic of the reader, with 109

the difference that the author has far more directive power. The range of the reader’s mobility is limited by the extent of the situation given to him. Naturally there is an ethnos of self, but the “ethnological interest” of the Boating author, perhaps as Whitmanesque ego, is humorous, a comment perhaps on the politics of identity in the postmodern period. Guest’s speaker (“I”) seems amused by her responsibilities as author: “upon me has been bestowed the decision of changing / an abstract picture of light into a ghost-like story / of a prince whose principality I now share, / into whose conAdence I have wandered” (140). In changing the light into “The Tale of Genji,” Guest announces the arbitrariness of an author’s decision to move in space and time; to create, recreate, or ignore. But once a decision is made, the author wanders into a new principality and a new set of conAdences (Genji’s) to which she is then beholden. This is quite a different concept of author-as-self than is seen in confessional poetry. Guest’s author is made subject to the whims of her art. She creates and extends herself each time she enters an imaginative world. Later in the poem, Genji “allows himself to be positioned on a screen” as a work in silk. Thus the author is given permission by the subject, Genji, who has his own rights in the matter. In the poem, “the light of Action and light of surface / sink into vision whose illumination / exacts its shades” (141). The light of surface is the real light in the parking lot. The light of Action is not simply the story of Genji, immobile as text but mobile in the reader’s mind; it is also the act of imaginatively entering Genji’s world. By the poem’s conclusion, the interanimation of Genji’s gardens and modernity is so complete that “upon that modern wondering space / Bash lights from the wild gardens” (141). The Active light has taken authority over the light of surface. This is not simply Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The poem’s fable of representation displays the shifting conditions of mind, world, and self that are inherent in art and everyday perception. The parking lot lights have no necessary relation to The Tale of Genji, but once that relation is established it seems both inevitable and demanding of attention. In her essay “Shifting Persona,” Guest makes a distinction between two kinds of viewers:

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The person inside a literary creation can be both viewer and insider. The window is open and the bird Bies in. It closes and a drama between the bird and its environment begins. When the person who is you is the viewer, you believe an extraordinary strength exists in that position. You are outside the arena of dispute or creativity or blasphemy, dwelling in a private space where emotive speculation is stronger than fact or action each of which passes before you in an attempt at dissimulation which you are free to dispute. This is called the orchid position, because of the extravagant attention the viewer demands. . . . Yet inside the window is the person who is you, who are now looking out, shifted from the observer to the inside person and this shows in your work. When you are the inside person you can be both heavy and delicate, depending on your mood; you have a sense of responsibility totally different from the you outside. You occupy the lotus position. . . . The lotus position is one of exaggerated self-dependency, in which the eye goes inward so frequently that rest stops are required, something like paragraphic encasings. These rest stops are noticed in the shifts that occur between the persona of the creator and the persona of the observer. In a well-developed persona the shifts take place before our eyes without revealing themselves, as if gauze had been spun especially for the purpose and a curtain falls shyly between the persona of the person and the persona that is now accepted. We travel back to the mountain-top and the valley with the shifting of spatial contacts. . . . The ability to project both windows is a sign of originality and is rare. (1991, 85–86)

The shifting of personae from the viewer to the viewed, from subject to object and back again, is central to artistic empathy and our consciousness of creation. There is no point in disguising the artiAce of a poem. It is a made thing, and its madeness is part of its beauty, like the stitched seams on a baseball. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the Parmigianino painting that was also the title of John Ashbery’s poetry collection, depicts the doubleness of the artist’s position as subject and object, maker and made thing. The creator is also the creation’s viewer or reader; he judges and

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revises it in the process of making. He must also make the choice as to what sort of object he presents to his own eye. Narcissism is the risk, but in many self-portraits the Agure of self is secondary to the phenomenology of creation. The subject of the work is the relation of consciousness to the external world, a drama enacted along the taut line of the gaze. The gaze always communicates both the wonder of the primitive romantic (things do exist including my own consciousness) and the fetishist’s desire for Axity. In the Parmigianino painting, the youthful artist sits in proximity to the round mirror, which lends roundness to his face and an almost dizzying roundness to the room in which he sits. While his body is undistorted, his right hand, which he has extended toward the mirror, lies distorted at the frame’s edge. The most distorted part of his body, its Angers are elongated like the tentacles of a squid and the body of the hand bulges toward the eye. Presumably Parmigianino was left-handed, since that is the hand free to paint. The right hand is the subject hand, uselessly beautiful in its swollen state and emerging from a scalloped sleeve that further emphasizes the marine qualities of this Ashbowl environment. The creative hand is hidden, the subject hand entirely public. While the artist’s countenance is serene and direct, the subject hand’s distortion makes it the most dramatic element in the frame. The fable of representation depends upon the complexities of seeing and being seen; the artist’s intellection as represented by his gaze; and the extension of this gaze toward the public by means of the creative and subject hands. This painting is not “about” the artist himself but rather the drama of seeing and creating. A further conceit on seeing lies in the globular shape of the mirror, which is also that of an eye. The Agure at the painting’s center, Parmigianino’s own face, is therefore the apple of the eye, but he gazes dispassionately rather than admiringly at his own Agure. This is because his intent is to objectify—to see everything that it is to be seen—in the chosen frame, rather than to ennoble his own Agure. Parmigianino is an object of serenity at the center of distortion. His fattened hand is not grotesque because made “real” by the convexity of the mirror. We also trust therefore in the reality of his serenity. Parmigianino was a mannerist, and according to David Sha112

piro so is Ashbery the postmodern poet: “Mannerism is no longer to be thought of in the pejorative sense. For Ashbery and modern art critics, it is the movement of art away from classical norms toward the dissonance that counts. It is a movement in art that not only distorts, but rescues the very value of distortion. . . . In its bizarre suavity, its unrealities, its sudden discontinuities, its constant theatricality, its inordinate fondness for framing devices, Mannerism no longer seems to us anything but our central precursor. The elongated syntax of Ashbery, his love of parenthesis and ellipsis, his sense of being cut off from any direct treatment of Nature, his disequilibria . . . his self-reBexiveness and high self-consciousness—all of these make Ashbery a Mannerist in the most positive sense” (1979, 5). Such distortions and discontinuities clarify rather than obscure our sense of the world, since they awaken us to its variety and difAculties. An old window with its warped glass is more beautiful than the uninterrupted view through plain glass. Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” begins: “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises” (1975, 68). The hand thrust at the viewer disguises what it projects. The same could be said of Ashbery’s poetry, that it is a series of dramatizations, false leads, and aporia that veil and unveil a series of realities. In an Ashbery poem, the cape is more fascinating than the bull. Like Barbara Guest, Michael Palmer acknowledges the contingencies of identity and authorial placement. Here is the beginning of “The Project of Linear Inquiry”: [Let a be taken as . . . ] a liquid line beneath the skin and b where the blue tiles meet body and the body’s bridge a seeming road there, endless rain pearling light chamber after chamber of dust-weighted air the project of seeing things so to speak, or things seen 113

In life we constantly see things, but when it becomes a “project,” seeing is a work of purposeful mind, as in philosophy, painting, or poetry. We begin the assiduous act of assigning importance and even symbolic value: “Let a be taken as . . .” The creating of such identities tends toward the immobilization of their meanings, but Palmer presents us with difAcult or shifting identities: “a liquid line beneath the skin” and “where two tiles meet / body and the body’s bridge / a seeming road there, endless / rain pearling light.” Later in the poem, “c stands for inessential night— / how that body would / move vs how it actually does— too abstract &/or not abstract enough” (59). Because each identity is complex, the poem suggests that the parts of the world are too numerous and too interrelated for a project of linear inquiry. One thing does not follow another as a follows b. The mere attempt results in dizziness (“I stood there torn / felt hat in hand / wondering what I had done / to cause this dizziness”). Here the “I” speaks as the consumptive author, victim of his own naming devices. He is aware of the limitation of his projections, that he names nature poorly, but it is through this romantic self-awareness that his strength is realized. He stands humbly, “hat in hand,” before the powers of inessential night, for it is not in the deAned powers of the essential that the “real” is to be located. It lies, rather, in the random acts of the inessential and the unknown. Authorship must acknowledge that “salt, pepper, books and schedules” share “the same error and measure of inattention” (Palmer 1981, 59). The new realism therefore gestures with humility toward the indeterminate. A linear inquiry is rife with error because it does not perceive the fullness of the world. Palmer’s poem “Voice and Address,” which begins with the line, “You are the owner of one complete thought” (1984, 7) humorously suggests the Anal solution of linear inquiry. Yet many artistic projects can be reduced to a onesentence description: Christo wraps buildings; Chris Burden brutalizes himself; Sharon Olds tells all. Palmer’s syllogistic language is of course reminiscent of the Wallace Stevens poem “The Connoisseur of Chaos.” This does not mean that he is in debt to Stevens on the larger scale; his inBuences lie closer to Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and the lyricism of Zukofsky’s “A-11.” Nor is Michael Palmer associated with 114

the New York School. However, he does share an interest in the abstract lyric and in postmodern French poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud. Stevens and Palmer—indeed all poets working in the abstract lyric—conceive of the poem as an argument about the wor(l)d rather than a dramatization of social or personal issues. Palmer’s arguments are less pointed than Stevens’s and more diffuse; he works a bit more “high and dry,” to borrow O’Hara’s phrasing. All poets in this mode operate at an intellectual remove that makes their work “difAcult”; at the same time, the argument is borne by the attachments of lyric, which draws us near to the fray. In a section of his essay “Counter-poetics and Current Practice” entitled “Lyric Practice (Analytic Lyric?),” Palmer describes the dilemma of lyric poetry in the post-Holocaust, postVietnam era and Ands its renewal in the work of Jabès, Celan, and Vallejo—an international poetry that offers a “critique of the discourse of power” (1986, 14). He is also concerned about the Marxist critique of language poets like Ron Silliman who hold a “distrust of the lyric” and who view the lyrical as “simply an indulgence” (14). For Palmer, a lyric poet, the dilemma is resolved by “the incorporation of silence” while maintaining “the notion of doublings of the subject, dissociations, junctures, and ruptures, and a lyric that operates from an economy of loss” (14). The challenge is to join lyricism’s regret, absence, and yearning with the modernist style. I would argue that the abstract lyric, primarily the device of the New York School and its descendants, has always met this challenge. The difference between the abstract lyric and Palmer’s analytic lyric would seem to lie largely in their critiques of the discourse of power. We are speaking largely of the same principle: the “thought song,” if you will, a poetry that thinks by means of lyric. Palmer Ands the origin of the analytic lyric in Hölderlin’s Anal fragments, written just before he descended into thirtyAve years of madness. Richard Sieburth translated one of these fragments, “Es fesselt / Kein Zeichen,” as “No sign / Binds” (Palmer 1986, 11). “It struck me,” Palmer writes, “as one of the sources of the modern lyric and certainly of German Expressionism. It just popped out at me, this notion of 115

disintegration of faith in the sign” (11). His argument continues in a direction that is consistent with Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, de Saussure, and existentialism: “There is no absolute relation which people in a certain act of faith have clung to as a possibility throughout time. There is a certain arbitrariness outside a given language system, so that the possibility of reference and signiAcation begins to disintegrate, for whatever reason. . . . This doubt leads to the lyric voice, the problematics of self-expression, as when (with Hölderlin) the unitary and integral self itself is very much in question, and therefore the unitary voice is in question, and the possibility of controlling the tone” (Palmer 1986, 12). Uncertainty is of course a condition of the world. Keats acknowledged its afArmative value in his comments on negative capability: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (350). Uncertainty is basic to artistic creation. But the postmodern era has fetishized uncertainty into widely accepted certainties such as “disintegration of faith in the sign,” “the impossibility of reading the world,” and “the real crisis of representation and signiAcation” (Palmer 1986, 11, 14, 12). This crisis of signiAcation is based in a romanticism still stunned over the death of God. It would seem obvious that language is an arbitrary system in which the word “tree” has no meaning in French. How long then must we elegize the supposed rift between the world and words? If it were impossible to read the world, nobody could make it to the grocery store. Even a modest observer can see that the world is saturated with meaning (leaves are falling), that readings of this event (things die) can cause a young girl named Margaret to grieve, and that some of the most convincing readings are done through poetry (the work of G. M. Hopkins, for instance). The ability of poetry to express complicated matters is held as evidence of its famous “difAculty,” when in fact it is the source of its power. No sign binds only for poor Hölderlin. Since roughly 1990, the abstract lyric has been associated with poets who are otherwise inBuenced by language poetry. Here is the concluding section of Elizabeth Robinson’s “The Ferry”: 116

v. Half-way. Lights so perturbed with each other that they expand the presence of God. Barely. The children playing in the street are going blind. These invocations are roughly the same as sleep disturbed again by the youngest who’s woken from a bad dream. From here to an antidote.

The poem’s meditation is personal in reference to the author’s children. But its more powerful impact is on the metaphysical level: “Lights so perturbed with each other / that they expand the presence of God. / Barely.” As the conditional meets with the absolute, the state of being “half-way” assumes a kind of sanctity. (Half-wayness is the condition of many abstract lyric works including the preceding Guest, Lauterbach, and Palmer poems.) A student of theology, Robinson’s abstract movements often have spiritual implications. Hugh Huppert relates one of his Anal visits to his friend Paul Celan, not long before the German poet killed himself. At Celan’s invitation, he read some of Celan’s recent work out loud: “Indescribably abstract,” I told him, “imponderably spiritual,” and could not hide my inner agitation about certain mental turns in the intermittently gentle and musical passages of this lyric expression. Celan responded, “I am glad that you say ‘abstract’; and ‘spiritual’ is also Atting. Perhaps you are, like myself, no supporter of the ‘socialization’ of one’s inner life. . . .” “And how do you explain your abstract expression?” I asked. “This follows a similar track. My abstraction is a processed freedom of expression. The rehabilitation of the word. Are you familiar with ‘concrete poetry’? It’s an international phenomenon; but neither concrete nor poetry. A narrow-minded misuse of language. A sin against the word. As long as this mischief is called concrete, I will call myself abstract. . . .” 117

Then he showed me his wife’s atelier, Alled with various apparatus for the reproduction of steel engravings, etchings, and lithographs. “I am impressed, and inBuenced, by the intellectual precision of this—what I would call the French— style of engraving,” Celan began; “it too is only outwardly abstract; its crystallographic features are formulas made visible—sensual, vital. . . . “I no longer play music, as I did in the days of the notorious ‘Death Fugue,’—a poem so thrashed about that it’s now ripe for anthologies. I make an important distinction between music and lyric poetry. I feel closer to drawing today; in the same vein I use more shadows than Gisele [his wife], I intentionally darken curves for the sake of nuance in truth, faithful to my own kind of spiritual realism. . . . “I remain basically sensory in my approach, never pretending to be ‘extra-sensory’ . . . which would be against my nature, a pose. I refuse to consider the poet as prophet, as ‘oracle,’ visionary or fortune-teller. In this I hope you see clearly why I consider my so-called abstraction and my actual ambiguity to be moments of realism.”

The key expressions are “spiritual realism,” the complex shading of truth by means of the sensory, and “my actual ambiguity,” a phrase that suggests the darkened curves of one’s personality as maker. That is, the maker is also complex and, like the world, stands on shifting ground. What Celan calls the abstract is also the sensory, like the interaction of Barbara Guest’s parking lot lights and a Japanese drawing based on The Tale of Genji. Both are experienced in the real world, but their interaction suggests another level of experience that has several names: the spiritual, the abstract, the real, the mystical, the true, and the beautiful. Because of the variety of registers practiced by the New York School within even the same poem, the real undergoes slippage that strengthens and renews the connection between the word and the world. The Comic Sublime New York School poetry is unique in the postmodern period for the range of its expression, from the comparatively direct po118

etry of O’Hara and Berrigan to the comic sublime of Kenneth Koch and the elusive meditations of Ashbery and Guest. It is an unavoidable inBuence on many poets born after 1950; it is also the standard with which new generations of the avant-garde have had to contend. This is particularly true of the Ashbery inBuence, which virtually deAnes postmodern innovative practice. Language poetry has much to offer, but at the threshold of lyric its adherents are faced with a dilemma that they have not successfully overcome. If you want to “do” beauty in the postmodern period, you inevitably are drawn to the abstract lyric mode of the New York School. The personal lyric has suffered a decline in recent years for several reasons: its oppositional style has faded along with bohemianism; it has been made to seem more conventional than it is by language poetry’s attack on subjectivity; and its mode of sardonic wit has long been assimilated by poets like James Tate, Dean Young, and August Kleinzahler whose histories and realm of acceptance largely lie elsewhere. At the same time, the assimilation of New York School practice is a sign of its lingering power. New York School inBuence can be felt in the work of David Lehman, whose “First Offense” is a villanelle on the subject of getting a trafAc ticket and whose The Daily Mirror joins New York School “dailiness” with Harry Mathews’s Oulipo-inspired Twenty Lines a Day; Jorie Graham, who shares Ashbery’s sublimity and obliquity but not his sense of humor; Paul Violi, a comic conceptualist in the mode of Kenneth Koch, who wrote the Actional life of a bad artist named Sutej Hudney in the form of an index; David Shapiro, an abstract lyricist who describes poetry as “the constant mastering of irony”; Susan Wheeler, whose recent book Smokes moves from the comparative openness of New York School irony toward the packed discontinuity of language poetry; Charles North, whose poem “A Note to Tony Towle” begins, “One must have breakfasted often on automobile primer / not to sense an occasional darkening in the weather joining art and life”; Amy Gerstler, who marries the surrealist prose poem to a comically melancholic feminism; Elaine Equi, whose tongue-in-cheek minimalism passes through the New York School on its way to Robert Herrick; Caroline Knox, whose poem “Freudian Shoes” begins, “Freudian shoes, the puddings of orthopedic Bight”; Rachel 119

Loden, whose Arst book, Hotel Imperium, contains a sequence of poems on Richard Nixon with titles like “The Death of Checkers” and “Memories of San Clemente”; Mary Jo Bang, whose new collection The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans has the gravity and linguistic playfulness associated with the New York School; John Koethe, the Ashbery-inBuenced Wordsworthian; David Trinidad, who joins pop culture topics with traditional forms such as the pantoum; and Tom Disch, an eccentric formalist otherwise identiAed with the new formalism movement. The very popular work of Billy Collins takes from Kenneth Koch the use of a whimsical concept as organizing principle. His poem “Philosophy” begins: “I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism, / lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke, / contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman / might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass” (69). Unfortunately, Collins’s work represents the domestication of New York School wit. Which brings us to the complex case of Kenneth Koch. His poetry is intelligent, amusing, and dear, and he is one of the originals of his generation, but one senses an enormous hesitation on the part of reviewers and critics: is it, and can comic art ever be, really major? James Breslin’s From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 devotes chapters to Olson, Ginsberg, Lowell, Levertov, James Wright, and Frank O’Hara, as well as a page and a half to John Ashbery, but the index makes no mention of Koch. Even Ashbery’s blurb on the back of Koch’s Selected Poems (1982) suggests desolation: “This long-awaited collection should at last establish Kenneth Koch for what he is: one of our greatest poets.” He has been overlooked and under-reviewed. Yet his humor, like Lord Byron’s, creates an “aery charm” that is Anally quite sincere. One need only read his elegiac poem “Seasons on Earth” to see his easeful formalism turned to graver purpose. Written in ottava rima, the stanza of Don Juan and his own comic epic The Duplications, the poem is addressed to his deceased wife Janice and relates to their early years together: April then May came Buttering through the branches Of peach and pear tree all around the neatly Landscaped young villa two miles from the campers. You, six months pregnant, lost the baby; it was The saddest thing that ever happened to us. 120

You almost died. They tried to give you oxygen In the wrong way, in the bare-beamed Municipal Hospital. I helped save you. They were lax again With blood. Good God! All life became peripheral, A mess, a nightmare, until you were back again. My poem had not a trace of these things medical; But it was full of dyings and revivings And strange events, that went past plain connivings—

The eventfulness of these stanzas is of a different order than some of his other work. Its invention is limited to the requirements of ottava rima rather than comic disjunctions of language such as “simplex bumblebees”; the settled tone helps make possible the sublimity of “dyings and revivings.” A form as noticeable as ottava rima will always contains a sense of its own “connivings,” but here the rhymes are weighted with loss. Koch’s comic mode offers a different form of the sublime, one based in invention (“Elmer opened his mouth and let the snow fall in it”) and discovery (that “Lorca says” rhymes with “metamorphosis”). But he rarely locates and sustains that cadence within lyric that is near to stillness. Ottava rima is perfect for his sensibility because it is in constant motion, like a noisy perpetuum mobile. We admire its bright clatter and the tease of its thought, but we are not consoled by its absences. The forces of movement and stillness are evident in a stanza from “Seasons on Earth” in which he grieves to Janice about his errors in marriage: What is, I want to know, the truth if there is Truth in the view of things I had, and what is The source, if it’s mistaken, of its errors? Do we come into life with minds and bodies Ready to live in some ecstatic Paris Or is the limit of our lives more modest? Is there seed in us? are we the pod? Is The blossom pleasure, and the fruit the goddess? Did you too ever feel it, like a promise, That there could be a perfect lifetime, Janice?

The passage breaks with ottava rima by adding two lines to the octave and by sustaining virtually the same rhyme (modest / 121

pod? Is / goddess / promise / Janice) throughout. Despite the formal inventiveness of such rhyme, Koch creates sublimity of tone and intensity of address. Like all comic poets, Koch is moralistic and didactic at heart, but he is not essentially a satirist. He stings mildly with parody, and his targets are usually works of art, not political situations or public Agures. “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” uses Williams’s famous poem about the plums as a basis for further invention rather than to demean Williams. The inherent sophistication of his project—and the pretension that might go with it—is deBated by the openness of his wit. Even in “Fresh Air,” the comic manifesto in which The Strangler kills several bad academic poets, Koch is too funny to be sanctimonious or mean. Koch is Horatian and romantic at the same time. His whimsical common sense is in contrast to Robert Bly’s hyperthyroidal embracing of spiritual presences; it embraces the actuality of the world. When Koch is meditative, a major mode for Ashbery, he becomes Virgilian. The Anest work of his middle period can be found in The Art of Love (1975), especially in “The Art of Poetry” and “Some General Instructions,” poems which “make it new” by ignoring Pound’s anti-Virgilian dictum. Masterpieces of sustained tone in a relaxed idiom, they maintain tension by balancing wit and didacticism. With such a broad range of reference, anything might be essayed in and seem to At. When the poem has achieved its panoramic stature, it can simply end, as “The Art of Poetry” does, with the line, “Now I have said enough.” Eliot had convinced the generation of the 1940s to be dramatic and metaphysical; along comes Kenneth Koch with rhetoric and generalization, as if he wanted to write the Ars Poetica of our time. In so doing, he makes Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry seem fussy and irrelevant. The self, too, is an object and actor in the world. Even one’s own poems can present themselves as topics. Koch’s poem “The Circus” in The Art of Love begins with a reference to the poem “The Circus” in his Arst full-length book, Thank You (1962). Koch is often at his best in the catalogue form, a structure that allows for one-liners—for example, “Alive for an Instant” with its wonderful ending: “I have a baby in my landscape and I 122

have a wild rat in my secrets from you.” His love poem, “To You,” which begins “I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut,” is both a comic catalogue and a parody of E. B. Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee.” In narrative mode, Koch’s occasion is often a journey, a strategy reminiscent of A. O. Barnabooth (Valery Larbaud) and Raymond Roussel, acknowledged masters for Koch as one of the editors of the French-inBuenced journal Locus Solus. Likewise, Koch’s authorial stance is that of the eccentric amateur. Like all the New York poets, Koch sees art as part of life, so there is little self-consciousness in referring to it. The criticism of Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and other formalists makes such artiAce almost obligatory, yet as a romantic formalist Koch never poses as the ardent technician. He is Arst a poet of excitable content and tends to use forms that allow for his charm and quiet asides. Like Ginsberg, he often employs a long line, though his work is hardly “bardic and Melvillean” in breath. His intentionally “light” poetry stands in opposition to the seriousness and muthologos of Charles Olson. Koch’s only dictum seems to be liveliness. His work is therefore consistent with Sartre’s statement: “Whatever the subject a sort of essential lightness must appear everywhere and remind us that the work is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift.” In “The Study of Poetry,” Matthew Arnold wrote of the “power of liquidness and Buidity in Chaucer’s verse . . . dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing with language, such as is now impossible” (1961, 317). He goes on to characterize Chaucer as a less than classic author, in contrast with Dante: “The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness” (318). Arnold is writing, of course, as an enemy of French poetry, an inBuence that arrives in Koch’s work not by way of Christian de Troyes and Chaucer, but through Apollinaire and the dada and surrealist poets. Seriousness in poetry can easily become forced gravity, a poetic tone established by convention even before the “criticism of life” begins. Those who extend the standard of high seriousness, such as John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, continue to mistake earnestness for true seriousness. Thus Gardner prefers the poetry of 123

Linda Pastan, Dave Smith, Galway Kinnell, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, and William Meredith to that of Ginsberg, Koch, and Ashbery. There is an almost grandiose mediocrity to Gardner’s choices, as if the only standard were the avoidance of “largeness, freedom, and shrewdness” in favor of moralism, rationalism, and Christianity. It is enough for Gardner simply not to be creepy. “Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its Arst and most obvious identifying sign,” he writes in On Moral Fiction— Poe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Goya, Beckett, Eliot of The Waste Land, and his own novel Grendel notwithstanding. Ironically, it is Kenneth Koch who deAnes the slimy and the creepy in “Fresh Air,” the bad poets “bathing the library steps with their spit” or “gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children.” Certainly the poetry of Kenneth Koch isn’t “the godless terror of John Hawkes’ The Beetleleg” (Gardner), but neither is the sentimental reminiscence of one’s father singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” Gardner’s personal emblem of truth in life and art. Mainstream critics like Matthew Arnold argue for the values of a dominant social group, and Koch is marginal to that experience in his French inBuences, Jewishness, and urbanity. It is thus quite true that he doesn’t speak to the central experience of American life, but neither did Eliot, Pound, Crane, Stevens, Hughes, and Moore. Their work was also “creepy” and idiosyncratic, as much great writing is on Arst examination. In a talk given at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, Ted Berrigan noted that the root of the word amusement is muse (1978, 39). Art is that which “stirs the muses,” and does so most effectively in resistance to the accepted standard of the time. The new is moral in its freshening of perception and deAance of institutionalized deAnitions of art. But “largeness, freedom, and shrewdness” will appear at Arst to be “creepy” to those who desire only the familiar. The irony with W. C. Williams and Kenneth Koch is that the strangeness of their art—and its revolutionary implications—begins with a delight in the ordinary. What is all the more remarkable about Koch’s poetry is that what begins in the ridiculous (“I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach / And a Bower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals” in “Alive for an Instant”) readily asserts itself as the sublime (“summer in my brainwater”). Undoubtedly this bridg124

ing of the comical and the sublime is Koch’s major gift to the New York School. The inclusive reach of his humor also joins with the performance orientation of the Beats, for example the improvisatory Zen comedy of Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” (“Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!”), Corso’s “Marriage” (“often thinking Flash Gordon soap”), and aspects of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (“And I am only an Apache / Smoking Hashi / In old Cabashy / By the Lamp.” Such irreverence and joy provided the moral center of the “New American Poetry,” as Donald Allen called it, and still radiates into the poetry of our time.

works cited Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1971. Selected Writings. Ed. Roger Shattuck. New York: New Directions. Arnold, Matthew. 1961. “The Study of Poetry.” In Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler, 306–27. New York: Houghton MifBin. Ashbery, John. 1957. “The Impossible.” Poetry, July, 250–54. ———. 1962. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1970. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: E. P. Dutton. ———. 1972. Three Poems. New York: Penguin. ———. 1975. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking. ———. 1989. “The New Realists.” In Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987, ed. David Bergman, 81–83. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Auden, W. H. 1975. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927–1957. New York: Vintage. Bamberger, W. C. 1995. “Breaking the Surface: Recent Works of Kenward Elmslie.” Sulfur 37 (fall): 194–201. Bernstein, Charles. 1986. Controlling Interests. New York: Roof Books. ———. [1995] 2000. Residual Rubbernecking. In Republics of Reality: 1975–1995. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press. Berrigan, Ted. 1964. The Sonnets. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1978. “The Business of Writing Poetry.” In Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute, ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb, 39–61. Boulder: Shambala. ———. 1980. So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1979. Berkeley: Blue Wind Press.

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Collins, Billy. 1995. The Art of Drowning. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Crane, Hart. 1986. Complete Poems of Hart Crane. New York: Liveright. Elmslie, Kenward. 1968. The Champ. Illustrated by Joe Brainard. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press. ———. 1980. Moving Right Along. Calais, Vt.: Z Press. ———. 1982. “Libretto Land.” Parnassus 10, no. 2: 199–209. Guest, Barbara. 1991. “Shifting Persona.” Poetics Journal 9 (June): 85–88. ———. 1995. Selected Poems. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press. Huppert, Hugo. 1988. “(‘In the Prayer-Mill’s Rattling’): A Visit with Paul Celan.” Trans. James Phillips. Acts 8–9: 156–62. Keats, John. 1975. “Letter 45. To George and Tom Keats. 21 [27?] December 1817.” In Criticism: The Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan, 349–50. New York: St. Martins Press. Koch, Kenneth. 1962. Thank You and Other Poems. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1969. When the Sun Tries to Go on. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press. ———. 1987. Seasons on Earth, Ko, and The Duplications. New York: Penguin. Lauterbach, Ann. 1987. Before Recollection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Lehman, David. 1998. The Last Avant-Garde. New York: Doubleday. Mac Low, Jackson. 1984. Bloomsday. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press. Notley, Alice. 1981. How Spring Comes. Iowa City, Iowa: Toothpaste Press. ———. 1998. Mysteries of Small Houses. New York: Penguin. O’Hara, Frank. 1955. “Another Word on Kenneth Koch.” Poetry, March, 349–50. ———. 1964. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights. ———. 1972. Collected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Orr, Gregory. 1973. Burning the Empty Nests. New York: Harper and Row. Olson, Charles. 1951. Selected Writings. New York: New Directions. Padgett, Ron. 1969. Great Balls of Fire. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Palmer, Michael. 1981. Notes for Echo Lake. San Francisco: North Point Press. ———. 1984. First Figure. San Francisco: North Point Press. ———. 1986. “Counter-poetics and Current Practice.” Pavement 7 (fall): 1–21.

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Pound, Ezra. 1968. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Robinson, Elizabeth. 2000. House Made of Silver. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press. Rosenthal, M. L. 1965. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roskolenko, Harry. 1954. “Satire, Nonsense, and Worship.” Poetry, July, 232–34. Schuyler, James. 1980. The Morning of the Poem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1988. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Shapiro, David. 1979. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1994. Stanzas in Meditation. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press.

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Upper Limit Music (Counted Verse)

Counted verse operates by the number of words rather than the number of syllables and stresses to the line. It is not primarily syllabic and accentual, though it obviously has those features. As Dana Gioia suggested in conversation, it reminds us that there are two kinds of lines, the visual and the aural. Often the appearance of a poem on the page is the Arst information we have of it. In this respect, counted verse has a designed look similar to shaped or patterned poetry. Counted verse does not make the shapes of objects in words like Apollinaire’s calligrammes (“Il Pluet” is written vertically to give the appearance of rain falling). Rather, it announces the physical reality of words as objects. They All actual, intellectual, and sonic space. George Herbert’s shaped poem, “Easter Wings,” has aspects of counted verse, rising and falling in number as the visual pattern is served. This is especially apparent at the pinched center of each stanza, where two words (“Most poore” and “With thee,” for instance) provide stable connective tissue. While the words per line in Herbert’s “Paradise” vary between six and eight, the Arst tercet contains only seven-word lines and the concluding tercet six. But the poem’s main feature is that the Anal word of the Arst line of each tercet holds within it the next two end words, with which it also rhymes. Counting by subtraction, the end words of the second stanza are charm, harm, and arm. Reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls, the project is sculptural as much as musical. Counted verse reminds us of the arbitrariness of all poetic forms. Such willed orderliness has elements of absurdity. Why two words to the line, or three? On the other hand, if the poet From An Exaltation of Forms. Ed. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2002.

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has wit, strictness of the poetic line adds pleasure to the formal game. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics states that meter “establishes a sort of distance between both poet and subject and reader and subject by interposing a Alm of unaccustomed rhythmical ritual between observer and experience.” At the same time, meter “reminds the apprehender unremittingly that he is not experiencing the real object of the ‘imitation’ . . . but is experiencing instead that object transmuted into symbolic form.” It is foolish therefore to speak of “natural” rhythms in poetry. Even heartbeats have irregular stress and duration. Poetry is a thing made, an artiAcial object constructed of sound, image, thought, and intention (though its meanings are often unintended). It is important to remember, of course, that symbolic meanings often have as much or more power than the experiences they represent. Poems are “complete” even when indeterminate. Ron Silliman’s book-length prose poem, Tjanting, is structured according to the Fibonacci number sequence, an arithmetic progression of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on, seen in natural objects such as seashells. But the poem itself is far from “natural” in its formal mania and artiAce. As pre-ordained shape, all poetic form is conceptual, presenting a dubious “what if?” to which the text then adheres. This is especially true of counted verse, which gently parodies poetic meter but also faithfully serves the cause of compression. Once a concept is created, word choice is central to the integrity of the line. The poet becomes conscious of how much weight the words in a given line should have. Given that the line in counted verse is generally narrow?—two to four words—it is less the sentence than the word group (“blueing to translucent,” Zukofsky) where the drama of relation occurs. In May Swenson’s “FourWord Lines,” generally two of the four words in each line have relational weight. In the line “I wish we were,” alliteration and mirroring (the “we” in “were”) are barely enough to sustain the line, and it feels thin. But the sentence “When your / lashes ride down and / rise like brown bees’ / legs, your pronged gaze / makes my eyes gauze” is weighty and resonant line by line. The parallelism of “pronged gaze” and “eyes gauze” is reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” Written in counted verse of mostly three-word lines, Brooks’s poem contains a “boxed 129

set” of internal rhymes: “sing sin. We / thin gin. We . . .” It also contains identical end rhyme, enjambment, caesura, internal rhyme, alliteration, and a choral point-of-view. Except for its stage direction, the poem is entirely monosyllabic. Shakespeare’s sonnets contain numerous monosyllabic lines (“If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun”); their frequency shows the poet’s pleasure in formal gamesmanship, central to which is a primitive delight in counting-as-utterance. Like “We Real Cool,” William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is written in counted verse; it is also formally replete despite being only eight lines long. The Arst line of each stanza contains three words and the second line, one. The poem is just as orderly in its syntax, as modifying phrases like “glazed with rain” fall from the Arst line of each stanza onto the hard surface of the noun in the second line. Louis Zukofsky made major use of counted verse in his encyclopedic poem, A, especially section 14. He begins the section with one-word lines, moves quickly to couplets, each of which contain two-word lines, and takes up the bulk of the poem with tercets consisting of three-word lines. The section concludes by reversing the same pattern. The mathematical balance is perfect—one by one, two by two, and three by three. The use of three-word lines is especially successful, as it allows for relation and difference within the line itself. The number three is stable (a stool can be made with three legs) but more inviting of “indeterminacy” than two or four. Compositionally, it encourages weaving and folding and lends excitement to the line break. “A14” contains the often-quoted lines “lower limit speech / upper limit music,” part of a hierarchy that concludes with “lower limit music / upper limit mathemata.” In Zukofsky’s cosmology, dance is superior to the body, speech superior to dance, music superior to speech, and mathematics superior to music. My own attraction to counted verse is not its superiority as mathemata, but to the basic animal pleasure of striking your hoof in the dirt. My long poem “South of X” uses a three-by-three counted verse stanza. (A four-by-four or Ave-by-Ave stanza has little formal attraction, as the line break ceases to be of interest.) Discovering counted verse changed the tenor of my work.

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Often relying on a “reading through” of other texts, usually prose, I let the conjunction of words come as a surprise. Despite the arbitrariness of this procedure, my poems took on a starker, more elegiac character. I would add to Zukofsky’s hierarchy “lower limit mathemata, / upper limit themata.” Bob Perelman’s poem “Chronic Meanings” contains lines of Ave words. The great majority of the lines are sentence fragments and therefore indeterminate. But indeterminacy is also used lyrically in the poem, which was written in memory of AIDS victim Leland Hickman. I Arst encountered “Chronic Meanings” when the author read it at New York’s Ear Inn poetry series. Informed that the poem was about a speciAc death, the patrons at the crowded bar became quietly attentive despite the work’s lack of resolution. Once we are accustomed to the rule of discontinuity, we chafe at complete sentences such as “The train seems practically expressive.” The last Ave stanzas contain no complete sentences, as incompletion is central to the poem’s drama. Traditionalists and avant-gardists have more interest in poetic form than practitioners of confessional free verse. Both admire intelligence, irony, and formal play. Well educated, they are tolerant of difAculty and suspicious of personal subject matter. Both the traditionalist and the vanguardist are also good readers of history, especially the history of poetry, and their work often comments, directly or implicitly, on it. With their love of pantoums, sestinas, and sonnets, poets of the New York School generally and John Ashbery especially have provided a bridge between experimentation and tradition. In every avantgardist, a traditionalist lies in hiding. He or she works in opposition to an established dominant. Once this reaction becomes the new dominant, the innovator seeks to protect it from the depredations of change. Four-Word Lines May Swenson

Your eyes are just like bees, and I feel like a Bower.

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Their brown power makes a breeze go over my skin. When your lashes ride down and rise like brown bees’ legs, your pronged gaze makes my eyes gauze. I wish we were in some shade and no swarm of other eyes to know that I’m a Bower breathing bare laid open to your bees’ warm stare. I’d let you wade in me and seize with your eager brown bees’ power a sweet glistening at my core.

Paradise George Herbert

I bless thee, Lord, because I grow Among thy trees, which in a row To thee both fruit and order ow. What open force, or hidden charm Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm, While the inclosure is thine arm? Inclose me still for fear I start. Be to me rather sharp and tart. Then let me want thy hand & art. When thou does greater judgments spare, And with thy knife but prune and pare, Ev’n fruitfull trees more fruitfull are. Such sharpnes shows the sweetest frend: Such cuttings rather heal than rend: And such beginnings touch their end. 132

Chronic Meanings Bob Perelman

The single fact is matter. Five words can say only. Black sky at night, reasonably. I am, the irrational residue. Blown up chain link fence. Next morning stronger than ever. Midnight the pain is almost. The train seems practically expressive. A story familiar as a. Society has broken into bands. The nineteenth century was sure. Characters in the withering capital. The heroic Agure straddled the. The clouds enveloped the tallest. Tens of thousands of drops. The monster struggled with Milton. On our wedding night I. The sorrow burned deeper than. Grimly I pursued what violence. A trap, a catch, a. Fans stand up. yelling their. Lights go off in houses. A Actional look, not quite. To be able to talk. The coffee sounds intriguing but. She put her cards on. What had been comfortable subjectivity. The lesson we can each. Not enough time to thoroughly. Structure announces structure and takes. He caught his breath in. The vista disclosed no immediate. Alone with a pun in. The clock face and the. Rock of ages, a modern. I think I had better. 133

Now this particular mall seemed. The bag of groceries had. Whether a biographical junkheap or. In do sense do I. These Aelds make me feel. Mount Rushmore in a sonnet. Some in the party tried. So it’s not as if. That always happened until one. She spread her arms and. The sky if anything grew. Which left a lot of. No one could help it. I ran farther than I. That wasn’t a good one. Now put down your pencils. They won’t pull that over. Standing up to the Empire. Stop it, screaming in a. The strong smell of pine needles. Economics is not my strong. Until one of us reads. I took a breath, then. The singular heroic vision, unilaterally. Voices imitate the very words. Bed was one place where. A personal life, a toaster. Memorized experience can’t be completely. The impossibility of the simplest. So shut the fucking thing. Now I’ve gone and put. But that makes the world. The point I am trying. Like a cartoon worm on. A physical mouth without speech. If taken to an extreme.

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The phone is for someone. The next second it seemed. But did that really mean. Yet Los Angeles is full. Naturally enough I turn to. Some things are reversible, some. You don’t have that choice. I’m going to Jo’s for. Now I’ve heard everything, he. One time when I used. The amount of dissatisfaction involved. The weather isn’t all it’s. You’d think people would have. Or that they would invent. At least if the emotional. The presence of an illusion. Symbiosis of home and prison. Then, having become superBuous, time. One has to give to. Taste: the Arst and last. I remember the look in. It was the Arst time. Some gorgeous swelling feeling that. Success which owes its fortune. Come what may it can’t. There are a number of. But there is only one. That’s why I want to.

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The New Modernism

The editors of Green Mountains Review have assigned the difAcult task of prophecy, to determine “both the state of poetry now and what current trends predict for the writing of the future.” I suggested in my introduction to the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) that postmodernism, as an extension of romanticism and modernism, does not represent a clean break with the past, as Fredric Jameson claims in his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). There can be no doubt of the triumph of capital and the cultural impact of consumerism. But the characteristics which Jameson assigns to postmodernism—“aesthetic populism,” “the deconstruction of expression,” “the waning of affect,” “the end of the bourgeois ego,” and “the imitation of dead styles” through the use of pastiche—are true only in part and then mainly of the popular culture rather than poetry. Affect has not waned; indeed, it is still a late-romantic affect that fuels much poetic practice. Nor has the “bourgeois ego” disappeared. Being largely confessional, American poetry is the ritualizing of middle-class desire. “Aesthetic populism” was central to American culture long before the postmodern period. Modernist poets like W. C. Williams, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot were also inBuenced by mass culture, as seen in Eliot’s lines, in The Waste Land: “O O O O that Shakespeherian rag / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.” Populism is fueled by liberal democracy. It also takes its legitimacy from television, rock and roll, and cultural pluralism, all of which seek larger markets through an apparent lowering of the stanFrom Green Mountains Review, fall–winter 1996–97 and spring–summer, 1997, 30–37.

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dard. A curious fact of American culture is that a new “low” always contains the seeds of a new elitism. Nothing could be more standard than “revolution” in the United States, but these revolutions are so readily consumed by a product-hungry public that they rarely do any ideological damage. Many new artistic practices like rap music and performance poetry originate in marginalized culture, but they become “the new” only at the point they are fashionable among the (white) middle class. There has been much complaint about the appropriation of the blues by white musicians like Elvis Presley. Such cultural compromises lie at the heart of liberal democracy as well as Bakhtin’s concept of the “dialogic,” a process by which disparate cultures and idioms are conjoined through contact. Cultural compromise is the genius of American culture; it also contributes to its reputation for soullessness. Section XVIII of “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams, beginning with the lines, “The pure products of America / go crazy,” is a critique of American culture. The lines of interest are: and young slatterns, bathed in Alth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but Butter and Baunt sheer rags.

In America, what constitutes a “peasant tradition,” especially one that is an imaginative and uniting cultural force? The girl Elsie is from a poor family, an American peasant lacking the cultural advantages that tradition provides. She is therefore voiceless, “succumbing without / emotion / save numbed terror.” If the American voice is not provided by ritual mediums like poetry and religion (as still occurs in Vietnamese culture), but 137

rather by marketing mediums like popular music, television, and Alm, what is likely to constitute the American soul? In “To Elsie,” William Carlos Williams is a Matthew Arnold of the American suburbs, casting a fearful eye on cultural anarchy— this from a poet who contributed to “aesthetic populism.” Populism, of course, is far from “numbed terror” and “No one / to witness / no one to drive the car,” the poem’s ending lines. Williams’s point is that democracy is successful only when the people maintain imaginative cultural traditions. The last Afty years—roughly the lifetime of the baby boomer generation—has seen the rise of a new romanticism counterbalanced by an occasional stab at formalism. New formalism, as a movement, is too dedicated to past practices and too conservative politically. It also lacks a major poet. The most meaningful alternatives to free-verse epiphany are to the found in the innovative formalism of the New York School and language poetry. Both are attracted to systematic Oulipo procedures, and both employ modernist devices like substitution (fetishized in the object by surrealism and in syntax by Gertrude Stein), parasyntaxis, polyphony, and collage. In the next few years, there will probably be increased use of the “new sentence”—see Ron Silliman’s book of essays of the same title—and more attention to the material nature of language. Some poets associated with centrist poetics—most notably, Jorie Graham—have already begun a negotiation with language poetry and the Ashbery inBuence. Due to Graham’s presence and visiting writers such as Michael Palmer and Leslie Scalapino who have been in residence, experimental poetics is now being practiced by some of the students at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. This may signal an assimilation of innovative values by the wider literary culture. Compositional complexity and a renewed emphasis on abstraction are the cornerstones of the new modernism. It has some of the difAculty of modernism but little of its commitment to history and myth. In its love of the fragment, mosaic organization, broken sequences, and appropriation, the new modernism also resembles the old. What differs is the gender and ethnicity of the poets involved. The new modernism consists of

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(1) poets like Ann Lauterbach, Marjorie Welish, Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nathaniel Mackey, Donald Revell, and Bob Perelman whose work contains Agured abstraction and, at times, sustained lyrical argument and are inBuenced by the romantic lineage of postmodernism including Ashbery and Duncan and (2) poets like Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein whose origins are in Gertrude Stein, objectivism, and Charles Olson and employ a more discontinuous compositional progress. At the turn of the century, consciousness is increasingly multiple. This is partly due to our changing models of communication, from the singular to the plural, from three networks to eighty-four channels. But representation has always been “double,” like the shadows in Plato’s cave. It involves the thingas-thing and the thing-as-language, an author in negotiation with a reader, and the many complexities of identity and difference. Poetry reBecting that doubleness (cf. Stevens and Ashbery) is more realistic because it acknowledges the impact of the writing act on the resulting text. The truest poetry is reBexive, or selfmirroring. Paradoxically, without the presence of the world, the mind’s reBection on its own devices is a useless solipsism. Centrist practice is essentially the same today as it was in 1975. It is nearly always written in free verse and on personal topics; moreover, its tone is elegiac. This poetry is late romantic because, despite being inBuenced largely by Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and Roethke, it still has its roots in Wordsworth. The problem with Wordsworth is that, in his resistance to and perhaps fear of the metaphysical, he depended too strongly on the authentic. The authentic is a Action, to be found in poetry as acts of sentiment. Like Wordsworth, much of contemporary poetry is sentimental about experience. A recording instrument rather than a divining rod, it fails to recognize the life of the mind. Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophical Investigations, “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.” The converse is also true: poetry ought really to be written as a form of philosophy. One of romanticism’s best poems was Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”:

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Only that Alm, which Buttered on the grate, Still Butters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny Daps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, everywhere Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought.

The excitement of the italicized lines (mine) is not only the compression of their language (“puny Baps and freaks”) but also their ability, in a more metaphysical vein, to blend the physical and the abstract. In this respect, Coleridge and Keats are the fabulous romantics, not Wordsworth and Shelley. Yeats worked in the romantic tradition, yet he wrote, “All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. . . . If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of the reader.” Recent emphasis on performance poetry will continue into the next century. Inspired largely by Ginsberg and Baraka and further encouraged by MTV and rock and roll, it has distinct advantages and even more distinct limitations. Among its advantages are immediacy and the ability to be understood at one hearing. Its disadvantage is its fatal loss of privacy. A public poetry is desirable on public occasions. But poetry is a complex communication, like jazz, that demands inner attention. Containing sound, thought, strategy, structure, and experimental cinema, it requires close listening. When I saw the PBS series based on the Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman anthology, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, I was surprised by its lack of verbal energy. All the push was in Alm editing rather than the language of poetry. The Alm gave no sense of how good a performative poetry can be. In the work of Paul Beatty, Wanda Coleman, and Amiri Baraka, words erect their own stage. The performance is not external to the words. The end of the nineteenth century was a quiet time for po140

etry. This may also seem true today. There are few social movements to capture poetry’s attention, no dawning of a new age despite the arrival of a new millennium. All that is new today, like language poetry and performance poetry, has already achieved its second generation. Public issues like multiculturalism and feminism have already inBuenced poetry and are unlikely to contribute more. Moreover, all of the above were products of the social ferment of the 1960s. This raises questions about the aging of the baby boomers, the main producers and consumers of cultural products. The passing of this generation will undoubtedly bring the death of its ideologies and a change in poetry’s ruling assumptions. History isn’t dead, as Francis Fukuyama insisted; it is sleeping in the heads of baby boomers. The Emily Dickinsons and Walt Whitmans of our era may not be visible to us. There is no way of estimating, by current fashion, what work will be considered great in the next century. History suggests that, whatever it else turns out to be, its vision will be large even if its language is eccentric. One metaphor for contemporary poetry is the franchise strip. Regional and local franchises obtain their rights from headquarters at Iowa City, SUNY Buffalo, and the Nuyorican Cafe. While this development is disheartening, it is no different from the popularization of earlier poetic commodities like the imagist poem. While the computer provides an interesting tool for research and communication and can even assist in composition, it will not have a major impact on poetry. We will not see a rage for multiple-track texts despite the fascinations of Ashbery’s “Litany,” a long poem in two columns suggestive of stereo speakers. It is more interesting to blend contrasting idioms within the same progression of sentences, as seen in the polyphonic texts of Nathaniel Mackey. On the other hand, some interesting work has already appeared in CD-ROM format. The best I’ve seen so far is The Little Magazine, edited by Don Byrd and others in Albany. The limit of the computer is Anally the limit of consciousness. The basic rhetorical forms are older than Quintilian, and the experimental possibilities of poetry have long been in existence. The computer will negotiate with these rhetorics rather than establish new models of consciousness. 141

The history of contemporary poetry is one of an ongoing argument between narrative and nonnarrative, steadiness and unsteadiness of discourse, and lyrical versus nonlyrical modes. My own approach as a poet has been to incorporate elements from both sides of the controversies. I hope this is also true of my editing of New American Writing and the anthology Postmodern American Poetry. W. S. Di Piero expressed surprise that I had selected the work of his friend August Kleinzahler for the anthology, yet I had also published August’s work many times in New American Writing. Kleinzahler’s writing is of the William Carlos Williams line of investigation, with other inBuences in the objectivists (his teacher was Basil Bunting) and the New York School. But because Williams was long ago assimilated into mainstream practice, Di Piero was puzzled to And such writing in an anthology of innovative practice. Moreover, Kleinzahler himself is a sworn enemy of language poetry and has recently been praised by the comparatively conservative critic Helen Vendler in the New Yorker. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is included in my anthology as a postwar bohemian, but the style of his poetry is virtually mainstream in its transparent use of language and narrative tendency. His work is easily understood, and he reliably Alls the identity category, created by the media of the 1950s, of genial hipster. A Bay Area language poet once described me as a narrative poet. My poems rarely tell stories. He meant, I think, that they are often thematic. Like parallel lines that appear to meet in the distance but never do, these poetic arguments never come to resolution. Yet they are strongly Agured, have thematic settings (often shifting), and occasionally use a personal point of view. I like a full range of strategies including dispersion and was even identiAed, in a New York Times Magazine article, as a leading language poet. My recent work is more lyrical than ever before. But a substantial part of it was produced by using compositional aids such as the computer program Travesty (Hugh Kenner and Charles O. Hartman, 1984), which scrambles words of an imported text, and the appropriation of words at the right margin of existing texts—for example, my own out-of-print novel Saigon, Illinois. I have also been using “counted verse” in which a limited number of words—usually two or three—are used in 142

each line. The stanza length is also dictated by this number. Here’s the Arst section of a seventeen-page poem, “South of X,” derived from my Vietnam novel: The melodramatic nurses are often quiet now; crease your clothes with gazes. Erased by summer rain, covered with mud and Jesus, the century falls asleep in a pink electric year. The warped ramp to heaven rises toward no ground except for bony landscapes wearing Vietnam. Every camera bleeds. Yet they wear their caskets proudly, play Hendrix very loudly. Often now we hear curses from the earth, put our hands in curtains fresh from Are. Who will ride to war? What bumps inside our faces with its consuming need? Summer evenings climb the stairs to lie on beds like wheat. 143

The present strokes its genius in an aging rural kitchen hidden and Cartesian. An empty room gets the Arst bad letter. At the margin watch intently, the blood knot turns. Night’s window shakes. Smoke and names.

The poem is stained with the novel’s subject matter, yet the tone and Agures are quite different. The method of composition, described earlier, resembles sortes vergilianae, the process of fortune-telling by randomly choosing passages from Virgil’s poetry. The resulting work is alien both to language poetry (it is too thematic and intended) and mainstream practice (it is too dispersive and discontinuous). We are now witnessing a welcoming of poetic difference on some fronts. Poets of the New York School, as well as an untypical poem by Charles Bernstein, have recently been published in The American Poetry Review, if not in that grayest and deadest of periodicals, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, and others with a mainstream publication history, are increasingly engaged with language poetry and the Ashbery inBuence. The postmodern future is as bright as a Marin County landscape. In the meantime, we’re in the millennial tunnel leading, somewhat darkly, to it.

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A Score for Undetermined Moments

The following interview was conducted by Chad Faries and Jayson Iwen in a small deli in Milwaukee’s historic Third Ward district in November 14, 1999, the morning after Paul Hoover’s visit to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee where he had done a reading and a Q&A session. It moves sequentially from the deli, to a small, rusty Honda Civic en route to the train station, through a long tunnel at the terminal, and ends at a platform with Paul getting on his train. This physical energy and movement seemed to parallel the intellectual movement of the interview; therefore, the interviewers have attempted to retain “talkiness” and passage through time and space. Chad Faries: Yesterday you talked a little about your inBuences, which are interesting, because they’re probably not what people would expect from someone who edited a postmodern American poetry anthology. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re reading now and about what you’ve been inBuenced by in the past? Paul Hoover: Well, I’m not reading any poetry all that actively at the moment. I tend to do more of my in-depth reading when I’m writing in the spring and summer. My tastes are unexpected and eclectic and that’s reBected in the magazine and to a degree in the anthology. In the contemporary period, my tastes have always run in the direction of the New York School and language poetry, and this is reBected in the editing of New American Writing. But I also love the work of Charles Simic and other writing outside the experimental. I thought the God section of Glass, Irony, and God by Anne Carson was pretty good, and I like From Cream City Review 25, nos. 1–2 (2001): 145–62.

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Stevie Smith for poems like “Pretty.” I have a weakness for devotional poetry if it’s inventive, probably because of my background in the church. You were asking me about my inBuences. I should be more complete about that. My work lies somewhere between the plainness of William Carlos Williams and the Boribund asceticism of Wallace Stevens, with the balance falling to Stevens. My work is more or less in the vein of the abstract or critical lyric, as it’s been called. So I read Ann Lauterbach and Marjorie Welish with interest. To put it more simply, when I’m down about poetry, Stevens is one of the people who revives my interest. I love Cesar Vallejo, particularly Trilce, and the metaphysical poets, especially George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson. I like Herbert better than Donne. Jayson Iwen: Why is that? PH: I don’t know. The poetry’s quiet and ingenious. He wrote eight hundred poems in his short career as a poet, and six hundred of them were in different forms. I have since become interested in the formal approach, from traditional forms like the cento and terza rima to math-driven forms such as counted verse (a prescribed number of words to the line and lines to the stanza). CF: What is your background in the church, Paul? PH: My father was a pastor in the Church of the Brethren, a paciAst sect which began in Schwarzenau, Germany, in the early 1700s. It’s similar in belief to the Mennonites and Amish. The Old Order Brethren, as they are called, wore prayer coverings and plain clothing like the Amish, and in the church sanctuary men sit to the left and women to the right. We are a more assimilated version of the Brethren and wear everyday clothing of “the world.” The ironies inherent in being German and paciAst may be evident in my work. Behind my reluctance to fully accept performance poetry is a dislike of personal display that comes from my church upbringing. The text—that is, the word—always comes Arst for me. Text and voice are the only actors required. JI: You also mentioned that when you’re “down about poetry.” What gets you down about poetry? PH: Since poets deal in words and in meanings, their efforts will sometime seem insubstantial even to them. Even if the result is 146

satisfying to you, you’re never sure what its effect is on others. The reception isn’t always immediate and clean. And the text itself can be smudged with uncertainty. I always thought the title of Sartre’s essay “Why Write?” was on the mark. Actually I don’t ask myself why I write poetry. I write because there’s nothing else I like doing better. JI: What were you interested in before that? PH: I wrote short stories in college. I disdained poetry. Then, in college, I ran across the work of William Carlos Williams. For years it affected me even though I considered it to be too plain. That’s why I like poetry that has both Williams’s directness and Stevens’s ornateness. I like to be able to change diction and levels of rhetoric, to Batten it out or heighten it as occasion demands. Also, I prefer the Stevens-Williams-Moore side of modernism as opposed to Pound and Eliot. I have mixed feelings about Pound. He was a tremendous motivator of the age and a very generous person, but I don’t And much of his work inspiring for my own practice. CF: And Olson of course. I have mixed feelings about him too, on an ethical level, but his redeAnition of the epic, collage work, and imagist principles served to provide a bridge from the modernists to what came to be called postmodernists. The concern with the thing itself, the essential image, and the bare musicality of language seems something prevalent in your work. JI: Yes, you’re interested in the word as word, but you’re also interested in the larger linguistic meaning, or the image. PH: Exactly. You can slow things down and do staccato movements in which the language is primary, the “new sentence” being one example. Or you can push out into traditional sentence structure. To be able to employ both is what I’m after. I read these free-verse poems in Poulin’s anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, and it’s disappointing that so few of the poets are making sudden moves, moves that would surprise—beyond the obligatory Ashbery section, that is. Ashbery has always been attractive to me for his range. He’s an omnivore, willing to consume anything and produce anything. And then there’s language poetry, of which I became aware in the late seventies. By 1983 there was evidence of its inBuence in Somebody Talks a Lot, though it has always remained small in my work. By the mid to 147

late eighties the language poets were a big deal already, at least for the small group that pays attention. My work was inBuenced by the New York School, to some extent the deep image, and surrealism. I thought I saw a connection between language poetry and surrealism because of their attraction to method. I was open to language poetry despite how foreign it seemed to my own practice, and I’ve been generous to it as an editor. But I had no intention of becoming entirely the captive of any particular program. When The Novel: A Poem appeared, some people in Chicago said “Oh, you’re a language poet.” But I don’t think The Novel: A Poem is language poetry at all, it’s more of a collageeffect modernism. JI: There is a sort of oblique narrative at work there, too. PH: Right. The story about—what’s her name. I forgot my own character. The girl whom I introduce early on? JI: She goes to And her father? PH: Then I dropped references to her, because I realized that I was going to have to invent stories for her. Her name was Mandy, and she appeared in an inferior pulp novel of James M. Cain, late in his career. Section 20 through section 30 could be published as a book itself, because a new and more conAdent style arrives. I like the whole thing, actually, but when I read from the book my selection is always from section 24 to the end. JI: Have you gotten much feedback on The Novel? PH: The Novel: A Poem was given a wonderful review by Stephen Ratcliffe in the Poetry Project Newsletter, which later became a chapter of his book of criticism, Listening to Reading. Also, Gillian Conoley wrote a long review in Denver Quarterly that showed great insight into the work, which she called “appetitive.” That’s exactly what I do in the long poem, eat up the scenery, moving this way and that. Another reviewer, Rohan Preston, referred to my “staggering selves” because the poem changes its characters and point of view so insistently. The novelist Paul West attacked the poem in Parnassus by parodying the style. In the end of the review, he seemed to wish that I would get cancer and die. Apparently he thought I was making fun of novelists. You know, how dare you put us down. Ours is a noble effort. CF: Maybe you were sort of reBecting on your own feelings about how successful the novel (Saigon, Illinois) that you had 148

done just before that was. So if you were putting anyone down, perhaps it was yourself. PH: I had mixed feelings about writing Action, that’s for sure. When I was working on Saigon, Illinois, I’d write every evening after work until about midnight. Philip and Julian, our twins, were clamoring at the baby gate, trying to get into the dining room where I was set up with my word processor. I remember feeling heat in my face as I was typing. I hadn’t written Action since college, so what was I doing in this foreign genre? But I had to write the book because I had those experiences as a conscientious objector, and the Vietnam War thing was beginning to be remembered. So I hurried along and wrote it in Ave months. Almost immediately, the New Yorker accepted a chapter as the story “Demonstration,” and Vintage took the manuscript three days later. The Vintage Contemporaries series was then really hot because of the Jay MacInerney book Bright Lights, Big City. My novel was essentially an interlude in my poetry production. That’s why I wrote The Novel: A Poem immediately afterwards, to calculate the experience of authorship generally. JI: How long did it take you to write The Novel, just in comparison? PH: Probably a year, a year and a half. I wrote it entirely on the word processor, which had no hard drive, just moving ahead, not scripting anything in advance. The idea was to use the computer as a tool for “onwardness.” If I got stuck, I’d look at the books in my room, often books of philosophy such as a volume I have on innate ideas. Nonpoetry sources are especially good. The poem has parodies of the adventure novel, action novel, romance novel, and so on. I may have been inBuenced by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, each chapter of which is the Arst chapter of a different novel. JI: When reading The Novel, I kept getting the impression that there’s a deAnite element of levity or jouissance. Was it fun for you to write? It seems like you had a ball writing it when I read through it. How much of it was fun and how much of it was work? PH: If I had a good writing day, it would be a lot of fun. But I’ve found that it’s possible to produce good work even on days when I’m grinding it out. Two long poems from Idea—“From a 149

Gazebo” and “Sunlight in Vermont”—were written straight at the typewriter in this spirit of jouissance you mention. It’s the same spirit, I think, that Gillian Conoley calls “appetitive.” In one case, I think it was “Sunlight in Vermont,” I went to the store and bought one of those rolls you put into the cash register, and I fed it into an IBM Selectric typewriter. I set margins so that I could type only on that narrow column. Of course, this was in imitation of Kerouac and his Teletype roll. You create this romance just to give yourself the desire and “stage” from which to write. But much of my work has been light in its movement and given to sudden turns. CF: There are other elements of experimentation, or perhaps a better word is play in your work, and I mean both sport and an elemental theatricality. For instance last night you talked about a computer program Hugh Kenner developed, and that both you and Jackson Mac Low used which was based on principles of chance. That was pretty . . . PH: While preparing the anthology, I became more acquainted with Jackson Mac Low’s use of computer programs. I thought I could use them in my own writing. So I contacted Charles O. Hartman at Connecticut College. Travesty is a DOS program that Hartman wrote with Hugh Kenner, the Pound scholar. It was published in Byte magazine in 1984. You can also download it off the web. You import an ASCII text from the program itself, and then you judge from 1–9 how much sense or nonsense you want to make. At 9 the text makes complete sense, but whole sentences will get circulated out of order. Around 1–3 is utter nonsense. At 3 and 4 words start to appear, and at 5 and 6 new and coined words are combined with the words already there. Phrases join in really strange ways, very jumpy ways, and of course a lot of it’s a mess. You have to strike out what you don’t want, which is a lot. It’s in the act of editing, in other words, in which you get the poem. Much also depends on the palette that you chose to begin with—the imported text—because it will have a distinct vocabulary. My favorite poems were the ones based a screenplay I’d written. The script was called Water, but the 1994 movie was called Viridian, thus the title of my poetry book. It had a very elemental vocabulary—the boy, the woman, the man, and a lot of elemental nouns like water and sky. It was 150

set in the Midwest and the setting called for a wide-angle lens. When I “Travestied” the script, I got a juicy result. The editing was easy and nothing had to be forced. The program recycles certain words, so there are poems in the book that also repeat words and phrases. CF: Any of that in “Shadow Gate,” “Stationary Journey?” PH: Yes, “In a Shadow Gate” has elements of the method: “The woman writes, as if in space: / The boy shines in the house.” Those phrases emerged from the movie script through Travesty. I expanded on that situation with freshly written lines such as “the reckless scatter of swimming pools down the California coast.” “Stationary Journey” was written “intuitively,” as Mac Low says, after my writing had been inBuenced by Travesty’s style. Poems that were written through the software include “The Beautiful Cities,” “Reason’s Eye,” and one of my favorites, “As Quietly as Distant.” In that poem you see the same words coming back: “century,” “movement,” “ text,” and so on. “A German Version,” by the way, was written by cutting up the program handed out at an acoustics festival in New York. I ran into Jerome Rothenberg on the street and he said, “Hey, we’re going to an acoustics festival and Cage is going to read, come along.” I got there and they had a program sponsored by Rundfunk, the German record company. People were dropping feathers past microphones, rolling bowling balls across the stage, and things like that. Cage came out and just sat at a table and read with this incredible voice and that was his acoustics. He was the best thing on the program. Generally if I cut up and rearrange a text, I will add “grafts” on my own composition. Usually the grafts begin to assert themselves over the cut-ups. CF: That’s interesting that you wrote a script. I see your work as Almic. PH: I have a poem about Alms, about going to a video store. CF: I mean more like Almic jumps. Like Stan Brakhages’s editing work. There is a lot of layering and you can force a type of narrative out of quick sequential edits that are seemingly unrelated. PH: That’s true. I think visually. I And it confusing that the language poets don’t value the iconic. There’s probably more to be examined about that. There used to be a Jewish study group in San Francisco that examined the relations of language to poetry 151

and theology. Tom Mandel was involved, I know. I haven’t looked that far into it, but my sense is that the refusal of the icon in language poetry has its source in Judeo-Christian thought. You don’t speak the name of the Deity and you don’t worship icons. But the word itself is powerful and even involves mathematical formulas, since letters in Hebrew are also numbers. There’s a strong distrust of iconography in Protestantism, particularly in the plain or low churches with which I’m acquainted. CF: We started with Almic aspect. PH: It’s true that my poetry is Almic. But let me start with the image. There was a period in the eighties when I noticed that a lot of my students were doing list poems that were also imagist. It was poem as slide show. Clearly I was encouraging this kind of organization in my students. Poetic rhetoric was at a low ebb, and there was little in the way of overall theme. The excitement was in the individual parts. Students would knock the images down the page, often luxuriously. But that kind of poem gets tiring after a while. Exhausted by the seriality of the image poem, I began to look for other kinds of discourse. So I began reading people like A. R. Ammons and Elizabeth Bishop to introduce rhetoric and frustrate my imagist “grasp.” My work could be seen as Almic because its scene-making is precise. But the camera is often unsteady. You will rarely And full narration in my work such as you see in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose.” I recently wrote an essay, “Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry,” that was presented at a conference in Belgium. In it I discuss kinds of realism including photographic and cinematic realism, for example in Allen Ginsberg’s “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels.” In that poem, the camera movements are the main evidence of authorship as Ginsberg subtly moves us through Kesey’s house and toward the road in front where the red lights of police cars revolve “in the leaves.” That word “in” is very cinematic because it thrusts the vision upward and into intimate contact with something unexpected yet telling. The camera angles are in the prepositions. I would say that in my poems, as in Alm, the eye is always moving. But poetry has greater powers than Alm because it is not limited to the visual realm. JI: It seems to me that you make references to television quite a 152

bit in your work, that your work is televisual in the way it jumps around, changes channels and such. I was wondering, do you watch a lot of TV? PH:. I rarely watch TV now. I’ll watch a sports event if it’s a good one. I watch the news. That’s about it. I don’t watch the situation comedies or any of that stuff. I don’t even watch PBS to any degree. But when I was a kid I watched a lot of TV, and I’m part of a TV culture, obviously. I have a lot of references to TV in the book, for example in the opening lines of “In a Shadow Gate”: “Because it has rained and the TV / is on, the world is not itself.” CF: It’s always there. You’re not watching it, but it’s always there. A perfect Pythagorean solid. PH: The TV glowing in the living room is an absolute America icon. In The Last Picture Show, which is in black and white, there’s a scene in which you can hear the TV on in the next room. It’s at Cloris Leachman’s house, and the character played by Sam Bottoms is trying to patch up their romance. The presence of the TV both hollows out that scene (nothing is sadder than a TV playing in an empty room) and gives tremendous reality to the scene in the kitchen. The TV is on, therefore everything we are witnessing is real. CF: Yeah, Bogdanovich’s Alm. Leachman was seducing a young boy in the kitchen. No music, only that TV and the creaking of the Boor, a little wind blowing in through the kitchen window. PH: I wrote a poem recently that ends by referring to a real event in East Germany, where a man was discovered dead in his chair watching TV. The TV was still on, and he’d been dead for four years. It’s called “Necessary Errand” and begins “After quiz shows fade / and the mind is silent, / after neutral acts / obscure yet fatal, / the blunt trauma object / shakes with pleasure.” The TV is on in “the house of words,” but the “allegorical weather” has Latinate diction and struggles to exist. Anyway, television has the last word. JI: I’d like to ask you if you want to get into deAning postmodernism again. Maybe you’re getting kind of sick of it. PH: Well, the introduction to the book, quoting from Fredric Jameson, attempts to deAne it both as a period style of its own and an aspect of late modernism. Much of Jameson’s characterization seems true of our period—for example, “aesthetic 153

populism,” “the deconstruction of expression,” “the waning of affect,” “the end of the bourgeois ego,” and the “imitation of dead styles” through pastiche. But it may turn out that Jameson was describing cultural styles of the eighties that are already behind us. The waning of affect ended with the rock band Devo. Affect never disappeared. It was transformed into the baroque. It seems unlikely that we will see the end of bourgeois ego. Look at the popularity of Sharon Olds! But you’re asking how does postmodernism connect to what’s in the anthology and things like that. Postmodernism is another term for avant-garde poetry of the postwar period, 1950 to the present. Postmodernism is either the exhaustion of modernism or its logical extension. For example, nearly every element of postmodern poetry—appropriation, the fragment, the inBuence of popular culture—can also be located in The Waste Land. My argument is largely to be found in this sentence from the introduction: “This anthology does not view postmodernism as a single style with its departure in Pound’s Cantos and its arrival in language poetry; postmodernism is, rather, an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology.” By ideology, I mean poetics. I believe that the avant-garde cycle still holds; that new practices come from the outside to challenge the dominant practice, ultimately overwhelming it and establishing a new dominant. Then it is time for a new form of resistance. My anthology and others of its kind—Weinberger, Messerli, and the two-volume Rothenberg and Joris—sent a warning shot through the dominant practice because it suggested that such poets were working on borrowed time. As innovative poetry of my generation becomes more accepted, we see poets of the mainstream repositioning themselves as the innovative. This reached its absurd limit with last year’s essay in American Letters and Commentary announcing ellipticism as a new school. And what is ellipticism? Apparently a belated and diminished version of the Ashbery style as practiced by Lucie Brock-Broido and Liam Rector. In other words, we are seeing the assimilation of the innovative. Who thought in 1979 that language poetry would have such an impact on the culture? Or that American Poetry Review would feature poets of the New York School on its covers? Probably the biggest question is Jameson’s: How connected is 154

postmodernism to global capital? Is the avant-garde preparing the way for the triumph of global capital or seeking, as it seems to claim, to prevent it? I don’t want to get into a scenario where we have a late Marxist aesthetic conspiring with global oil companies. But as a reminder of this dilemma, I keep on my desk a photocopy of an event announcement from a recent Modern Language Association meeting: Session 686: Cash bar arranged by the Marxist Literary Group, 5:15–6:30 p.m., Imperial Ballroom, San Francisco Hilton. JI: I just want to ask one question. Last night you called the poems in your book Nervous Songs “faux sonnets.” Aside from the fact that they all consist of fourteen lines, and are each divided spatially into an octave, there are no obvious indications that they are sonnets, and yet they seem to radiate a kind of structural tension. Do you think that this is a result of verging on formal verse? That a certain uncanny power can be obtained by Birting with the very form of narrative that many postmodern poets seem to adamantly avoid? PH: I was drawn to sonnets because of Ted Berrigan’s sequence, The Sonnets. Unconsciously, I was also building toward writing a longer work, and two long poems did appear in the collection Idea of the following year. Then of course I wrote the booklength work, The Novel: A Poem. Like Berrigan, I didn’t want to write in a formally perfect way, but rather to create tension through the compression required of fourteen lines. Structural tension is a factor in my work generally. The mind is constantly in reaction to what it just established, line by line and word by word. Because my mind works in quick turns, I’m drawn to metaphysical poetry and surrealism. Contradiction and difference are a compositional style. In the sonnets, I was also trying to reach toward lyricism. So some of the poems are antic, like “We’ve Decided” with its line “I am an ape today,” and some are more personal. “After Miss Graven’s Remarks” is based on attending a musical performance at my daughter’s grade school. A little girl was to play the trumpet, and everyone was being respectful, but she couldn’t play a note. She’d blow these strangled sounds out of the horn, and my wife and I were cracking up. The more we tried to hide it, the more we cracked up. When I am moved by something, my left eye will get weepy—only my left 155

eye—thus the opening sentence: “Boy, my left eye cries when I see kids / play violins and things.” Some people told me Nervous Songs was their favorite book of mine up to that time. CF: It was well received. Marjorie Perloff liked it a lot. She’s a good person to have on your side. JI: Did that make it easier to write The Novel later on? PH: That I’d done sonnets? JI: Yeah, that you’d done the sequence. PH: Yes. It was a beginning of longer movements in my writing, but I didn’t start considering the architecture of long poems until I worked on “From a Gazebo” and “Sunlight in Vermont.” Recently I’ve been writing a lot of counted verse poems that run three or four pages in typescript. There’s compression within the line and stanza but extension by means of the sentence and page. I like to keep extending until I’ve run through a range of differences in terms of subject and language usage; in other words, until attention has repeatedly curved. I don’t naturally think in terms of short movements. But lately I’ve been considering a series of half-page poems with longer lines. I like to make a formal change now and then to keep up my interest through the problem-solving challenge. CF: The Norton Postmodern Anthology has been extremely inBuential in recent years, primarily at the pedagogical level. Personally, my Arst encounter with the anthology was as an undergraduate in a beginning poetry workshop. I was a psychology major at the time. Now I’m a Ph.D. candidate in a poetry program. The anthology seems to legitimize, especially for younger writers, the desire to bust out of washed-out perceptions of poetics. It encourages experimentation and that aspect of play that I mentioned earlier. Do you want to tell us about how such an anthology was conceived? PH: I had seen that there was a dearth of anthologies representing this literature. The most recent experimental anthology of any impact had been the 1960 Donald Allen volume that started it all. Also, a number of new anthologies of contemporary American poetry had come out, but they were all mainstream with the exception of the Ashbery, O’Hara, and Ginsberg selections. I was frustrated by that, but I didn’t even have plans to do an anthology. 156

In 1988, the second edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry came out, edited by Ellmann and O’Clair. I was shocked by the revisionist selections, which eliminated many poets with an experimental history. Gregory Corso was dropped, also Louis Zukofsky. Poor Zukofsky never could get a break. He made it into the 1973 edition, minimally, and Afteen years later they take him out. James Schuyler was another poet missing in action, even though he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. I thought, no fair, this isn’t happening on the other front. I attended the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago in 1990, and The Novel: A Poem had just been published, so I went over to the New Directions book table. I mentioned casually to Peter Glassgold, a senior editor, that someone should do an anthology of experimental poetry. He took it seriously, as if I had a proposal, and said “Oh, we couldn’t do that, the permissions expenses would be too great.” It turned out that the permissions costs were thirty-Ave thousand dollars for Postmodern American Poetry. That’s a lot of money. Half of that, by the way, came out of my own royalty earnings. So he took me by the arm and took me six steps over, to W. W. Norton at the neighboring table, and I was introduced to Barry Wade, a senior editor. He immediately asked me, “What’s your idea?” I started by criticizing the Norton Moderns, especially the 1988 edition. If I had come to him armed with a plan, I never would have done that. But that’s what provoked them to take the project seriously. They had received some criticism of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, second edition, the Aercest of such reviews written by Clayton Eshleman in American Poetry Review. Barry Wade said, “I don’t think we’ll do it, probably, but send me a proposal.” I took three weeks to draw up a proposal with names of people who should be included. A couple weeks later I got a call at my ofAce from Julia Reidhead, who was wonderful: “We’d like to do your book and all the young people here are excited about it.” It took me two and a half years to put it together, and a lot of labor. I would sit in my little ofAce at home with books stacked up over my head. I would stand all day at a copy store machine, preparing a manuscript from shopping bags full of books. Then there was the labor of writing the headnotes—103 poets, and I had to describe accurately the activities of each one. 157

I wrote poetry while I was doing that, but not as much as I ordinarily would have. JI: Were the headnotes a requirement? PH: They told me that I had to include an introduction, headnotes, and a teacher’s manual. Much of the rest was up to me, even the type font and cover art. CF: So it was to be a pedagogical tool from the start? PH: It was double-listed in their catalogue under the trade and college divisions. After it was published, I went to the MLA again, and Julia said excitedly, “Paul, it’s a hit. It’s really great.” They were very happy. CF: It was deAnitely a hit. But there were certain individuals who maybe had some difAculties with it. So I’d like to put you on the spot a little bit, and I’d like to hear you defend yourself against some of these statements. John Haines, in an article in the New Criterion Review, June 1995, says: “Taken simply as fun, as play with language, such stuff”—he gives an example of a Bernstein poem, his language—“such stuff may amuse for a page or two, but when confronted with close to six hundred pages of it, the undoctrinated reader might well wonder if a terminal disaster had struck the language, and we would soon be speaking gibberish to one another.” PH: Well, it’s not gibberish. That’s his big mistake. When a new style arrives, it is always difAcult to Agure it out, even if that style is as direct in expression as William Carlos Williams. Now we’re at a point where the plainspoken is taken for granted, and Haines himself works in free verse, which was developed by French poets of the nineteenth century. If Haines had been alive at the time, he would no doubt have disapproved. Today, complication is on the agenda for poetry, as well as formal inventiveness. CF: Which seems to be a reBection of contemporary society as well, since technology is advancing exponentially people are grappling with fundamental expression. Hence, the call for Prozac. I think the plainspoken is still valued, but it has become part of that layering through a tweaking of the syntax. A bit more subversive than Williams. But Haines may want a quick and easy explanation and what he Ands in the introduction isn’t tidy enough for him. 158

PH: He just doesn’t get it, and this frustration leads to anger. He’s thinking, “If this is some sort of new style and my stuff isn’t like that, I must be horribly old-fashioned.” Naturally he would feel that way. Bernstein’s poetry is perfectly accessible once you hear him read it. It takes more than clarity to communicate. You also have to consider that Charles consciously plays the role of the gadBy and sophist. JI: There’s another quote here—“My best hope is that another generation of poets might be brought to see the folly of a school of poetics as represented here, resolve to grow up, and move on to better things.” PH: Haines certainly grew up, didn’t he? He grew into his Axed position. Everyone has to deal with his or her Axed position, as well as the fact that other practices than your own exist in the world. Remember, the review appeared in the New Criterion, a new formalist site that would welcome such views. The work of James Schuyler, which is perfectly accessible, is also included in the anthology. Who can’t “get” a poem like “Korean Mums”? The most complicated line in that poem is “the rue I gave Bob / Bourishes.” The poetry is perfectly expressive and picturesque. We had twenty-Ave poets reading at the publication celebration of this book in New York City at St. Marks in 1994, from Allen Ginsberg and Hilda Morley to Bruce Andrews and Ray DiPalma. It was an amazing collection of people, with a lot of diversity. I heard some poets such as Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews read for the Arst time. Their work makes even more sense read out loud. It’s funny, for one thing. JI: You make a strong distinction between performance poetry and language poetry in the introduction to the postmodern anthology. What you’re telling us now, does that kind of defy that distinction, that dualism? That, say, language poetry isn’t for performance, or couldn’t be performed? PH: Some language-oriented poets such as Jackson Mac Low, Steve McCaffery, Leslie Scalapino, and Steve Benson have written works for performance. My essay “Murder and Closure” deals with this issue. I’ve wondered for some time why language poetry and performance poetry became dominant as innovative practices. Was it as simple as the page and stage duality? I even asked this question at an MLA session and was misunderstood 159

by panelist Joanna Drucker to be complaining about such a state of affairs. One answer lies in the writings of Marshall McLuhan. Here’s a description of The Gutenberg Galaxy by his biographer, W. Terence Gordon: “Before writing, mankind lived in acoustic space, the space of the spoken word, which is boundless, directionless, horizonless, and charged with emotion. Writing transformed space into something bounded, linear, structured, and rational.” In other words, with the rise of mass media such as radio and television, we return to acoustic space and its literary values. Despite the fact that it is supremely literary and theory-driven, language poetry adheres to the values of acoustic space. McLuhan believed the work of Gertrude Stein to be “a carefully devised strategy to get the passive visual reader into participant, oral action.” The “new sentence” as deAned by Ron Silliman lends itself to acoustic space despite its lack of mnemonic device. Performance art began under dada and has traditionally involved a more body-oriented actor. But the voice is actor enough. Charles Bernstein has edited a wonderful collection of essays on this subject. It’s called Close Listening (Oxford University Press). We were speaking earlier of the presence of TV in my poems. Television has a subtle and devastating impact on us—the way we organize our poems, the kinds of subjects we refer to, our common knowledge, even the kinds of utterances that we make. More common knowledge is provided by television than any other area of culture. JI: A devastating impact? PH: We’re such a visual culture these days that literacy sometimes seems under challenge. My students are much more cultured in mass media than they are in literature, and their Arst writing models are often media heroes like Henry Rollins. Politically, it’s possible to be opposed to the rule of media while also under its thumb. You’re thinking one way and living another. I’m saying that demagoguery is possible under the power of mass media. If our presidents get any less literate, the State of the Union address will be a matter of grunting and pointing. JI: Do you think much of the argument between free-verse writers and formalists? PH: That battle’s more important for people who stand to gain 160

from it, like Dana Gioia. I write both in free verse and in forms. The problem with recent use of traditional form is that it tends to suppress the poem’s matter and becomes a display of form for form’s sake. A lot of wit in traditional form is puerile in my experience. I’ve been interested lately in experimental formalism and would recommend The Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie. The fun of form is laying bare the device, but I like to see poems struggle beyond their formality into a fresh means of expression. If you leave the device bare for too long, you’re some kind of exhibitionist. CF: There’s got to be another edition of the anthology eventually. What changes would you make? PH: I’m going to be really careful now in answering that. Certain people would have to be dropped, because they haven’t produced substantially enough in the interim. Other poets whose production has been strong will replace them. Also, I would want to include a range of younger poets who are writing well. I’m not going to mention any names. CF: That’s Ane. What about the introduction? Do you feel there’s anything to clarify or change in your introduction? PH: I reread it recently, and it looks okay. The arrival of new poets naturally requires a fresh introduction. Permissions contracts run out after seven years. It was published in ’94, so that’s the year 2001. The Norton editors said that they expected this to be an ongoing work, with new editions, so we will see. We’ll also have to see what the new millennium has in store. Will it seem accurate to call the poetry of this coming decade “postmodern”? Both romanticism and modernism began around the turn of a century, but I don’t see anything that momentous on the horizon. If Francis Fukuyama is right and we’re at the end of history, the postmodern style is Anal and there will be a Starbucks on every corner. CF: Well, that will make the new edition easy enough. You won’t have to change any terms! JI: I have just one more question for you, which is, you mentioned when you were talking about poetry getting you down, just the fact that you felt like maybe you weren’t having an impact with your words. PH: For any poet, I think, rather than just me. It’s possible for 161

any poet to fall into uncertainty about the creation and reception of his work. I feel that my own writing does have an impact. I feel this most strongly after giving a reading, when attention has been strong in the room. The reception is more confusing in publishing a book because it’s delayed. JI: I’d like to ask you what you would like people to learn from your work. CF: Yes, any great and powerful Oz truths that emerge? PH: It’s not what paraphrasable truth emerges from poetry—all that’s known and has been announced. What’s important is the enactment of the language itself, of words in relation to matter. You can’t take a good poem and pare it down to a single truth. Its truths are complex and many. All that said, I believe that poetry is a higher form of truth. It gives us the world unfamiliarly.

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The Poet in His Skin Remembering Paul Carroll

I Arst spoke with Paul Carroll in 1971 when as director he called to tell me of my acceptance to the Program for Writers at University of Illinois in Chicago. The enthusiasm in his voice surprised me. I had applied on the basis of the ten poems I’d written up to that time and had no conAdence in what I was doing. I soon learned as his student that his excitement for poetry— and his involvement in the work of young poets—was genuine. Editor of a well-known anthology of the time, The Young American Poets (Big Table, 1968), Paul was always drawn to younger poets. InBuenced by a romantic line that comes down through Whitman, Neruda, and St.-John Perse, Paul was a poet of wonder. His many and various enthusiasms were contagious. He believed that poetry could change your life. Indeed, he frequently claimed that his own life had been saved by poetry. It seemed a poet’s exaggeration until I learned of his personal difAculties, which seemed to have begun when his father, a prominent IrishCatholic founder of banks (he owned eight, including Hyde Park Bank) and property developer (he developed the suburban community of Homewood) died when Paul was young. His hero gone, the family’s fortunes ruined because “Honest John” Carroll had paid back eight-seven cents on the dollar during the bank crises of the Great Depression, Paul was left to the care of his mother, whom he despised. This mother said to me, at Paul’s Ada Street loft on our Arst meeting, “Yes, Paul is my son, I suppose,” nodding with indifference in his direction. One of Paul’s favorite stories was of traveling with his family From Chicago Review 44, no. 1 (1998): 5–12.

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in a limousine on Sunday afternoons to visit the Miller family of Milwaukee, founders of the well-known brewery. He would often return to it, as he did to recollections of riding a pony on his father’s weekend farm, learning poetry at the feet of Morton Dawen Zabel at the University of Chicago, his Arst reading of the poetry of Horace, and having slept with the beautiful woman, a Morton Salt heir, who had posed as the Morton Salt Girl. Such moments were part of his originary myth. Unfortunately, they were always matched by the dark side of his selfnarrative, such as the time he nearly won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, only to be told by judge Dudley Fitts at a party that his (Beat-inBuenced) poetry had Anally been too “profane.” The same thing happened when Paul had a book accepted by Henry Holt, only to have its “coarseness” discovered by Mrs. Holt when she came across the manuscript at home. It seems extraordinary that a man of such learning, who loved poetry of spirituality, beauty, and even decorousness, could suffer such an accusation. Perhaps because of his editorial support of the Beats and his appearance in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945– 1960, Paul was considered to be more bohemian than he really was. As can be seen from his photo on the cover of his Anest collection, Odes (Big Table, 1969), he was a dapper man in the mold of Tom Wolfe, wearing his signature boater, a suit and tie, and sunglasses. He drove, rather carelessly, a Mercedes-Benz, and owned a handsome townhouse full of paintings on Lincoln Park’s Mohawk Street. A Chicago poet among painters, his friends included Claes Oldenburg, Aaron Siskind, June Leaf, and Ed Paschke. But from the distant perspective of Dudley Fitts and those who believe they are defending the great tradition, Paul must have been seen as a minor bohemian, an Irish Midwestern Allen Ginsberg. Socially, however, he was more a man of Michigan Avenue and the galleries. While Paul never had the publishing success he desired as a poet, he was often brilliant as a teacher, editor, man of letters, and literary entrepreneur. The Poem in Its Skin (Big Table, 1968), a collection of essays based on single poems by Robert Creeley (“A Wicker Basket”), Allen Ginsberg (“Wichita Vortex Sutra”), James Dickey (“The Heaven of Animals”) and others, is a shrewd examination of what he calls “The Generation of 1962.” 164

The opening essay on John Ashbery’s “Leaving the Atocha Station” is a masterpiece of balanced critical writing that acknowledges the poem’s inBuences in dada and surrealism while joining it with the modernist mainstream of Hopkins, Eliot, and Pound. In many of its selections, The Young American Poets was prophetic and helped introduce the work of Charles Simic, James Tate, Louise Glück, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Robert Hass, Kathleen Fraser, Clark Coolidge, Tom Clark, Kenward Elmslie, Marvin Bell, and Mark Strand. Paul also discovered that genial eccentric, Bill Knott, who published his Arst book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, under the pseudonym St. Giraud (1940–1966). St. Giraud was a “virgin and a suicide,” in the words of the book’s jacket. Paul was unusual in his willingness to read, with equal interest and dedication, poets of divergent aesthetics. For this generosity, he was often dismissed by the same poets he had so willingly aided. He also suffered the anger of those excluded from The Young American Poets. He said that when he sent a note of rejection to Bernadette Mayer, she used it as toilet paper and returned it to him in the mail. Paul founded Big Table, one of the leading literary magazines of the late Afties and early sixties; Big Table Books; and the Big Table Series of Younger Poets, which published the Arst books of Bill Knott, Dennis Schmitz, Andrei Codrescu, and Kathleen Norris. It is not widely known that Paul Carroll also founded the Poetry Center, Chicago’s leading independent reading series, and organized the program for its inaugural year, 1973. More signiAcant in the public mind was the January, 1959, reading Paul organized for Big Table featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others that packed the enormous Palmer House ballroom. The tape of the event (done by the Anancial sponsor, the Shaw Society) became the Fantasy album, Howl and Other Poems, that is the deAnitive recording of the poem. Paul Carroll helped usher in a new literary era nationally and was Chicago’s dean of literary hipness until the arrival of Ted Berrigan in the late 1970s. But his contribution to letters would be signiAcant if only for his editing of the magazine Big Table. Although it ran only Ave issues from 1959 to 1960, the magazine was startlingly astute in representing new and often risky writing. 165

The Arst issue, “the complete contents of the suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review” according to its cover, contained “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac; “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs; “The Sorrows of Priapus” and “The Garment of Ra” by Edward Dahlberg; and three poems by Gregory Corso. Subsequent issues contained “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg; “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher” and “Europe,” two of John Ashbery’s Anest early poems; and work by Frank O’Hara (“Naptha,” later to appear in Lunch Poems), Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Diane Di Prima, Robert Duncan, Paul Bowles, Pablo Neruda, LeRoi Jones, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Creeley, Leon Golub, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edward Dorn, and André Breton. A sixth issue, on the subject of “Post-Christian Man,” was announced in issue 5 but never appeared. It is remarkable how accurately Paul traced a volatile literature at the very moment of its explosion. The title “Big Table” was provided by Jack Kerouac, who also named “Howl” and the Beat Generation. The concept was of a table big enough to hold a lot of diverse manuscripts. Inclusiveness was natural to Paul, perhaps in part because of his Chicago perspective, from which bitterly held aesthetic differences on the coasts seemed like so much quibble. Why not the best of all worlds? Paul’s meritorian views were probably an inheritance of prairie populism, but they leave their own legacy in the form of magazines like New American Writing, ACM, and the Chicago Review as now constituted. One of Paul’s disappointments was never being named editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. He had keen insights into the magazine’s history and was perfectly situated, as a native Chicagoan and one of the city’s respected literary Agures, to take on the position. He understood that the magazine’s best editors were Harriet Monroe and Henry Rago, whose excellence lay in their high standard and eclectic tastes. They did not edit the magazine out of ideological commitment or due to the pressures of friendship. Nor were they ambitious for their own poetry. In his best years, Paul would have made that kind of editor. But the board of Poetry is conservative, and Paul had made his name through the cause célèbre of having an issue of Chicago Review, of which he was an editor, suppressed by the Uni166

versity of Chicago. Trouble began when Jack Mabley, a newspaper columnist, wrote an article denouncing the “obscenity” of an excerpt of William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch. Dismissed as editors, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal published the same manuscripts in their own newly founded magazine, Big Table. Its suspicions aroused by the Chicago Review furor, the U.S. Postal Service seized the four hundred copies of the Arst issue. Paul was Ared from his teaching position at Loyola University, and the editors were taken to court for the distribution of indecent literature. Julius Hoffman, later of Chicago Seven fame, judged the magazine to be of literary and social merit. According to the introduction to the Anal issue of Big Table: Commenting on the two articles in Big Table #1 singled out by the Post OfAce [as obscene]—“Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac and “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs—Judge Hoffman ruled that both were in the broad Aeld of serious literature. The Kerouac article was described by Judge Hoffman as “a wild prose picnic . . . which seems to be some sort of dialogue, broadly, between God and Man.” The Burroughs novel, he said, was intended to “shock the contemporary society in order perhaps to point out its Baws and weaknesses.” Judge Hoffman concluded his ruling by quoting from the Ulysses decision: “Art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a Aeld is more stiBing to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique.”

Thrust onto the national literary stage, Paul wrote a series of articles for Playboy that included an interview of Norman Mailer and advanced to a full professorship, with tenure, at University of Illinois in Chicago, where he founded the Program for Writers. Here his fortunes waned through a series of personal problems and competition with fellow faculty. In time, he was demoted to teaching only undergraduate classes, a sad development for those of us loyal to his cause. Around this time, Paul was hospitalized. When Maxine Chernoff and I entered his room, the comedian Severn Darden was 167

there cracking jokes. A Second City member at the same time as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Darden liked to do impromptu comedy, such as commentary on randomly chosen television shows. One of Paul’s Anest poems is “Ode to Severn Darden about Angels, the Common Cold, Nuclear Disarmament, and Popcorn.” The Whitmanesque catalogue, with its anaphoric phrase, “The weather today, Severn. . . ,” was published in Odes as one continuous fold-out that stretched to the Boor when opened. Paul was a great teacher, but he didn’t offer keys to writing or understanding poems. His greatness lay in his enthusiasm for poetry, which radiated from him like heat. He had an inimitable way of pursing his lips as he prepared to speak. Then he would rub one eye with the heel of his hand. When he Anally spoke, it was always in praise of a poem’s Anest qualities. His message was that poetry is intensely important. It is something to which you must dedicate your life. In the spring of 1971, I presented poems to Paul that he liked very much. Immediately after class, he asked me to walk with him to his car. Although the sun was shining, it was raining. Paul and I stood under his umbrella at the entrance to Adams Hall as he told me that I was a “real poet” and that he planned to include a section of my work in a forthcoming second edition of The Young American Poets. Because Paul lost his position at Follett Books, the second edition never appeared, and the Big Table imprint disappeared. But none of this mattered. The gift Paul offered young poets was the conAdence to continue. I can still remember the intense disappointment I felt when fellow poets such as James Leonard and Dean Faulwell, early co-editors of oink!, the magazine that preceded New American Writing, quit producing poems. Like Paul Carroll, I had come to see poetry as a calling (my father was a Protestant minister, so bear with me) and a means to truth. To give up poetry is to abandon spiritual discipline. It sounds corny. But poetry is Anally a kind of coherence-seeking even when employing strategies of dispersion (Mallarmean method, language poetry, and so on). All poets are devotional to the act of construction. Because I have a mail-order ministerial degree from the Universal Life Church of Oklahoma, I married Paul and the sculp168

tor Maryrose Carroll in her Ada Street loft. Only six people were present. In addition to the bride and groom, they were Maryrose’s mother; Maxine Chernoff and me; and Luke, Paul’s son by his Arst marriage and the subject of Paul’s The Luke Poems (1971). The service consisted of poems by André Breton (the surrealist blazon, “The Freedom of Love”) and Walt Whitman and a brief exchange of vows. Then we went out to a Japanese restaurant in Old Town, Kamehachi, where the service was bad and the conversation awkward. Luke, who was nine or ten years old, said something like, “Who are you going to marry next?” But Paul’s marriage to Maryrose, like poetry, saved his life. When Paul disappeared one very cold winter night and had not been seen for two days, Maryrose called Maxine and me to help search for him. Using a photo of Paul on a poster for one of his readings, we searched all the homeless shelters in what was then Skid Row. He had been seen at the PaciAc Garden Shelter on State Street, where he had been very noticeable due to his designer eyeglasses and expensive sheepskin coat. After midnight, as it snowed heavily, we saw police squadrols pull up at the shelters with loads of homeless men, an act of civic kindness out of a Damon Runyon novel. We then searched the area around Paul’s far northside apartment on Eastlake Terrace, its windows glazed with ice from Lake Michigan waves that had crashed against the building. When I searched a small nearby beach that was frozen and desolate, I was startled by the emergence of a large white rat that skittered along the shore and disappeared under a rock. Paul turned up after a four-day absence. He had been in the bus station on Randolph Street most of the time, where we hadn’t thought of checking, sleeping on the seats and harassed by security guards. In the midst of our search for him, Maryrose revealed that it was the missing love of his father, who had often ignored him, that had made Paul so emotionally bereft. He had constructed the myth of an heroic father in order to disguise his pain. In 1975 while Maxine was pregnant with our daughter Koren, Paul rang the bell of our Sheridan Avenue apartment at Ave in the morning and asked for a breakfast of scrambled eggs. He had been beaten up in his favorite bar, O’Rourke’s on North Avenue, and his face and knuckles were raw. He ate the eggs quietly, had 169

some coffee, and left around ten. He came to our apartment frequently during that time, attracted, we thought, by Maxine’s pregnancy. He spoke of how John Logan, his best friend, had loved the taste of mother’s milk when his wife was breast-feeding. It was around this time that Paul began to supplement his teaching income, which was substantial as a full professor, by driving a Yellow Cab. He needed the money to pay his psychiatrist, whom he saw four times a week. One day a cab full of conventioneers treated him disrespectfully by showing indifference to his topic, the poetry of Pablo Neruda. He pulled over halfway to the destination and ordered the riders to “get the fuck” out of his cab, which they did. Paul was a good-sized man and impressive when angry. He also worked as a clerk in a men’s store in the Hancock Building. It’s hard to imagine this job lasting very long, given Paul’s volatility at the time. Every week would bring some new concern among his friends. He was skidding out of control. Maryrose provided the warmth and safety that Paul needed. While he would still drink too much, his behavior became less self-destructive. He also began writing again, producing numerous manuscripts of poetry and memoir. The last few years of his work were done in Vilas, North Carolina, where Maryrose had located a rural property with studio space for her work. Paul retired from the Program for Writers and left the city that seems, even now, unimaginable without him. There are only a few writers of whom this is true: Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, and Paul Carroll of the postwar generation. Bellow moved quietly to the East, as Algren (bitterly and publicly) did before him. When Paul departed there was sadly little public comment. Gwendolyn Brooks and Paul Carroll are the mother and father of contemporary Chicago poetry, and all of us are in some way indebted to them. Even though our relationship became more distant in recent years, Paul has profoundly inBuenced me. I will always remember him in his boater and Brooks Brothers three-piece suit, weaving through trafAc in his Mercedes, as he talked excitedly about poetry, often turning to address someone in the back seat as cars blindly passed. Miraculously, we all survived the trip. Paul often said, sentimentally, that when he died he wanted to be 170

seated at a big table in heaven with the poets of eternity. But I prefer to think of him riding around Lincoln Park on his bike, wearing a watch cap and yellow rain slicker, dreamily reBecting and chatting with friends. He remains one of the great spirits of Chicago poetry—brash, romantic, and undisguised in his dislikes and affections.

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Last Chicago Days In Memory of Ted Berrigan

In the late seventies, when Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley announced they were returning to New York City at the end of Ted’s fall semester at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, all the younger poets were stunned. He had taught there for about Ave years, but some sort of dispute had arisen about his M.A. credentials from the University of Tulsa. He had completed the degree with a thesis on George Bernard Shaw, but Tulsa wouldn’t release his transcript because of some unpaid fees and library Anes. It appeared that Northeastern, in spite of support from fellow faculty member Alan Bates and others, was trying to give Ted trouble. So he resigned. We all immediately sensed that an era was ending. The readings at the Body Politic, many of which were made possible by poets from the coasts being in town to visit Ted, continued for a while, but without his garrulous presence in the middle of the second row, commenting on the reader’s work with laughs and asides, the excitement wasn’t there. Ted was the pope of the scene and made everything around him seem important. If Ted praised your work during or after a reading, you were in heaven, and if he didn’t you went home empty. The week they were leaving town, Art Lange threw a party that everyone attended. Ted was in terrible shape. His doctor had told him that if he didn’t stop drinking and taking pills he would have only a short time to live, but he stood at the center of the party, drinking a pint of Southern Comfort. After each swallow, From Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan. Ed. Anne Waldman. St. Paul: Coffee House Press, 1991.

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he would cough deeply and long—a sick cough. Everyone was worried about him, but we heard he got better in New York, a city he had missed tremendously. Half of the poetry scene went with him including Bob Rosenthal, who became Allen Ginsberg’s secretary, his wife Shelley Kraut, Simon Schuchat (whose perfect imitation of Ted’s manner of speech always astounded me), Steve Hamilton, and Steve Levine. Later, when Ted won an NEA, word came that he’d cashed the check at a local currency exchange (the fee was $350) and walked down the street with money bulging out of his pockets. We admired the bohemian courage with which Ted and Alice lived. One visiting poet staying with Ted in Chicago went down to the kitchen in the morning to Ax some breakfast, and the only thing could And in the cabinets was Ave bottles of Pernod on a gray shelf. The next time I saw Ted was when he and Ron Padgett gave a reading I organized at the Poetry Center of Chicago. The high point of the visit was a trip to the home of J. Philip O’Hara, Frank’s brother, who lived in a beautiful old white fame house in Oak Park, Illinois. At the time, Ron was editing a volume of Frank’s letters, and he wanted access to letters in the brother’s possession. It was my job to drive Ron and Ted out to the western suburb, where we were greeted by J. Philip with some suspicion. Instead of asking us into the house, he gave us wicker chairs on the porch, where we talked for quite a while on a beautiful June day. He was clearly checking us out, but Ron’s business-like manner Anally won him over. We were asked to sit inside at the dining room table, onto which O’Hara dumped a shoebox full of Frank’s letters and effects. There were letters from the early sixties from John Ashbery and Edwin Denby, among others. Ashbery’s were written on blue airmail stationery from France. There was also Frank’s passport, issued when he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art; his employment was given as “Exhibition Specialist.” Ted loved this detail and took out his small spiral note pad to write it down. Then he turned to O’Hara’s wife, who was passing through the room, to ask if she had any pills. “What sort of pills do you mean,” she asked, “aspirin?” “No,” said. “Do you have any uppers or speed or anything?” She recoiled as if from a joke, and J. Philip stepped in to assure Ted that they couldn’t offer that sort of 173

thing. In fact, Ted had already taken a huge, lethal-looking capsule on the way to Oak Park, and he was high. He proceeded to devour every piece of chocolate candy on the milk-glass disk at the center of the table. As we were standing to leave, O’Hara asked if we would like to see some of the paintings Frank had owned. He led us to an upstairs bedroom where Ave or six wonderful paintings by Grace Hartigan and others were stacked against the walls. Ted pointed to the lower right-hand corner of a painting, where a small L-shaped tear had been repaired. “Frank loaned me that painting for about a year,” he said, “and it got torn when it fell from my mantel. I gave it back to him like that, but he didn’t say anything.” We looked at Ted with amazement then back at the paintings with increased pleasure. I sensed that J. Philip O’Hara was beginning to appreciate Ted to a small degree; I also felt his relief when he got us out to the car. I learned of Ted’s death while staying on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine. As we had no phone, the neighbor handed a note in the door to call Richard Friedman and Darlene Pearlstein in Chicago, who gave us the news. Because we were stuck on the island, which was served by a small ferry, we were unable to make it to the funeral services at St. Mark’s Church. I learned on the last day of our stay that the neighbor, Ben Henneke, had been Ted’s professor at the University of Tulsa and had followed his career ever since. While we stood on his porch watching the fog roll in over Penobscot Bay, I told him of the importance of the note he’d given us.

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Journals of Addiction

In 1958, the graduate student editors of the Chicago Review, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal, published excerpts from an unpublished—and seemingly unpublishable—novel The Naked Lunch by an unknown author named William S. Burroughs. The excerpt had been sent to the editors by Burroughs’s friend and agent, Allen Ginsberg, whose poem “Howl” had made a sensation when he read it at San Francisco’s Six Gallery on October 13, 1955, thus giving birth to the “San Francisco Renaissance” and the Beat Generation. Fortunately for Burroughs, Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley attacked the Chicago Review issues for obscenity. The resulting furor, including the refusal of the U.S. Postal Service to mail Carroll’s subsequent magazine, Big Table, led to the immediate publication of The Naked Lunch by Maurice Girodias of Paris-based Olympia Press, the publisher who had made a similar sensation by publishing Nabokov’s Lolita. The rest is history. Burroughs’s reputation as a leading literary “outsider” was established and The Naked Lunch came to be viewed as a classic work of the Beat Generation. With Jean Genet and Georges Bataille, Burroughs became one of the leading authors of “transgressive” Action. His inBuence is also felt on contemporary writers and poets such as Kathy Acker, Jim Carroll, and Dennis Cooper. According to Barry Miles’s biography, William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis on February 5, 1914. Named after his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the From Review of Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (New York: Hyperion 1993) and The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945– 1959, edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris (New York: Viking, 1993), Chicago Tribune Books, September 5, 1993.

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adding machine, Burroughs was raised in what he later described as “haute bourgeois” circumstances. The family was attended by a butler, a cook, a maid, a gardener, and a yard man. Young William and his brother Mortimer, who would later bail him out of a Mexican jail on a charge of murder, were attended by a Welsh nanny. Burroughs studied English literature at Harvard, but his career there was distinguished mainly by having kept a loaded gun and a ferret in his room. In the summer of 1942, Burroughs moved to Chicago, where he worked for a detective agency and took his now-fabled position as an exterminator. In the summer of 1943, Burroughs moved with childhood friend Lucien Carr to New York City, where Carr planned to study at Columbia University. Within months, Burroughs, then twenty-nine years old, met the younger Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and forged friendships that would eventually inBuence the direction of American letters. Here events considerably darken. In 1944, Carr was charged with the murder of his roommate, David Kammerer, whom he stabbed with a Boy Scout knife as a result of Kammerer’s unwanted homosexual advances. Carr served only two years in prison for the crime, which was labeled an “honor slaying.” Using the incident as their basis, Burroughs and Kerouac began writing a collaborative novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, alternating paragraphs as they proceeded. This book remains unpublished; however, it led to the important invention of what Ginsberg was to label “routines,” a parodic compositional method that was to serve Burroughs in the compiling of The Naked Lunch. With the further passage of time, Burroughs was to acquire his drug dependency, purchase a farm in Texas on which he attempted to grow marijuana for sale in New York City (the scheme failed), and move to Mexico and Tangier, the latter providing the inspiration for Interzone, one of the settings of The Naked Lunch. Burroughs’s transgressiveness is genuine. Openly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was publicly scorned, he was addicted to heroin and a proliferation of other drugs, including yage (Bannisteria caapi), in Burroughs’s words “a hallucinating narcotic that produces profound derangement of the senses.” His travels to South America in search of the drug and his re176

sulting correspondence with Ginsberg regarding the quest have been described in the previously published The Yage Letters. The yage letters, as well as numerous other letters to Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, are included in Oliver Harris’s brilliantly edited collection of Burroughs’s correspondence. Because of the horriAc adventure that has been Burroughs’s life, as well as his scrupulous honesty in depicting his desires and selfinBicted misfortunes, the letters read like a novel. Not only do they provide insight into Burroughs’s state of mind before his fame was achieved, they also include a number of the “routines” that would be included verbatim in The Naked Lunch. Chief among these is the notorious Dr. Benway’s anecdote about a man who taught his lower oriAce to talk; eventually this “personage” grows teeth and takes on its own personality. There is also a memorable “routine” that involves doing some violently sexual things to the president of the United States, then Dwight D. Eisenhower. We learn that much of The Naked Lunch was written in Tangiers under the inBuence of a hashish candy called majoun, concocted from kif, honey, cinnamon, caraway seeds and ground nutmeg. We also follow the course of his numerous withdrawals from drugs, a progress that results in his discovery of apomorphine, the only substance Burroughs believes capable of inducing gradual withdrawal. Burroughs’s opinions as a letterwriter are direct. In a letter to Jack Kerouac of May 1951, he cautions Kerouac against romanticizing Mexico, where Burroughs was then residing: “Mexico is not simple or gay or idyllic. It is nothing like a French Canadian naborhood [sic]. It is an Oriental country that reBects 2000 years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism. Mexico is sinister and gloomy and chaotic with the special chaos of a dream. I like it myself but it isn’t everybody’s taste.” Burroughs’s letters also reveal the purpose behind his decision to live outside the United States for over two decades: “One of my reasons for preferring to live outside the U.S. is so I won’t be wasting time reacting against cops and the interfering society they represent. . . . Living here you feel no weight of disapproving ‘others.’” The United States of the Eisenhower era was too repressive and bland for a hipster of Burroughs’s tastes. In The Naked Lunch, the United States is referred 177

to as Freeland: “Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stiBed the concept of rebellion.” It was rebellion of an absolute—and very personal—kind that Burroughs was seeking; ironically, his libertarian politics are more consistent with the far Right than with Ginsberg’s leftist views. Like the corporate life that he spurned and which also protected him (he received two hundred dollars a month from family accounts), Burroughs was predatory in his selAshness, pushing individual freedom to its phantasmagoric limit. It was in Mexico on September 6, 1951, according to Barry Miles’s somewhat sketchy biography, that, drunk and enormously depressed, Burroughs killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing “William Tell” with a Star .380 automatic. Missing the shot glass she had placed on her head, Burroughs Ared a bullet through her forehead. Using $2,312 brought to Mexico by Burroughs’s brother Mortimer, Burroughs’s Mexican lawyer obtained his release after he had served only thirteen days in jail. Burroughs’s son with Vollmer, Billy, was sent to live with Burroughs’s parents in St. Louis. The letters contain no word of concern about Billy’s welfare; eventually, however, Burroughs was to express regret over his wife’s death. It is not generally known that one of the other great loves of Burroughs’s life was Allen Ginsberg, for whom he pined in letters from Tangier. It was wise for Ginsberg to keep his distance. Burroughs’s faithful companion in Tangier, a young Arab named Kiki, was stabbed to death in 1956 by Kiki’s new lover, the male leader of an all-girl orchestra who found Kiki in bed with one of the girls. It is a judgment against the Miles’s biography that the collected Burroughs letters, so ably introduced and scrupulously footnoted by Oliver Harris, give as much of the biography and a good deal more of Burroughs’s psychology. This is partly due to the fact that Miles has addressed readers of the postpunk, cyberpunk, and MTV generation, many of whom have not read Burroughs’s work but understand the message of his celebrity. Thus, Miles spends his long Arst chapter reminding the reader of Burroughs’s impact on mass media, from the rock band Steely Dan 178

(named after a sexual contraption in The Naked Lunch) to the movie Blade Runner. Nevertheless, Miles’s nonliterary audience is essentially consistent with Burroughs’s writing, which by its emphasis on the “routine” rather than the shaping of character and plot, is more consistent with performance art than the traditional craft of the novel. In the “Atrophied Preface” to The Naked Lunch, actually an afterword, Burroughs sets forth his alternative program: “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . .I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity.’” This discontinuity is not only the product of Burroughs’s drug visions; it is also central to experimental practice. Burroughs’s invention of the “cut-up” method of composition, made much of by his unabashed fan, Barry Miles, was in fact the discovery of dada poet Tristan Tzara some Afty years earlier. In recent years, Burroughs has turned to painting by means of Aring shotguns into a mass of cardboard and paint containers, a practice Arst discovered by the Parisian artist Niki de SaintPhalle. Nevertheless, Burroughs stands as one of giants—I nearly wrote “monsters”—of the postmodern period for the courage and recklessness of his endeavor. In the long run, however, it may be for the Action of his life, rather than his actual writings, that he is most remembered.

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UNDER DISCUSSION David Lehman, General Editor Donald Hall, Founding Editor Volumes in the Under Discussion series collect reviews and essays about individual poets. The series is concerned with contemporary American and English poets about whom the consensus has not yet been formed and the final vote has not been taken. Titles in the series include: On James Tate edited by Brian Henry Robert Hayden edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman Charles Simic edited by Bruce Weigl On Gwendolyn Brooks edited by Stephen Caldwell Wright On William Stafford edited by Tom Andrews Denise Levertov edited with an introduction by Albert Gelpi The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass edited by Stephen Haven On the Poetry of Philip Levine edited by Christopher Buckley Frank O’Hara edited by Jim Elledge James Wright edited by Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano Anne Sexton edited by Steven E. Colburn On Louis Simpson edited by Hank Lazer On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell edited by Howard Nelson Robert Creeley’s Life and Work edited by John Wilson On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg edited by Lewis Hyde Reading Adrienne Rich edited by Jane Roberta Cooper Richard Wilbur’s Creation edited and with an introduction by Wendy Salinger Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess