Pitch of Poetry 9780226332116

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Pitch of Poetry

Pitch of Poetry Charle s Bernstein

Th e U ni versit y of Chicago Press Ch i cag o and L on d on

Charles Ber n st ei n is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, Recalculating, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Charles Bernstein All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-0-226-33192-8 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-0-226-33208-6 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-0-226-33211-6 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226332116.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Bernstein, Charles, 1950– author. Pitch of poetry / Charles Bernstein. pages cm isbn 978-0-226-33192-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-33208-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-33211-6 (e-book) 1. Poetry—History and criticism. I. Title. pn1136.b427 2016 808.1—dc23 2015026776 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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Contents

Preface ix

I. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E In Unum Pluribus: Toward a More Perfect Invention 3 You Can’t Evict an Idea: The Poetics of Occupy Wall Street (with Jane Malcolm) 13 Sounding the Word 29 This Picture Intentionally Left Blank 34 Disfiguring Abstraction 48 The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 60 Coda: Enough! 78

II. Pitch Gertrude Stein: The Difference Is Spreading 83 Louis Zukofsky 100 Charles Olson: A Note on “The Kingfishers” 110 Paul Celan’s Folds and Veils 113 Barbara Guest: Composing Herself 120 Jackson Mac Low: Poetry as Art 123 Robin Blaser’s Holy Forest 128 Robert Creeley: Hero of the Local 131 Larry Eigner’s Endless Song 137 John Ashbery: The Meandering Yangtze 147 Hannah Weiner’s Medium 154 Haroldo de Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot) 157

Jerome Rothenberg: Double Preface 162 “And autumnstruck we would not hear the song”: On Thomas McEvilley 168 Leslie Scalapino’s Rhythmic Intensities 174 Maggie O’Sullivan: Colliderings 177 Johanna Drucker: Figuring the Word 182

III. Echopoetics Contemporary Literature (with Allison Cummings and Rocco Marinaccio) 187 Musica Falsa: On Shadowtime (with Eric Denut) 203 Foreign Literature Studies (with Nie Zhenzhao) 211 The Humanities at Work (with Yubraj Aryal) 222 Bomb (with Jay Sanders) 227 Chicago Weekly (with Daniel Benjamin) 238 FSG Poetry: All That Glitters Is Not Costume Jewelry (with Alan Gilbert) 248 Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses: Editing as Com(op)posing (with Manuel Brito) 251 Études anglaises: Poetry’s Clubfoot—Process, Faktura, Intensification (with Penelope Galey-­Sacks) 258 Evening Will Come: Off-­Key (with Joshua Marie Wilkinson) 274 Wolf (with Stephen Ross) 276

IV. Ben t St udies The Pataquerical Imagination: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies (a fantasy in 140 fits) 293 Pataquericals & Poetics 345

Preface

Here’s the pitch. Black and thick. The confidence man’s selling, but not a bill of goods: the pitch itself. Only this and nothing more. Pitch is the foul stain, the skank and stench of a viscous taint. The kind of poetry I want is when you can’t get the pitch out. Poetry’s the thing with feathers (tethers) tarred on, as in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering). The kind of poetry I want gums up the works. A tangle of truths. This is the scandal of poetry. Not the one but the many. Not the many becoming one but the one becoming many. (Appearance precedes essence the way purpose is a perfume and being late to school a blessing.) “I’m not a helluva poet but a poet for the hell of it,” Diego Maquieira tells me one sunny spring day in Santiago. “I’m self-­untaught,” I replied. Back home in Brooklyn it’s deepest fall. The politics of poetic form is no politics at all. But it’s the only politics that can’t be taken away, the cartilage of the body poetic. Who’m I kidding? Mostly myself, that’s whom. So come on let’s beat that dead horse until we’re blue-­faced or green with envy or just whistling old tunes that we make up in the pitch dark of night. Until the rhythm becomes alive if not to us then to that part of ourselves we no longer recognize. No man is himself, even to an island. Nor woman neither. (Obviousness is the hobgoblin of common sense.) You can’t represent what you can’t think, and thinking is nothing near what it’s made to do. What’s done’s undone in the twist of a phrase or a catchy image. The past is just as lost as our love is, our love was. Ontological pitching (a metaphysical lurch or stagger): here / not here; heard / not

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heard; taught / untaught.1 Gently rapping and then it’s all you can make out. Abstraction is the dream of figuration just as lines are a way of marking time till the sentence is over. Unheard melodies are celestial demographics. Even if you can’t put your finger on it you can still pretend to count. You go to the club in the evening only to be clubbed at dawn. How long has this been going on? There’s more than one way to fleece a sheep but only one way to stop. Echopoetics is the nonlinear resonance of one motif bouncing off another within an aesthetics of constellation. Even more, it’s the sensation of allusion in the absence of allusion. In other words, the echo I’m after is a blank: a shadow of an absent source. A network of stopgaps. Even my explanations need explication; my commentaries, elucidation; my prefaces, glosses; my shadows, shadows. (Truth be, I’m afraid of my own shadow.) This book starts by interweaving threads, from metaphors for abstraction and representation to the poetics of cultural dissent. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E gives a historical and archival ground for the often speculative essays. Pitch is the sound of poetry. But pitch is also the attack or approach. The angle. Pitch in the sense of register. Poets catch my ear because of their pitch: I prefer live wires to retread tires. In the second section of the book I provide a set of accounts of such “more perfect” pitches. (The poem as conceptual scheme, poetics as scam or scum.)2 This is followed by a series of conversations that echo and extend (ravel and ruffle) my threads until, in the final section, they end in a kind of threnody. (Echopoetics is dialogic critical encounters. Pataquerics is the arena of the excluded.) The book concludes with a wild pitch (low and outside) for the aesthetic, which, still, I hope strikes responsive chords. The value of a poem’s pitch is not in the words but in what the words allow for a reader. As valuable as poems are for themselves, this value is eclipsed by what they may foment in intensified perceptual/conceptual experience. 1. In his “Overture” to A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Stanley Cavell speaks of pitch “as a determined but temporary habituation and an unsettling motion” (ix). 2. See Peter Middleton, “Conceptual Schemes: The Midcentury Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson,” in Physics Envy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Preface : xi

So let’s pitch in. You and I may be referring to the same thing, but the thing’s not the same. (We’ll bridge that cross when we come to it.) Let’s take play into our own hands rather than become its plaything. For instance, what happens when you realize that the devils underfoot might not be the problem, that Satan is dressed as if it were St. Michael? The issue is not identification with the downtrodden but recognition that even the best angel is a diabolic (dialogic) angle. But some would rather curse the light than put it out! Is it an error to think my reliance on error is an error? A mirror is better than most art. I like poets who are clutch hitters. Who can knock the ball out of the park. Score tied . . . Bases loaded . . . It’s the windup . . . It’s the . . .

In Unum Pluribus Toward a More Perfect Invention

On March 18, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama gave one of his most resonant speeches. His subject was, to use a phrase of Langston Hughes, America and the racial mountain. Obama’s speech was titled “More Perfect Union,” a phrase he often used in speeches during this campaign and early in his presidency.1 “More perfect” is the sign of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s moral perfectionism, to use the contemporary American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s term for Emerson’s view that while we move toward provisional goals, we do well not to fret about arriving at a destination: we dwell in process and betray that process if our orientation is toward predetermined results. Our journeys don’t end, our business is unfinished, our poems open upon ever new poems. More perfect is a direction, a movement, not a final state of idealized perfection. The poetics here is ethical, not moral: dialogic and situational rather than fixed and rule-­bound. Obama’s speech begins with a slight truncation of the opening words of the Preamble to the US Constitution (he elides “of the United States”): “We the People [of the United States,] in Order to form a more perfect Union.” Not a perfect one but a more perfect one, with an emphasis on process rather than final destination: ever more perfect, never achieving perfection. It’s no wonder Emerson’s moral perfectionism is called pragmatic: we do the best we can. Obama’s poetics are explicit: “We perfect our union Espians (Sun Yat-­sen University, Guangzhou, China), no. 2 (2012); reprinted in the first issues of CAAP’s International Journal of Poetry and Poetics (2014). Inaugural address presented at the first convention of the Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics, China Central Normal University, Wuhan, on September 30, 2011. The initial sections of the essay were written for the keynote address of the annual international conference of the American Studies Association of Korea (ASAK) in Korea in 2010. 1. A video and text of Obama’s speech is online: my​.barackobama​.com​/page​/content​/ hisownwords.

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by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; . . . we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction.” Without saying the word, Obama continues by holding forth the truth of miscegenation, of the syncretic, as the promise of a more perfect union: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” And this is the grace note on which he ends his speech: “That is where the perfection begins.” We are always at that beginning; it is the promise of America. So here today at this first conference of the Chinese American Association of Poetry and Poetics, with the theme of “dialogue,” allow me to recast our national motto, E pluribus unum (from many one), in the name of an ever-­emerging dialogic poetics of the Americas, as In unum pluribus (in one many) but also In pluribus unum: within many one. The question of what kind of union or unity exists in the diverse poetries of the Americas is vexing but rewarding. It is a founding question for the poetics of the Americas. The Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics (CAAP) was founded in 2008, both at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and here at Central China Normal University. CAAP, like this conference, is dedicated to dialogue, and as I’ve suggested, I take this as a term of poetics more than just a gesture of friendship. Cultural exchanges and translation between Chinese and American poetry pose serious, but I would also say thrilling, barriers and opportunities for dialogue. I take the rather perverse view that the more we focus on the barriers, the greater the possibility for the exchange. Obstacles for translation provide opportunities for dialogue. The “same” words, phrases, gestures, styles, or forms—if the word same can be used provisionally here—often have the opposite, or in any case deviant, meanings in a Chinese poem and in an American poem. To translate a poem we need not only to translate the literal meaning but also to account for the social and cultural and—for it is not the same—the aesthetic meaning and context. One could say that about all translations, so also, for example, translations between the French and the American, but the meaning of this injunction would itself need to be applied differently, for the US and France have an intense history of poetic exchanges going back over 150 years and with special emphasis on the most formally inventive poetry of both cultures. With Chinese and American poetry, our cul-

In Unum Pluribus : 5

tures’ relative isolation from one another over this same 150 years poses other, unique challenges, one of which is acknowledging the dissimilarities in our foundational poetic assumptions, the ground against which innovation and tradition figure. Indeed, it is this very trope of innovation and tradition that means something quite different for a Chinese poet a hundred years ago and an American or European poet of that same moment. In Li Zhimin’s illuminating lecture as a CAAP Fellow at Penn, he stressed that, thinking still of the modernist period, in a Chinese context what we in the West hear as a cry of radical individuality, noncomformity, or rebellion would be heard in a Chinese poem as “Western”—not the shock of the new but the importation of foreign goods.2 There is no simple way to make this apparent in a translation, since the same words or content or gesture are understood culturally in opposite ways. Such key terms of poetics as conformity, deformity, difficulty, tradition, individual, talent, obedience, disobedience, rebellion, radicalism, and aversion are aversive—swerve from one another—in American and Chinese poetry. For this reason, universalism is both nonproductive and monological. A simple way of putting this: If I use “Coke” (for Coca-­Cola) in a poem, it is not the same as Pepsi or soda. If “Coke” is in a Chinese poem, it doesn’t mean the same thing and so can’t, exactly, be translated as “Coke,” or if it is, still, its meaning is aversive to my meaning of the same word in my poem. Coke the product is international—and possibly the “same” substance—but its meaning in a poem is local. Could this also be true of water? Looking at it the other way around, it was initially difficult for me to grasp key aspects of Mao’s poems. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine any American political leader being so deeply engaged with poetry, or producing poetry that has been recognized as a major artistic achievement, so the social meanings of what it is to be a poet are not held in common. During Obama’s campaign for president, he was sometimes accused of being poetic, just mouthing pretty words. He walked a thin line because the oratory of the black church, from which he sometimes drew, is viewed as inappropriately poetic to those who associate a “just the facts” rhetorical style with good governance. There is a well-­known saying that you should campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Certainly, in office Obama has adopted a very prosaic approach to his speeches, which I am sure is a very 2. Li Zhimin, “New Chinese Poetry: The Origin and the Development—From the Perspective of Cultural Exchanges between China and the West,” International Literary Quarterly, no. 10 (February 2010), interlitq​.org​/ issue10​/zhimin​-­li​/ job​.php.

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conscious decision to avoid seeming too poetic, in the sense of “just talk” rather than action. I think it’s disappointing. In a recent poem, I wrote, “A President should campaign in prose and govern in poetry.” I wasn’t being ironic: I think this is the lesson of moral perfectionism.3 Mao, of course, was not just a head of state but also a revolutionary leader. We do have a poetry of political and social rebellion and radicalism in America—one especially associated with the 1930s. But Mao’s poems have none of the markers of socialist realism or formal radicalism; they are prized, indeed, for their superb execution of traditional forms, and moreover by his great skill as a calligrapher. By the same token, if Bei Dao’s poems are translated into conventional-­sounding American free verse, as some were early on, the style chosen for the American version would fail to convey one of the most fundamental aspects of how the poems were heard, and how they mean, to Chinese ears, which is the most interesting aspect of the work. This would be true, perversely, in direct proportion to the literal accuracy of such a translation, because the apparently “same” or in any case mistily similar style does not mean the “same” thing in the different cultures. Indeed the term misty is itself an example of a vexed term, because it conveys something quite different in the American from in Chinese. The bedrock ideology of American official verse culture is that poems have a universal appeal, but this is exactly wrong: it is particularity that gives poems their aesthetic power. The incommensurable cultural divergence of American social space— the many in our putative one, the indissolvable multiples in our indivisible union, our states united by difference, not sameness—is itself, crucially, something not shared by Chinese and American poetics. So the emergent meanings of American forms that mark the course of moral perfectionism, including our cultural agonism, the overlay and melting of African American dialect, immigrant second languages, and the ghostly silence of scores of indigenous languages, are not readily able to be articulated into Chinese. And vice versa: in Chinese and American poetics, linguist divergence, catachresis, “bad” grammar, vernacular, and accent would have different meanings and in Chinese poetry are not present in the “same” way, because the history of Chinese dialects is not analogous to the history of American vernaculars. The first publication of CAAP was Our Common Sufferings: An Anthology of World Poets in Memoriam 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, edited by Nie Zhen3. President Jimmy Carter did publish a book of poetry after he left office; but this work is a sentimental pastime and not put forward as a significant artistic achievement. There was also a satiric book of mangled phrases spoken by President George Bush II set as poems.

In Unum Pluribus : 7

zhao and Luo Lianggong.4 This book commemorates the catastrophic Wenchuan earthquake, with its seventy thousand dead. The scale of that is so horrific that if we begin to think, as Blake has it, of every cry of every man, every woman, every child, of every parent, every teacher, of every sister and every brother, it is overwhelming; the mind, no matter how empathetic its heart, shuts down—we say “breaks.” A parent’s grief at the death of her or his child is so searing as to cut through cultural differences, or so I imagine. But whether that grief is understood in terms of individual deaths or collective deaths—well, there cultural difference begins to fill up the void of sameness, for culture abhors a vacuum as much as nature. Rachel Carvosso begins her poem in the volume with “natural disaster is not natural.” For an American, thinking of the terrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the line immediately brings to mind the political context of that disaster. It’s not that any of the deaths “in themselves” are made more or less unbearable by their context, but the cultural meaning of the event surely changes. And that’s where translating the literal and not the cultural creates a problem, because many poems are not, at heart, about the death itself, or the grief itself. If we want universal expression there, the expression of the body in pain, then I think of Artaud’s mark of the outer limits of art, the piercing scream. But poems traffic in cultural, not unmediated, pain, even if through their cultural signs they give voices to something near to that unmediated pain. If in a poem about Katrina I include some variant on “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”—well, the Americans here will recognize that, but probably very few of the Chinese. No technical knowledge of English will get you there. And even if you looked up on the web the origin of the phrase—a remark then-­president Bush made to the head of the federal disaster relief agency—the significance of it would require commentary: not just to say that “Brownie” was in fact not doing a good job but also why the expression “heck of a” played into it; why it’s different than if President Bush has said “excellent” or “adequate” or “noble” or “fantastic,” or if he had not used his nickname or even that nickname. By the same token, when the Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, son of the poet Ai Qing, after all, referred last month to his sense of deep alienation in the city, calling it “a constant nightmare,” he is not saying the same thing, not referring to the same urban alienation, as T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.5 In the first translation of mine into Chinese, done primarily by my 4. (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2008). 5. “This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant night-

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friend Zhang Ziqing in 1993, we entered into an illuminating dialogue on cultural versus literal translation, which is recorded in Zhang’s commentaries on the poem and in my poem “A Test of Poetry.”6 What interested me here was that no matter how formally difficult a poem is in terms of syntax or structure, and many of my poems are difficult in that way, the overriding difficulty is cultural, especially in terms of vernacular, cultural reference, and social context. Nonstandard, vernacular, slang, or accented language in a poem, which is a fundamental formal device of much twentieth-­century American poetry, loses its meaning when translated for the lexical or word-­for-­word meaning. In the case of my work, I often distort my cultural references, making it almost impossible to look up what the “original” reference is: a daunting problem for the translation. In one poem I refer to “Fat-­bottom boats”— an oblique reference to glass-­bottom boats, but with the added slang “fat bottom”—meaning a person with a large behind—and then whatever association I intended by the reference to fat-­bottom boats in the first place (a memory of a childhood vacation in Florida). Zhang thoughtfully queried a another phrase of mine—“caucus of Caucasians”—whose meaning is not the literal one of a white race party but rather a sarcastic remark on the way Americans mark all groups except the dominant one, whites, so this phrase would never be used in everyday language. My best example, from a poem not yet translated into Chinese, is “going cold turkey or lukewarm tongue.” This combines Jewish deli meats (why Jewish? turkey and tongue and even pastrami are not necessarily ethnically marked, and yet I would say they are in this line), with the slang expression for heroin withdrawal, with a pun on tongue meaning language, so a brain-­tongue twister. Add to that—we say insult to injury!—the line is a bad grammatical construction, an example of catachresis, which increases its wackiness quotient. More than the dictionary, data searches on the web provide the best means to grasp such colloquial and cultural specific references and uses. Restrictions on the ability to search or access the entire Internet are often justified with political reasons. Are these political reasons worth the potential loss of maximizing our dialogue through poetry? [Pause.] Yes, that is mare.” See “Ai Weiwei on Beijing’s Nightmare City,” Newsweek, August 28, 2011, www​.newsweek​.com​/ai​-­weiwei​-­beijings​-­nightmare​- ­city​-­67179. 6. Selected Language Poetry, trans. Zhang Ziqing and Yunte Huang (Sichuan: Sichuan Art and Literature Publishing House, 1993). “A Test of Poetry” was collected in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); multilingual web version: karawa​.net​/content​/a​-­test​- ­of​-­poetry​- ­charles​-­bernstein.

In Unum Pluribus : 9

meant to be comic: what government cares that much about poetry? But if I may risk becoming a latter-­day Don Quixote for a moment, a culture’s language is one of its greatest assets and the more we acknowledge that, the richer we will be. There is much discussion about Chinglish, but in traveling in China I found many of the Chinglish signs totally delightful and indeed poetic: they marked, even if unintentionally, real cultural barriers to translation and in that sense were for me sites of dialogue, an opening into difference rather than into the void space of sameness. A sign that warns against climbing over a fence says “Prohibition of surmounting” (禁止跨越), which I find quite beautiful (in American English, we surmount psychological obstacles but not physical fences); a sign in a hotel elevator touches on the magnificent impossibility of literal translation: a food dish is labeled “Jellyfish with Jew’s-­Ear” (醋椒海蜇头)—something I would like to use as the title of a poem, I like it so very much.7 Language is never simply technical nor ever basically literal. Even business language or public signage requires a poetics. This is why CAAP emphasizes not just the study of the Chinese or American language in the abstract but rubbing up against the way the language is used, its vernaculars and particularities, through the study of literature and language, not just language instruction on its own. Perversely, perhaps, studying extreme forms of language use, such as in poetry, may be the best exercise a student of English can have if he or she wants not just to register the words spoken but to grapple with the meaning. Language instruction requires literary study—let’s call it poetics; it is indispensable. And that is a lesson for the US and for China: technical efficiency in language instruction may sacrifice far too much. It may enable some level of communication, perhaps, but not dialogue. In this sense the radical translation practices from Chinese to English of Xu Bing, Yunte Huang, and Jonathan Stalling have much to teach us, in the US, about Chinese poetics.8 7. I have made a collection of these signs at epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein ​/ blog​/archive​/china​-­signs​-­2007​.html. 8. Yunte Huang’s SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (New York: Roof Books, 1997) provided a radical translation of Chinese classical poetry, bringing into English a sense of the linguistic structure of the Chinese written character as pre­ sented in the poems. While this mode of translation may at first seem literal, its originality is that it brings over the linguistic materiality of the source poems, character by character. In SHI, Huang transforms our sense of “Chineseness” by replacing the Orientalized scenic and stylistic tropes of traditional translations with multilevel encounters with the Chinese language. Jonathan Stalling’s Ying-

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My remarks here are in part occasioned by the release this week of my selected poems in Chinese, translated by Profs. Nie and Luo, and soon my selected essays.9 This is a daunting, some might say impossible task, so I am so very grateful to both of them for undertaking it, and very honored by the publications. Professors Nie and Luo and their associates have worked now for years on these translations, trying, pragmatically, to do the best job possible, and they have truly succeeded, doing an even more perfect job than I could have imagined possible. But still, I hold out as a matter of principle that such a translation project needs to necessarily include wrong translations along with right, and it is the wrong ones that will do the most to provoke dialogue. As we say about free speech: the cure for “bad” speech is more speech, not correct speech. Translation can also be done under the sign of moral perfectionism: if we ever arrive at the correct translation, then we have entered a void, a dead space. Otherwise we are in process with one translation, like one possibility, provoking another. Every solution requires another solution. For a dialogue to take place between our cultures, open exchange across digital networks is fundamental. At PennSound we have thousands of readings by poets, from the Wuhan group to William Carlos Williams. Hearing recordings of this work gives up dynamics not accessible in text versions of the poem: tempo, pitch, accent, timbre, tone, and rhythm. Here the Internet offers possibility to dialogue across the world, China to America, that was not conceivable in the past. It is a gift to us all. We are gathered here today in Wuhan to celebrate Marjorie Perloff on her eightieth birthday. In her keynote address yesterday, she made a strong case for a sociohistorical and aesthetically formal close reading: where we listen closely to cultural specificities of a poem and read those as guides to culture. A few days ago, on the drive from Xianyang to the Wudang Mountains, there was a sign posted on the road:

lish (Counterpath, 2011) is an uncanny homophonic translation: Chinese characters read aloud are heard as English, creating double poems, one in Chinese and one in the American. 9. Selected Poems, trans. Nie Zhenzhao and Luo Lianggong (1st edition: Nanjing: Yilin Press, China, 2010; 2nd edition: Wuhan: Central China Normal University Press, 2011), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetics (selected essays), trans. Luo Lianggong et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2013).

In Unum Pluribus : 11

Curve Continuously 持续弯道

—something in America we would have said in a far less poetic way, Caution: Road Curves. And I thought, yes, this is my aversive poetics: curve continuously. When we got to the Wudang Mountains, the trip to the highest summit was not easy. We struggled with the steep ascent. And I thought of Langston Hughes: “Life . . . ain’t been no crystal stair”10—my own personal journey, Hughes’s racial mountain, the mountain that separates one towering culture from another, such as the US and China. The view from the top of the Wudang Mountains, at the Golden Palace, was no better than the views below; all were sublime. What distinguished the view from the top was the difficulty getting there. “Life . . . ain’t been no crystal stair.” The difficulty of the journey overwhelmed the destination, which became a pivot, a place to turn around and go back down the mountain or up to another peak. Our journey was not over; it was always just beginning. Sometimes a correct translation is less significant, less generative, than a “wrong” one that marks a clash of signs, of cultures, of language, of values, of metaphors: such accented translations are a mark of intercultural production rather than mimicry. This is what makes so many of the Chinese signs I’ve mentioned poetically striking. The clash of signs is a manifestation of points of contact; awkward, perhaps, but the beginning of a dialogue, which is a kind of journey without summit, without end, without destination. Yunte Huang, in his provocative and brilliant book about Charlie Chan, Chinese American novel and movie detective, focuses on Chan’s delightfully poetic aphorisms as just the kind of cultural mark I am addressing here.11 This is the pure product of America, as William Carlos Williams figures it in “For Elsie.” For the pure product of America is always impure, a mixture, a sign swerving from its destination. Charlie Chan says, “Chinese funny people; when say ‘go,’ mean ‘go.’” Charlie Chan also says, “Every fence have two sides.” This Charlie says: Jew’s ear like motor car in lake: learn to adapt.

10. Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” in The Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 30. 11. Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

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When we got to one of the many peaks in the Wudang Mountains, a place that is the living home of Daoism, we saw all around us other peaks, other troughs, other paths. We were one among many. In unum pluribus. In one many. Out of one, many. Not a destination but a way station, a place between the peaks. Life ain’t been no crystal stair, not the life of the poetics of the Americas nor the relation of American poetry to Chinese poetry. Curve continuously.

You Can’t Evict an Idea The Poetics of Occupy Wall Street with Jane Mal colm

In the sixties, we used to say “Heighten the contradictions.” And then, when the contradictions were so excruciatingly high that you’d think the political center was some kind of homebrew of meth and glue, things just seemed to get worse. And that longed-­for breakthrough in collective consciousness not only didn’t happen but seemed, each day, that much further away. I know, Gramsci, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—I got that tattooed to my cerebellum, but some days the will’s just not there anymore. (You know you’re old when the promises of youth become clues to a map of a lost world twenty thousand leagues under the Edward I. Koch “Feelin’ Groovy” Fifty-­Ninth Street Bridge.) I always thought those who described George W. Bush as incompetent missed how successful he was in creating irreparable environmental damage and how well he succeeded with his agenda, including massive redistribution of wealth (crude as this measure is, the flow of money from the many to the few is a fairly accurate guide to Republican Party policies). So perhaps more than ever before, I began to internalize the public events of the days. I felt I was being poisoned by them. When the 2008 election came around, I wanted to see a public art that pushed back against the “fair and balanced” double binds of the mediocracy (antiwar sentiment on Iraq was the equivalent of prowar sentiment, the Bush lies were as valid as the questioning of the lies). How is that those of us in the streets demonstrating against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 knew the claims to WMDs were unverified while the massed media did not? Yes, the answer is obvious: I am speaking here to my emotional reaction to, let’s call it, the ideological terrorism of constant mendacity in the massed media. Symptoms: unproductive anger and frustration, mixed in with a range of not apparently related frustrations and disappointment both personal and with developments in poetry and art. The left and libJacket 2 (December 8, 2011); e-­mail exchange. Images and video at jacket2​.org ​/commentary​/ you​- ­can​’t​- ­evict​-­idea​-­poetics​- ­occupy​-­wall​-­street. The opening paragraphs are from “The Pataque(e)rical Wager,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online 5 (2011), writing​.upenn​.edu​/pepc​/meaning​/05​/ meaning​- ­online​-­5​.html​#bernstein.

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eral mainstream publications are so addicted to self-­restraint that they don’t allow much in the way of unruly political art: in any case, let’s not let tainted/confused emotions get into it; surely that would undermine the legitimacy of our position, which is grounded in rationality alone. I was seeing probity but I was wanting satire, sarcasm, irreverence, outrage, mocking. There is no wide-­circulation public forum that would publish my idiosyncratic political placards. But I had my own website and could—quicker than you can say Tom Paine three times backward while walking over shards of discarded Dells (I love the smell of burning operating systems at midnight)—publish my own forays into common sense (or, from the point of the mediocracy, eccentric musings), what I now call my pataquerical wagers.1 When Ken Jacobs recently looked at a bunch of these works, he wrote me, “I can envision the sleepless nights that produced these.” And he added, “Isn’t there a saying, ‘Irony closes out of town in two days’?” If there is, I sure never heard it. But I know what he means. This is my new quest: unpopular public art, with always the same joke that, by necessity, could never be funny. And that makes a point with which almost everyone in the audience already agrees (sort of ). My private recurring nightmares were coming from what I read in the newspaper each morning.

• How would you characterize your involvement with Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy movement? I’ve seen the footage you’ve taken as part of the crowd, and I imagine that as a New Yorker you must have especially strong feelings about it. I am on the periphery looking out: speculative, supportive, but somewhat spectral. I first heard about the Wall Street actions when Noah Fischer, artist/ activist, and son of my friend the poet and Zen activist Norman Fischer, wrote me about some guerrilla theater street actions on Wall Street over the summer: a small band calling itself the Aaron Burr Society was handing out nickels, dimes, quarters, even half-­dollars (ever seen one of those?) in an action called “Summer of Change”: tiny interventions with little public response and small numbers of demonstrators. I told Noah it re-

1. Full set of placards at epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein​/ blog ​/archive​/ placards​.html.

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minded me of the Yippies: Abbie Hoffman showering money onto the stock exchange on August 24, 1967. Hoffman’s genius was to stage something in the space between a happening, political theater, and a photo shoot—something that came across as comic but also to the point. And something that infiltrated itself large into that three-­headed dragon, the massed media. Noah said Hoffman was an inspiration. In any case, it was a quiet beginning. JM: I was reading your contribution to the Occupy Poetry anthology “In Utopia,” and I was very interested in the word utopia, partly because I’ve been thinking about Plato’s poetless Republic (a utopia) and our republic, from which the poets have not yet been evicted, even if they fan the flames, so to speak. You can’t evict the poets from the republic. Bloomberg/NYPD/corporate security/DHS cannot evict the poets from Foley Square (even if they can dismantle the “People’s Library”), but more importantly, they cannot evict the poetry from the movement because, as you said, you can’t evict an idea (which is now the slogan for Occupy Philly, by the way). Occupy Wall Street seems to be standing up for a vision of American civic being that relies upon a poetic or lyric sense of collectivity. ”We are the 1%” is a statement that turns on a pronoun. Who are “We”? Are “We” poets or citizens, both/and? Are “We” an embodiment of Bahktin’s lyric “I” (that is “We”)? Are we collectively doing Gramsci’s intellectual labor? I’m fairly certain that “We” is not a new Marxist poetics (even if the theoretical references are right on), but “We” is a poetics, perhaps as yet to be defined. In your poem you write: ”In utopia, we don’t occupy Wall Street, we are Wall Street.” In other words, “We” are the thing we’re trying to destroy, thus “We” have power over it and over the language of greed? Who are we? Is there a utopian poetics at work here? I ask this because the OWS moment is the first I can think of since perhaps immediately post-­9/11 that has been able to galvanize poetry communities in such a tangible way. I was thinking about Leslie Scalapino’s anthology Enough from 2003, around the time Bush declared war in Iraq. Her coeditor Rick London argued that “a radical purpose of poetry in critical times is to disrupt the language of consensus.” Certainly one of the goals of OWS is to disrupt or dismantle an old-­ garde, a language of consensus fabricated by the few and perpetrated on the many. In fact, the lack of consensus (which has been the mainstream media’s main critique of the movement) is actually one of its greatest strengths, rejecting consensus, sound bites, and the language of conformity, to some extent. You’ve written very recently in M/E/A/N/I/N/G that the “poetics of OWS are appealing partly because they are averse to the kind of policy declarations that the mediocracy craves.” It seems to me that a poetics of consensus is an

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oxymoron, and that a plurality, a spectrum of “otherness,” is the very soul of creative expression. What is the difference then between a policy declaration and a poetic one in this moment of galvanization and action? I was remembering the caution sign on your office door, “du calme: Poetry makes nothing happen.” I’ve always enjoyed the irony of that sign, and I’m especially keen to discuss it right now, in light of OWS and of the many poets who have decided to act, agir, in the existential sense of literally giving meaning to one’s actions, even after the fact, donner sens à. It seems to me that poetry has always been political for you, and I wonder if you could explain how that relationship has changed (or if it has) with each new wave of public action/crisis/upheaval, culminating with OWS/Occupy. That sign you remember is by the Spanish artist Rogelio López Cuenca. But what is this nothing that poetry makes happen? What is this thing called poetry? The irony is that just when you think there could be a realm of beauty outside the disruption and contention of politics, you come face to face with the ultimate instability of unbridled thought. Not that poetry is necessarily that, but that is the potential danger that Plato’s shadow knows lurks deep in the heart of the genre. I always liked Herbert Marcuse’s no doubt flawed and certainly out-­of-­date concept of “repressive tolerance.” You know: you let 123 flowers bloom, but you give only two or three direct light. And then say, “Martha, see what I told you, these flowers you got at Schwartz’s just don’t have the stamina and inner beauty.” Get out of the damn light! Poetry may not be banned from the republic, but it gets no respect, or what’s respected is often the work that serves poetry in the most meager way. Poets of different stripes unite When there is a war in Iraq to fight But our stripes are what counts in what we do So let’s not drown in the consensual glue

“We” want to talk about the poetics of OWS, and to salute that poetics; we want to embrace the way that poetics resists assimilation into the trivialization of thought and of resistance to the language of the massed media. There is a direct relation between OWS and a poetics that sees the representation of reality as always at stake when we use language, that insists on creating our own frames rather than translating our intuitions, aspirations, and demands into tabloid commodities or Democratic National Committee talking points. But, as you insist on asking, who is this we? What cover does it provide? Populist politics in this case is, like they say,

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on the right side of history (meaning the left side). Opposing the redistribution of wealth from the many who create it to the few who hoard it is, by definition, a populist position. The slogans of OWS have a poetics that I admire but not a poetry, if I can make a distinction I am already troubled by as I write it down. This struggle is not about poems or artworks, and so I would say the relation of poetry to OWS is necessarily minimal. Poetry, the kind of poetry I want, is not the 99% but the −.099%, a splinter of a fraction inside a negative number.2 You praise OWS for refusing a phony, polarizing consensus (cf. the long-­running Culture Wars). So perhaps poetry’s –­99 is—also sprach—what OWS is fighting for, a social mathematics that doesn’t prey on accumulation but recognizes the negative economy, those who spin not and can’t even get jobs sewing. It takes a poetics to hear and respond to OWS, but OWS speaks not in the language of poems but with aphoristic wit and symbolic gestures. The people’s advertising, not the poet’s rhetorical implosions. Coming home a couple of night ago on the subway, I ran into a friend from my building, and we started a conversation with a woman of our age who had spent the day (November 17) at the citywide protests. My eminently practical, down-­to-­earth friend said that what OWS really needs is a spokesman who is also something of a Wall Street insider, someone the media can go to for an official position. The demonstrator looked exasperated at both of us, even when I said I thought the lack of official spokespeople was one of the beauties of the movement. In terms of poetics, the ability of OWS to exasperate and indeed thwart the pigeonholing of the mediocracy is one of its triumphs. Demonstrations like OWS are symbolic and need to be read symbolically; but it is not like reading a poem. The credo of the massed media is “Always literalize,” so the clash with OWS’s modus operandi creates a frontline resistance to the assimilation, and ultimately domesticating, of the protests. The symbolism of OWS is not only ambiguous but also amorphous, which has allowed a resilient mobility through metamorphosis/ re-­formation, with energized manifestations sprouting up in new places: headless but not heedless, averting central authority in favor of dispersed, localized collectivities. “Act as if there is no use in a center.” You say rhizomatic, I say autopoiesis. The more you evict, the more it convicts. Cut off its head, more heads grow in its place. But this is all “in theory,” which is why it works symbolically, at least

2. I take the phrase “the kind of poetry I want” from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem and book (1943) with that title.

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for now (since it remains to be seen how any of this will look in a week, or month, or year). The amorphousness also accounts for the ability of different groups to identify with OWS, to see their (our) problems on display. Young people with uncertain economic futures, many unemployed, certainly connect at a visceral level with the mottoes and the primary participants. Labor unions see this as “our” issue. Last night (November 18) on New York 1, I watched a group of astute but complacent New York Times commentators focus primarily on the bad treatment of the press during the Zuccotti Park eviction; the treatment of the demonstrators or the economic inequality they decry was hardly mentioned, but they were outraged that their prerogatives as journalists were abrogated. And this is true, in our own way, of poets. OWS is not about poetry, but poets can pro­ject on to the literary coattails: the anthologies, the seemingly poetic “people’s microphone” (the seemingly poetic “people’s microphone”), the plight of the books . . . as if these were key parts of the project. “We” are doing this now ourselves. But it’s crucial not to unhinge the symbolism from the social conditions that engendered it. Rather, “we” need to think with and through the symbols. The eviction of the demonstrators from various encampments is outrageous because it violates democratic principles of free speech and the right to protest. But the violence against the demonstrators is trivial compared with the violence of evictions by the banks (in effect Wall Street). The massed media and the Right often feel that OWS is discredited by the cohabitation of the homeless and occupiers; but the plight of the homeless is one of the real costs of American economic injustice and of the destruction of safety nets. This is not a problem for OWS but for the mediocracy, which will not acknowledge that the plight of the homeless is a result of public policy. Newt Gingrich can say the occupiers “should go get a job after you take a bath” (November 19) because he understands how the media prefers a Big Lie repeated by a guy in a suit to the sight of millions of poor American children without enough to eat as a result of policies that he (and the other Republican candidates) put into place and continue to support. Satan has learned the trick of not smelling; but suffering flesh still stinks. That’s the smell of social truth. And even those real-­world evictions pale before the rate of incarceration of so many of our people, and specifically the targeting of black young people, whose systematic jailing is a permanent stain on these United States. We—whoever that may be, but it is just that kind of aside this movement has no use for and is also therefore central to it—cling to the symbols of the involvement of poets and writers, but I would not leave the tactical thinking of this movement to the poets I love best, at least not

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if they have their poet hats on. So poets and writers and artists want to be a part of this not just as citizens but also in terms of their/our work. There has been much ink spilled over the “people’s library” (a term that is mostly charming, but if I hear it one more time I may scream). But the actual people’s libraries in New York are named mostly after Andrew Carnegie (of the 1%) and have been among the chief victims of the municipal budget cuts. The OWS library may symbolize that; insofar as it does, it is another sign, another slogan, another motto in an ongoing campaign to raise consciousness. It’s not the literal books that matter but the idea. And that’s why Mayor Bloomberg and his police’s deliberate trashing of the books is far more heinous than the destruction of a modest and largely replaceable collection; it’s a Fahrenheit 451 moment. Here is a man of the 1% who unilaterally took over control of one of the largest school districts in the world, who installs as chancellor a woman involved with corporate management of commercial media who had virtually never stepped into a public school . . . Am I going off on a tangent? Suffice it to say: Prince Mike should not be running a school, much less all the schools, much less the city of New York. His symbolic actions speak loud and clear: yes, he was entrapped—which again shows the beauty of the whole seemingly tangential book collection—and, entrapped, Bloomberg showed his true colors. The foul stench pierced the air all the way up here on the Upper West Side. (Who would have thought colors smell?) I wrote “In Utopia” in July, along with a poem called “Strike!,” which also resonates strongly with the OWS moment. I added the “occupy” line on the day of the October 5 march, since I was reading the poem that night at St. Mark’s. Both poems are plugged in to the moment, but also for me reflect on all the engagements with politics I’ve had in my life. They combine the deflationary with the incendiary, the bathetic and opportunist, with what I hope is, indeed, a Gramscian ferocity. They are chameleons, perhaps applying to now, but perhaps also to 1968, when I turned eighteen on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In these two poems, I am as interested in political sentiment, even in their sentimentality, as in any instrumentality. They could not be banners for any struggle, but no politics can exist without such reckonings. I n U t opi a In utopia they don’t got no rules and Prime Minister Cameron’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him.3 In utopia 3. Cameron is responding to riots after the police killing of a black Tottenham resident. Telegraph, August 9, 2011, www​.telegraph​.co​.uk ​/ news​/uknews​/crime​ /8691034​/London​-­riots​-­Prime​-­Ministers​-­statement​-­in​-­full​.html.

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the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, we won’t occupy Wall Street, we are Wall Street. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog.

You can’t evict an idea. Then again, of course you can, as various sharp-­ witted friends have duly noted: it happens every time the victors tell the tale. But you can’t stop me from saying you can’t. And in saying that, against all odds, well, it’s a kind of poetry. I’m intrigued that you describe your role in OWS as “speculative, supportive, but somewhat spectral” (and not just by the alliteration), because each of these words evokes a certain hesitancy, but also they suggest that you are concerned with the distance between the observer and the object of scrutiny, the interplay between proximity and remoteness, perhaps? I was thinking, too, about ironic distance, and that the political stakes of the movement make it very difficult for us to be ironic observers. Irony, though, is so integral to your work, so I really appreciate that you make the distinction between that work and the organization of the movement by nonpoets or poets with their citizen hats on. (Of course now there have been so many hilariously ironic commentaries—I’m thinking especially of the various masterpieces of Western art that have been reinterpreted as “the pepper spraying incident.”)4 Since Occupy is about inhabiting a space—a time-­space, and a space of the mind—I wondered if you think of your role as poet or critic or person of/in but especially around the movement as necessarily liminal, by which I mean, is it perhaps the role of “unbridled thought” to occupy the space between the movement and the rest of the world, to narrate it neither from within or from without, but somehow around? And is it this distance that maintains (I was going to say “polices” but then thought better of it) the distinction between the poetics and the poetry? I was also wondering if you think you would have felt more comfortable, more integrated, less speculative, if OWS had remained small, that is to say,

4. “UC Davis Pepper-­Spray Incident,” Wikipedia, n.d., en​.wikipedia​.org​/ wiki​/UC​ _Davis​_pepper​-­spray​_incident.

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remained an experiment in the theater of the absurd with a political purpose (that was also an aesthetic statement). When I read, “The irony is that just when you think there could be a realm of beauty outside the disruption and contention of politics, you come face to face with the ultimate instability of unbridled thought,” it felt very personal but also seems to express a certain frustration or ambivalence with the pull of the political, the need once again to rally the troops or rally the language, so to speak, in the service of a crisis. I’m not trying to downplay your obvious excitement and enthusiasm for/about the Occupy moment; rather I understand the longing for that “outside” realm. The space of contemplation, of unfettered aesthetics and “unbridled thought,” is always fleeting, but there needs to be this space for poetry, this space where nothing happens and experiments in language, beauty, and the abyss are free to unfold (this is where the “splinter of a fraction within a negative number” flourishes). At the same time, in this (now) very public, very global movement, you have become a sort of bard—maybe it’s an anachronism to use that word, but I’ll stick with it—which is to say that, especially on forums like Facebook that blur the personal and the public, you have a fairly rapt audience, one that is eager to engage with your engagement, so to speak. Is that encouraging? Or sometimes difficult? I say “difficult” because it’s one of my favorite adjectives (as you know), but also because I completely understand the sentiment that “our stripes are what counts” and the very fact of belonging, of becoming affiliated, or representing, is a kind of vulnerability—i.e., it can be more comfortable or familiar not to belong, not to galvanize. We’ve already discussed how the heterogeneity of OWS is one of its major strengths, and perhaps in that sense, no one supporter has to lose his/her stripes to make a stand. And we’re back to a utopia! One where the parts/whole problem is beautifully and ironically manifest: e pluribus unum. But for a poet of the moment, again there is this problem of the margins—the where and why of the observer must upend that utopia. An editorial by Robert Hass in the New York Times on November 20 called the action by students at Berkeley “almost lyrical.” I find his word choice very interesting, for obvious reasons. His account of being brutalized while watching the University of California police club his wife, his colleagues, and scores of nameless students was titled “Poet-­Bashing Police” (and he references a student sign in the aftermath that read “Beat Poets, not beat poets”). But his being a poet had very little to do with his chilling account of the events, other than to provide a mass readership with the unholy image of the police clubbing a poet (very Platonic, in a way). Really, though, this article is a perfect example of the “sloganization” you were talking about (a false poetry?), that “the struggle is not about poems” or poets but about an admirable poetics, in this case also uncannily about poets as martyrs. I think Hass is writing more as a concerned professor and citizen than as a poet (though maybe the two

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are inseparable for him). But his response nonetheless made me think about the consequences for the Occupy Movement of its shift to universities, from the streets to the campus (another shift in space) and whether/how your own ties to university culture affects your thinking about OWS (the obvious difference between a public campus and an Ivy League notwithstanding). A big difference between the OWS and campus demonstrations and those during the late 1960s and early 1970s is that now the students, and other young demonstrators, are putting forward their own economic interests. The antiwar movement made gestures of support for the labor movement and working people, but this was a political position: the economic situation of the demonstrators was not as directly on the line, with high unemployment for recent college graduates and crippling tuition increases for current students. Campus protests against tuition increases, whether at the City University of New York or in California, contest an economic injustice that directly affects most of the demonstrators. While the draft added a vested interest to the anti–­Vietnam War movement, the goal of those protests was not the end of the draft but the end of the war. Indeed, in 1968 Nixon campaigned against the draft. Moreover, eliminating the draft had the effect of making it easier for the US to subsequently wage unjust and unpopular wars. The rhetoric, but we could just as well say poetics, of OWS has worked brilliantly: even the criticisms of the rhetoric have been welcome alternatives to the banal repetitions of how politics is supposed to work and what you need to do to be effective. What is the relation of “the 1%” to “the ruling class”: just a kinder, gentler term (less strident) for something similar, if not identical? The Democrat Party, as Bush II liked to call it, always emphasizes the struggles of the middle class, not the poor and certainly not the working class (a class that on some measures does better than the amorphous, nonunionized, precipitously unemployed so-­called middle class). I am more likely, even in writing this critique of the language of political opposition, to say working people than workers. Partly this is the response to a pragmatic fear of red-­baiting. So yes: I am always concerned with “the distance between the observer and the object of scrutiny.” But I think it also relates to a difficulty facing, representing, acknowledging the poor, at a time when so many of “our” poor are children, and in particular nonwhite children. In “Self-­Reliance,” Emerson writes: Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-­day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a

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class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-­houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.5

Extreme income inequality is our problem: addressing this issue is in the self-­interest not only of the vast majority getting the short end of the stick but also of those in the 1% who care about the viability of the system that brought them their wealth. Altruism, the religion of the do-­gooder, is not the solution because it misdiagnoses the problem. Patronizing the poor is not a means to solidarity. The current state of education makes me poorer and my work harder as a college teacher; it practically cripples the economic basis for poetry. The homeless man I pass late at night at Penn Station, returning from work, makes me shudder when I look directly at him and, even more violently, when I look away. It occurs to me that the “difficulty” of “facing, representing, acknowledging the poor” is a (quite Baudelairean) way of describing the troubled relationship between subject and object, full stop. And, as you have repeatedly suggested, the artfulness of that representation cannot really be the issue when the human stakes are so high, so Emersonian. I actually have been feeling a strong disconnect between the desire to intellectualize Occupy and the desire to experience it—though perhaps they are one and the same, in the end. Whether or not we are on the front lines doesn’t change the fact, the crisis, of extreme inequality. This discussion began because of an oblique allusion to Plato evicting the poets from the republic, after OWS was evicted from Zucotti Park. In my mind, the association between the two came from this tension between the artist and the state, both mutually threatening, especially in moments of dissent. In the Republic, Socrates wants to banish poets because they speak the truth but cannot explain why. In other words, they speak an irrational truth that is rooted in tuché or fate and not it techné or craft/praxis. Artistic seduction was especially fearsome to Plato because, by manipulating the emotions or adulterating the rationality of the citizenry, it compromised the authority of the state. We’ve acknowledged the pleasing irony that “poetry gets nothing

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-­Reliance”: RWE.Org, www​.rwe​.org​/complete​-­works ​/ ii​- ­essays​-­i​/ ii​-­self​-­reliance​.html.

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done,” or as you say: “Poetry may not be banned from the republic, but it gets no respect, or what’s respected is often the work that serves poetry in the most meager way.” While Plato’s poetry might be more analogous to television or media culture today (the true seduction of the masses), do you think that the fate of the −.99 is at all entwined with the outcome of OWS? Is obsolescence a positive or a negative space to occupy? I was reading some Auden, who (I think) first used the very phrase “poetry makes nothing happen” in a truly bizarre 1939 essay/poem about Yeats and the socialist republic (something he, Auden, feared), “The State vs. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats.” Auden stages a mock trial between poetry in action (the socialist republic) and inviolate art (aestheticism). For Auden, poetry should not be used, it should just be. This, too, is a troubling position (which I think he probably recognized). In any case, I wondered what thoughts you might have about (P)poetry and the (S)state. Zucotti Park was a small oasis, a symbolic autonomous zone against the permanent occupation by “the 1%” of the surrounding buildings, the city halls, the police, Wall Street, the trustees of our “nonprofit” universities, right up to the Congress. The irony is that by symbolically occupying a small public park, the protest brought home the nonsymbolic occupation of the major institutions of the nation. So this is a way to read the protests and perhaps a willingness to read these events symbolically, metaphorically, and metonymically, in a political culture, and often a poetry culture, that literalizes all it sees and all it touches. Literalizes in the sense of derealizes (and also in the sense of manipulates). I would never advocate poetry, per se, but a particular poem, just as it’s not politics we need, we always have that, but a politics that allows us to see the causes and outcomes of economic and social injustice and proposes ways to reverse or contain such injustices. But the description of an injustice is a poetic problem: there are no neutral descriptions that speak for themselves, uncolored by words, no way of being entirely free from manipulation (the sophists had it right on this point: beware a sophist baring [!] truth). Nor do images speak for themselves, even as they are served on platters of platitudes to tell us, wordless, one thing or another. People like to speak of telling truth to power. But the task of poetry is to speak truth to truth. And no one wants to hear that. Our conversation has been unfolding over several weeks now, and I think we are both very aware of how the spotlight has been moving, how the vogue of OWS is starting to wane for the mediocracy but also for the everyday consumer of media. So we’ve had to acknowledge the critical lag as we become “meta,” as they say. Is what we have written / are writing consumable, tem-

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porary? Is it, as Laura Riding (whom I have on the brain lately) might call it, “zeitgeist writing”? Does it capitulate? We have this problem of the news cycle v. the poetry cycle, the thinking cycle. It’s true that at the beginning of our conversation, I did feel a definite sense of urgency, a desire to be of/in the moment. But as this conversation evolves, and the moments it reflects upon become “yesterday’s news” faster than we can keep up with, does our conversation lose its urgency? Did we capture a “structure of feeling” that is now past? I’m resisting that interpretation, if only because social critique, if it is going to capitulate, cannot capitulate to the news cycle. Once again, the critique of the movement (whatever form it takes, whatever language it uses) abuts the movement but perhaps does not become one with it, which is to say that there is the experience of change and then the crucial space of reflection, the afterward, the space where meaning is created and for which time is a crucial catalyst. I’m reminded of the distinction you made between the “there” and the “there”: Occupy is situational, location-­based, but also virtual, rippling outward, mediated—it has a second life. Our problem is that though the essential issues haven’t changed and indeed are still worth every bit of ink, our conversation has become more of the afterward than the experience, the reflection on the changes rather than the change itself. But this makes me think again about the role of poetry, of language, in social movements / moments of crisis. The space of the poem is an experience in itself, a change in language, but the critique of the poem, of the movement, of the object of scrutiny—is it less alive? The news cycle changes the conversation day to day; it’s planned obsolescence. The trick is to be able to make connections from one incident to the next—a network of stoppages, in Duchamp’s phrase. It is the fundamental poetic work: to make palpable constellations from what may appear unrelated incidents and do this inductively, by intuition and association. In other words to argue not along the lines of rationality, which too often is the tool of technocrats who erase ideology and context, but along the lines of reason, close at hand to how the mind perceives in and through categories and frames. The text for an early October placard both traffics in the topical and is meant to avert it: Rally Round the One Percent no taxes no jobs no bank regulations no unions

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no infrastructure no safety net no greenhouse effect trillions for war billions for jails our america not yours Really reading the iconic image from the University of California at Davis: when the police pepper spray the patently nonthreatening Davis students, what does it mean? We hear a great deal about the disconnect of the UC administration, we feel the specter of Kent State, we understand that the iron fist of the state will be used to take capital away from students with the least of it in order to protect tax breaks for those with the most of it. Chorus: He that cannot pay: let him pay. We also can read the pepper spray incident as symbolizing tuition increases (students getting hosed) resulting in fewer opportunities to accumulate cultural capital (a college degree). The cost of public education needs to covered, to a significant extent, through progressive taxation. Tuition increases are regressive taxation: such increases are a greater financial burden the poorer you are. Affordable higher education is a fundamental value for the country as a whole. Shifting more of the cost of college education onto those that can least afford it has the effect of limiting access to higher education or darkening the financial horizons of students saddled with more debt than they have the ability to pay off. Opportunities for higher education should be based on your ability to learn, not your ability to pay. Chorus: Education is a right not a privilege. An educated citizenry benefits all. But I think something else is going on with that Davis video: this Internet “meme” gives us in the “middle class” or the “99%” a glimpse of the more commonly overlooked violence routinely directed against the poor and disenfranchised, for example the police violence against young black men. It might, by another stretch of the imagination, conjure up violence far worse than that delivered by pepper spray: the astronomically high rate of imprisonment of black men, especially those who have dropped

You Can’t Evict an Idea : 27

out of high school (69 percent versus 15 percent for white dropouts) and an overall imprisonment rate of 27 percent versus 5 percent for white (for those born in the US from 1975 to 1979). Or the fact that our incarceration rate is five times greater than that of any of our Western European counterparts.6 Exactly these kinds of metonymic leaps—taking an iconic image and having it stand for something beyond itself—have been used to terrible effect by the Right, for example the graphic imagery of the antichoice movement. The Davis campus police provided the best guerrilla theater of the month; if they were not secret agents of OWS they oughta be. The UC-­Davis video, so like so many Internet memes, cannot, literally, mean that much: perhaps just a cop gone amuck. To answer your question: it does remain, among other things, an experiment in theater. We read so much more into it because we take symbols for truth. But, like Marilyn Monroe once said, cymbals are for marching bands. How can you make visceral the fact that regressive taxation is the guarantor of income inequality? That those that benefit from the society the most need to pay the most to maintain it, not bleed it dry, putting their booty in tax-­free havens. Sales tax, like sin taxes, payroll tax, tuition increases at public universities, public transit fares, income tax loopholes, works regressively: the poorer you are, the greater the percentage of your gross income you pay. Chorus: The 1% occupy the tax code. The Republicans are not antitaxation, they are anti–­progressive taxation. What is the public benefit of having expensive business-­related meals be tax deductible while mass transit commuting costs are mostly not? Chorus: An even playing field except for the ones that own it. We also have a regressive penal code: not just the difference in punishment for selling crack and powdered cocaine, but the difference in punishment for thefts by banks and thefts of banks. Protests that can frame these issues work not (not only) as direct action but by metaphor, and metaphor is never stable. 6. See Bruce Western and Glenn Lowry, “The Challenge of Mass Incarceration in America,” in Bulletin of the American Academy (Winter 2010), pp. 44–46: .

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Chorus: You can’t evict an idea, but you can pepper spray it. You can’t evict an idea. But you can pummel it, distort it, hollow it out, turn it into blue cheese, make it so you want to disown it, make you feel it wasn’t a good idea at all. The Obama election elated many of those now rallying ’round OWS. Before too long, unrealistic and unwarranted expectations crashed on the rocks of realpolitik and the permanent government. No one wanted to hear a note of caution then. And they don’t want to hear now that “Obama disappointed us” is less telling than “I refused to accept that Obama believed the centrist platform on which he campaigned” (or that centrists are likely to tack to the right once in office, not to the left). I can’t really be a standard bearer for a social movement, because I can’t bear standards, or, rather, I want to lay them bare. Could we call this pata-­politcal?: calling the signs of the political to account for themselves. Every movement needs poets, but once in office, laureates rule. Where we dwell—not political poets but poets in, around, about, and beside the political—is in the in between. Providing a way to get through the long periods of disappointment by connecting the knots. In the end, then, the problems confronted by Occupy always are, and it is ultimately the how and why of the language (slogans, poems, etc.) used to “face” them, “represent” them, “acknowledge” them that counts. Charles, I want to thank you for having this conversation with me and for connecting so many new knots.

Sounding the Word

And the men which iourneyed with him, stood speechlesse, hearing a voice [phōnē (φωνῆ)],1 but seeing no man. Ac te s 9 : 7, K ing Ja mes Ver sion (1611)

Last summer, 133 years after Edison made the first sound recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the New York Times, which published its first issue just twenty years before the invention of grammaphony,2 described Woody Allen, who had just released an audiobook, as an “adopter of cutting edge technology.”3 In the introduction to a brief interview with Allen publicizing the release of the audiobooks of his “humorous essays,” Allen himself turned the unintended comedy of this remark into farce: “I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one, don’t own a word processor, and have zero interest in technology.” Allen is not alone in blithely discounting the fact that the alphabet and the book are themselves technologies, even relatively new technologies, depending on your time frame. Certainly the Greek phonetic alphabet, clocking in at about twenty-­five hundred years old, is still on the newer end of human history. But Woody is speaking in straight lines, not time lines. He gives the impression that audio recordings are a recent invention of the computer age, more recent than the television technology that gave him his start in the biz or the movies he grew up watching and with which he fell in love. One of Allen’s first jobs was writing scripts for the likes of Sid Caesar. His own early scripted monologues were released on 33 1/ 3 rpm LP (long-­playing) vinyl records. Here’s Allen (Woody, not Gracie) via a cutting-­edge alphabetic transmission system, e-­mail: “I can only Foreword, to Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011); Harper’s, March 2011. 1. Phōnē can also be translated sound. 2. I prefer keeping gramma (letter, written mark) as the root of the word: sound writing. 3. Dave Itzkoff, “Woody Allen’s Talk Therapy: Audiobooks by a Technophobe,” New York Times, July 20, 2010, C6.

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hope that reading out loud does not contribute to the demise of literature, which I don’t think will ever happen.” Maybe not, now that poetry and theater have survived the demise of orality after the advent of alphabetic writing. The presence of the word seemed to come through despite script’s absence of presence. (My worry is not the absence of presence in writing but the presence of absence in presence.) The story inevitably goes back to Homer: did alphabetic transcription spoil the oral epic, which was, as Eric Havelock and Gregory Nagy tells us, the culmination of a very sophisticated oral technology for storage and retrieval of cultural memory via reperformance and variation? Is Homer’s Iliad the first novelization? Woody’s not that troubled (the italics is a script code to tell you that if you read this out loud you should give an extra emphasis to that, pausing slightly before it). Literature, he notes, somehow survived the audio recordings of poetry he heard on Caedmon records, and he rather likes those LPs, as long as we remember they were a “little treat” that did not “encroach” on the mastery of the texts themselves. (Literature, after all, comes from the Latin word for letter.) Don’t get me wrong: I love Woody. So I find it funny—his clinging to such a literal understanding of literature, as if verbal art were joined at the hip to the new (depending on your time line) silent reading user interface (SRUI). (Augustine is credited with the first citing of SRUI, about sixteen hundred years ago.)4 But Woody Allen’s point, amidst the strategic technophobia, is that he wrote his books for SRUI, not as a script to be performed and listened to on an LP record or cassette tape or compact disc, or VHS videotape, or digital video disc, or RealAudio, waveform, Audio Interchange, or Moving Picture Experts Group file format: “The discovery I made was that any number of stories are really meant to work, and only work, in the mind’s ear and hearing them out loud diminishes their effectiveness. Some of course hold up amusingly, but it’s no fun hearing a story that’s really meant to be read . . .” And one might say, equally, that it’s no fun reading a script meant to be performed, as for example the sheet music for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or the printed version of Iphigenia in Aulis (Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι). One can well imagine Mr. Euripides being a bit put out by the paperback translation of the play that I read in college. I mean, how can you really appreciate Euripides except in Greek? (I wouldn’t know.) Or is everything in lit’ra’ture either a transcription (both in the musical sense and in the sense of a textual version of somethin’ spoken) or a translation or tran4. Augustine, Confessions 6.3.

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creation (as Haroldo de Campos puts it) or a traduction (Pound’s term) or remediation or . . . well, you get my drift. Let’s switch back over to Woody Live: Which brings me to your next question, and that is that there is no substitute for reading, and there never will be. Hearing something aloud is its own experience, but it’s hard to beat sitting in bed or in a comfortable chair turning the pages of a book, putting it down, and eagerly awaiting the chance to get back to it.

There is no substitute for substitution either, or another way to say that is that everything is substitution, including the metaphoric senses of substitution. There is no translation like the original, and the original is the remediated trace of the unknowable. In other words: if everything is translatable, nothing is. And verse vica. I love originality so much I keep copying it. So why the valorizing (“You just said the secret word!”) of one technology over another, or why this neoliberal nostalgia that the technology in which you invest your Symbolic Aura Dollars (SAD) is no technology at all but the Real Deal? Is printed matter the gold standard of lit’ra’ture? (—If you say so, buddy.) It’s so very Old Testament: the law as immutable scripture and all that. Not muttered and mutable sound. But even the New Testament is old news now. The term audiobook is vexatious, and that may be its allure. The etymology of book suggests something written or printed, a document (tablet or sheets); in this sense an audiobook is not a book at all. The book is a writing-­storage device that usually includes an audio dimension—the implicit sound of phonetic script (phonotext is Garrett Stewart’s term). Retrievable sound recordings, which used to be called records, then tapes, then discs, are now, in the most generic sense, called sound files. The published, packaged, free-­standing audiobook will, as media history goes, have had a relatively short shelf life. As a term of art, audiobook suggests, first, books-­on-­tape; the moniker seems hardwired to the cassette (1963–2003) and averse to poetry. I have often thought, walking into a Barnes & Ignoble superstore and glancing over the audiobooks section: “We blew it!”5 (“We” being a somewhat hysterical identification with poetry.) Books-­on-­tape are now primarily on CD (1982–2015) or down5. We didn’t. PennSound, writing​.upenn​.edu, gets about 6 million file downloads per year. Our files can be a single poem or a full reading.

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loaded via MP3 (1994–2018). While recorded (nonsinging) voice can be stored and played in many formats, it’s a safe bet to say digital files— streamed or downloaded or broadcast—will dominate in what I like to call “the coming digital presence.” Amazon’s category is “Books on CD,” and their bestsellers include a number of distinct genres: mysteries (Stieg Larsson is huge), thrillers, classic fiction, new novels, New Age, self-­help, political memoirs (Tony Blair v. Barack Obama), and motivationals (Dale Carnegie is still influencing people). The historical novelty of audiobooks is not the technology but the proliferation of multihour recordings in these genres. Crude but useful demarcations can be made between sound art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction audiobooks: the terms overlap (I always say poetry is nonfiction), but the boundaries are explicit. The other broad demarcation I’d make is between recordings made by the author and those performed/recited by someone else (actor by definition, “reader” the term of art). After listening to Yeats reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a student used to audiobooks suggested that we give no more authority to Yeats’s reading of his most famous poem (albeit recorded decades after he wrote it) than we would give to another reader/performer/actor or even impersonator (I do a mean Yeats impression). This is a little like saying the pope’s prayers amount to nothing more than those of any other parishioner. Pretty to think so, perhaps, but God surely pays special attention to the pope, and I advised the student to pay just such special attention to Yeats doing Yeats. On a computer, the same digital code produces the alphabetic letters on the screen and the voice sound coming through the speakers. It all depends on the output you request. (For the real experience of this script, play it on your computer’s voice reader and set “Ralph” for a rate of 35, pitch of 36, intonation of 82. The piece is about nineteen hundred words and runs about fifteen minutes as audio.) From its invention to right now (only that now was months or years ago), one of the alphabet’s primary uses was transcriptive: script to be read out loud (in a play or a newscast) or translation/evocation of speech. (Transcriptive, like its double lyric, has two complementary meanings: lyric means both the script of words to be sung and a poem that evokes utterance in its words alone.) Textuality, sounded, evokes orality. Textuality is a palimpsest: when you scratch it, you find speech underneath. And when you sniff the speech, you find language under that.

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The alphabet is frozen sound.6 So are the audiobook and all tape-­recorded voices. While the alphabet has to evoke the full range of human voice in just thirty or so characters (including punctuation marks), the audio recording provides a much thicker evocation of tone, pitch, rhythm, intonation, and accent. Unlike “live” performance, grammaphony is a textual experience: you hear it but it doesn’t hear you. Like writing, the audio voice is always a voice that conjures the presence of the speaker but marks the speaker’s absence. For this reason, all voice recording is at some fundamental, if usually subliminal, level ghostly. The voice of the dead speaking as if alive. Or alive one more time. Is the long car ride the necessary condition for the business model of the audiobook in our time? Take my wife. (Please.) Susan Bee tells me that on a long solo car trip she was listening to Frank McCourt’s reading of his Angela’s Ashes and that she had to pull off the road because she found herself weeping. Marjorie Perloff tells me a story of listening to a download from PennSound, with our low-­rent recordings, and, hearing the siren of a fire engine, pulling off the road before realizing it was an extraneous sound on the recording. The new frontier for audiobooks and their web extensions (podcasts, downloads, verbal audio art) isn’t filling them with words from the previous medium (think of McLuhan’s wry prediction that movies would fill the TV airways). There will also be new audio works created especially for this medium, sampling the audio archive but also making it new. There are only two kinds of writing: sound writing and unsound writing. Sound is always the ingenue at the media party. Sound is grace. We don’t earn it, but it is forever there for us, in its plenitude, as the social-­material dimension of human language. Its fleece was white as snow.

6. A reprise from “The Art of Immemorability” and “The Bound Listener” in Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

This Picture Intentionally Left Blank Like many, I resist the expressive deceptions of traditional memorials, which is why Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial is for me the more perfect embodiment of what is possible, not so much negative capability as negative dialectics. For this reason I also appreciate Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower New York. I also turn again to Marcel Ophuls’s Sorrow and the Pity, Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It, Jerome Rothenberg’s Khurbn, and, above all, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. To this company I would add Christian Boltanski’s “Les habitants de l’hôtel de Saint-­Aignan en 1939” (To be a Jew in Paris in 1939), an installation on the walls of a small courtyard a visitor enters after buying a ticket and passing through the full-­scale security check at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme in Paris. Boltanski has posted the names, birthplace, professions, and sometimes deportation dates of the eighty French Jews who lived in the building that currently houses the museum—­ marking a ghostly presence of those exterminated during the war. As you move through the museum and look out the window, you see these names pasted to the wall. These works punch enough holes in their representations to breathe life into a matter both behind and before us. Susan Bee and I were recently in Berlin, where by chance we stayed quite near Ahava Kindersheim, the Jewish children’s home where Susan’s mother took refuge as a child. As Susan writes, “My mother, Miriam Laufer, lived there from about 1927 to 1934; when she was 14 the whole home moved to Palestine, rescuing many of the children, including my mother. Ahava, which means ‘love’ in Hebrew, still exists in Israel.”1 With this building as our touchstone, the whole Mitte district took on the quality Adapted from a lecture at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw, November 27, 2014. “Reznikoff ’s Voices” was written for the liner notes of Charles Reznikoff Reading Holocaust, 12/21/75, a CD recorded and published by Abraham Revett and available at PennSound, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ pennsound​/ x​/ Reznikoff​-­Holocaust​.php. “After Writing” was included as a separate sheet with Heimrad Bäcker’s seastruck, trans. Patrick Greaney (New York: Ugly Duckling,

This Picture Intentionally Left Blank : 35

of a memorial, a shadow world under whatever we were seeing. It is unlikely that people of our generation would ever be able, much less want to, get out from under this shadow. For this reason, the most powerful works of memorial art I found in Berlin were the dispersed “stumbling stones” (Stolpersteine)—small obtruding plaques embedded in pavement, created by Gunter Demnig. Each brass plate acknowledges one individual, noting that he or she lived just here, and giving date of birth and of abduction or murder (if known). This too is a more perfect memorial. And the snapshots, like my not very good one, become part of the process of mourning. I was far more skeptical of the official Berlin memorial, Peter Eisenman’s Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europa, which is in the center of the city. The afternoon we went, it was a mellow scene: Berliners ate their boxed lunches on the edge while children were blithely playing tag, or maybe hide and seek, amidst the unevenly sized and placed blank slates, which suggest gravestones without names ( just the opposite of the stumbling stones: the abstract idea removed from concrete particulars). I was going to suggest that instead of a game of “Marco!!”—“Polo!!” the kids try out a call and refrain of “Adolf!!”—“Hitler!” But there was nothing about this site to disturb a child’s sleep. Bland abstraction of this kind—­nothing troubled, nothing gained—seems so well meaning as to be worse than nothing. Perhaps it was just as well that the underground information center was closed. In contrast, the oldest Berlin Jewish cemetery was not more perfect; it was just plain perfect. The Gestapo had trampled the stones in this cemetery in 1943, and it has been left to its own devices, becoming a radiant field of green, with the exception of a replica of Moses Mendelssohn’s grave and one extant original grave.

• Holocaust Museum Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum is composed of sets of captions from photographs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2013). “Letter from Poland” was first published in boundary 2 Review, January 14, 2015. 1. Quoted in my “Web Log” post “Memorials in Berlin,” November 3, 2012, jacket2​ .org​/commentary​/memorials​-­berlin. This post also has a number of pictures related to this essay. See also Susan Bee, “Miriam Laufer: 20th Century Voyage,” Provincetown Arts 2013, writing​.upenn​.edu​/epc​/ meaning ​/Laufer​/Miriam​-­Laufer​ _PtownArts​.pdf.

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Washington, DC. The absence of the images has a powerful effect, evoking the erasure of a people and a culture through the Systematic Extermination Process. Over the course of Fitterman’s book, lists become litanies, with intricate and horrific repetitions rippling through what simultaneously seems like dry-­as-­dust clippings. Fitterman’s work is exemplary in its apparently inexpressive, understated approach. Page after page of catalogue entries without photographs, names without faces, deeds without doers creates a work more chilling than the original installation from which the captions are derived. Loss—erasure and absence—is made palpable by the marked suppression of the missing photographs. The problems with representations “after Auschwitz” are well rehearsed, hovering, like an angry hornet, around the crisis for representation posed by this particular series of catastrophic events and processes. Images, no matter how disfigured, mask the unseen, unspoken, and inexplicable but always—here’s the hardest part—imaginable reality: imaginable in consequence of being real. Imaginable yet ungraspable. Imaginable yet apparently out of images’ reach. Imaginable because we have no choice but to imagine, no matter how resistant our imaginations may be to the task. Imagined, in other words, through the not that Adorno called negative dialectics. There is no medium more challenged by the taint and tain of Khurbn’s reification than photography (Khurbn is Yiddish for destruction): every scene depicted, including the documentary photos at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, strikes, like a blow to the mind, as fundamentally incommensurable, the surface of a surface. You have heard it before: the familiar, in some ways comforting, lament that many Hollywood films— and many journalistic and novelistic works—have engaged in a voyeurism bordering on Nazi porn. Comforting because, in a perverse way, such depictions humanize the Nazis, turning a cultural and ideological formation into caricatured sadists and so making it a matter of bad actors rather than “good” citizen. One of the delights of Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie Inglorious Basterds was that this problem was exaggerated to such a great extent that it hilariously strikes its blows by refusing to transcend or sacralize the problem (let’s say it histrionically tries to sublimate the resistance to the real into an artifice of fantasy). Raul Hilberg’s 1961 The Destruction of the European Jews stands as the monument against which any Shoah memorial needs be measured. While Hilberg’s book is a magisterial work of historical scholarship, it is also one of the greatest twentieth-­century works of documentary collage. The work’s power is that rather than offering a language of denunciation or conjuring iconic images of terror, it painstakingly documents the bureaucratic and legal processes that were the foundation of the Systematic Ex-

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termination Process. Hannah Arendt, partly relying on Hilberg’s work, famously described this as the “banality of evil”; but what Hilberg reveals might better be called bloodless systematicity and bureaucratic/legalistic relentlessness. Hillberg tells rather than shows; this is the genius of his work. In Holocaust Museum, Fitterman organizes the gleaned captions into seventeen categories, listed in the table of contents. These categories are his own invention—they do not conform to the archive’s categories: Propaganda, Family Photographs, Boycotts, Burning of Books, The Science of Race, Gypsies, Deportation, Concentration Camps, Uniforms, Shoes, Jewelry, Hair, Zyklon B Canisters, Gas Chambers, Mass Graves, American Soldiers, Liberation.2 This brings to mind the twelve categories Charles Reznikoff uses in his Holocaust, poems that use legal documents from the Nuremberg trials: Deportation, Invasion, Research, Ghettos, Massacres, Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks, Works Camps, Children, Entertainment, Mass Graves, Marches, Escapes.3 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s web photo archive has a very different set of categories, less edgy than the poets’ concise barbs: “Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust,” “The rise to power of the Nazi movement in Germany and Austria,” “The war crimes trials,” “Legal and illegal immigration to Palestine,” “Postwar immigration to the Americas” (and so on).4 The museum’s photo archive has almost eighteen thousand images on the web, so Fitterman’s choices for his 120-­page book are very selective indeed. Fitterman’s “Uniforms” section has 15 items from the set of 747 tagged “uniforms” by the museum, and while Fitterman includes no images, each of the museums captions is, of course, accompanied by a documentary photograph. The striped skirt of a prison uniform worn at the Auschwitz concentration camp. [photograph N00077] Studio portrait of Buchenwald survivor wearing a prisoner uniform. [photograph 29049] Prisoners’ clothing and uniforms hang outside the crematorium in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. [photograph 62251] 2. Rob Fitterman, Holocaust Museum (London: Veer Books, 2011). An illustrated version of this discussion can be found on “Web Log,” February 23, 2013, jacket2​ .org​/commentary​/ picture​-­intentionally​-­left​-­blank. 3. Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1975). Fitterman’s book has epigraphs from both this work and Heimrad Bäcker’s Transcript. 4. “Photo Archives,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum website, ushmm​ .org ​/research​/research​-­in​- ­collections​/overview​/photo​-­archives.

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A child survivor in a uniform stands smiling amid the rubble of Nordhausen concentration camp. [photograph 42050] Portrait of a Jewish boy dressed in his school uniform. [photograph 23372] A German soldier with an accordion performs together with a guitarist who is not in uniform. [photograph 43110] To get what Fitterman is doing, imagine now the photographs that accompany these captions, as displayed by the museum. And now imagine them blank.

• Reznikoff ’s Voices Holocaust, Charles Reznikoff ’s last book, is, like his great work of the 1930s, Testimony, haunted by the voices of the dispossessed. In Testimony, Reznikoff worked with legal records of violent crimes from 1885 to 1915 to create tautly etched accounts of the turbulent underbelly of these United States. The two long volumes of Testimony are difficult reading, though a different sense of “difficulty” from that of other modernist poetry by first-­wave modernists such as Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Stevens. There is no difficulty interpreting the content of these poems; in a sense they start with the heresy of paraphrase, for each poem paraphrases the longer account of a crime that Reznikoff appropriates, edited but verbatim, from legal documents. The book, composed entirely from archival material, averts an overarching story line or poetical reflections. In contrast, Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary poem Book of the Dead (1938) uses passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and a multivoice format that shifts from quoted letters from a variety of sources and journalistic accounts, to weave together a far more theatrical and narrativizing work than Testimony. Testimony is presented in a monolithic, if not to say monotonous, form, which offers no respite from directly confronting an unfolding, accumulating series of horrific events. Reznikoff ’s methodological refusal to mitigate means that the work speaks not for itself but as itself. Perhaps the most important precedent for Testimony is Whitman’s Song of Myself. Reznikoff ’s work is the antipode: in place of Whitman’s bursts of celebration, Reznikoff ’s Testimony is a prolonged elegy, an unflinching acknowledgment of unredeemable and inexcusable loss. What’s most radical about Testimony is the kind of reading his method makes possible, because this work (unlike Rukeyser’s) can’t be read in traditional literary or aesthetic ways. At first reading Testimony is numb-

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ing, but this experience of being numbed is the place not where aesthetic experience ends but where it begins. Reznikoff ’s refusal to aestheticize or sentimentalize (some would say humanize) the legal cases presented is exemplary of Tesimony’s ethical grounding and suggests a connection not only with Zukofsky’s “sincerity and objectification”5 but also with the postwar neorealism of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini. For in Reznikoff ’s refusal to aestheticize brutality, he does not turn away from aesthetics but rather shifts the aesthetic frame from the “content” to the reading experience itself. In this sense, Testimony is “reading-­centered,” to use a phrase of Jackson Mac Low, another poet whose work is largely based on organizing large bodies of found (or appropriated) language. Both Mac Low and Reznikoff pose a challenge to how we read and where we find meaning, creating conceptual works that make our initial inability to read an aesthetic challenge to read differently, read anew. As Kenneth Goldsmith remarks about conceptual poetry: it requires not a “readership” but a “thinkership.” The initial unreadability of the vast catalog that is Testimony is what makes it one of the towering works of second-­wave modernist American poetry, our great anti-­epic. Because if we can’t read Testimony then we can’t read our own history. Or then again, perhaps what we at first find unreadable, numbing, becomes a way to what Stevens called “a new knowledge of reality.” I rehearse these matters because they echo concerns about the representation of the systematic extermination of European Jews—graphic, filmic, novelistic, photographic, poetic, documentary, memorial. Representing the historically unrepresentable is both an impossibility and an obligation. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews is the essential work of scholarship; its accumulation of everyday facts, of the dense network of often small bureaucratic and legal regulations that lead to the larger catastrophe, sets the standard for any work on this topic and provides a key context for Reznikoff ’s approach. I want to mention also Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It, which shows how digression and the comic can weave their way around an empty center without betraying it. Paul Celan is the poet most closely associated with the project of refusing to represent in order to most fully confront. Many will also think also of the exemplary accounts by Primo Levi and Jean Améry. 5. Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” in Poetry, February 1931, www​.poetryfoundation​.org​ /poetrymagazine​/ browse​/37​/5​#!​/20577923; collected in Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays, ed. Mark Scroggins (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

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Holocaust was published in 1975, the same year that Abraham Ravett made the recordings of Reznikoff reading the poem, which was just a month before Reznikoff ’s death. Holocaust is largely based on documents from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. While its structure is similar to that of Testimony, it differs in being singular in its places, times, and crimes. Also the nature of the acts depicted necessarily dwarfs the serial record of brutality in Testimony. The events in Testimony took place during the first years of Reznikoff ’s life and the decade immediately prior to his birth in 1894. The events of Holocaust occurred in the middle of his life, and he is reflecting on them in his final years. It’s notable as well that the documentary material for Testimony is from US court records and in English, while Holocaust uses translated material from Europe. By its nature, if it doesn’t demean nature to use that word here, the material of Holocaust overwhelmed the techniques Reznikoff had developed in his earlier work. A certain level of distance from the material—its “objectification”—is not possible in reading this work, even had the technique been identical. The distinction is at the heart of what makes Holocaust so compelling: it forces a confrontation with the way the “same” conceptual approach works with differently charged material. Testimony developed a form suitable to its content; on the face of it, this would not be possible for Holocaust. Something happens, however, when we listen to the Ravett audio recordings, that changes everything: Reznikoff’s voice. In Reznikoff ’s earlier recordings (available on PennSound), his voice is warm, friendly, compassionate, world-­embracing, and empathetic. Not here. Reznikoff does the Holocaust with fiery and defiant voices. While his earlier readings bring out qualities of witness and engagement fully present in the text, Reznikoff ’s readings from Holocaust bring in a tone not present in the written poems. When Charles Reznikoff, at eighty-­one, gives voice to “Heil, Hitler!” one hears a kind of glee, something in between Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin, a glee that adds, in its performative dimension, an ethical necessity for this work: anger, yes, but, more resounding, contempt. The sound of Reznikoff ’s contempt is liberating.

• After Writing To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric. In the original 1985 German version of Heimrad Bäcker’s seestück, the only paratext is the one you will find on the last page of the text proper:

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Reference: IMT (International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, 1949), Vol. XIV, 340–41; Vol. XXXV, 623–25.

Though subtle in the extreme, this note is enough to allow an allegorical reading of the highly elliptical text that precedes it (I won’t yet call it a poem), as much in spite of as because the specific textual gleanings seem on the face to resist allegorizing. Patrick Greaney has translated Literatur as “Reference” because the reference given identifies the source material for the language in the work. But in Bäcker’s choice of this one word, he elides the difference between the literary work and the historical record by reversing the assumed aestheticizing movement from document to reified work, in doing so suggesting that it is the document that is literature while Bäcker’s text is, by extension, deliteratured. Or, in any case, Bäcker raises the question of the relation of his text (I don’t yet want to call it a poem) and its source. The absence of any other information or commentary in the original publication needs to be acknowledged in an afterword that is many times longer than the 220 or so words that comprise seestück. Greaney has kept the translator’s note short, about half that word count. For my part, I need to offer this commentary, in the first place, to note that Bäcker’s text (I am not now ready to say poem) is itself a commentary on the literature it cites in the reference note as “literature.” If that makes both Bäcker’s text and mine midrashic, this could also be said of the source text from the Nuremberg trials, Document 873-­D, which incorporates the excerpted ship’s log for June 21, 1941, narrating the event that appears to underlie this work (I am not going, at this time, to call it a poem). The long prose paragraph, in the center of the work, tells the story as recorded in the first person by the ship’s captain (it is signed “Flacksenberg”): A Nazi U-­boat comes upon a shipwrecked Norwegian crew. The U-­boat captain gives them provisions and points to the coast of Iceland, knowing full well that they will perish. In the Nuremberg trial, Third Reich Vice Admiral Erich Schulte-­Mönting offers this commentary: “I do not know what there is about that that is inhumane.”6 So we have a set of commentaries on an original event that is specifically occulted, shredded from its prose source, in the manner of M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong (2008), in which she discorporates and reassembles the

6. International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1949, 14:341; testimony given May 22, 1946.

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legal records of a 1791 extermination of 150 Africans on a slave ship so the owners could collect insurance money. document 873-­d extracts from the war diary of submarine “u-­7 1.” entry on 21 june 1941: three norwegian shipwrecked sailors not taken aboard, but provided with food and directed towards the coast; unlikely that they would reach it (exhibit gb-­4 81)7

The original of which seascape is an echo is not the transcript of the Nuremberg trials, nor the ship captain’s diary that is included in the Nuremberg report, for these are themselves commentaries. Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) was an Austrian poet associated with the Vienna Group and also with concrete poetry (Helmut Heißenbüttel, Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Frederike Mayröcker, and Reinhard Priessnitz come to mind). seascape situates itself on the ground of the shipwreck (du fond d’un naufrage) in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and is part of a series of quasi-­ documentary works that collage or cut up found texts, including, in the US, Reznikoff, Rukeyser, Olson, Burroughs/Gysin, and Susan Howe.8 The most specific European predecessor for seestück is two books by the Swedish poet Åke Hodell: Orderbuch (1965) and CA36715( J) (1966).9 The “order book” consists of death-­camp prisoner numbers, followed by a J for Jew in parentheses. Under the prisoner number is a single word that indicates what the prisoner can be used for: soap, lampshade, et cetera. Crossed-­out numbers indicate extermination. CA 36715 (J) is a journal of one of the prisoners from the previous book, charting his deteriorating state through his handwriting. seestück was published in Austria in 1985, the year before Bäcker’s stunning and exemplary achievement nachschrift. Dalkey Archive published this book as Transcript in 2010, with an English translation by Greaney and Vincent Kling and edited by Friedrich Achleitner. Transcript, published in Austria in 1986, is made up entirely of quotations or citations, which are often visually arranged in a manner that resembles the grid 7. This is from the Nuremberg trial documentation, vol. 35. seestück references the exhibit number, in parentheses as here, putting just that parenthetical on its penultimate page. 8. “Asylum,” my 1975 cut-­up of Erving Goffman’s Asylums, also comes to mind. 9. Orderbuch (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1965) and CA36715( J) (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1966). Both are available as free PDF downloads at the EPC Digital Library (epc​.buffalo​.edu​/ library).

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lists of concrete poetry. These found linguistic shards confront, without summarizing or representing, the Systemic Extermination of the European Jews. In contrast to Reznikoff ’s elegiac event-­moments in Holocaust (1975), Bäcker’s source texts (which overlap with those used by Reznikoff) are sampled, fragmented, constellated. Narrative is under erasure, but ineradicable. Transcript’s sources are documented in notes that form an integral part of the text. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews is prominent among the works appropriated for the poem, which feels like a long cut-­up of that work, or to put it a different way, a “diastic” reading of Hilberg (to use Jackson Mac Low’s term for reading through a source text). But, in fact, there are many and various sources. Unlike Hilberg and Reznikoff, Bäcker was in the Hitler Youth, and this biographical fact, not explicit in the work, affects the reading in a way that is exemplary of how such external factors always frame meaning.10 In its first edition, the cover for seascape reads SEESTÜCK nachschrift von heimrad bäcker

Nachschrift would become the title for Bäcker’s next book, but here it is used as a description. Greaney translates Nachschrift as “transcription,” emphasizing that the words are taken entirely from, or after, source texts and placing the work squarely in the company of other works, such as Mac Low’s of the 1950s to 1980s entirely derived from prior or found texts. Nachschrift literally means “after writing” or “writing after.” In Prisms Adorno writes, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”: after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.11 seestück and Nachschrift absorb the problems of reification and representation after the Second War. As for Literatur, Bäcker’s term for his source material: that is the before writing (the writing of witness, that which places itself before, in front of, the event). I turned down their request to be taken aboard, provisioned the boat with food and water and gave them the course and distance to the Icelandic coast.

10. Greaney has an informative essay on this work, “Aestheticization and the Shoah,” in the Winter 2010 (37, no. 1) issue of New German Critique. I am grateful to him for providing me the source materials for this work. 11. Theodor Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Prismen, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), vol. 10, pt. 1, p. 30.

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To write poetry after the Second War is to accept that barbarism is before us, staring us in the face. Does this overbearing commentary destroy the original? That is a hopeless hope. “I do not know what there is about that that is inhumane.” Ich bin ein Norwegian. Bäcker’s Nachschrift, his after writing, feels for the ground of a post-­ Enlightenment, aftermodern poetry, as a blind person feels for another’s face.

• Letter from Warsaw In November 2014, Susan and I visited Lodz and Warsaw, Poland, for the first time, along with our friend the poet Tracie Morris. Susan’s mother was born in Lodz, moving to Berlin when she was around five. When I spoke at the American centers at the University of Lodz and Warsaw, I acknowledged standing on the ground of a great experiment from the decade before I was born, which aimed to expel difference in order to increase harmony through sameness, but the move toward homogenization versus miscegenation is powerful in the Americas as well, since the poetics of the Americas is the continuation of European poetics by other means. When I explore the poetics of representation of the Systematic Extermination Process, I said in Warsaw, I don’t do so as an American looking at Poland and Germany but as someone whose intellectual and cultural foundations are European. I feel it to be as much my story as anyone else now alive and that a part of European culture destroyed here lives on with me, in and as an American, and is expressed through a commitment to the syncretic and miscegenated poetics of Americas. The aversion of an originary or authentic or correct language is foundational for the poetics of Americas and makes a sharp contrast with those European (and American) nationalists who place a single language as fundamental to national or literary identity or who work to police national identities in ways that go beyond being born in a place, which, unlike in parts of Europe, is sufficient for US citizenship. Several years ago, at the urging of my daughter, my father-­in-­law, who was born and grew up in Berlin, tried to reclaim his German citizenship under repatriation laws. His request was denied because he had never actively claimed this citizenship during the Nazi period, when he was a teenager. He was told that he was from Poland, the country of origin of his parents. But he would be unable to claim Polish citizenship because knowledge of Polish is required

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for that; Yiddish was not then, nor is it now, considered a proper language of this nation, which was precisely the problem in the first place, now compounded. As long as monoculture laws stand in Poland, the stain of the destruction of the Jews will be ineradicable. There are can be no right of return for the dead, but there could be for European diasporic Jews. The power of American poetry comes from the mixing of many languages and the resistance to the dominance of any one language, including English—or proper English, anyway. As I argue in “The Poetics of the Americas” in My Way: Speeches and Poems, it is the overturning of standard English by second languages and vernacular/dialect speakers that defines American poetry, which is not to say that there is no resistance to this idea in America. The question of who owns a nation or a people is not, of course, just one of language. We can say in the US that Occupy Wall Street raised the specter of the 1% whose control is through cultural tolerance combined with economic dominance. But the closer analogy in the US for the systematic extermination process here is the mass incarceration of African American young men, stripping them of opportunities to fully participate in American cultural and economic life.12 In Poland, you have about 224 prisoners per 100,000 people; in the US it’s over 750, but for some age groups of black men it’s over 10,000—one in nine people in that population. More than one in three young black men without a high school diploma are currently behind bars.13 In Warsaw, we found an extraordinary new museum created as if from ashes. POLIN: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a site-­specific work, situated on the ground of the Jewish Ghetto and thus serving as a memorial as well as a tribute to those who fought in the uprising. The museum’s main entrance is directly across from the more traditional and figurative Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which was erected in 1948. The meaning of the museum is fundamentally connected to its location: as we descended into the core exhibition on the lower level, a ghostly presence made itself felt and was a constant, and welcome, companion. This is a museum not of artifacts but of the historical record. POLIN overwhelms not with abstract splendor or Holocaust memorial kitsch (as in the statue in front of Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station, of children going off to “camp”

12. The House I Live In, a 2012 film by Eugene Jarecki, makes a compelling case for this analogy. 13. Catherine Rampel, “Jails and Jobs,” New York Times, September 29, 2010, economix​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/09​/29​/ jail​-­and​-­jobs​/?​_php​=​true​&​_type​=​blogs​ &​_r​=​0.

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as if the camp had been “summer” and not “death”).14 This is a museum of deep, or thick, description. In place of sentimental, monumental, or abstract gestures of loss, icons that mark an absence, POLIN in its core exhibition, curated by Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, provides a superfluity of what was present to substantiate (and transubstantiate) what has been lost. The museum is not a funeral pyre but a living archive of what the Jews called Po-­Lan when they arrived in the Middle Ages. And it succeeds in making indelible the presence of the Jews in and as Poland: not an eradicated blip in Polish history but an ineradicable thread in the fabric of Poland. Ineradicable even after being eradicated. As in Poe’s “Tell-­Tale Heart,” under the floorboards that seem to seal us off from the ground is a beating heart—or here, let’s just say, once the floorboard that covers the ground is removed, a vast underground cavern is revealed, as deep as the world and as wide as possibility. This cavern is not filled with broken rocks or statuettes of forlorn children. As we look into it more closely, we can see that it is a book. Jane Eisner’s “Chasing Ghosts, Reviving Spirits: The Fall and Rise of Poland’s Jews” provides an account of a trip to Poland at the same time as ours; and, indeed, Eisner’s experiences were close to ours.15 A number of Polish commentators on this article lamented the author’s failure to blame the Nazis for the systematic extermination of the Polish Jews or failure to acknowledge the horrific suffering of many Polish people during the war. As Benjamin might have said, history is written by the (self-­) righteous. He made me do it. POLIN brings the horse of denial to the water, but it doesn’t make it drink. In that sense, the museum is programmatically gentle—a wise choice. There is much documentation of the role the Jewish ghetto police played in the extermination process. As for Polish complicity, there is a small placard that notes, with a bloodless tone, that Poles had their own battles to fight and their own everyday lives to live; most stood by and did nothing. (And that leaves out the active participation, and profit, on the part of many Poles but also the active resistance on the part of some others.) Daddy, what did you do during the war? POLIN starkly 14. One of the Kindertransport Sculptures by Frank Meilser, Trains to Life—Trains to Death (2008): “Standing at the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station this bronze sculpture commemorates 1.6 million children murdered in the Holocaust and 10,000 children whose lives were saved by being granted entry into England in 1938,” www​.frank​-­meisler​.com​/CitySculpture​.html. The site includes images and a line of Meisler’s Jewish kitsch figurines. Ten thousand divided by 1.6 million comes to 0.00625 (but who’s counting?). 15. Jewish Daily Forward, November 30, 2014, forward​.com​/articles​/209962​/ chasing​- ­ghosts​-­reviving​-­spirits​-­the​-­fall​-­and​-­rise.

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documents the continuing anti-­Semitic terror in Poland during what the Poles call the “Communist time”: under this new post-­Nazi regime, most of the remaining Polish Jews left Poland—but not to the Poles but rather to what was left of them. The Jewish extermination in Poland was a Polish extermination, or let’s just say the blood is mixed on the ground. It’s not a blame game, it’s a change game. At the museum gift shop I search in vain for a T-­shirt that would say: i survived the museum of the history of polish jews

On our final evening in Warsaw, we went to see the last remains of the Jewish Ghetto, with bullet-­ridden walls over which stenciled words say “Never forget” and “Truth.” There was one small peephole on a stone wall, similar to Duchamp’s peephole for “Étant donnés.” The view opened onto a dark, stagnant alley, caught in a time neither now nor then, a liminal space haunted by its own aching hollowness. On the other side of the alley was a window with a flickering light; someone was still there, barely there. In a year this last remnant of the ghetto will be covered over with new, chic shops, where perhaps you will be able to buy a figurine of an old Jew floating in amber. Maybe the one we nearly saw in the ghostly light that last night.

Disfiguring Abstraction

You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both. Gertru de Stein t o Alfred Barr 1

No painting is so figurative that under certain conditions it will not look abstract. af ter O scar Wilde2

What color is abstraction? It can’t just be white. Its invention in time (for example, 1910 or 1912) means only that it creates a holding space for abstractions from other times and places. To centrally locate one locus of abstraction would be to diminish the radicality of abstraction’s connections to its others—or its engendering of its others. Around 1912, high art abstraction, what became museum abstraction, is discovered—not invented—in Europe. This discovery is a little like Columbus discovering America as a by-­product of his quest to find a shortcut to India. “Indians” are a telltale sign (in Edgar Allan Poe’s sense) that America was already spoken for (if not claimed). White Abstraction is im-

Critical Inquiry, Spring 2013. Notes for, from, and after two planning seminars on the Museum of Modern Art’s Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, curated by Leah Dickerman, with Masha Chlenova, which opened December 23, 2012. MoMA had originally planned a centennial commemoration, giving the date range as 1912– 25. My notes for the planning session were written in February 2011; those notes formed the basis of this essay, which was completed, after the seminars, in February 2012. 1. Quoted by John B. Hightower in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 8. 2. See Wilde’s “Lecture to Art Students” (1883) in Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde: Miscellanies (New York: Nottingham Society, 1909), 309–21. Wilde begins, “In the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you tonight, I do not desire to give you any abstract definition . . . at all.”

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portant not only for itself but also for the portal it opened onto the already existing abstraction in the first, second, third, and fourth worlds. How many senses of abstraction is it possible to imagine in terms of concrete art practices? In the futurist moment and the years immediately following (1909–25)?3 Would an array of these senses of abstraction be a constellation, in Walter Benjamin’s sense?4 Isn’t a constellation an abstract set of elements that we perceive as a figure (synchronically) or a chord (diachronically)? Abstraction is already present from the first recorded history of art, on the Paleolithic cave walls of France and Spain. Marks in space. Perhaps proto-­language, perhaps proto-­art, no doubt something outside of the categories we now understand. Abstraction and patterning—visual marks unmoored from utility or representation—is a recurring impulse in the history of inscription, whether we frame it as the unconscious or the primitive. Abstraction at one cathected historical point echoes those other moments of abstraction or taps into abstraction as a dark pool, possibly a geyser, just under the surface of visual skin or appearance. Abstraction is not a race, as in who got there first; but the race line scars its putative invention. Abstraction, that is, is not invented but rediscovered, if not to say reinvented, over and again. Those reinventions are themselves signposts in the history of art. What was the most radical development in the visual art of the futurist moment? The invention (let’s say rediscovery) of the “pure products” of abstraction? The ready-­mades? The collective actions of the Russian futurists? The move of the Russian futurians out of the museum and realm of high art and into decorative arts, costumes, micropress books? The kineticism of Italian futurism? The blank and monochromatic “non”paintings? The intertwining of abstraction and figuration in Klein-­bottle-­like or Möbius conundrums? Or the oscillation between these elements? Is it the

3. Marjorie Perloff ’s Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) is a crucial model for my speculations here, as is Holland Cotter’s critical writing of the last decade and more in the New York Times. See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4. Benjamin takes up this idea for the final time in his 1940 work “On the Concept of History,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 1:691–704. See the translation by Harry Zohn in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938– 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392–93.

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“pure products”5 or the impure process, including the “bad” products of abstraction? Yet we delight in all these and need not choose among them. It is the possibility of abstraction, more than any single instance of it, that enthralls. Not just “rested totality”6 but the anxiety, the restlessness of abstraction. The Russian futurist/formalist moment is, for this reason, the emblem of the most radical moment of the period. The Museum of Modern Art’s introduction to its 2011 On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century frames it as an “expanded history of drawing”; in this sense one might imagine an expanded history of abstraction—but perhaps better, the expanded field of abstraction.7 Abstraction is never more than an extension of figuration, just as figuration is never more than an extension of abstraction. But also abstraction is never more than a figuration of extension. Quoth the Raven. Abstraction is figuration by other means. Abstraction is a metaphor, not a style; the connection of one abstract work to another is by family resemblance, in Wittgenstein’s sense. The harder we try to define abstraction, the more it slips away. In this sense, abstraction is a term of art like conceptual, representational, realist, material, spiritual. The linguistic concept of abstract visual art is a product of verbal poesis, not visual art. While the visual art practice can be separated from poetry, the term abstract cannot. Abstraction@100 (or does it always stay 39?), in the visual arts, is the happy (or then again hapless) victim of its own success. While greatly and justly admired, and understood like crazy (to take a phrase from Mike Nichols and Elaine May for “I’ll still respect you in the morning”), canonical abstract visual art (arguably) has lost much of its conceptual, philosophic, and epistemic force because of its hegemonic position in the history of modernist art. Moreover, individual works have lost (some of ) their visceral force by becoming iconic of themselves, logo rather than loco, logos rather than lowghost (the haunting return of the repressed in Jack Spicer’s striking phrase).8 That is, museum shows, like a postcard collec5. I take the term from William Carlos Williams’s “For Elsie” (1923), section 18 in Spring & All, recently reissued in a facsimile edition by New Directions (New York, 2011). 6. The term is from Louis Zukofsky’s “Sincerity and Objectification,” first published in Poetry in 1931 and collected in Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays, ed. Mark Scroggins (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 193–202. 7. www​.moma​.org​/ interactives​/exhibitions​/2010​/online. 8. Spicer initially uses this term in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1960): “No, now he is the Lowghost when / He is pinned down to words”—“A Textbook of Poetry,” no. 19, p. 308, in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of

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tion or art history slide show, risk reifying the work so that they appear as contained objects interpreted through received critical parameters: paradigms of aesthetic beauty rather than disruptive, contentious, inchoate, challenging. In contrast, poetry has fared better. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, the equivalent for poetry of the most radical abstract visual art, has yet to be assimilated.9 Stein’s disruption of the representational norms of verbal language is still a challenge even for those who advocate abstraction in the visual arts yet fail to account for it in their own writing practices. Likewise, the collaborative books associated with Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov remain anomalous. Or put another way, Kurt Schwitters’s “Ur Sonata” still seems pataquerical in a way that his collages do not (which is not in any way to suggest that his collages are any less radical or significant). What would happen if we traced the immediate origin of abstraction not to its formalist precursors in Ma/Mo-­net but to Alfred Jarry and his pataphysical painting machine? How would this be different from tracing this history to the nonretinal in Duchamp? Is there a form of abstraction that can be said to take on the outward appearance of representation while hollowing out its verisimilitude or mocking (making a mockup of ) Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). In “Partington Ridge,” in the same 1960 book (p. 268), Spicer remarks, “Rabbits do not know what they are. / Ghosts are very similar. They are frightened and do not know what they are, but they can go where the rabbits cannot go. All the way to the heart.” Spicer brings the point home in “An Embarrassing Folksong” (290): “Ghosts are not shrewd people. History begins with shrewd people and ends with ghosts.” For more on “Lowghost” see Spicer’s The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 21–30. Lowghost is echo. 9. Tender Buttons was published by Claire Marie in Paris in 1914. Stein was not included in the MoMA exhibition on the grounds that she fell outside the networks related to abstraction documented by the show, which opens with a large diagram of these networks (or “connections”): see www​.moma​.org​/ interactives​/exhi bitions​/2012​/ inventingabstraction​/​?page​=​connections. Dominique Fourcade and I take a different view of Stein’s connectivity and her relation to abstraction in “La poétique, l’écriture de la poésie et l’invention du modernism” (Poetics, the writing of poetry, and the invention of modernism), presented at the Gertrude Stein colloquium at Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso . . . L’aventure des Stein, at the Grand Palais in Paris (same show as The Steins Collect at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), October 21, 2011; MP3 file at PennSound writing​.upenn​.edu​/ pennsound​/ x​/Fourcade​.php. The poets included in the MoMA show are Guillaume Apollinaire, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Blaise Cendrars, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

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its methods? De Chirico, whose Hebdomeros so much resembles Jarry’s Faustroll? Malevich’s white on white may be Suprematist, but it’s also no signal. Then again: abstraction/flatness as dysability to draw, disturbance of verisimilitude, dysfluency, dysfunction between appearance of the canvas and appearance of the world. (It don’t mean a thing if it isn’t got that swerve. Chorus of Mondrians: Doo wop doo wop doo wop.) Think of abstraction as the self-­reflection of the semiotic process of representation. Abstraction represents the visual discourse of representation, including, ironically, the representation of abstraction. Abstraction is in essence spiritual, as Kandinsky demonstrates. Abstraction is in essence material, materializing the means of representation. Museum abstraction is framed as decorous as opposed to decorative, beautiful rather than sublime, tasteful not a riotous upturning of taste, logos over bathos. Born free but everyone sublated. Absorption is the handmaiden of reification. Kandinsky’s art and Malevich’s art, so aversive to each other, are readily assimilated into the abstraction of “abstraction”—a master plot that each contests. While acknowledging the affinities of the two artists, isn’t that contestation as significant as the subsumption? Nonrepresentation versus afiguration versus antirepresentation, abstracting from versus abstraction as or to, iconic versus inconoclastic. At the MoMA seminars, Masha Chlenova noted that the museum’s 1915 Malevich classic Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack—Painterly Masses in the Fourth Dimension was exhibited by Alfred Barr in 1936 as Suprematist Composition: Black Square and Red Square.10 Ironically, despite the anxiety Malevich’s ludic title creates for museum abstraction, the buttoned-­down pseudodescriptive title operates as a figurative mask (albeit geometric figures). But then Malevich was adept at visual and linguistic masking, not to say drag. To understand the full irony of the sensership, imagine one of Malevich’s great late paintings, say Women with a Rake (1928–32), renamed by a Soviet museum Study in Color and Volume. Perhaps the best approach to this problem, following MoMA’s no translation rule, would be to leave the title in Russian, rendering it a kind of abstract linguistic code for museum visitors who can’t decipher Cyrillic. It is sometimes argued that visual art, and especially abstraction, is universal or anyway transnational, in contrast to the language-­boundedness of poetry. Without giving up the heuristic value of this sentimental discourse, it’s useful to keep in mind the degree to which this approach has underestimated the value of reading abstract art in narrowly historical and

10. “Participants’ Statements” distributed for session 1, March 4, 2011.

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national frames and focusing on the ways in which it did not, and could not, be translated across cultural divides any more easily than poetry. The problem of translation, the task of the translator, does not disappear with visual art but becomes even more intractable because apparently invisible. So this is just to trouble the claim (in the MoMA seminar’s letter of invitation) that the 1912 pioneers of abstraction established a “universal language of the avant-­garde” by the mid-­1920s,11 which tends to undercut the contribution of these very artists toward the still-­evolving project of a local (tactical rather than strategic) language of invention that resists that universalizing claim of the avant-­garde (even if this cuts against their own universalizing and utopianism). Marinetti’s Italian futurism cannot be seamlessly translated into Khlebnikov’s Russian futurism, and neither can be understood without grappling with the specific poetics in each case, as well as the politics. Abstraction is plural and multiform. The relation of one approach to abstraction to another is not underlying unity but incommensurability. One boy’s abstraction is another woman’s exact reproduction of an alternative universe. Late Kandinsky is either hyperobjective and diagrammatic (similar to a scientific graph or figure, or microcopic superenlargements) and/or nonobjective and abstract. Like Certs: two mints in one (taste and function). (Go figure.) Abstraction is not only a matter of geometry but also prosthetic, in the sense of perpedeutic for perception or vision, as Laszlo Moholy-­Nagy explores in Vision in Motion12 (and others explored at the Bauhaus and other modernist centers of research in the arts). Engendering trouble. The history and theory of abstraction has often been written about in a way that is fundamentally averse to the artistic practice of abstraction. Often, master narratives have been imposed on a chaotic field of activity—narratives that in their neopositivism reject the critique of perspectival, linear representation in much of the artwork. History is written by the victors, art history too. But in this case who are the victors? The avant-­garde, and especially the theory of the avant-­garde, is insuffi11. The wall texts of the MoMA exhibition articulate this perspective, outlined in the invitation letter sent to all the abstraction seminar participants in December 2010. Here’s the pitch for the show in a New York subway ad: “Over 80 artists, one radical new artform.” E pluribus unum: a collection of incommensurable art practices has been declared unitary and, scrubbed clean of cultural and historical precedents, forever new; but alas, the radicalism of the work has been compromised by a domesticating frame. 12. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947.

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ciently radical to account for the achievement of the artists of the futurist moment. The theory of the avant-­garde has tended to reify and domesticate the work. The radicalness of the avant-­garde has to do with how this work extends contemporary artwork and not the other way around. Our starting point for viewing the work of the past needs be the present. Theory is undertheorized. Either everything is abstract or nothing is. What is the equivalence of abstraction in other arts: music/noise or twelve-­tone/atonality; poetry: grammar, narrative, meter, subject matter, representation, reference? What’s poetry got to do with it? Apparently, a visual art exhibition cannot accommodate poetry on an equal footing. Nonetheless what appears supplemental may turn out to be fundamental. What is framing what, who, whom? Some of the key artists of the period are also poets of great significance: Picabia, Schwitters, Hartley, Kandinsky. And virtually all the developments in visual abstraction of this period were part and parcel of developments in the other arts and conceptually inseparable from poetry and poetics. Vision in Motion remains a key historical work that envisions the relationship, along with key little magazines like Transition and Camera Works, as well as Russian and Italian futurist and Dada publications and exhibitions. Abstraction in the period in question is embedded within an aesthetic spectrum that included painting, drawing, sculpture, fashion, industrial design, poetry, photography, performance, music, and film. While often professed to be enhancing the value of each specific medium, the now axiomatic but historically revisionist segregation of the arts risks diminishing the whole and its parts, accepting, as one key example, a reductivist pushback against the feminized poesy of art nouveau and Pre-­ Raphaelitism for a masculine, antiliterary purity: geometric, hard-­edged abstraction versus aestheticism and artifice. “Form follows function” argues for masculine decoration and against feminized whimsy, just not in those words. Abstraction, as a pataphysical project, plays all sides against themselves. In place of (or supplemental to) wall labels, it might be possible to place the poems of an artist next to his or her visual artwork. By extension, it might be possible to place poems in the exhibit as a verbal-­visual intertwining, such as Sonia Delaunay’s and Blaise Cendrars’s The Prose of the Transsiberian, for example. Certainly if this work is exhibited, a full translation of Cendrars’s poem should be provided.13 And that could be a model

13. Though several versions of this work were shown at the MoMA exhibition, no translations of the poem were provided.

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for exhibiting the Russian futurist book works. Exemplary in this respect is the Getty’s Tango with Cows exhibit and the related web exhibit of the book.14 Speaking of wall labels: these might be considered as much the province of poetry as of critical discourse—not an “explanation” of the work, which is so often at odds with the spirit of the work, but an extension of the work. Some works exhibited without labels in a room of their own (information provided external to the room). Conflicting art-­historical perspectives provided in one label. Historically and aesthetically related poems in place of labels (replacing not the title/date/medium but the explanatory text). If one sense of abstraction is that it is antirealist, then expository explanation of the work may deflate its exuberant entry into the world. Labels don’t need to contain; they can be points of liberation, complication, perilocution. Abstract art often questions linear narrative, so linear narrative, historical or formalist, should not be given the last or only word. The rejection of “poetic” thinking in relation to the visual arts, and the preference for expository, monological explanation, may be both antimodernist and anti-­abstract. That’s not a bad thing, but it need not be the only thing. He’s got a goddamn big abstract thing going on. At least one “thinking area” could offer maximum contradictions for the possibility of abstraction in the visual art of the futurist moment and immediately after—an oasis from whatever overarching narrative the show otherwise provides. This would include works which are not ordinarily or, better to say, not easily considered abstract but which are exemplary of a counterclaim to abstraction. The criteria for inclusion in this area would be not because something fits but because it doesn’t, an unassimilable series that encourages the viewer to think abstractly. Implausible connections, but not arbitrary ones: a series of contingent possibilities. Not fitting, but fits. Thomas McEvilley’s critique of MoMA’s (William Rubin and Kurt Varnedoe’s) 1984 Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern remains pertinent.15 It suggests ways that un- and underrepre14. See the Tango with Cows reading/sound archive that we host on PennSound, writing​.upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/ x​/Explodity​.php. This is the best example I can provide for how this might be done, though I would also point to Aimé Césaire, Lam, Picasso: Nous nous sommes trouvés at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 2011. 15. “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-­Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” in Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, NY: Documentext, McPherson, 1992), 27–56. The article, together with a number of letters in response, first appeared in Artforum.

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sented ideas, peoples, groups, genders, races, classes, ethnicities, and geographies might be brought into a conversation without the stigma of underdevelopment or naiveté or the jargon of authenticity. Insofar as the “On Line” and the abstract expressionism shows have swerved in the direction of rethinking their defining players, the exhibitions have been more powerful. Then again the McEvilley-­Rubin exchange suggests how much depends on origins and precedents, both historically causal and disconnected, both near (European, North American, or South American) and far (Islamic, African, Jewish, medieval, Byzantine, Egyptian, indigenous/aboriginal, Paleolithic . . .). White Abstraction is the doppelgänger of all that is repressed by the effort to contain its own claustrophobic historicizing. Abstraction is a field of activity as much as a consummated visual style, a direction as much as a destination. The danger is that with criteria too narrow, all the objects begin to look like examples and the history preordained and sacrosanct. To say it again: individual works cease to engage an aesthesis of abstraction, turning into icons of themselves, token in a historical survey, representing their place in art history while ceasing to enact the fierce struggle against representation that at one time animated them. The danger is that with the criteria too loose, it’s hard to see why one object and not another is included. Intensity of figuration could be said to be an extraction of figuration and hence abstract, such as in the example of Edvard Munch. Munch’s bedspreads becoming Jasper Johns’s flat, late geometries. Abstraction in a Hartley landscape or Hartley abstracts. The toggling of focus is itself a still-­pertinent form of serial abstraction. What happens when we look at Schwitters’s Norwegian landscapes informed by his collages (and is it possible not to?), or informed by his poetry (will a time come when this is not a stretch?), or his final environments? Philip Guston frames the issue for us now. It’s as much the ambidextrous and amphibious as the ambivalent. To see things not abstract as if they were. And vice versa. There is no abstraction like the present, and the present is entirely concrete. (False.) Abstraction makes nothing happen. That’s no abstraction, that’s my husband. That’s no abstraction, that’s the symbolic order writ large. What is the gender of abstraction? Abstraction can never kick its intimate association with the ornamental, the decorative, with textiles, and with fashion; like a Chinese finger trap, the more it tries to disarticulate these elements, the tighter the hold. Decoration poses a threat to high art abstraction (abstraction-­for-­its-­

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own-­sake) because it owes its canonical success to its double; that is, it can be appreciated as decorative and certified as antidecorative. The relation of decoration to abstraction is, thus, similar to the relation of figuration to abstraction. Tender Buttons is important to read as decorative because it insists on its relation to the decorative—buttons, objects, rooms. For high art abstraction, the threat of the decorative is the threat of the feminine: of sensibility versus intellect, of craft versus agency. You say applied, I say even thine own self is duplicitous. High abstraction is a form of applied design. Formalist accounts of modernist abstraction risk abstracting a clear aesthetic line from a famously agonistic field. Historicist accounts risk underestimating the epistemologic and aesthetic contributions of specific works, reducing them to symptoms of a cultural moment rather than valuing them as models for reflection and critique. In contrast, social formalism interrogates the politics of aesthetic form, that is, reads form ideologically and historically. Social formalism is addicted to context and paratext. This means that aesthetic success, the masterpiece, is viewed in the context of what is ideologically rejected (a return to didacticism as a form of radical aesthetic intervention). But also: the bad products and the failed products of modernist abstraction—not the same thing—are shown cheek by jowl with the good objects. The sharp ideological and aesthetic conflict of the period is foregrounded as a gesture that itself explicitly contradicts entrenched histories and theories that risk the appearance of being subservient to historical museum-­collecting patterns and contemporary market values. (The Guggenheim’s 2010 Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 is a good case study.) Social formalism does not undermine the value, radicality, or inventiveness of modernist abstraction but expands the imagination of the field on which these interventions took and take place. That field is nothing less than imaginary. We speak of messy abstraction and of clean abstraction (or sometimes biomorphic and geometric abstraction), but this applies not only to the “works themselves” but also to our approach to them. Abstraction is not only an idea of form but also a matter of defamiliarization and derangement. Abstraction is in equal measures both theatrical and performative, absorptive and ideal. And the abstraction that is ourselves. If any demonstration were needed that the rag trade was part of the invention of modernist abstraction, then Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay would do the trick (Cooper-­Hewitt Museum, New York, 2011). Delaunay’s textile design is so ingeniously inventive that her ap-

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plied work confronts and transforms the achievements of her paintings. One of the greatest colorists of the period, rivaling Matisse and Mondrian, Delaunay created dresses, hats, and scarves that vibrate with the pulsating rhythm of “The Rites of Spring.” If this is one of the fundamental frames for the “invention” of abstraction, then the iconic image would have to be Man Ray’s (Emmanuel Radnitzky’s) 1911 Tapestry, made entirely from fabric swatches, presumably taken from the floor of the family factory.16 Not to mention the investment in clothing design by Liubov Popova and Natalia Goncharova, who saw it as integral to their artwork. Ornamentation and abstraction are interdependent. Abstraction was not an end in itself but a movement of art beyond the frame of the museum and of the reifications of art history. Applied abstraction is hardly more or less commercial than “pure” abstraction; but if this distinction is to be made, it is museum abstraction that has the greater commodity value. Framing abstraction: High Museum Abstraction, as a patented brand in modernist art history, lobotomizes the most radical impulses of abstraction, let’s call it pata-­abstraction, an antimimetic, non-­re-­presentational, investigative art practice, something that complicates and reformulates— and even breaks free from—the reification of abstraction, even if this breaking free is imaginary. The imaginary is abstract or not at all. High museum abstraction—a straw man that would need to be invented if it didn’t have such a robust afterlife—figures the invention of abstraction in terms of a quest narrative with religious teleology. A work is imagined to be on the brink of abstraction, pulls back from it, finally realizes it. But what is achieved is not abstraction, which is metaphysical, but non/figuration, which is stylistic. The radicalism of the (mostly) men of 1912–17 is not the articulation of nonfiguration—no matter how significant—but the process of moving in, about, and around non/figuration. What’s most radical, in other words, is the series of swerves, the defamiliarization (ostranenie) that opens up a constellation of possibilities. Not a purging of figuration but a transformation of figuration into abstraction, abstraction into image, and image into the figurative. What’s most radical is not the actualization of “pure abstraction” but the oscillation of figure and nonfigure, a fort-­da of appearance/disappearance. Retreat and advance: almost got it, falls away, has the courage to come at it again. In part, this is a belated art historian’s nostalgia for an avant-­garde

16. epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein​/ blog​/ images​/Man​-­Ray​_Tapestry​-­1911​.jpg.

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that he would never himself have participated in. In the context of the futurist moment, this imagery brings to mind the futile advances of the troops in World War I, trench by trench, pushed back by mustard gas and enemy fire. In contrast, the modernist art of the futurist moment moved not by the crude linear measures of advance and retreat but by oscillations better measured in fractals. Except for those sublime retreats into paradise. Purify, as in pure abstraction or pure war. Anorexia rules. Purge is not just a political tactic but a weapon for reification. Radical modernisms, like art histories and museum practices at their most dynamic, do not aim to purify but to plurify. Am I extravagant? No doubt. But not extra-­vagant enough. Art is born free but everywhere in chains. No one owns art history: not the artist, not viewers, not scholars, not critics, not museums. Not even art. Neither art nor art history is proprietary, but some still claim one or the other, even both, as their fiefdom. The effort to claim art history for one ideology or race or gender denies the truth of abstraction, not what it is but what it does, and not what it does but the permission it grants. The bogeyman of a formalist history of abstraction is neoliberalism: not the return of the repressed but of Hegel. Abstraction is not a claim to a diamond mine: it is a practice, on the one hand, and an epistemological/perceptual potential, on the other. Is there a place in a show of high modernist abstraction for a hall of anomalies, swerves, and bad objects? Insofar as museum abstraction chooses to repress or excludes the full range of abstraction’s visual history, from Paleolithic cave art to fashion and design to African and Asian prototypes (from pots to rugs), it reduces itself to an idea of abstraction, figurative in the extreme, and betrays the art it proposes to honor. The irony is that such official art history undermines the value and significance of the work it sees fit to display. “If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.”17

17. Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923): text and audio of Stein reading the work at EPC Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library ​/Stein​-­Gertrude​_If​-­I​-­Told​-­Him​_1923​.html.

The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which I edited with Bruce Andrews, published its first issue in 1978 and its last in 1982. In our preface to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984), we provided a summary of our editorial project: Throughout, we have emphasized a spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter. All of these remain at issue. Focussing on this range of poetic exploration, and on related aesthetic and political concerns, we have tried to open things up beyond correspondence and conversation: to break down some unnecessary self-­encapsulation of writers (person from person, & scene from scene), and to develop more fully the latticework of those involved in aesthetically related activity.1

At its most fundamental level, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an editorial action: a frame for selecting and combining a range of disparate poetic practices and critical thinking. We didn’t capture an already-­existing, fully formed aesthetic as much as participate in its creation. The approaches to poetry explored in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were emerging in the mid-­1970s in several small magazines and presses and in a number of local reading series. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and its many different names—­ Language Poetry, Language Poetries, Language Writing, Language-­ Centered Writing—mark different frames of a field of poetic activity that has no unified stylistic consistency. Bruce Andrews’s epithet “so-­called,” and more precisely, “so-­called so-­called language writing,” suggests an ongoing ambivalence about labeling, for one of the obsessions of (one fracRoutledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (New York: Routledge, 2012). Includes bibliography. 1. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1984), ix. Facsimiles of the entire run of the magazine are available at Eclipse, eclipsearchive​.org.

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tion) of this poetic constellation was a resistance to (or phobia of ) naming, characterization, and standardized modes of representation. So the description is part of the “problematic,” and it remains an open question whether this constellation of activity was a movement or school, aesthetic tendency, or convenient label, and whether the names for the phenomena were insulting labels or a standard for group solidarity. For some practitioners and advocates the local scene played a fundamental role, for others it was a set of defining aesthetic principles, while for others still the most important thing was the exchange across geographic borders. All three aspects are vital parts of the story. Overall, there was a commitment to poetry as a social activity: an equal commitment to exchange value as to the value of individual works. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a site of conversation about a set of marked issues, a place to air differences but not necessarily to settle them. That conversation was radically distinct from the values of the official verse culture of the time, not only in terms of what poetry is, what it does, and how it works, but also in terms of the commitment to group and community formation through conversation. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the poetry and poetics surrounding it was formed in controversy and remained controversial because its unity was not a set of agreed-­upon aesthetic principles but rather an aversion to the conservative dogmas of much of the dominant poetry of the time. Yet despite its unruliness, the ensemble of activities that falls under this rubric does share a family resemblance—to use Wittgenstein’s term. Both the poetry and poetics posed a stark alternative to the prized poetry of the era. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E made a turn from some aspects of modernist avant-­ garde formations, staying clear of univocal manifestos, though not from polemic intervention. This is not to say that social or aesthetic insularity, or the promotion of particular styles, was not present, but that it was neither governing nor defining. Indeed, a pervasive wariness about, combined with a peculiar devotion to, some of the more doctrinaire aspects of the modernist avant-­garde formations was one of the constituent interests in the formation of the work in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E primarily focused on poets from the US and Canada born from the mid-­1930s to the mid-­1950s. Some of these poets had a greater affiliation with the project while others (call them fellow travelers) were more aversive to affiliation; both pulls, one to the idiosyncratic and the other toward group solidarity, are constituent of the field. It is my intention to note the contributions across this spectrum. Many of the key poets were born during the Second World War, and much of their work was formative to the development of the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, at the time and after, even if as individuals some were skeptical of some

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of the theoretical articulations or group framing. In hindsight, among the signature poets of this older half-­generation are Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, Ted Greenwald, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and Michael Palmer. The poets born in 1945 and after had a sometimes different generational consciousness that affected our poetics; in hindsight, among the signature poets of this younger half-­ generation are Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Bruce Andrews, Johanna Drucker, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, Bob Perelman, Bernadette Mayer, Barrett Watten, and Mei-­mei Berssenbrugge. Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Weiner, and David Bromige, though of the New American Poetry generation, became part and parcel of our work. Dozens of other poets made crucial contributions to the field, so such a list necessarily leaves out many of the most significant contributions, a few of which are detailed in what follows; indeed, as a call for poems for a new, highly ephemeral, magazine rightly insisted in the early 1990s: you may be a language poet and not know it. Key geographic centers for this work were New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington, DC, and Toronto, with perhaps the most intense reformulation and extension of the work occurring in the late 1980s and 1990s in Vancouver, with the Kootenay School of Writing. Linguistically innovative British poetry has had a close connection to its American cousin, while remaining distinctive and self-­generating. Bob Cobbing’s Writer’s Workshop spawned a generation of mostly London-­ based VVV poets ( Joyce’s verbal-­vocal-­visual), whose “messy” mimeo productions combined word and image. In contrast, Cambridge has been the site of intensely compacted “sprung” lyric production. If Tom Raworth’s open, speedy, socially charged poems are one pole, then J. H. Prynne’s tightly wired renunciations are the other. In between there are Allen Fisher’s process-­oriented explorations of discrete forms and vocabularies, Maggie O’Sullivan’s exuberant re-­creation of a virtually magical charm-­melos, Denise Riley’s stunning engendering of the lyric, cris cheek’s conceptual performances, Bill Griffith’s syntactic invention and accentual insistences. The fine poet Ken Edwards published in the UK some of the earliest L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-­related works in the 1970s and 80s. But perhaps the most striking parallel to many of the ideas explored in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is to be found in Veronica Forrest-­Thomson’s critical work Poetic Artifice (1978). A few of the younger British and Irish poets continuing in these directions include Caroline Bergvall, Drew Milne, Catherine Walsh, Peter Manson, Tim Atkins, Miles Champion, and Redell Olsen, who, along with Robert Sheppard, John Wilkinson, D. S. Marriott, Peter Middleton, and

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Fisher, have made a significant commitment to poetics as well as poetry. In New Zealand, there has been a strong connection with Wystan Curnow, Alan Loney, Michelle Leggott, and the late Leigh Davis. In Australia, John Tranter’s Jacket Magazine, probably the best web literary magazine of the past decade, did a remarkable job of covering the broader field of English-­ language innovative poetries. There are many international associations with the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which has in the twenty-­first century moved toward a transnational use of English as a medium for radical poetic practice by nonnative speakers, as advocated by Finnish poet Leevi Lehto. Strong affiliations have been established between the US and Canadian poets and those in other parts of the Americas (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Mexico), Europe (including Russia and Scandinavia), and China. But the link with French poetry stands out for its historical continuity and density, with a number of active poet/translators, including Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, Ron Padgett, Cole Swenson, Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, and Stacy Doris, who have translated Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-­ Journoud, Anne-­Marie Albiach, Dominique Fourcade, Danielle Collobert, Christopher Tarkos, and Olivier Cadiot. Many of the American poets discussed here have been translated into French, through such groups as Bureau sur l’Atlantique, the Royaumont literary center, and Double Change, as well as a pair of anthologies edited by Royet-­Journoud and Hocquard.

Poetics and Literary History L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published not poetry but poetics: the importance of an activist poetics—thinking with the poem—is a crucial feature of the expanded field of activity around the magazine. Poetics is different from literary criticism or journalism in its primary engagement with poesis and faktura, the art of making. In L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, poetics was conceived as reflections, investigations, and speculations by and for poets. In particular we emphasized nonexpository approaches to critical thinking, discursive writing where the compositional imperatives of poem making were manifest. In the Bay Area in the 1970s, Perelman started a series of “talks,” which encouraged informal thinking out loud; this format was picked up by San Francisco’s 80 Langton Street and proliferated from there. For American poetry, one of the unique contributions of this emphasis on poetics has been an unprecedented number of books of critical writing published by poets in the larger L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E context, including Silliman, Hejinian, Scalapino, McCaffery, Susan Howe, Palmer, Watten, Nick Piombino, Fanny Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mullen, Andrews, Ann

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Lauterbach, Douglas Messerli, Madeline Gins, Hank Lazer, Eileen Myles, Abigail Child, Susan Stewart, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Perelman, Lorenzo Thomas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Pierre Joris, Kathleen Fraser, Grenier (in ms), Stephen Ratcliffe, Anne Waldman, Armantrout, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Padgett, Dick Higgins, Erin Moure, Adeena Karasick, Norma Cole, George Quasha, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Joan Retallack. The work of literary critics provided an increasingly significant dialogue with the poets. Marjorie Perloff ’s “The Word as Such: Language Poetries in the Eighties” (American Poetry Review, 1984) was instrumental to bringing this work to a wider audience; Perloff ’s subsequent essays, along with books and essays by Jerome McGann, Jed Rasula, Michael Davidson, Alan Golding, and A. L. Nielsen, extended and deepened the poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. While few of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets were connected to universities in the 1970s, by the 1990s several of the poets had taken teaching jobs (some after completing graduate studies and some not). In 1991, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, Dennis Tedlock, and I founded the Poetics Program at SUNY-­Buffalo. Following on such nontraditional arts programs as Black Mountain College, this was a PhD program in which innovative poets taught literature rather than creative writing and graduate students combined work as active poets, editors, and scholars. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is associated not only with poetic practice but also with an active effort to reclaim the legacy of radical modernist poetry from revisionist antimodernist accounts. Strenuous efforts to place Gertrude Stein’s work at the center of first-­wave modernism have largely succeeded; equally important has been the greater attention to the second-­wave modernists such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Neidecker—the Objectivists—as well as Laura Riding and Mina Loy. There was also a clear, and much acknowledged, connection to Russian futurism and formalism. Unlike some modernist avant-­garde movements, the poets in the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were as much involved with an extension of the aesthetic and political radicalism of their poetic predecessors as with breaking with them to create new works. For a few, Blake, in his “Mental Fight,” remained a preceding poetic angel, as did Mallarmé and Baudelaire, Poe and Dickinson. Still, the greatest literary debt for most of these poets was probably the immediately prior generation of New American Poetry, to use the title of Don Allen’s 1960 anthology as a convenient label for the poetry and poetics of the New York School (Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler), the Beats (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman), the San Francisco Renaissance ( Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen), the Black Arts Movement (Amiri Baraka,

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Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight),2 Projectivism / Black Mountain (Larry Eigner, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, John Wieners), Ethnopoetics and anthologies (Rothenberg), and Talk/Performance poetry (David Antin).

Frames and Contexts Phil o sophy and Linguistic s Ludwig Wittgenstein is a foundational thinker for the turn to language, taken up, some might say with a vengeance, in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Wittgenstein’s work cannot directly be translated into a poetic practice, and his emphasis on ordinary language puts him at some distance from poetry that emphasizes invented and queer language. And yet Wittgenstein’s recognition of how the language we use shapes how we perceive the things of the world is fundamental to the work in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Some of the poets specifically cite Wittgenstein—his propositional style is an early ghost in the poetry of Palmer, while the fullest poetic account of this work comes in Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles (1987), where she turns his philosophical dialogues into gendered conversation. Among linguists, Roman Jakobson—who was closely associated with the Russian futurists—provides the most influential account of the poetic function: verbal language that foregrounds its material (acoustic and syntactic) features, providing an understanding of poetry as less about communicating a message than an engagement with the medium of verbal language itself. Another crucial philosophic source is the work of Walter Benjamin, both his interest in “language as such” in the context of media theory and his engagement with found or citational language. A larger context for these philosophical dispositions might be found in Emerson’s essays, where process is valued over predetermined or fixed goals and where mood and inconsistency is found to be a stronger affective ground than stylistic uniformity and continuity. Emerson’s emphasis on “aversion of conformity,” stressed by contemporary American philosopher Stanley Cavell, resonates with some of the poetics in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, despite Emerson’s attraction to reconciliation, which is at odds with the more polemical agonism and ideological conflict of the later poets. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was contemporary with the

2. But also the expanded field chartered by A. L. Nielsen and Lauri Ramey in Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans and What I Say (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006 and 2015).

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rise of poststructuralism in the U.S., and while poststructuralist thinking and that of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E overlap, the latter’s project was to relate such approaches to a radical poetry of invention. In this context, there is surely a symbiotic relation to the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, and, more specifically, Roland Barthes’s writing about writing, as in Writing Degree Zero (1953). More recently, the work of linguist George Lakoff on the importance of metaphors in framing meaning directly connects with the approaches to breaking frames and to reframing that are ubiquitous in much of the poetry under consideration here. Ideol ogy The poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, with the shadow of the Second World War still hanging over us. Several of the participants were active in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, and all were deeply affected by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The midcentury catastrophe of the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Japan created, for this generation of poets, a skepticism toward received ideas of technological, economic, and cultural progress—well known from accounts of the 60s and its countercultures, from psychedelic counterrealities to sexual counter-­ genders. There was a strong desire to connect oppositional political and cultural views with linguistically inventive writing, breaking sharply from leftist art that was representational and conventionally populist. At the most basic level, there was a sense that words do not always mean what they say, that language is never neutral but rather always betrays an ideological interest and unstated messages. This was the focus of the 1990 anthology that I edited, The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. The idea was not that poetry can be “pure” and beyond such interests—the sort of romantic ideology (in McGann’s phrase) that was rejected by the poets— but that poetry can “lay bare the device” by “making strange” or “defamiliarizing” (ostranie; the terms are from the Russian futurist Viktor Shklovsky); that is, poems can make the metaphoricity of our perception in and through language more palpable. This approach also related to Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation” or “distancing” effect (Verfremdungseffekt): the idea that one can look aslant at what one is experiencing, to get glimmers of its means of production. Surely, the influence of Marx hovers over all this, and especially his latter-­day interpreter Louis Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970). The Frankfurt School’s ideological critique, especially the work of Theodor Adorno, provides another useful

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frame for understanding these issues. But it should be noted that many of the most brilliant poets of this field did not read, and were not directly influenced by, the political, philosophical, and linguistic thinkers detailed here. Still, the ideas were in the air for all to breathe, as was the desire to formulate an “oppositional poetics,” to quote the title of an influential essay by Erica Hunt in The Politics of Poetic Form. Fe minism The feminism of the 1970s had a powerful effect on both poetic practice and social formation, which is not to say that the poets involved were free of the effects of misogyny among ourselves and in our culture. (Davidson has written about compulsory homosociality in the New American Poetry communities.) Formally, feminism offered a tangible and tantalizing diacritical perspective on the gender narratives of both grammar and the lyric, as exemplified by the work of Quebec poet Nicole Brossard. Hejinian’s signal essay “The Rejection of Closure,” in her 2000 The Language of Inquiry, is closely related to a critique of the Faustian desire to possess knowledge, which Hejinian contrasts with an epistemology figured in terms of Scheherazade’s refusal of closure. Hejinian’s critique, informed by feminism, provides a grounding for an alternative, exploratory, research-­oriented poetics. How(ever), edited by Kathleen Fraser starting in 1983, provided a crucial space for the exploration of these issues, which have been specifically addressed in critical writing and poems by Howe, Drucker, DuPlessis, Scalapino, Carla Harryman, Armantrout, Mullen, Hunt, Waldrop, Lauterbach, O’Sullivan, Moure, Myles, Joan Retallack, and Chris Tysh, among others, and pursued—in very different, often unexpected ways—by such younger writers as Juliana Spahr, Bergvall, Lisa Robertson, Nada Gordon, and Tracie Morris. Tra n spa rency, Ref erence, Meaning, and the Reader Silliman’s 1977 essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” focused on the transparency effect of much conventional writing, where language is used instrumentally, like a window, to reveal only what is on the other side of the pane. To Silliman, the erasure of the traces of glass—the social materiality of the linguistic—makes language into a commodity, valued for what it produces while its process of production is repressed. Silliman advocated a poetry that makes the social materiality of language more apparent (or opaque). Around the same time, McCaffery and

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Andrews were exploring the “politics of the referent” and advocating a poetry that foregrounded sound and syntax. Meaning and reference do not disappear from this new poetry, but other ways of making meaning, and a greater range of possibilities for linguistic reference, are activated. Such “language-­centered” writing was not intended to replace all other forms of writing but rather to open up new spaces for poetry and to combat the dogma that the only goal of writing is to produce transparent, conventionally representational works or I-­centered lyric utterances—direct expressions of an author’s feelings (as if unmediated by language). In this sense, Silliman, McCaffery, and Andrews were arguing for a poetry that did not use words instrumentally but rather created a non-­ purpose-­driven aesthetic space that allowed for pleasure in reflection, projection, and sensory engagement with verbal materials. This writing would create a very different role for the reader, as Mac Low argued: the work was not language centered but perceiver (or reader) centered. The imagination of readers was activated: they were not told what to think or feel or see but encouraged to make intuitive leaps: to interenact—as I like to say it—rather than passively consume. Certainly, many of the poets created a “small (or large) machine made of words” (in William Carlos Williams’s phrase), semiautonomous objects or contraptions that don’t so much tell as do. In this way, poetry becomes an act of construction rather than a transfer of preexisting information. Ex pression, Self, Voi ce, Rhetoric , Affec t The move toward opacity and away from transparency reflected a view that poetry is a mode of rhetoric, not an expression of unmediated truth. However, the typically pragmatist poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E rejected a hermeneutics of suspicion—the idea that truth and meaning are fundamentally unknowable—often associated with poststructuralism in theory and postmodernism in the arts. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was not about deconstruction as an end in itself but about reconstruction, emplacement, and enactment: it was constructivist. In the poetry, syllogistic logic and naturalistic plot gave way to intuitively felt, aesthetically designed, or programmatically arranged connections among elements of a work. The poem was imagined not as the fixed voice of a self-­contained ego conveying a predetermined, or paraphrasable, message but as a collage or constellation of textual elements: not voice, but voicings. The expression in the poem is not in the message of the poet’s autonomous lyric voice but in the process of an affective and dynamic compositional field. While the conventional lyric of the time stated or named its emotional content, this new poetry enacted its affective state. The move was from emptied-­out emotional be-

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havior to a new linguistic sentience. The self was not something assumed in such poems but found in the act of collaboration with the language of the poem and the reader’s response. Speech Grenier’s “i hate speech” from the first issue of This magazine (1971) is often mistakenly taken as a manifesto against speech; it should not be missed that the remark is itself a speech act. Grenier’s call is against the way utterance is tamed and indeed reified in much conventional voice-­ centered poetry. Indeed the vernacular, dialect, slang, and speech acts— voicings more than “voice”—pervade the poetry under discussion here. Greenwald’s work, with its down-­to-­earth vocabulary, is rooted in the spoken, even if it spins the spoken into artifice or variation and recombination. Marked local accent also plays an important part in the work of Raworth, Lorenzo Thomas, and Michael Gizzi, and Claudia Rankine’s uncanny voicings. Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995) is a masterpiece of the vernacular, taking demotic (everyday) “folk” material such as nursery rhymes and African American songs, calls, and speech to quilt a wild lyric ballad, rooted in its embodied rhythms. Minima l ism From the late 1960s to the mid-­1970s, Clark Coolidge and Aram Saroyan created poems with very basic linguistic units, from a single word on a page to juxtapositions of two words, from a work made up of only prepositions to works with permutations of a restricted vocabulary. Greenwald’s 1975 Makes Sense and Raworth’s 1974 Ace poems with single-­word lines might be considered in this context, as well as Kit Robinson’s 1976 Dolch Stanzas, made up of a small set of the most frequently used words in English. Carl Andre’s 1970s grid poems are also related. Such minimalism focused attention on small units of language, which were rhythmically charged by the repetition and displacement inherent in their serial or permutational forms. Grenier’s 1978 Sentences consisted of five hundred large-­format index cards, each with a short poem or utterance; freed from the constraint of a bound book, the work could be read in any order; this was not a collection of tiny poems but a long poem with shifting relations among the parts.

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Disju ncti on, Fragment, Rec ombinati on, Coll age, O ver l ay, and Constell ation One of the most typical stylistic features associated with the L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E poetries of the 1970s and 1980s is disjunction or parataxis. Logical connectors between elements have been elided to create a poetic force field that relies on sound, rhythm, motif, intuitively felt connections, or structural programs/constraints. On one end of the spectrum, there is Silliman’s Tjanting (1978), which uses the Fibonacci series to determine the number of sentences in each paragraph. At the other end is Susan Howe’s rhetorically thrilling juxtapositions of historical material as a way to giving voice to the silenced. Scalapino has worked with linguistic displacement/replacement to create four-­dimensional sonic holograms with deep affective resonance. These approaches—and they are just a few of very many—work not toward fragmentation but from fragmentation (often considered the social given). The works use disjunction and overlay to create constellation (to use Benjamin’s term) and rhythmic oscillation, making manifest new textual pleasure at each turn. Proc edure, Progra m, Constraint Averting apparently “natural” writing styles as well as traditional forms also gave rise to the extensive use of constraints, procedures, programs, invented structures, and syncretic forms. Though influenced by Mac Low’s use of “chance” operations (text-­selection procedures) on found language (what he called “diastic,” for reading through these given texts), and also the use of constraints by the French OuLiPo group, much of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E work used such programs either to generate material that was incorporated into a poem or to determine the external form of the poem while freely composing its text within the invented form or constraint. And often constraints were mixed or violated. Retallack, who often works with procedural form, considers the importance of John Cage in The Poethical Wager (2003). Since 1990, the use of constraints and algorithms has increased, with the emergence of digital poetics and poetry in programmable media. Glazier, Chris Funkhouser, Matthew Kirchenbaum, John Cayley, Jim Rosenberg, and Brian Kim Stefans are pushing the work discussed here into new frontiers. Craig Dworkin, in his poetry and essays, has expanded the possibilities of the conceptual poetics of procedure, exploring extreme constraints that approach the unreadable and the unconscious. The most renowned recent work of constraint-­based poetry is Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001), a work in prose format in which every chapter uses just one vowel. Bök is now

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pushing constraints to beyond the human horizon, working on a biopoem generated via DNA sequencing; irony is useful in considering his projects. Pro se Many of the works of poetry in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E use prose, rather than verse, format. This use of prose is distinct from the genre of “prose poem” that has developed in the wake of Baudelaire’s prose poems. The poets have developed two distinct modalities: imploded syntax and serialized sentences. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E also called for a new approach to the essay, averting exposition in favor of wild combinations, shifts of mood and tone, hyperbole, enigma, lyric exuberance, rhythmic propulsion, telegraphic immediacy, digression, aphorism, contradiction, investigation, and dialogue. We see this in such works as Nathaniel Mackey’s ongoing epistolary novel/ essay From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (1986, 1993, 2001, 2008), Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985) and later essay collections, Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (1994) and later collections, Ben Friedlander’s Simulcast (2004) (rewriting Poe’s essays with current content), Theresa Hak Cha’s Dictee (1978), Bruce Boone’s My Walk with Bob (1978), and Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1970), Alan Davies’s Signage (1987), as well as in the dialogic (multivoiced) criticism of McGann. Nick Piombino’s Boundary of Blur (1993) and Theoretical Objects (1999) have most fully explored the relation of self-­disclosure, free association, and psychoanalysis (in both the form and content of these works). Free Writing Imploded syntax prose is sometimes thought of as “free writing” or improvised prose, even “automatic” or unconscious writing (putting on paper whatever comes into your head, without analytic planning): phrases tumble on phrases, words bouncing off one another in extended sentences, if there are sentences at all. In fact, there is a great deal of artifice in this approach, and a variety of concepts determine the form and style. Bernadette Mayer’s Memory and Studying Hunger (both 1976) are exemplary, while Coolidge’s “prosoid” works from the 1970s and 80s suggest jazz-­inflected improvisation. At around the same time, Peter Seaton forged perhaps the densest, most magisterial, and awesomely refractory work of this kind (sometimes mixing verse and prose), while Lynne Dreyer created prose works which she likened to the experience of swimming. In contrast, James Sherry engaged and poetically exploded discursive aspects of genre prose. A diaristic/journal feel often pervades some

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of these works, most explicitly in Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal (1975), composed of three conflicting “voices”: one clairvoyantly seen (in CAPS), one commenting (in italics), one narrating. For Weiner, visually arranged prose (with juxtaposed typographic fonts) was an ideal medium to map consciousness, understood not through a single or unified voice but through a melded clashing of voices. The New Sentence Silliman introduced the term “new sentence” to denote the serial or disjunctive ordering of grammatical sentences, such as one finds in Tjanting. There are many works of this type, but the best known is Hejinian’s My Life (1980), an autobiography, written when she was thirty-­seven, comprising thirty-­seven prose sections of thirty-­seven sentences each; key sentences recur in different orders throughout the work (she revised the work to forty-­fives when she turned forty-­five). Another remarkable work in this mode is Perelman’s A.K.A. (1978), where paradigmatic sentences move from statement to aphorism to philosophical reflection to autobiography to lament. David Bromige’s acutely funny “My Poetry” (1980) paratactically wove together reviews of his work. Such approaches to prose poetry have been extended more recently by Spahr in the riveting, woven prose of The Transformation (2007), as well as in the pervasively citational, politically acute work of Canadians Jeff Derksen and Kevin Davies. Spru ng Lyri c The lyric is a vexed term for the post-­1975 poetics of invention; such lyric resistance has paradoxically led to a resurgence of new lyric intensities in startlingly varied forms. Sprung lyric stands between the sentence-­driven and discursive drives of the new prose-­format poems and the traditional I-­centered free verse lyric of personal sincerity or epiphany. In the 1970s, Diane Ward published a series of books that seemed to actualize the space of interpersonal relationship, from attachment to distancing. Lauterbach has developed an open field of crystallized, sometimes elegiac, processual lyrics, using fragments in the service of sonic excess: torn moments of language are left “as is” so as readers we can piece them together as we grapple toward a shared articulation. Palmer has developed a related form of analytic (non-­I-­centered) lyric, often more propositional in texture. Armantrout has created a unique form of new-­sentence lyric, where each sentencelike unit is broken into phrasal elements, each part cracked open to show its dark matter. The parts come together into a whole the way a puzzle with missing pieces comes together in a dream. Armantrout’s

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often dark poems hover between irony, whimsy, and astringent social critique. As in the work of Elaine Equi, bemused popular cultural references vie with sardonic commentary on everyday life in America. Messerli’s sprung lyrics of the 70s and 80s often used riddles and puns to created a linguistic pop and pull in the poems. John Yau has pioneered a surrealist-­ inflected social lyric, exploring cultural identity and interpersonal relationships. Fred Wah’s social lyrics have moved toward improvisation. Norman Fischer, a Zen priest, has used lyric and an open-­ended form for reflection and meditation. Hank Lazer has written eloquently on his and Fischer’s fusion of Zen, jazz, and open-­ended reflection in the new non-­ I-­ centered lyrics. Alan Davies’s preternaturally precise, uncanny, enigmatic, poignantly beautiful poems are also influenced by Zen. Sprung lyrics party with wild forms—what I’ve called “Nude Formalism”—from Ted Berrigan’s 1964 serial love poems, The Sonnets, peppered with unattributed literary “steals,” to Joseph Ceravolo’s 1965 syntactically ecstatic Fits of Dawn, and Tom Weatherly’s aesthetically radical echoes of Baraka in Maumau American Cantos (1970), to, in subsequent decades, Will Alexander’s rhapsodic “exobiotic” excursions into the hyperreality of the cosmos, to Maggie O’Sullivan’s “colliderings”—her trembling, warbling, stuttering charm-­poems. The work of slightly younger poets inhabiting this range of poetic possibilities includes Peter Gizzi’s “threshold songs,” with their abstraction and attenuated rhythms; Nada Gordon’s zany “high” syntax and lyric exuberance (in her 2007 Folly); Lee Ann Brown’s often balladic polyversity; Elizabeth Willis’s synthesis of the Pre-­Raphaelites, epistemology, and historical counternarratives; Stacy Doris’s conceptual forms; Myung Mi Kim’s tense negotiations between Korean and English; Brian Kim Stefan’s ventriloquist acrobatics; Rod Smith’s laconic wit; and Tonya Foster’s flickering sonograms of spaces, people, and times. Appropriation, Citation, Qu otation, Origi nali t y, D ocum en tary, and the F ou nd The move away from directly self-­expressive lyric poetry went with a questioning of originality: the self was seen as quintessentially social rather than autonomously individual; verbal language was viewed as a vast collective record to be mined for poetic use, whether in a documentary mode or in a collage or palimpsest, or through the pervasive use of “sampling” in a work. Such repurposing of found language was partly fueled by an aesthetic interest in the sensation of the citational, the palpable sense of something being quoted or put on display: nontransparent “language to be looked at” (to use a phrase of Robert Smithson’s). Since the 1990s, both “Flarf ” and “Conceptual” poetry have further

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e­ xplored this line of inquiry. K. Silem Mohammed’s Flarf in Deer Head Nation (2003) is one of a number of works using digital “data mining” as a poetic tool; in this case, the book title was a Google search term, producing poems—often with grotesque Americana motifs—from the resulting search pages. Jena Osman has pursued a new documentary poetics. Kenneth Goldsmith has created (or assembled, since “Uncreative Writing” is his calling card) a series of epic works in which the found material (transcribed weather or traffic reports, for example) creates the illusion of being presented uncut and unedited. Goldsmith is something of an alchemist or trickster figure, conjuring up loads of creative thought and solid-­ gold frames of invention from the base materials of found language. Col l aboration As an extension of the exchange that was at the heart of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, collaboration among the poets was frequent and became a stylistic foundry for some of the most inventive works of the milieu. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published the supersized Legend by Andrews, McCaffery, Silliman, Ray DiPalma, and me (1980); Mayer collaborated with Coolidge, Hejinian with Harryman and Scalapino, McCaffery with bpNichol. Collaborations between the poets and artists in other mediums was even more common, with Steve Clay’s Granary Books emerging in the 1990s as a key publisher of poet-­artist collaborations. Poetry Pl astiqu e In 2001, Jay Sanders and I cocurated the Poetry Plastique show in New York, focusing on poetry that moved off the page, from visual and concrete poetry to poetry sculpture, painting, and installation. Drucker, in her book art and several of her critical studies, has most fully explored the visual materiality of poetry. From 1986 to 1996, Susan Bee and Mira Schor edited M/E/A/N/I/N/G, focusing on artists’ writing and partly extending the work of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s magazine 0–9 (1967–69) is a rich source for the intersection of poetry and conceptual art. Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s 1971 The Mechanism of Meaning set a crucial precedent for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. It is illuminating to consider the work of language and book artists such as Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Tom Phillips, Richard Tuttle, Xu Bing, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Ligorano/Reese in this context, which would also include Grenier’s hand-­drawn poems, DiPalma’s rubber stamp books, McCaffery’s typewriter works, Tan Lin’s ambient installations, and Ronald Johnson’s Ark. Site specificity, beyond the book, is another dimension of Poetry Plas-

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tique. The acute relevance for poetry of Smithson’s engagement with site specificity has been taken up recently by Lytle Shaw in Fieldworks. Tra n sl ation, Trancreation, Idiolect, Nom adic s Writing poems in a made-­up language is a legacy of Russian futurism, James Joyce, and also Lewis Carroll, with strong connections to both sound and visual poetry. Frank Kuenstler’s Lens (1964), N. H. Pritchard’s The Matrix: Poems (1970) and Eecchhooeess (1971), and David Melnick’s Pcoet (1975), as well as much of P. Inman’s work of the 70s and 80s, foregrounded the possibilities for ideolect, taking nonstandardization down to the level of the word. In 1983 Melnick followed up Pcoet with Men in Aida, a queerly homophonic Homer, translating the sound of the Greek into an ideolectical American. The poetics of translation inform many aspects of the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and there is a kinship with the critical explorations on this topic of scholar/translator Lawrence Venuti and Joris, as well as the 70s speculations on translation by McCaffery and nichol (writing at the Toronto Research Group): Translation as metaphor, or better to say metaphor as translation—from English to English, dialect to ideolect, thought to text, visual to verbal, and so on. Joris makes the case for a “nomadic poetics” in the space between languages: both for poetry as an othering of language and for poetry as a second language. M. Nourbese-­Philip’s poetry focuses on the anguish of writing in the other’s language. A new horizon may be multilectical poetry, as for example Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 Dictee and Anne Tardos’s 2003 The Dik-­Dik’s Solitude. Perf orma nce In L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, all poetry is a performance rather than a statement of disembodied content. At the most fundamental level, the poetry reading provides a site for the work to come into a new life in sound. It’s not only to read but also to hear the poets being discussed, and many of them have developed quite distinct performance modes, from the very understated to the extravagant. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998), a collection of essays that I edited, explores this topic. In their 2010 anthology The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945–1985, Kevin Killian and David Brazil include plays by Harryman, Perelman, Waldman, Robinson, Greenwald, Andrews, Gordon, Scalapino, the Waldrops, Steve Benson, Thomas, Alan Bernheimer, and Fiona Templeton. Charles Borkhuis should also be mentioned in this context. Killian is a central force in the Bay Area poet’s theater, infusing it with something of the queer ener-

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gies of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company. Messerli, in both his publishing and his own work, has also been a strong force for poet’s theater. Templeton and Mac Wellman are poet-­playwrights whose work, like that of Richard Foreman, has become a key force for poet’s theater in New York. Sound poetry and its conceptual extensions is another aspect of performance, pursued in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. In the 70s and 80s, McCaffery’s and Benson’s work was deeply tied to performance, while in 1982 Andrews began his long-­time sound performances accompanying dancer Sally Silvers. A key contemporary, whose work is too rarely acknowledged in accounts like this, is the “spoken word” pioneer Gil Scott-­ Heron. New modes of what Bergvall calls “performance writing” have been taken up by Bergvall, Bök, Julie Patton, Rodrigo Toscano, the Black Took Collective (Dawn Lundy Martin, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Duriel E. Harris), and Morris. Morris combines aspects of performance poetry and sound poetry to create electrifying pieces that verge on song; her work is often inflected by African American sounds and themes. Many of these poets have collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and dancers. Henry Hills’s 1985 film Money documents the New York scene at the time. Like Hills, filmmaker-­poet Abigail Child was a central figure in that New York scene, just as filmmaker Warren Sonbert was vital to the Bay Area scene. Ec opoeti cs In the 70s and 80s, Christopher Dewdney wrote a set of geologically stratified poems in a pulsing, imploded-­syntax prose, both visionary and dystopian. The collage lyric of Johnson explores heart, hearth, and earth. Ecopoetics, as framed by Jonathan Skinner in his magazine of that title, brings together radical formal forays into writing as ecosystems and environment of/as/against language. Berssenbrugge, in her long lines of attenuated lyrics, uses language as a medium for hyperperception and expanded, non-­ego-­centered consciousness.

Onward: Dissonance, Ambience, and the Pataquerical The more open the legacy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the more successful our approach. Both a historical moment in North American poetry and poetics and a philosophical and political orientation toward poetry and the language arts, the expanded field, both after and next to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, has been characterized by the ingeniousness of its appropriations, deformations, and reorientations. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E pursued a poetry aversive to convention, standard-

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ization, and received forms, often prizing eccentricity, oddness, abrupt shifts of tone, peculiarity, error, and the abnormal—poetry that begins in disability (see Davidson’s 2008 Concerto for Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body). This is what I call the pataquerical imperative (a syncretic term suggesting weirdness, wildness, and precarious querulousness by combining inquiry with ’pataphysics, French protomodernist Alfred Jarry’s “science” of exceptions, imaginary solutions, and swerves). Dissonance is certainly a signal manifestation of what might also be called the pataqueasical, and it marks perhaps the starkest break from the harmonious or melodic or tonal lyricism of much free verse poetry. In the 1980s, Andrews perfected a dissonant, unsettling, often angry poetry, breaking down cultural detritus at the microlevel and remixing it into something strangely exquisite in its consciousness of itself. In contrast, starting in the new millennia, Lin has created an “ambient” poetics: easy listening, low key, sampled at a macrolevel from readily identifiable materials. The future horizon for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E lies between imaginary poles: dissonance and ambience, opacity and radical legibility, concept and aesthesis, with the full force of the irony of these artifices and the artifice of these ironies. Beyond the expanded field, it is the task of this poetics to acknowledge errancy, malformation, system failure. We are all pataqueroid now.

Coda: Enough!

In these difficult times, let us not draw away from our poetics in an attempt to redress the ominous possibilities of future US government policies or the onerous effects of current government policies. As poets, we need to pursue our own forms of ethical and aesthetic response rather than engage in the sort of pronouncement by fiat and moral presumption of President Bush and his partisans. In his State of the Union message on January 28, 2002, Mr. Bush said, “America’s purpose is more than to follow a process; it is to achieve a result.” This statement alone provides sufficient evidence to oppose his policies. What our America stands on, its foundation, is a commitment to process over results, to finding by doing, to thinking by responding. Solutions made outside of an open-­ended process compound whatever problems we face. If this statement does not seem forceful enough, if it appears too uncertain or insufficiently categorical, so be it. If we are to talk of “poets” against the war, then what is it in our poems—as opposed to our positions as citizens—that does the opposing? Perhaps it might be an approach to politics, as much as to poetry, that doesn’t feel compelled to repress ambiguity or complexity nor to substitute a skeptic’s dialogue for the righteous monologue. At these trying time we keep being hectored toward moral discourse, toward turning our work into digestible messages. This too is a casualty of the war machine, the undermining of the value of the projects of art, of the aesthetic. Art is never secondary to moral discourse but its teacher. Art, unregulated by a predetermined message, is all the more urgent in a time of crisis. Indeed, it is a necessary response to crisis, exploring the deeper roots of our alienation and offering alternative ways not only to think but also to imagine and indeed to resist. Enough, an Anthology of Poetry and Writings against the War, ed. Rick London and Leslie Scalapino (Oakland: O Books, 2003). Initially presented at the Enough reading and launch at the Bowery Poetry Club on March 9, 2003.

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A decade ago, just after the previous Persian war, Leslie Scalapino, the convener of today’s session, sent Dead Souls, a series of searing indictments of that war, to a number of newspapers, who declined to publish, as editorial matter, a kind of writing they found inaccessible. But the task for poetry is not to translate itself into the language of social and linguistic norms but to question those norms and, indeed, to explore the ways they are used to discipline and contain dissent. Poetry offers not a moral compass but an aesthetic probe. And it can provide a radical alternative to the outcome-­driven thinking that has made the Official Morality of the State a mockery of ethical thinking and of international democratic values. We all saw the effect of outcome-­driven thinking in Florida during the fall of 2000, when the Republican National Committee launched a unilateral antidemocratic campaign, capturing the state power of the executive branch from the winner of the popular vote for president. To achieve their goal, Mr. Bush and his partisans had to turn against their own espoused belief in states’ rights. In the course of their righteous zeal to win at any cost, the Bush faction turned against the will both of the Supreme Court and of the electorate of the State of Florida. The prestige and integrity of the United State Supreme Court was collateral damage to Mr. Bush’s determined insistence that ends justify means. The Supreme Court, which we once thought of as a guarantor of liberty, was exposed as a tool of the ultra-­right-­wing agenda of the Republican National Committee. This past week, we have seen this same Supreme Court rule that fifty years of incarceration is not cruel and unusual punishment for a string of three petty crimes. Once again, we see the contempt the chief justice, Mr. Rehnquist, and his Star Chamber cohorts, Justices Scalia and Thomas, have for the shared meaning of our common language, shared meanings that are the foundation for the system of laws to which we have given consent through the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. “Unilateralism” is not just the course the Executive Branch is pursuing, with disastrous consequence, in foreign policy, but also the policy it pursues domestically, in its assault on our liberties, on the poor, and indeed on our aspirations for a democratic society. So I come here this afternoon, to the Bowery Poetry Club, to say, with all of you, enough!

Gertrude Stein The Difference Is Spreading

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) is the most radically inventive American poet of the modernist period. Yet recognition of the scale of her achievement has been thwarted by resistance to her language-­centered practice, which, paradoxically, has kept her work at the cutting edge of poetics for a century. The greater the resistance to Stein, the more radical her work becomes. Yet inevitably, despite new flashpoints, Stein’s work has finally, in the twenty-­first century, moved, as she imagined, from “outlaw to classic.”1 But is Stein even American? Since her writing is in English with an American accent, it hard to see her classified as anything but. And yet she was a resident of France writing in English, and her Americanness is a term of art, an artifice, which is, ironically, what gives her the strongest claim to be an exemplary American poet—that is, if America is understood more as a utopian possibility than as a nativist condition. Stein well understood this. For her, the central ontological fact of American literature was that it was written by people who are new to their world. This is what made her “a real American.”2 As she wrote in “What Is English Literature,” the centuries-­old vertical relation of names and place in the “island life” of England was displaced by a newly emerging horizontal relation of name and place. Stein calls this American: And so the poetry of England is so much what it is, it is the poetry of the things with which any of them are shut in in their daily, completely daily island life. . . . And now think how American literature tells something. It A History of Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 1. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, originally published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1926. Available at EPC Digital Library, writing​ .upenn​.edu​/ library​/Stein​_Composition​-­as​-­Explanation​.html. 2. Stein writes in the opening page of The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Olympia Press digital, 2011, play​.google​.com​/store​/ books ​/details​?id​=​sKrg​-­PLj70MC): “It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American . . .”

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tells something because that anything is not connected with what would be daily living if they had it. . . . Think about all persistent American writing. There is inside it as separation, a separation from what is chosen to what is that from which it has been chosen. Think of them, from Washington Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry James. They knew that there is a separation a quite separation between what is chosen and from what there is the choosing.3

Stein’s radically antinativist view of America is closely connected to a remark of Emerson in “Experience”: “I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West,”4 and also to Charles Olson’s metaphorically westward view, in his book about Moby Dick, that “space” is the defining dynamic for Americanness,5 where “space” is as much linguistic as otherwise. Stein’s choosing her Americanness contrasts with her being chosen as Jew, an affiliation to which she is aversive. All of which makes Stein a kind of affiliative (self-­defining) antinomian, linking her to Emily Dickinson and the antinomian strain in American literature,6 something Stein also figures as her “genius” and marks her anti-­identitarian view of human mind over human nature in “Identity: A Poem” (to which I shall return). Stein was a writer of nonnational modernism, a foundational member of a permanent diaspora of writers-­in-­English who hail from otherwheres. English was not Stein’s native language but a language of the pen, and in this she is a mother to the growing number of poets, from all over the world, who choose English as the language of their verse. That’s not to say that Stein’s writing is not rooted in American vernacular but that this foundation was a choice: she is local by election, not by circumstance. In her modernist compositions, Stein found an alternative to the teleological thinking that underwrites much aesthetics as well as ethics: the idea that meaning lies outside or beyond what is at hand. She found meaning inside the words of which a poem is composed, a discovery and exploration of the wordness of words that has parallels in Einstein’s discovery 3. Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), 15, 50, 51. 4. Stanley Cavell takes Emerson’s phrase for the title of his book, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989, repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 5. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (1947), in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 6. See Susan Howe, The Birth-­Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993).

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of relativity, Freud’s uncovering of the unconscious, and Wittgenstein’s encounter with ordinary language.7 In Stein’s work, every word has a potentially equal weight in a democracy of language. Rather than emphasize nouns or verbs, Stein created a writing in which articles and prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions, would count as much as nouns and verbs, where the words and phrases are no longer subordinated to received prescriptions of grammar but shimmer in syntactic equality in poems that avert beginnings and endings for the ongoingness of middles: poems that elide past and future in favor of continuous presents.8 As when paintings collapse figures onto ground so that the action of the painting occurs on the same plane, without the subordination of perspective, Stein’s compositional space, in her most radical works, collapses the separation of viewing and viewed, see-­ er and seen, providing a breakthrough for the Baudelerian impasse that had pushed the poem to the verge of voyeurism, objectification, and spectacle.9 Perhaps this achievement is best described in terms of representation, for Stein created works that do not represent something other than what is happening as it is happening, works where the entity of writing takes on a fullness it rarely is allowed to sustain, where literary figures are grounded in “actual word stuff ” 10 and where the hierarchic distinction between figure and ground is collapsed into a compositional plane where words sing not so much for their supper as for our collective succor. Stein’s poetry is made up of everyday words, with a marked absence of literary allusion, symbolism, and the use of traditional form of lyric poetry, including the verse line. This gives her a work a distinctly different cast from that of her contemporaries T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound but aligns her, albeit obliquely, with William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Mina Loy. In Stein’s early novel Three Lives, she worked out some of the key issues of her subsequent work. She found poetry in African American speech. “Melanctha: Each One as She May,” while steeped in racist primitivism, 7. See my “Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature” (1972), which takes up the relation of Wittgenstein and Stein (Asylum’s Press Digital Edition, 2012: jacket2​.org​/commentary​/ three​- ­compositions​-­philosophy​-­and​-­literature​-­1972). 8. Stein uses the term “continuous present” in “Composition as Explanation.” 9. Peter Nicholls takes up this point with great acumen in Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 10. Williams, The Correspondence of Williams Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 544 (1928).

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breaks open the prose sentence to rhythmic patterning, especially variation through repetition, that hewed close to the vernacular, bringing the spoken into the written: It ain’t very easy for you to understand what I was meaning by what I was just saying to you, and perhaps some of the good people I like so wouldn’t think very much, any more than you do, Miss Melanctha, about the ways I have to be good. But that’s no matter Miss Melanctha. . . . No, Miss Melanctha too, I don’t mean this except only just the way I say it. I ain’t got any other meaning Miss Melanctha, and it’s that what I mean when I am saying about being really good. . . . I don’t know as you understand now any better what I mean by what I was just saying to you. But you certainly do know now Miss Melanctha, that I always mean it what I say when I am talking.11

In her close listening to black speech (and to the broken German-­English of “The Gentle Lena”12), Stein, foundering, found essential ingredients for her non-­speech-­based, nonrepresentational compositional practices, while developing the style of repeated saying as meaning that would reach fruition in The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family’s Progress. For Stein, repetition, as it emerges from the vernacular, is a constantly shifting modality that allows the individual “insistence” of each person to emerge. For Stein, repetition is the opposite of sameness, for each repetition is a variance. Repetition resists essence: A thing that seems to be exactly the same thing may seem to be a repetition but is it. . . . Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be. . . . Expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”13 11. Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha,” in Three Lives (1909), paragraph 171, available at bartleby​.com, www​.bartleby​.com​/74​/21b​.html. 12. “You don’t know how nice you like it Herman when you try once how you can do it. You just don’t be afraid of nothing, Herman.” “The Gentle Lena,” in Three Lives, paragraph 119, as posted at bartleby​.com, www​.bartleby​.com​/74​/31​.html. 13. “Portraits and Repetitions,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, ed. Catha­ rine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 292, 288. Lyn Hejinian discusses this point in “The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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Stein’s first great, still unassimilated, masterpiece (I use this word less ironically than polemically) was The Making of Americans (1903–11), which begins as a nineteenth-­century novel of the Jewish American immigrant experience and ends as a breakthrough epic poem, where the phrasal repetition of her earlier work becomes, in “David Hersland” and “History of a Family’s Progress,” the final two sections of the work, a spellbinding, pulsing modular repetition of word clusters that breaks with any sense of speaking or “insistence” and resembles more logical, or quasi-­procedural, permutations of propositions. In the linguistically opaque “wordness” of the final section, Stein foreshadows the formal breakthrough she would make in Tender Buttons, while conveying a Zen/existential sense of life-­as-­ living, without logos or telos: Anyone is one being one being living and anyone is saying something and anyone is saying anything again and anyone is one having been in family living and anyone is one not beginning anything of being in any family having and anyone is one being one being in family living and being one then not beginning anything again and being one then saying anything again and having been saying something and being then not saying anything and being then again not saying something and being then again saying anything. . . . Almost every one coming to be almost an old one, coming to be an old one is one having it then as being something existing being one going on being living. Almost every one being one coming to be almost an old one is one having been being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be an old one is one having been being in some family having. Almost every one coming to being an old one is one having been being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be almost an old one is being in some family living. Almost every one coming to be an old one is being in some family living. (708, 713)

Although Three Lives and The Making of Americans were radical innovations, neither was as revolutionary as Tender Buttons (begun in 1912 and published in 1914).14 Tender Buttons is the touchstone work of radical modernist poetry, the fullest realization of the turn to language and the most 14. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, ed. Seth Perlow (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014). Perlow has made some changes from previous presentations of the work, based on a review of relevant documents. They include a change in the way the titles appear. References to this work are given by section title. There are about fifteen thousand words in the work, which is in prose format, though not a prose poem as that term has been previously defined. This is about five times the length

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perfect realization of wordness, where word and object merge. No work from Europe or the Americas had gone so far in creating a work of textual autonomy, where the words do not represent something outside of the context in which they are performed and where the meanings are made in and through composition and arrangement. The sections of the work are not “about” subjects that are discussed but are their own discrete word objects (verbal constellations). Meaning in these works is not something to be extracted or deciphered but rather to be responded to, so that the reader’s associations create a cascading perceptual experience, guided by the uncanny arrangement of the words. The more readers can associate with the multiple vectors of each word or phrase meanings, the more fully they can feast on the unfolding semantic banquet of the work. The key is not to puzzle it out but to let the figurative plenitude of each work play out; for, indeed, this work is not invested in a predetermining structure or in precluding or abstracting meaning. Tender Buttons does not resist figuration but entices it. And the work is rife with linguistic and philosophical investigation as well as an uncannily acute self-­awareness of its own processes. Consider the title, which has many associations that bear a direct relation to Stein’s poetics. Buttons are used to fasten (attach or join) discrete pieces of fabric; this suggests a compositional practice akin to quilting and collage and not only situates the work as a form of practical art or craft but also suggests a connection to what has often been considered (and denigrated as) women’s work (buttons are often ornamental or decorative). The sense of domestic space is also suggested by the section subtitles “Rooms” and “Food”—suggested only, because the association is loose. You press buttons: the operating system here is point and click in a touch-­ sensitive textual environment. A button is also a small protuberance: stud or knob or bud (its etymological root). Tender Buttons suggests nipples or clitorises: the poetics is decentered eroticism (meaning disseminated evenly over the body of the text, not cathected onto nouns or plot), which is to say the work is aversive to phallic or climax-­oriented satisfaction. Tender Buttons, while not a manifesto, advocates a poetics of acting “so that there is no use in a center,” where “the difference is spreading.”15 Tender, like the poem, is gently caressing, fragile, soft (rather than rigid or hard), edible (tender food), effeminate (weak or delicate). But tender also means of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 “The Waste Land,” the most canonical American long poem of the era. 15. The iconic “Act as if . . .” is the first sentence of “Rooms,” the second part of the work. “The difference is spreading” is from the first section of “Objects,” the first part of the work.

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money, something offered in exchange for something else, as in legal tender.16 In the semiotic economy of the poem, words are tender and the poem is fundamentally involved with language as a system of exchange (rather than “pointing,” word to object). Yet Stein’s work is not random but intended; as she says, “no mistake is intended,” even if she is a “mischief intender.”17 And Stein’s approach to composition is to be less a controlling of language than its tender. Now let’s segue into the first part of the first section of the three-­part work: A carafe, that is a blind glass. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

This poem addresses the relation of word and object (this first section of Tender Buttons is called “Objects”), or perhaps better to say signifier and signified. It brings to mind Ferdinand de Saussure’s suggestion in his contemporaneous Cours de linguistique générale (1906–11) that language works by creating a system of difference of one sound to another. Difference also suggests sexual or gender difference. In trying to break down the difference between signifiers and signifieds, Stein lets words “be” themselves, stand for nothing but what they are. Stein says that “the difference is spreading”—on the one hand this suggests that difference is proliferating, while on the other hand it suggests a way to see signifier and signified fused or melted onto one plane, when we “spread” words instead of using words “in a system of pointing.” Think of painting with words or think, in painting, again, about breaking down the foreground and background of perspective to get the “radical flattening” of some “abstract” painting (i.e., all surface, no depth). So, says Stein, this approach is not random or chaotic or meaningless because it doesn’t “point” or doesn’t use resemblance (“not unordered in not resembling”: not unordered but rather ordered differently). The poem then might be seen as a carafe (a transparent/glass container: one view of what language is) that is a “blind glass” (one that you don’t see through because it is filled with something dark, so it takes 16. “Tender” appears ten times in the work, always suggesting tenderness, but also note “a transfer is not neglected” (“Roastbeef ”). While I don’t think the ten/ tender was planned, the modus operandi of the works potentiates such serendipitous collusions. 17. “Breakfast” and “Mutton,” the second and third section of “Food”; italics added.

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possession of itself ). Now, circle back to the double meaning of “spectacle”: eyeglasses and something one looks at from a distance, something one is separated from, as by a glass, or even the frame of a stage. But imagine if we could melt this difference between us and a world we look at as spectacle, imagine if we could avert looking at our words as glasses that pro­ject distance, that separate us from the world. How can we break down this difference, this separation? How can we turn objects, how can we turn words, into tender buttons? This is not what the poem means. This is not a paraphrase. But it sketches a set of investments that run through the full work. Those investments come in the form of a constellation of repeated words. Stein’s approach is to both derange and rearrange: “There was an occupation,” she writes at the beginning of “Rooms.” Reading this work presents a necessary challenge to thematic close reading, which won’t work, while still requiring close scrutiny through an associational/ambient reading of the linguistic prompts and an allegorical reading of form (thinking about what the form means).18 All key words in Tender Buttons are repeated numerous times, but the repetition is distributed throughout the work, making much of the poem less rhythmically repetitive and more abstract than other Stein works. Among the most frequently used words (after articles and conjunctions) are such forms of to be as is (1,017 times, almost 7 percent of the words used):19 the copulative is literarily procreative. There follows a very high frequency of be, are, and being (in keeping with Stein’s approach to the “continuous present”), as well as was. Other frequently used words include little (90 times), means (44), strange (25), as well as makes, shows, color, white, whole, change, single, same, suppose, and nothing. The word difference appears 13 times in the work; when differ and different are included, it occurs 24 times. Center occurs 22 times. Come or coming or comes makes 35 shows, as in the specifically erotic “Cuddling comes in continuing a change” but also “The truth has come” (and keeps coming). Resemblance and arrangement each come into the text about a dozen times. In “Roastbeef,” the opening section of “Food,” the second part of Ten18. This use of allegory is developed by Michael Golston in Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). See also the set of readings of Tender Buttons in the sixth issue (December 1978) of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, eclipsearchive​.org ​/ projects​/LANGUAGE​/ language​.html. 19. In contrast is constitutes less than 2 percent of the words in “The Waste Land.” Moreover, none of the key words from Tender Buttons occur with any frequency, if at all, in Eliot’s poem.

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der Buttons, Stein briefly returns to rhythmic repetition through the use of gerunds that create a palpable sense of “continuous present.” This passage is among the most evocative and enthralling of the work: In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

If Emerson saw meaning as inflected by mood,20 Stein brings it into a dynamically diurnal intimacy with the feeling of time passing, from morning to evening, as well as the movements of meaning through the changes of resting, mounting, resignation, recognition, and recurrence. We are pinched awake by recognizing these conditions and by recognizing a view from “outside” ourselves and “inside” ourselves; indeed, it is this torquing of outside and inside that marks language’s semiotic play, hear / not here. Words shift in use so that our norms and standards can take flight in exception and our lives can be as grounded as grains of “sand.” The tender of our language is change and exchange: All the time that there is use there is use and any time there is a surface there is a surface, and every time there is an exception there is an exception and every time there is a division there is a dividing . . . tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succor . . . (“Roastbeef ”)

In Tender Buttons, Stein was engaged in making a dialogic poetic of nonresemblance: words not dominating the world with their order but allowing the world to inhabit the words. Tender Buttons marks a decisive break with a voyeuristic poetics of subject and object, looker and looked at, figure and ground. It elides perspectival distance in favor of intimacy, non-­ goal-­directed erotics, and gustation. Stein’s most famous line, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” was writ20. “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-­colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” “Experience” (1844), www​.emersoncentral​ .com​/experience​.htm.

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ten at the same time as Tender Buttons in a tribute to Emily Dickinson (“So great so great Emily. / Sew grate sew grate Emily”).21 Nothing better shows Stein’s insistence on “is,” and nothing better demonstrates her view that repetition (like a stitch is sewing) creates variance and meaning occurs though use and context. Stein begins “Rose is,” not “A rose is,” suggesting that Rose is the name of a person; the word morphs from proper name to flower name and from noun to verb. The line gives a sense of dynamic and erotic movement, rose arose aroused, with the implicit play on eros; it also insists that things (and words) are what they are and not symbols—a turn away from the symbolic use of the word rose so common in English verse but also harking back to Juliet’s plea to Romeo that we are more than our names: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”22 The line also brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s equally iconic pseudonym “Rrose Selavy”—eros, c’est la vie—used first for Man Ray’s 1921 photo of Duchamp dressed as a woman. In 1947, Stein commented on her motto: “Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying is a is a is a. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”23 Note “a hundred years”: not ever, just since the romantic period. Stein created poems that do not resemble the look of the world; rather, they mime the world’s manner of existence. Her choice of prose gives her work a generic quality: it doesn’t look like poetry, and yet it can be nothing but. Throughout her career, Stein flirted with different literary genres, from novel to mystery story to essay to primer to children’s book to autobiography. Her portraits are touchstone works in this respect, and none more so than “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” from 1923. To fully experience this work, it is best to listen to Stein reciting it herself:

21. “Sacred Emily,” EPC Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Stein​-­Gertrude​ _Rose​-­is​-­a​-­rose​.html. In the preface to Dickinson’s Poems, 2nd series, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), Todd writes about Dickinson’s “sew grate” stitches: “Most of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-­paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets.” “Rose” appears a number of times in the three early collections, as flower and verb (rose and a rose), including, in the first volume (1890), a poem (XVII) the editors titled “The Wife”: “She rose to his requirement, dropped / The playthings of her life / To take the honorable work / Of woman and of wife.” 22. Romeo and Juliet 2.2. 23. Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), vi.

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her startlingly bell-­like voice, with vividly precise pronunciation, provides a key to the moiré-­like sound patterning in the work.24 The portrait is “completed” but not complete: it’s not all-­encompassing but done, not perfect but worked, not a finished product but the record of a compositional process. The first line is a vernacular question without a question mark: “If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.” He is presumably Picasso, and you get the sense that no, he probably wouldn’t like it, but what is the “it” he wouldn’t like, doesn’t want to hear? “Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.” He probably wouldn’t like to be compared to Napoleon—the short guy with the big ego and the power to go with it. Stein then enters into a series of permutations of each of the words she used, breaking down the subject-­verb-­object stadium of the sentence, letting it be known that dominance is a kind of grammar. How can a textual composition sound not as an “over there” but as a here? How can a portrait avoid semblance and become its own entity? “If I Told Him” is a portrait that doesn’t show but does. It’s teasing as it teases out the problems of resemblance. The next set of four sentences enacts the structure of the linguistic sign: “Now. / Not now. / And now. / Now.” “Now” is always also “not now”: language is materially present as we hear it (make it here/adhere) but also evokes what is not here. Now, however, sounds what it is; its open vowel “ow” makes the now of its enunciation palpable, as a kind of onomatopoeia. “Now / not now” is similar to Freud’s fort/da: the game a child plays to come to accommodate the absence of his or mother, throwing and retrieving a ball and saying there/ gone.25 This rhythmic toggling or oscillation of presence/absence is the essence of the sound patterning in “If I Told Him.” This play is immediately followed by “Exactly as as kings.” “As as” is this work’s keynote: one thing looks like another, it is like or as the other. As is in between: as is like as: exactly identical in resembling resembling. As for kings—Picasso a king, but also king versus queen (female sovereign or queer, a use that goes back to the eighteenth century); king as the viewer in Renaissance perspective, which is here flattened by “as as.” The poem then provides a bravura onomatopoetic riff, referencing queens in the sense of a female linguistic rule (in contrast to the spec24. Text and sound file at EPC Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Stein​ -­Gertrude​_If​-­I​-­Told​-­Him​_1923​.html. 25. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. C. J. M. Hubback (London: International Psychoanalytical Press, 1922), 12–13. The translation was published the year before “If I Told Him.”

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tacle of perspective—“farther and father”) and queer rule; there is also a marked sense of coital rhythmic contraction: “Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also.” In this passage we experience the toggling of the shutters opening and shutting. Once again there is play on the structure of the sign: a conventional idea of verbal reference is that words are like window glass that transparently let you view what is on the other side; in contrast, by rhythmically opening and shutting the language’s shutters, Stein viscerally shows language itself as a “blind glass,” here/gone, here/gone. In 1920, just three years before “If I Told Him,” Duchamp made a related work, Fresh Widow, which is a picture of blinded French windows, the panes (pains) shuttered with black leather. This play of “exact resemblance to exact resemblance,” where the words sound like what they mean, is picked up, with as as key in “As trains. / Has trains. / Has trains. / As trains. / As trains.” Stein’s formulation for a portrait of “exact resemblance to exact resemblance” is the fuller statement of her poetics of “as as.” It is linguistically exact, word and object are overlaid, in the sense that a word is identical to itself and yet, through echo and repetition, always different: “Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.” Perhaps Stein was thinking of Man Ray’s 1922 photograph of her in which Picasso’s famous panting of her is pictured as if it were an exact resemblance of her exact resemblance: a mirror image of herself, or herself a mirror image of the painting. In 1926, Stein wrote “Composition as Explanation” for lectures at Oxford and Cambridge. Along with “An Elucidation” and her Lectures in America, this is Stein’s most revealing work of poetics. In this work, Stein offers an alternative to persistent theories of the avant-­garde. Stein’s textual invention was more avant-­garde than most of the poetic innovations of the modernist avant-­garde in Europe, although she was not part of a group or movement (Dickinson—“Sacred Emily”—is her forebear in this respect).26 Moreover, while Stein’s work may suggest affinities with “postmodernism,” it is historically and aesthetically more accurate to rethink what modernism is after taking Stein’s work into account. 26. See Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). For those following his gender-­biased schema, America’s two most avant-­garde poets, Dickinson and Stein, would not be considered avant-­ garde at all.

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“Composition as Explanation” rejects the basic idea of the avant-­garde as being advanced or ahead of its time: “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.” In contrast to the idea of a vanguard, Stein insists on the poet’s radical contemporaneity—a contemporaneity that puts her or him out of step with accepted opinion, which, she acerbically notes, is often “several generations behind.” The poet is not ahead of the times, but rather the culture is behind the times or, as she memorably puts it, is “out of it.”27 “The time of the composition is a natural thing and the time in the composition is a natural thing it is a natural thing and it is a contemporary thing.” Stein’s persistent commitment to the “continuous present,” as she invokes it in this essay, and her aversion to the formulaic plotting of beginning, middle, and end, extends not just to her artwork but to her views about art and literary history; progressivist ideas about the development of art were, for her, tied up in a nineteenth-­century tradition that she contrasts with the continuous existential and textual present that she realizes in the queer final sections of The Making of Americans: A History of a Family’s Progress.28 Stein’s writing takes direct aim at teleology. Her poetics repeat over and again that meanings are not ulterior or interior but come into being by doing things. Fundamental to this ontological dimension in Stein’s work is her antimasculinism, her critique of what she calls, in a signature 1927 poem, “Patriarchal Poetry”: Let her try . . . Is not gain . . . Aim less / Sword less . . . Patriarchal Poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry . . . In differently undertaking their being there . . . Patriarchal poetry left left left right left . . . Patriarchal poetry the difference . . . 29

27. Contrast this with the lament of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” in the opening lines of Ezra Pound’s poem: “For three years, out of key with his time, / He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’/ In the old sense” (EPC Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Pound​_Ezra​_Hugh​_Selwyn​_Mauberly​ .html). Mauberly is “out of key with his time,” while Stein proposes that the modern composition makes the time and that it’s those who fail to get with it that are the ones who are out of key. 28. In “Beginning Again with The Making of Americans,” a chapter from “Everyday Epic: Evolution, Sexuality, and Modernist Narrative,” his 2013 dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, Vaclav Paris views the work as a “queer epic . . . with different parameters than those of ‘straight’ time.” 29. The Yale Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 106–44.

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The “difference” continues to be “spreading,” to echo Tender Buttons. Stein refuses the idea that the poet is able to assert power or control over an inchoate world that is other than, or outside, oneself. She works out an alternative compositional practice that reimagines the reader-­writer relationship and that averts representation through a collapsing of figure and ground. “Nothing changes from generation to generation,” she writes in “Composition as Explanation,” “except the thing seen and that makes a composition.” The entity of a composition is akin to the human mind and stands in contrast to the vicissitudes of human nature (identity): not what it is but how it can apprehended, as she formulates it in her 1935 work “Identity: A Poem.”30 Since for Stein compositional process is primary, her poetics and her poems are both written as compositions: her critical writing is not secondary, expository, or explanatory. It does what it does by doing it, says what it says by saying it. In this Stein sharply departs from the normative critical and polemical manifesto styles of many of her fellow modernist innovators. She refused to explain the inventiveness of unconventional art in conventional prose, and thus she challenged the writing assumptions not just of poetry but also of art and literary history and criticism. In the 1930s, as she was writing about the difference between the virtually unknowable mind and an all-­too-­knowable identity, Stein became famous—even notorious—as a personality; all the while, her poetry remained relatively obscure.31 Her most popular book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her own story told in the voice of her lifelong lover and partner, was written in late 1932 and published the following year, just before her sixtieth birthday. The Virgil Thompson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, for which she wrote the libretto in 1927, opened on Broadway in Febru-

30. This work excerpts the longer The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (New York: Random House, 1936). I discuss this work in “Stein’s Identity” in My Way: Speeches and Poems. According to Stein, human identity is what your little dog knows as you; your mind cannot be known in this way. She talks of “entity” in the 1936 “What Are Master-­Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1911–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 148–56. 31. For an informative account of Stein’s work in the 1920s and 30s, and the best critical overview of Stein, see Ulla E. Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008). Dydo’s A Stein Reader (Northwestern, 1993) is the best single-­volume introduction to Stein, with superb introductory notes.

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ary 1934 in a production directed by John Houseman, with sets by Florine Stettheimer, and with an all-­black cast. Stein’s libretto included the line “Pigeons on the grass alas”: if the public didn’t understand what it meant, that just fueled a very great, often delighted, commotion about Gertrude Stein. Stein’s wildly successful lecture tour in America began in the fall of the same year; Lectures in America followed soon after. In sharp contrast to this newly public Stein, consider two of her most aesthetically challenging and astounding works, How to Write (1931) and Stanzas in Meditation (1932), which had no public. No doubt Stein was quite conscious that her celebrity status would give her a standing in American culture that her aesthetic inventions had not. But perhaps her celebrity and her obscurity are complementary parts of her own self-­fashioning. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is the signal example. But Stein’s self-­fashioning of the scores of portraits made of her by painters and photographers is equally significant, according to Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer in the catalogue to the 2011 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.32 The dual portraits of Alice and Gertrude have become iconic lesbian, feminist, and Jewish images. Given Stein’s deep engagement with portraiture, it makes sense to see her hand in the making of these images by so many different artists. Though she made herself a celebrity, Stein is not always celebrated. She remains controversial not only because she challenged the prevailing notions of poetry, language, and communication but also because she defied norms of gender and genre, ethnicity and nationality. While Stein was radical in many ways, like some of the other great modernists she was quite conservative in other ways, as exemplified by her adamant opposition to the New Deal. Stein was anti-­German, anti-­Nazi, and anti-­Hitler; nonetheless she translated and wrote an introduction for the speeches of Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, who worked in collaboration with the Nazi occupation, something puzzling if we think of Stein as “American,” less puzzling (though hardly happy) if we frame her as an elderly French woman living in the Vichy-­controlled countryside, protected by her neighbors.33 Despite Stein and Toklas’s extremely precarious 32. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Corn has elaborated on this point in subsequent lectures. See the web exhibit from the National Portrait Gallery: www​.npg​.si​.edu​/exhibit​/stein/. 33. For a full account, see “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight,” which I edited for Jacket 2 (2012), jacket2​.org​/feature​/gertrude​-­steins​-­war​-­years​ -­setting​-­record​-­straight.

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situation living in the southeast of France during the time of the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews, she and Toklas survived, and Stein’s great art collection was not looted. How that happened is a puzzle. Stein’s takes on being puzzling in her last major work, the feminist opera The Mother of Us All, published and performed in 1947, the year after she died and a couple of years after she wrote her exuberant postwar celebration of American GIs, Brewsie and Willie. The Mother of Us All is the second opera libretto she wrote for Virgil Thomson. In words Stein gives to suffragette Susan B. Anthony, she says, “It is a puzzle. I am not puzzled but it is a puzzle. . . . I am not puzzled but it is very puzzling.”34 There is no repetition in these lines because each use of the word puzzle means something different. Looking back on her own life and work, Stein says in The Mother of Us All, in the voice of Susan B. Anthony: “We cannot retrace our steps, going forward may be the same as going backwards.” As Emerson might also have said, what counts most is not what is “won” but what is “done,” a distinction that is at the heart of her antiteleological ethics and her ontological aesthetics. In a 1946 interview, Stein says that she got from Cézanne “the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole. . . . 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.”35 Fundamental to this practice is Stein’s conception of the “entity” status of verbal language, similar to the entity status of the picture plane in Cézanne: language not used for the goal of expressing ideas through it. Rather language is valued for itself, in itself, and as itself. Stein’s is a poetry of the everyday that does not take us to some other place but rather puts us in contact with where we are: not a re-­presenting of ideas but a merging with things. Stein dissolves the antagonistic relationship between word and object, the thing and its description. The writing and the reading enter into a dialogue: listening and performing in place of apprehension or fixing. Stein puts it this way at the end of The Mother of Us All: “Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.” The problem Stein keeps coming back to in her last work is that if the 34. Gertrude Stein, Last Opera and Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). All quotes from The Mother of Us All from 85–88. 35. Gertrude Stein, “Transatlantic Interview” by William S. Sutton, in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1971), 15.

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structures of power are not changed, then bringing women into power, getting the vote, doesn’t change a thing. “You have only got the name, you have not got the game,” says Jo the Loiterer, who cannot vote, even after women’s suffrage, because he, like a nomadic play by Gertrude Stein, has no fixed address. Stein, as she writes of Susan B. Anthony, is a “martyr all my life not to what I won but to what was done.” So then it is not what you’ve got that counts, nor the gold in your pocket, nor the marble in your mind’s eye. Not, that is, the canonical statue symbolizing the achievement of the goal but our loitering in between where we were and where we are going; our lingering in reality without dissembling that we have gotten to an other side. Stein’s haunting critique of teleology comes in an ordinary phrase: “Has it not gone because now it is had”—and have we not been had by it. It’s a matter of struggle and “strife,” not victory. “In my long life in my long life.”

Louis Zukofsky

The melody! the rest is accessory: . . . My one voice. My other: is An objective—rays of the object brought to a focus, An objective—nature as creator—desire for what is objectively perfect Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars F ro m “ A ” -­6

Louis Zukofsky is the most formally radical poet to emerge among the second-­wave modernists who composed in the wake of such first-­ generation innovators as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. Each one of these older poets was an important source for Zukofsky, whose response to his modernist predecessors was precise and comprehensive. In place of a sometimes overwhelming monumentalism of “the” great poem, Zukofsky emphasized the need for “a” series of poems. He rejected the major keys for minor chords, universals for particulars, the grandiose for discreetness. In the process, he created a ravishing, yet sometimes forbidding, body of work notable for its intricacy of detail as well as for its resistance to sweeping pronouncements and vague generalizations. Zukofsky’s poetry is both emotional and accessible, but it demands much of its readers because of its refusal to separate intellect from feeling, or complexity from clarity. Louis Zukofsky was born in 1904 on the Lower East Side of New York, the child of Yiddish-­speaking parents who had emigrated from Russia (or, more precisely, Lithuania) just before Louis was born. His father Pinchos Introduction to Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2006), which I edited. All quotations from Zukofsky are from this volume, except the quote from “To my wash-­stand,” which is collected in Complete Short Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 52.

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(ca. 1860–1950) and mother Chana (1862–1927) figure significantly in his work. Zukofsky attended Columbia University, part of the unprecedented spike in Jewish students admitted to Ivy League colleges immediately after World War I, following the introduction of test-­based admissions. At Columbia, Zukofsky studied with Mark Van Doren, already a prominent poet, and John Dewey, the philosopher so influential for artists of Zukofsky’s and the immediately subsequent generation. A precocious student, Zukofsky was only twenty when he got his MA, writing a dissertation on Henry Adams. (Zukofsky never got his BA, having failed to take a necessary phys ed class.) While he was at Columbia, Zukofsky’s closest literary comrade was Whittaker Chambers, who at the time was involved with the Communist Party, but who later turned on his fellow travelers on the Left, becoming famous as one of Alger Hiss’s principal accusers. Among the first-­wave modernists, Pound cast the biggest shadow for Zukofsky. In 1927 the twenty-­three-­year-­old poet sent Pound “Poem beginning ‘The.’” Pound published it in The Exile and also recommended that Harriet Monroe let Zukofsky put together a special number of her magazine, Poetry. Editing the “‘Objectivists’ 1931” issue was a turning point for Zukofsky, firmly establishing his “objectivist” aesthetic in both his lead essay and his selection of poets, including several who, along with Lorine Niedecker, whom he met a few years later, would become his most significant companions-­in-­poetry—George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and the British poet Basil Bunting. Zukofsky supported himself in a decidedly ad hoc manner until 1934, when he got a research job with a federal works program and soon after with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), where he stayed until 1942, most significantly working on a history of American handicrafts. He met Celia Thaew in 1933, and they were married six years later. The Zukofskys had one child, Paul, born in 1943, the same year Louis left the WPA to work as a substitute public school teacher and a technical writer. Paul and Celia, both musicians, figure prominently in Zukofsky’s poems, most movingly in the lyric rondo “A”-­11. (Paul went on to become a prominent violinist and conductor.) Moreover, domestic themes become more pronounced in Zukofsky’s poems written after the Second World War. In 1947 he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he would teach until retiring in 1966. For most of his life, Zukofsky lived in the heart of New York City, and certainly his poems are as much in, of, and about New York—itself an urban collage of energy twenty-­four hours each day—as anything else. In 1972 the Zukofskys moved to Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island. Zukofsky died there in 1978.

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After a prescient early poem from 1922, the selection of Zukofsky’s poems included in this volume begins with three of the six movements of “Poem beginning ‘The.’ ” The complete poem begins with an untranslated epigraph (in Persian) by Omar Khayyám, followed by a full page of sources given by name and line. “Poem beginning ‘The’” is a powerful response to Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land; its list of sources is a wry comment on Eliot’s appended notes to his poem—but that is just an opening gambit. “Poem beginning ‘The’” anticipates many of the major formal and thematic concerns in much of Zukofsky’s subsequent work. Composed of 333 separately numbered lines, including one left blank, the poem is a masterpiece of pointillist collage, in which the basic unit of composition, the numbered line, is allowed to stand by itself, discrete, while simultaneously being stitched together with the other lines. This concern for the relation of part to the whole—specifically, that the part is neither consumed by the whole nor isolated from it—is a key aspect of Zukofsky’s poetics and politics. Thematically, the poem addresses a central concern for the immigrant generation: the problem of assimilation, both cultural and poetical. In contrast to Eliot, Zukofsky’s list of sources is ethnically inflected, local, comic, as well as deeply responsive to the canon of British poetry. In particular Zukofsky gives prominent mention to, and translates, the Yiddish American poet Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden), most famous for his Yiddish translation of the Torah. “Poem beginning ‘The’ ” raises the problem of the poet, through his newly acquired, lofty education, his socialist views, and his atheism, losing connection with his religious familial culture. This is evident especially in its poignant address to Zukofsky’s mother in the fifth movement of the poem, “Autobiography”: “If horses but could sing Bach, mother,— / Remember how I wished it once— / Now I kiss you who could never sing Bach, never read Shakespeare.” In contrast to Pound and Eliot, Zukofsky—from this earliest poem—recognized the founding significance of difference for American poetry. The final lines of “Autobiography” are emblematic: “Keine Kadish wird man sagen.” The passage is adapted from Heinrich Heine’s “Gedächtnisfeier” (Memorial): “Keine Messe wird man singen, / Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen, / Nichts gesagt und nichts gesungen / Wird an meinen Sterbetagen” (No Mass will anyone sing / Neither Kaddish will anyone say / Not said and not sung / When I lie dead). These same issues are addressed in the excerpts included from “A”-­12, where Zukofsky’s father figures prominently. Louis Zukofsky’s poems operate within an interval that he describes, in “A”-­12, as “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.” The music of poetry, in Zukofsky’s sense, refers to the intricate patterning of sound that every-

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where pervades his work. This poetry leads with sound, and you can never go wrong following the sound sense, for it is only after you hear the words that you are able to locate their meanings. In other words, these poems are not representations of ideas but enactments of thoughts in motion, articulated as sound. Zukofsky loved to create patterns, some of which are apparent and some of which operate subliminally. Often in reading one of his poems, you can sense multiple patterns at play; indeed, reading Zukofsky induces this sensation. But these poems are not multidimensional crossword puzzles: no solution is required, or, for that matter, even desired. The experience made possible through the crafting of the poems is “when the meanings are” (as Emily Dickinson puts it): the meaning is not behind the words but in the words as they unfold, and refold, in the ear. Often Zukofsky’s poems have no speaker; they are what are, things in the world, handmade. I’s (pronounced eyes) (the title of one of Zukofsky’s collections of short poems) is his now-­classic formulation for the I that becomes an other. The I in the eye, and the eye in I (aye aye; the ayes have it). In Zukofsky’s lyric, the personally expressive poem is not replaced by the poem as thing seen (recall Pound’s injunction to use no word that does not contribute to the sense of a thing seen). For Zukofsky, it’s all about toggling: between I and I, it and we, eye and you, seen and unseen, present and absent, here and there; a redoubling-­as-­redoubting of the senses. “See sun, and think shadow” (#21, Anew). Zukofsky’s poems-­as-­objects are not impersonal so much as autonomous, “small (or large) machine[s] made of words” (Williams), “nature as creator” (“A”-­6). There is no better example of self-­reflectivity in poetry than #20 of Anew, a poem that does what it says it’s doing: “The tune’s image holding in the line.” Thinking in psychoanalytic terms, the “objectivist” poem is a transitional object, a thing that takes its meaning by means of our relation to it. Or to put it more baldly: the materiality in Zukofsky’s poetry is always a social materiality. It’s not a matter of what it says but of what it is; or, better, it is not a matter of what it is but of what it does. Words are things too, and in Zukofsky’s poetry they have a heft, a stuffness, a thickness that we can count on and that counts on us. These poems are not well-­wrought urns but crystalline vessels of light; when we hold them in our hands we see our hands. Immediately following “Poem beginning ‘The,’ ” we pre­sent a spectrum of Zukofsky’s short poems, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. These poems build their meaning one word at a time; the words tug at you as soon as you let the poem take you in tow. These short lyrics are not about overhearing but about hearing again; each word, like a stone dropped in

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a pond, creates a ripple around it. The intersecting ripples on the surface of the pond are the pattern of the poem. Listen for the figures rather than try to figure anything out. In September 2004, before a standing-­room-­only crowd at the Zukofsky centennial at Columbia and Barnard, Peter Quartermain spoke of “Thinking with the Poem,” citing “The,” from After I’s (1961–64): The The desire of towing

“A one-­word title,” Quartermain noted. “Followed by four one-­word lines. . . . Zukofsky explained to [Ian Hamilton] Finlay that he’d been thinking of tugboats, which tow very seriously.” Zukofsky also pointed out the modulating vowel sounds in the poem. The kind of microtonal attention required of a Zukofsky poem is not a matter of deciphering but of close listening, of evenly hovering attention to the sonic, linguistic, and lexical dimensions of the poem, as much for their discrepant engagements as for their fit. I love the simple fact of the title, “The,” by the author of “A.” In his talk Quartermain asked: Is “A” pronounced ay or uh? Eh? And now we have another poem beginning “The.” Is the title pronounced thuh or thee? Beats me. Both. Syllable count: 1/2/1/2. Tow the line? but they say it’s supposed to be toe the line. So much depends upon . . . whether you want to be towed, since this is the desire, not a desire. Now go back to the image: Tiny tug drags large barge. Perhaps this poem’s a counterpoetics: do you want a poem to tow you or to do some towing yourself? A Zukofsky poem does not tow you along for a ride; that’s what Quartermain means by emphasizing “thinking with the poem.” In contrast to the desire of towing, we might speak of a desire not to be towed. Or anyway, told. Perhaps Zukofsky’s most exquisite realization of the microtonal shifting of vowels in one of his permutational poems, or rounds, is the valentine “Songs of Degrees,” which creates constellations among nine seed words: hear, her, clear, mirror, care, error, in, his, is. There is a Möbius effect as the same words shift from noun to verb. Another striking example of word-­by-­word permutation, approaching fugue, is “Julia’s Wild,” from Bottom: on Shakespeare, whose multiple variants of the word order and phrasing of this eight-­word decasyllabic string, come- shadow- come- and— take—this—shadow—up, is a tour-­de-­force of polymetrical imagination in its aversion of (not to) pentameter.

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At the other side of the spectrum from “The” and “Songs of Degree” is “Mantis,” a much-­cited poem from 1934, not included in the selected. The elaborate conceit of the piece is a praying mantis “lost in the subway”— “fact,” Zukofsky notes, not “symbol,” of the “oppression” and “helplessness” of the poor. In his most explicitly proletarian mode, the author produced the single work of his that is most conducive to New Critical close reading. Indeed, “Mantis” displays how Zukofsky is able to use the closed-­ form sestina as a means for social reflection: Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor Beg—“Look, take it up” (thought’s torsion)! “save it!” I who can’t bear to look, cannot touch,—You— You can—but no one sees your steadying lost In the cars’ drafts on the lit subway stone. ... Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!

More remarkable, however, is “Mantis, An Interpretation,” Zukofsky’s extensive commentary-­in-­verse, which suggests the insufficiency of the poem and the necessity for interpretation—not as closure but as dialectical method for opening the word’s work into a social world: “The mantis might have heaped up upon itself a / Grave of verse, / But the facts are not a symbol.” The final lines of the poem do not represent an idea but enfold “the simultaneous, / The diaphanous, historical / in one head.” As if directly confronting Kafka, Zukofsky wryly concludes: “No human being wishes to become / An insect for the sake of a symbol.” “A” is Zukofsky’s lifelong long poem in twenty-­four parts, one for each hour of the day, written from 1928 to 1974 (though not in chronological order). The complete poem runs about eight hundred pages in the Johns Hopkins University Press edition. Most of the movements begin with an A or an an. “A” is a serial collage, an explicit turning away from Pound’s desire, in the Cantos, for montage, for the parts to cohere. As such, “A” opens a “z-­sited path” (“A”-­23) for the long serial poems of Zukofsky’s most immediate heirs in the following generation—Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Hannah Weiner, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Jerome Rothenberg. Ideas in “A” are not proclaimed but threaded into successions of voicings. The sources, themes, and forms

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in “A” are plural and overlaid; there is much taken from daily life, much from family life, many literary and philosophical threads, alongside explicitly addressed political and aesthetic commitments. These are Zukofsky’s “historic and contemporary particulars,” which together make up a tissue of allusion and articulation that is everywhere localized and embodied in and as the poem. “A”-­1—first word “A”—opens on the night of April 5, 1928—both the first night of Passover and Good Friday—at a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall. Bach weaves through “A,” whose intricate pattern of recurrences, recapitulations, and extensions can be compared, at least metaphorically, to the form of a fugue—from the chordal arrangement of syllables to the recurrences both between and within the movements of the work. “There’s naw-­thing / lak po—ee try,” Zukofsky writes in “It’s a gay li—ife,” “it’s a delicacy / for a horse.” Is this the horse Zukofsky evokes in “Poem beginning ‘The,’” the one he told his mother he wished could sing Bach? “A”-­7 returns to horses—there are many plays on horse in Zukofsky—here it’s police sawhorses closing a street, sawhorses that look like a capital letter A in this poem of seven sonnets. “A”-­9 is the crux of “A”—a supreme realization of what Zukofsky called “rested totality,” that is, “desire for what is objectively perfect.” The poem takes its form, and rhyme scheme, directly from Calvalcanti’s “Donna Mi Prega,” which had also been the subject of an influential translation by Pound. “A”-­9 has two halves, written, respectively, before and after World War II. The second half of the poem is a mirror image of the first. Its sources include Marx and Spinoza (the two liminal figures for secular American Jewish thought), as well as a scientific treatise on quantum physics (related scientific material is also found in “It’s hard to see but think of a sea,” #12 of Anew, included in the selected). “A”-­9’s intricate system of patterning goes from its eleven-­syllable lines, mostly in sonnet-­ length stanzas, to what Zukfosky called the “conical” distribution of n’s and r’s, to the syntactic rotation of the same words shifting to different parts of speech (as in the “Songs of Degrees” and “Julia’s Wild”). “A”-­9 presents the shimmering figure of a crystal turning on its axis to an imagined beat, leaning leftward, arriving at song. The poem’s recurrent motif is for a rescaling of values toward that which is created by “hands” and “hearts”—that is, by the production of good and goods made by human hands; rather than by commodity value, that is, by how much a thing is sold for. “Labor as creator,” as Zukofsky puts it in “A”-­8, from the 1930s. One outtake from “A”-­9 is the hilarious and charming “A Foin Lass Bodders,” a translation of “Donna Mi Prega” into Brooklynese. “A”-­15 begins

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its second stanza with a homophonic translation of the book of Job: if you listen closely you can almost hear the Hebrew percolating through the English: “He neigh ha lie low”; but this is also a horse’s song (its neigh), or “An hinny,” which is not only a backside but a cross between a “she-­ass” and a stallion. Zukofsky’s iconoclastic approach to translation would flower with Catullus, which he wrote with Celia Zukofsky, working on it from 1958 to 1966. For Catullus, the Zukofskys developed a technique that has come to be called homophonic translation—translation with special emphasis on the sound rather than the lexical meaning. Since Latin and English share many cognates, the results are sometimes uncannily resonant, even passionate, versions of the original poems. It is worth comparing the Zukofskys’ versions of the poems with the Catullus originals, which is easy enough to do since editions of Catullus are available online and in print. The number for each poem is the same (note that #22 of Anew is an early version of Catullus 8). Let’s take #112 as an example. The Latin is Multus homo es, Naso, neque tecum multus homo est qui descendit: Naso, multus es et pathicus. Literal translation by Celia Zukofsky: Much a man you are, Naso, and that you much a man it is who comes down: Naso, much you are and pathetic/lascivious. Cornish edition in the Loeb Classical Library (used by the Zukofskys): You are many men’s man, Naso, but not many men go down town with you: Naso, you are many men’s man and minion. Finally, the homophonic version: Mool ’tis homos, Naso, ’n’ queer take ’im mool ’tis ho most he descended: Naso, mool ’tis—is it pathic, cuss.

The Zukofsky version is able to take on a certain texture that brings us closer to the Latin while at the same allowing the queerness of the original to come out. Leading with the sound, homophonic translation reframes what is significant in translation, challenging the idea that the translation should focus on content or create poems that sound fluent in their new language. Zukofsky insists that the mark of the translator be pronounced, and that in making the translation strange, we may provide a way to come closer to its core. Following Catullus, Zukofsky completed the remaining movements of

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“A,” writing “A”-­22 and “A”-­23 from 1970 to 1974. He then went on to 80 Flowers, a work in which the density and overlays of “A”-­23, let’s call it the mulching of sources and reflections, is extended and formalized. The work consists of eighty-­one poems, each with eight five-­word lines. After 80 Flowers, Zukofsky planned one more work, Gamut; he was able to complete the first poem of the projected series. Zukofsky’s work is too varied to create a representative selection. For this gathering, we have necessarily left out his prose writings, both essay and fiction (I should have liked to begin with “An Objective”). Since “A” is best read as a single long poem of twenty-­four parts, the scale of that work cannot be reflected here. In the limited space available, I have tried to give a visceral sense of a range of formal, thematic, and aesthetic possibilities that exists within the highly articulated constellation of Zukofsky’s work as a whole. The selection is built around three long poems that are included: First, “Poem beginning ‘The,’” inaugural for second-­wave ( Jewish) modernism. Second, “4 Other Countries,” based on a European trip Zukofsky took in 1957, with its capacious range of references and locations, and also its intimation of the five-­word line. (Williams expressed his enthusiastic response to this poem in a letter that was very encouraging to Zukofsky.) Last, the late, majestically refractive (not to say sublimely refractory) “A”-­23, with its one thousand five-­word lines, Zukofsky’s most linguistically radical achievement and a foundational work for the thickly textual American poetry of the last part of the twentieth century. Those three works make a perfect interrelated set and key in to the other selections. The unit of composition is not the part but the whole 160-­page book: each section must contribute toward that whole but also hold its own. That is, I have tried to use Zukofsky’s principle of collage and arrangement in “A” to create a historically grounded constellation of particulars. To achieve this goal, it has been necessary to make excerpts from poems, a precarious practice that is justified only because it is part of an overall design; excerpts from single movements of “A,” published by themselves or in an anthology selection, would not be justified (nor approved by the copyright holder). Naturally, many significant poems have had to be omitted. Zukofsky’s ode to his washstand (from 29 Poems) remains a useful example of the poetics of the common and the reversal of values from the worship of/ at “the” altar to “a” secular everyday, with relevance to Reznikoff, for example:

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To my wash-­stand in which I wash my left hand and my right hand To my wash-­stand whose base is Greek whose shaft is marble and fluted

The first part of the three-­line “partita” of “A”-­13, with its twirling aphorisms, is one of the highlights of “A.” Those seeking out the complete “A” will be sure to take in the turn from one- to two- to three-­word lines in “A”-­ 14 and the full flowering, in “A”-­22, of the five-­word line (often in stanzas of five lines) that is a basic unit of late Zukofsky. “A”-­22 starts with what has become something of a signature piece for Zukofsky, a valentine tercet, made with nine vowels and nine consonants that concatenate multiple plays on era/anno/aer/are, and on a/an/any, and also on year/ear; perhaps you can hear, mirrored, an error in that other poem for valentine time, “Songs of Degrees.” A round of these six words shows the care in all to come anon. an era any time of year

Charles Olson A Note on “The Kingfishers”

Olson’s “The Kingfishers” is an inaugural poem of postwar American poetry, and it takes its place of honor at the opening of Don Allen’s defining anthology, The New American Poetry. “The Kingfishers” is both thrilling and exasperating, inspiring and challenging. The date of its composition has become as emblematic as anything in the poem: 1949. Just four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, just four years after the gates of Auschwitz were broken open and the unfathomable lies of what happened there were revealed, the same year as Mao’s forces triumphed in China (Olson’s “La lumiere de l’aurore est devant. Nous nous devant nous lever et agir” [The light of dawn is before us. We must arise and act.] is from Mao).1 Sixty years later, and on the verge of celebrating Olson’s centennial, we are still confronted with the dogged question at the heart of this poem, “shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?,” a line that has the status of Adorno’s questioning of the possibility of lyric poetry in the wake of the “final solution” (the Systematic Extermination Process). Is our Western heritage salvageable? A stirring, iconic voice rises up in this poem, one phrase tumbling upon the next, hectoring, charged, bursting through the dead silence and com-

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko asked me to write a commentary on “The Kingfishers” for his new Russian translation (2009); it was published first in his Russian translation in New Literary Observer (Novie Literaturnoie Obozreniye) 105 (2010). David Herd included it in his collection Contemporary Olson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). A great deal has been written about this poem, documenting its sources line for line; see especially Ralph Maude, What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997); George Butterick, “Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and the Poetics of Change,” American Poetry 6, no.2 (1989): 28–69; and Guy Davenport, “Scholia and Conjectures for ‘The Kingfishers,’ ” in The Geography of the Imagination (Berkeley, CA: North Point, 1981). 1. “The Kingfishers” is quoted from Olson’s Collected Poems, ed. George Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 87–93. PennSound features a sound file of Olson reading most of the poem.

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placency often associated with this proto–­Cold War moment in US history. Olson’s rhetorical power is a blast against conformity, against the postwar methodology of “prosperity” through repression. “What pudor pejorocracy affronts”: our decency, if we still have it in the human dethronement of that moment, 1949 (or 2009), is offended by the worsening rule of government. And Olson breaks beyond “the Western box” with his opening, signal invocation of Heraklitus: all is change, stasis is Thanatos (a death wish). And so the poem enacts this very Heraklitian change/movement/ dynamic/parataxis; it invokes a poetics of dynamic movement, where each phrase takes on new meaning in new contexts. One thought is overlaid on another, a veritable palimpsest, as they say. I’ve read the poem many times over the years, and I still don’t follow it, keep diving back in for more. You can never step into the same poem twice (to conflate Olson and Heraklitus). The poem is a bracing test of nonlinear reading: because it quickly loses the reader trying diligently to “follow,” since it demands another approach, one that doesn’t follow the leader but the lieder (why am I writing this way for you, Arkadii, since my puns can’t be translated into Russian?). Guy Davenport calls the poem as a whole an ideogram, marking its unmistakable, and not entirely happy, Poundian lineage. The poem is weighted/freighted by those Poundian need-­to-­know (or do you?) uncited references, as for example the appropriations from Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (“the priests rush in among the people,” “of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes / of gold”). And at or near the center: “I thought of the E on the stone.” This is not Frank O’Hara referring casually and without consequence to graffiti on Second Avenue but an allusion to the Inscrutable Inscription on the Stone at Delphi. But this is the weight that for Olson we cannot cast off: of the enigma of our cultural histories, which form us and from which we are formed. We are not one but many, and from the many threads the fabric of our possible lives will be woven. Do we weave it or let it be woven for us? Will dawn follow this dark night? We come late to a world that we feel, less and less, is of our making: we are estranged from that which we feel we are, by right of nature, familiar—as if our own hand were not part of our body, or our own society no longer a polis, no longer “ours” (to extend a fragment of Heraklitus quoted by Olson in his Special View of History),2 Near the end, Olson quotes a couplet from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell (“Alchemy of the Word”): “Si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guère / Que pour la terre

2. Special View of History, ed. Ann Charters (Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1970), epigraph and p. 27.

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et les pierres” (“I only find within my bones / A taste for eating earth and stones,” as Paul Schmidt translates it).3 Rimbaud, Heraklitus, Mao, Prescott, Delphi are, for Olson, points outside the deadness that inscribes “us” in the “West” in the wake of the war. They are stones with which we might build a new world, word by word; but they are also the weights of that other demonic world (of which the New World is not innocent). This dead-­midcentury poem marks a liminal moment between a controlled Poundian montage (ideogram) and the possibility for a more open-­ended collage that might come after. “The Kingfishers’” acknowledgment of the crisis for Western culture in the wake of the war is the postmodern turn, where the call of the poet is so much birdfeed. “The kingfishers! / who cares / for their feathers / now?” As Jack Spicer would say a decade later, “No / One listens to poetry.”4

3. Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000), 234. 4. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 372.

Paul Celan’s Folds and Veils

No poet cracks open the possibilities for translation more than Paul Celan. With Celan, translation is not a supplemental activity but a hermeneutic necessity. The accompanying set of poems create an environment for experiencing Celan’s haunting, insinuating poem “Todtnauberg” by presenting multiple, contrasting versions, each version an interpretation. First, I pre­ sent my own quasi-­homophonic version (that is, written with primary attention to bringing into “the American” some correlatives to the sound and rhythm of the German). Following that are translations by Pierre Joris, Michael Hamburger, and John Felstiner.1 (Felstiner, in his Selected, restores a line cut by Celan after the first printing of the poem, inserting it into the end of the third stanza “(un-­/delayed” [un-­/gesaümt].) Finally, I have made a composite version of these translations. Reading, which is to say translating, Celan, and in particular “Todtnauberg,” requires toggling bibliographic, etymologic, historical, biographical, and formal approaches, as Pierre Joris demonstrates in his account of the poem in “Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death,” which synthesizes and moves beyond the secondary literature on this poem, including Otto Pöggeler’s study of Celan. From a conventional perspective, one might expect that each interpretative layer would com-

Textual Practice 18, no. 2, 2004. Originally presented on November 2, 2000, at the New School University, as part of a panel on Paul Celan, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Graduate Writing Program of the New School. The panel was organized by John Felstiner and also included Paul Auster, John Hollander, and Maya Maxym. 1. John Felstiner, trans., Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Michael Hamburger, trans., Paul Celan: Poems (New York: Persea Books, 1980); Pierre Joris, “Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death,” in Paul Celan—Übersetzer under übersetzt, ed. Alfred Bodenheimer and Shimon Sandbank (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999). Joris’s article is online at epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ joris​/ todtnauberg​.html. My version was included in Recalculating (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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plement the others, leading to something at least approaching a unified final reading. In contrast, with “Todtnauberg,” the comparative procedure leads to a destruction of any singular meaning, as each layer competes with, in other words undercuts, the next. The layers of interpretation are incommensurable. Indeed, Celan’s poems are not so much in German as acts on German. The directly expressive strata of his poems are not their destination but their material subject; as Ben Friedlander puts it, the latter swallows the former.2 “Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won,” writes Celan (in Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation).3 And this goes for the meaning of the poem as well. “Todtnauberg” takes as its subject Celan’s July 25, 1966, visit to Martin Heidegger’s cabin at Todtnauberg in the Black Mountains of Germany. At the thematic level, the poem provides a positive account of the Jewish poet’s visit with the great German philosopher, and the poem has been interpreted in this way, most notably by Hans-­Georg Gadamer.4 But as Joris points out, there is a powerful destabilizing undertow to the poem, starting with the first syllable of the title, which casts the specter of death (Todt) over all that follows (at the same time implicitly invoking “Todesfugue” [“Deathfugue”], Celan’s most famous poem). At first blush, the opening stanza presents a straightforward description of the scene of the visit. But Joris meticulously tracks another tale told by the poem’s words. Arnica is an herb used to heal bruises, shocks, blisters, wounds, contusions, fatigue, paralysis, and even “concussion of the brain.”5 “Augentrost,” or eyebright, which literally means consolation for the eye, is a remedy for weak eyes. After two apposite words, we are alerted to look harder if the trauma is to be healed. Or perhaps that the site we are entering is marked by weak eyes and trauma. Arnica is bright yellow when in bloom, as it would have been on the day of Celan’s visit. The yellow of the flower blends with another image presented to us: the Sternwürfel or star-­die. Collating yellow and

2. Ben Friedlander, “Paul Celan in Translation,” in chloroform: an aesthetics of critical writing, ed. Nick Lawrence and Alisa Messer (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo University Press, 1997), 140. See also Benjamin Hollander, “In the Extreme of Translation,” Dark Ages Clasp the Daisy Root, no. 3 ( June 1990). 3. Rosmarie Waldrop, trans., Paul Celan: Collected Prose (Manchester: PN Review / Carcanet, 1986), 16. 4. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeship, trans. Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 5. Charles Julius Hempel, A Treatise on the Use of Arnica, in Cases of Contusions, Wounds, Strains, Sprains, Lacerations of the Solids, Concussions, Paralysis, Rheumatism, Soreness of the Nipples, Etc., Etc., with a Number of Cases Illustrative of the Use of that Drug (New York: William Radde, 1845).

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star-­die inaugurates the full descent into the poem. In the American, “die” brings us again to Todt. In the German, Sternwürfel refers to the cubelike object with a star shape that hangs over Heidegger’s well. Würfel is a die, its six sides leading us again to the six-­pointed yellow Jewish star, as Joris notes. He also points to the connection to Mallarmé’s “throw of the dice.” Jumping to the final lines, Celan describes his walk with Heidegger on the woodland trails—but the phrase could literally be translated as “bludgeon walkway” (Knüppel-­pfade) and perhaps also, as Joris notes, makes biting reference to one of Heidegger’s best-­known postwar books, Off the Beaten Track, in its most recent English incarnation, though previously translated as Forest Paths, from the German Holzwege.6 Finally, Joris turns our attention to Waldwasen, Celan’s word for the woodland expanse (not the more common Waldwiesen, or glade) that is the poem’s ostensive setting. Through his probing etymologic investigation, we get the chilling sense of an underground network that holds together, in their decomposition, buried animal parts—in other words, “the killing fields” of the Death Mountain (Todt/berg) that Joris uses to title his essay. Celan addresses this process when he writes, “Reality for a poem is in no way something that stands established, already given, but something standing in question, that’s to be put in question. In a poem, what’s real happens . . . . The poem itself, insofar as it is a real poem, is aware of the questionableness of its own beginning.”7 Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time is that we have venerated him, in the process removing him not only from his own time and place but also from our own poetic horizon. I am thinking of the way Celan is so often cited in the absence of any other poetry, contemporary or subsequent. The poetic horizon from which Celan beckons us has vanished, or perhaps better to say, as Ben Friedlander writes in a letter, has been decimated. The task, then, is to imagine other, still contemporary, company for him, fomenting a necessary compromise for the crippling exceptionalism that has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice, while at the same time acknowledging his specific and immutable historical, geographic, national, ethnic, personal, and social contexts. Celan provides little comfort for those who seek a model for spiritual or transcendental lyric. In his 1958 speech at Bremen he writes, “For a poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to

6. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7. Felstiner, trans., Selected Poems and Prose, 118.

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reach across time, not above.”8 Celan’s late books are a struggle against the reification of lyric poetry, a radical calling into question even of questioning, through his use of what Felstiner calls “uninnocent” language.9 The later books have an affinity with the serial poetry of his near contemporaries Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, who together formulated the idea of the “serial poem,” in which the poems in a book were linked open-­ endedly, each poem another pass rather than a finalized articulation, even if Celan’s practice of seriality is more aversive to continuity than theirs. If this risks pulling Celan into an American present, perhaps that present is not a destination but a way station? An American context would make Zukofsky something of a precursor and Creeley a companion along the way. There is a German context as well, including Helmut Heissenbuttel and, in Austria, Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker, among his own generation. This unsettled company, real and imaginary, along with Celan’s own identification with poets from Hölderlin to Dickinson, adds further layers to the folds, the continuing enfolding, of his work. In Celan’s poems, such as “Todtnauberg,” things are never what they appear to be. The poems avert representation: they are antirepresentational. Antirepresentational poetry is marked by its struggle with representation, its questioning of reality, its refusal to be satisfied with description, its nausea in the face of the given, and its evisceration of the settled order of things. Words are neither cudgels nor comforters but probes of a reality we need to pierce so that we are not suffocated by it.

8. Waldrop, trans., Paul Celan, 34. 9. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 113.

Todtnauberg / trans. Bernstein

Todtnauberg / Celan

Todtnauberg / trans. Pierre Joris

Arnica, hold-­in-­trust, tear Trump out dim Bruise admit dim Stern waffled drought,

Arnika, Augentrost, der Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem Sternwürfel drauf,

Arnika, eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-­die on top,

indigo Hut,

in der Hütte,

in the Hütte,

die in that Bush —lesson Naming nouns off where dim mines men— die in die’s book gust’s ribbons fail one I’m an huff-­none, hurt Oaf I’m a dunken den commends Wart in heart’s end

die in das Buch —wessen Namen nahms auf vor dem meinen?—, die in dies Buch geschriebene Zeile von einer Hoffnung, heute, auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen,

written in the book —whose name did it record before mine—? in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker’s word to come, in the heart,

World-­wizened, uneyed and bent Arc is un-­arc is, eye’s realm,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

forest sward, unleveled, orchis and orchis, singly,

Crude, spatter in führer Deutsche light,

Krudes, spätter, im Fahren deutlich,

crudeness, later, while driving, clearly,

Tears a fog, dear Mensch, dares admit abort

der uns fährt, der Mensch, der’s mit anhört,

he who drives us, the man, he who also hears it

die halved beschmuddled Cudgel fade in Hock’s moor

die halb-­ beschrittenen Knüppel-­ pfade im Hochmoor,

the half-­ trod log-­ trails on the highmoor,

Folded, veil.

Feuchtes, viel.

humidity, much.

Todtnauberg / trans. John Felstiner

Todtnauberg / trans. Michael Hamburger

Arnica, Eyebright, the drink from the well with the star-­die on top,

Arnica, Eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-­die above it,

in the hut,

in the hut,

into the book —whose name did it take in before mine?— the line written into this book about a hope, today, for a thinker’s (un-­ delayed coming) word in the heart,

the line —whose name did the book register before mine?— the line inscribed in that book about a hope, today, of a thinking man’s coming word in the heart,

woodland turf, unleveled, Orchis and Orchis, singly,

woodland sward, unlevelled, orchid and orchid, single,

crudeness, later, while driving, clearly,

coarse stuff, later, clear in passing,

the one driving us, the man who hears it too,

he who drives us, the man, who listens in,

the half-­ trodden log-­ paths on high moorland,

the half-­ trodden wretched tracks through the high moors,

dampness, much

dampness, much.

Todtnauberg (Composite Version) Arnica, Eyebright, the drink / the draft / from the well with the star-­die on top, / above it / in the hut, / in the hütte into the book / written in the book —whose name did it take in / —whose name did it record before mine?— the lines written into the line about / the line —whose name did the book register before mine?— the line inscribed / this book about / in that book about a hope, today, for a thinker’s (un-­ delayed coming) word in the heart, / for a thinker’s / of a thinking’s man’s / coming / word to come, in the heart, woodland turn, unleavened, / forest sward, unleavened / =woodland sward unlevelled, / Orchis and Orchis, singly, orchid and orchid, single, Orchis and Orchis, singly, coarse stuff, later, clear in passing, crudeness, later, while driving, clearly the one driving us, / he who drives us, / the man who hears it too, / who listens in / who also hears it the half-­ trodden log-­ paths on high moorland, / the half-­ trodden wretched tracks through the high moors, the half-­ trod-­log trails on the highmoor,/ dampness, / humidity much.

Barbara Guest Composing Herself

You can’t expect me to sleep in the same bed as my husband.

The last time I saw Guest at a public event was at a 1999 Barnard poetry conference titled Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women. Guest told a packed crowd that had come to honor her that she had come to her session unprepared. Her comment was a classic instance of both her reserve and her poetics. For fifty years, Barbara Guest gave us a poetry for which we were unprepared, a poetry that tested the limits of form and stretched the bounds of beauty by revisioning—both revisiting and recasting—the aesthetic. Guest, who was born in 1920, died in Berkeley on the day after St. Valentine’s Day 2006; she was a poet at all times close to, yet decisively out of sync with, the rites of lyric voicing. Indeed, her work, more than that of any other poets of her generation, enacted a “lyric negation,” as critic Robert Kaufman has noted, singularly inhabiting and disavowing poetry’s ability to mime personal utterance.1 Guest’s unsparing aestheticizing created a new horizon for alyric verse in which saying cedes seeing, composition concatenates context, and palette elides figuration. For these reasons, she is the direct heir to Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and to the idea of imagination that she found in Coleridge and Stevens. I take Guest’s aversion to the lyric to mean that her work is not an extension of herself—herself expressed—that is, not a direct expression of her feelings or subjectivity, but rather is defined by the textual composition of an aesthetic space—herself (itself ) defined. And while I would not call her Objectivist (or, in the parlance of another media, “nonobjective”), I think

Bookforum, April/May 2006. Epigraph comes from an anecdote of John Ashbery about a remark Guest made to a Paris hotelier, requesting double beds in her room. 1. Robert Kaufman, “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry,” American Poetry Review, July 1, 2000.

Barbara Guest: Composing Herself : 121

the link is there, both to the American Objectivist poets and to nonobjective painting. Guest’s first book of poetry, The Location of Things, was published in 1960 by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, when she was forty. Like Stevens, a poet with whom she felt a close affinity, Guest arrived on the scene with total command and startling freshness. She had met Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler in the 1950s when she was writing reviews for ARTnews. Many of these reviews, along with a selection of later essays and poems on art, were collected in Dürer in the Window: Reflexions on Art (Roof Books, 2003), edited by Africa Wayne and sumptuously designed by Richard Tuttle. An important related book is her collected essays on poetics, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Kelsey Street, 2003). In all, Guest published twenty books of poetry, twelve in the last two decades of her life, this prolific late period inaugurated by Sun & Moon’s publication of Fair Realism in 1989 and continuing through Wesleyan University Press’s publication of The Red Gaze in 2005. Guest also published one of the great poet’s novels, Seeking Air (Black Sparrow, 1978; reprint, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), and a biography, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (Doubleday, 1984). While Guest is often associated with O’Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery, aka the New York School, a remark she makes in an essay on Helen Frankenthaler’s relation to the painters with whom she is usually grouped applies to herself as well: “her eyes focused differently.”2 Indeed, the distinctiveness of her work is better understood if a comparison is made to Frankenthaler and to another painter Guest much admired, Joan Mitchell. The writer’s aesthetic, which becomes ever more apparent in her later work, is well expressed in a comment she makes on Frankenthaler’s process: “The moment the brush touches down, the painter is free to explore. The brush carries the momentum as the artist explores the moment—moment and momentum are the springboard. . . . The moment now becomes the distance.” Guest’s insistence on detachment, as she calls it, or let’s just say her restrained elegance, is exemplified in her attraction to lapidary surfaces that set her apart from many of the most innovative “New American” poets of the 60s, with their various projections of spontaneity, insouciant informality, the visceral, camp irony, or pop inflection. These same “distances” made her even more unavailable to official verse culture, exemplified, as Linda Kinnehan has noted, in James Dickey’s Kenyon Review response

2. Barbara Guest, “Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance,” in Dürer in the Window: Reflexions on Art (New York: Roof Books, 2003).

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to Guest’s first trade book, which was published by Doubleday in 1962: “Miss Guest,” Mr. Dickey assures us, “abolishes relationship, and consequently abolishes value.”3 If we take Dickey’s comment as a declaration of Guest’s—and by extension American poetry’s—independence, then we might say that in her late Fair Realism and Defensive Rapture (Sun & Moon, 1993) she fulfills the promise of The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery’s most explicitly disjunctive book, published in 1962, a work that points to the lyric negation that became central for Guest’s poetry. No ideas only surfaces, no surfaces only words, no words only textures, no textures only contingent connections . . . The proofs of poetry often take a long time to develop. If affinity is any measure, Guest’s shadow graces poets as accomplished and different as Rachel DuPlessis, Charles North, Elizabeth Willis, Susan Howe, Douglas Messerli, Kathleen Fraser, Peter Gizzi, Ann Lauterbach, Rosmarie Waldrop, Norma Cole, Cole Swenson, Michael Palmer, and Mei-­mei Berssenbrugge. In a period of American poetry in which the most visible and indeed much of the very best poetry has been written with hooks galore—whether outrageous or flamboyant or hip or morally uplifting, the arrogant or agonized or transcendent—Guest used no hooks. This allowed her to create a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, the flickering in translucent surfaces that we call painterly for lack of a term to chart the refusal of a pseudo-­depth of field. It would be easy to dwell on the exquisite surface refraction in Guest’s work while eliding the significance of this insistently modulated diffusion and liminal warping and woofing. In his prescient review, Dickey admonished the new poets: “They expect the reader to work devotedly for them to solve conundrums, to supply transitions, to make, out of a haphazard assortment of building materials, a habitable dwelling.” Guest never fit in to our premade categories, our expectations, our explanations. She wrote her work as the world inscribes itself, processually, without undue obligation to expectation. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit.

3. Kenyon Review 24 (1962): 756–64. Cited in Linda A. Kinnahan, Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 44, 50.

Jackson Mac Low Poetry as Art

Jackson Mac Low, who died on December 8, 2004, at the age of eighty-­ two, had two children. His son, Mordecai-­Mark, is a computational astrophysicist working at the Museum of Natural History, and his daughter, Clarinda, is a dancer and choreographer who often performs in downtown Manhattan. The two paths his children have chosen exemplify Mac Low’s own contribution to poetry: his profound understanding of the physics of language and his exuberant articulation of the sounds of words in unpredictable motions. Mac Low is probably the most controversial of the many great poets of the legendary “New American Poetry” generation, literary artists born in the 1920s and weighted with such names as Beat and Projective, New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. Of the group, Mac Low has been the hardest to assimilate into the predominantly humanist, self-­ expressive orientation of postwar American poetry. Seen from the point of view of the visual and performing arts, Mac Low’s work may appear less abrasive; and yet there is no visual or performing or conceptual artist— not even among his many Fluxus associates or his longtime comrade and instructor in the art of chance, John Cage—who has created word works that approach the complexity, ingenuity, and density of Mac Low’s. It is not that his work is better than his contemporaries’—Mac Low himself rejected such forms of evaluation—but that his work’s significance for the development of poetry and for our understanding of verbal language is without parallel. He mined deep and rich veins for poetry that had previously gone largely untapped. Mac Low was a superb performer, bringing a musician’s ear for tempo and pitch to a preternatural precision in the enunciation of even the most far-­flung vocabulary. The experience of reading his work on the page pales in comparison to the experience of hearing him perform live or on recordings. He was a performance artist of the highest order and a performance poet avant la lettre. His texts are scores for performance—by the poet but also for the reader. Indeed, a text of his was performed by Julian Beck and Bookforum, February/March 2005.

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Judith Malina’s Living Theater in 1962, and one of his signal works, The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1979) emerged from his engagement, in the 1960s, with Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, and other dancers associated with the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Mac Low’s readings often involved active creative participation by a small group from the audience in the realization of such works as “Simultaneities,” in which the text is read not in unison but through a practice of active listening. Throughout the last two decades of his life, Mac Low often performed stunning duets with his wife and fellow artist, Anne Tardos. Over his long career, Mac Low wrote many types of poem. His first works, such as “HUNGER STrikE wh at doe S lifemean,” were composed when he was a teenager in the late 1930s. He went on to become one of the most prolific American poets of the twentieth century, though much of his work remains unpublished, a good deal untyped. Mac Low continued to create poetry, including sound and visual poems and musical compositions, right up until the time of his death, with many of his most powerful and original works—and the majority of his published work— written after 1980, including From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday (College Park, MD: Sun & Moon, 1982), Words and Ends from Ez (Bolinas, CA: Avenue B, 1989), Twenties: 100 Poems (New York: Roof Books, 1991), Pieces o’ Six: Thirty-­Three Poems in Prose (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992), and 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1994). Much of Mac Low’s most compelling work in his later period echoes qualities of his aleatoric poems, while being freely composed. This is also true of the work of a number of the poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, many of whom, myself included, felt a close kinship with Mac Low and with whom, it could be said, he found one of his aesthetic homes as an elder and fellow traveler, after his important founding participation in Fluxus, and alongside his close association with a circle of poets that included David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, and Hannah Weiner. The multiplicity of Mac Low’s forms and his rejection of any hierarchy among the forms of poetry (objective and subjective, expository or nonrepresentational, lyric and epic), along with his refusal to identify poetic composition with a characteristic “voice” of the poet, are among the most radical aspects of his poetics. But Mac Low’s radicalism went beyond his art practice: he was a lifelong anarchist and pacifist, engaged in decades of antiwar, civil rights, and social justice activism. Mac Low, who grew up in suburban Chicago in a Jewish household, moved to New York after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1941 and quickly became involved in political dissent. At the same time, he was part of the new

Jackson Mac Low: Poetry as Art : 125

wave of Americans to come under the influence of Buddhism, through the teaching of D. T. Suzuki, in the 1950s. Despite the great variety of Mac Low’s output and the significance of his political commitments, he is most frequently associated with a compositional practice he began in the 1950s: the use of predetermined structures—procedures or algorithms—for generating poems. This was the kind of work that he included in his best-­known early publication, the 1963 Fluxus collection An Anthology, on which he worked with La Monte Young, and also in his two groundbreaking collections of works from 1960, Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Barton, VT: Something Else, 1972) and Asymmetries 1–260 (New York: Printed Editions, 1980). In later years, Mac Low preferred to call such works “quasi-­intentional,” rejecting the designation “chance-­generated.” If Mac Low realized an alternative to the personally expressive poem, it was not through a rejection of intentionality but through a realization of the hyperspace of aesthetic motivation, which takes into account the social trajectory of a work and the aesthetic choices made, as well as any specific content. Mac Low’s work reflects intention writ large, along with a ferocious commitment to precision and documentation. Intention in Mac Low is not found in any one poem or structure but rather in the interconnection among works, or perhaps in the burning space between, as Edmond Jabés once suggested. Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986) provides the only single-­volume map, so far, of the exemplary pluriformity of his work. As anyone who knew Mac Low or worked closely with him was aware, he did not countenance accident or carelessness or typographic error, even in works whose word order was determined by a systematic process. His aim was to fully articulate the possibilities of form forging meaning. Given this, the means he employed in creating his compositions were never offhand or mysterious. Consider, for example, Mac Low’s characteristically long, detailed, and sometimes exasperating introductions to his work—not only documenting the rules for text generation and the dates of composition, but also often stipulating exactly how the works were to be performed, down to the number of seconds to pause between phrases. Mac Low sought a kind of total aesthetic control more often associated with contemporary composers of complex music than with poets. To achieve his intention, all the identifiable material conditions involved in the fabrication of the work were acknowledged upfront. In Mac Low’s poetics, the motivation for the poem is not to convey a predetermined meaning or set of marked associations but rather to maximize semantic potential within the bounds of stipulated constraints. As a result, the difficulty of reading his work is of a

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different order from that associated with much modernist poetry. In Mac Low it is never a question of deciphering, since there is nothing hidden, obscure, or purposefully ambiguous: the difficulty is not like that of figuring out a puzzle or interpreting a dream but of responding to the virtually unassimilated, the nearly unfamiliar, and the initially unrecognizable. Reading Mac Low provides a rigorous but exhilarating exercise in aesthetic projection and determination, in the dawning of aspects and the indispensability of frames. Meaning is not handed over but discovered, just as value is not preordained but wrested from the materials at hand. This is a profoundly secular and democratic exercise. There is plenty of pleasure to be had, but passivity is not rewarded. Collective response, just like group performance, is fomented. What could make a sharper political contrast than the imaginary of a Mac Low composition and a reality in which so many of the rules that manipulate social meaning and choice are deliberately hidden. In contrast to core values manufactured by unstated or disguised objectives, Mac Low provides no effects but only principles. Our greatest poet of the manipulated poem is also our greatest poet of negative dialectics—of the total rejection of hidden manipulation in the pursuit of expressive engagement. As such, Mac Low’s work embodies an ethics of sincerity and responsibility. But of course all the objectification in the world will never explain how the poems take flight or the resonance they shore against an ever-­ darkening night. It turns out that far from emptying the poem of emotion or interiority, Mac Low was a Zen Jewish alchemist: converting words into quarks and sparks. His magnificent and multidimensional poems open vast expanses for the imagination to inhabit. Among Jackson’s most beautiful works is Light Poems. The “32nd Light Poem” (1971) is an elegy for Paul Blackburn, but I now I think of my companion, guide, and light in so many things seen and unseen, heard and misheard, hoped and lost: Let me choose the kinds of light to light the passing of my friend ...... If there were a kind of black light that suddenly cd reveal to us each other’s inwardness ...... but the black light of absence not ultraviolet light revealing hidden colors

Jackson Mac Low: Poetry as Art : 127

but revelatory light that is no light the unending light of the realization that no light will ever light your bodily presence again Now your poems’ light is all The unending light of your presence in the living light of your voice1

1. Jackson Mac Low, The Complete Light Poems, ed. Anne Tardos and Michael O’Driscoll (Victoria, TX: Chax, 2015), 182–84.

Robin Blaser’s Holy Forest

I dwell in Possibility— A fairer House than Prose— Dick i nso n

Robin Blaser’s poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else but, rather, being where you are and who you are—where you is always in the plural. In the plural might be a good motto for Blaser’s courageous and antideclamatory poetics, his profound continuation, deep into the darkening heart of contemporary North American poetry, of Emily Dickinson’s core value: “I’m nobody . . . Are you nobody too?” For Blaser, it is not only nobody but also no mind, or “no” mind, for this is a poetics of negation that dwells in pleats and upon folds. Pleating and folding being Blaser’s latter-­ day, Deleuzian, manner of extending his lifelong project of seriality. One poem must follow instanter on the next, a next always out of reach until in hand, in mouth, in ear. Blaser celebrated his eightieth birthday on May 14, 2005, just as this book was going into final production. The present edition, an expanded version of the 1993 Coach House Press publication of the same name—Blaser’s first collected poems—features a number of poems from the last decade and also includes several significant works not included in the Coach House publication. Most significantly, Blaser has added a recent long poem for Dante to his Great Companion series. This astounding work provides a bridge between Blaser’s poems and critical writings, marking a direct point of contact to the University of California’s companion volume of Blaser’s collected essays. Blaser’s work constitutes a fundamental part of the fabric of the North American poetry and poetics of “interrogation,” to use his term. Compared to his most immediate contemporaries, Blaser has pursued a difAfterword to The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, ed. Miriam Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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ferent, distinctly refractory, willfully diffuse, course that has led him to be circumspect about publication. As a result, it was almost forty years from his first poems to the time when The Holy Forest began to emerge as one of the key poetic works of the present. Indeed, Blaser’s lyric collage (what he calls “the art of combinations” in a poem of that title, alluding to Leibniz) seems today to be remarkably fresh, even while his engagement with (I don’t say commitment to) turbulence and turbulent thought seems ever more pressingly exemplary. Blaser’s work seems to me more a part of the future of poetry than the past. Blaser’s poems and essays insist on the necessity of thinking through analogy and resemblance—that is, thinking serially so as to move beyond the epistemological limits of positivism and self-­expression. At the same time, Blaser has committed his work to everywhere affirming the value of human diversity, understood not only as sexual or ethnic difference but also as the possibility of thinking outside received categories. There are some remarkably powerful and explicit political poems in the volume, notably “Even on Sunday.” But the most radical politics of this work goes beyond any one poem: it is inscribed in the work’s compositional practice. Even as Blaser questions the stable, lyric, expressive “I,” he never abandons the possibility of poetic agency, through his generative recognition of language as social, as the “outside.” Blaser’s “Great Companions” have now gone into the world of an ever-­ present no-­longer-­of-­this-­life: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, of his immediate company; Dante, Nerval, Merleau-­Ponty, Deleuze of his Imaginary. The poems of The Holy Forest are points on a map of a cosmos that does not exist in historical terms, that cannot exist, yet that must exist, if we are to make it to a Century 22 that is more than the name of a clothing store. The points form a constellation that we are not quite ready to apprehend but through which we are already formed. We grope and we stumble, but then, out of the blue or black or ultra suede, something unexpected happens: we are ensnared by the encounter. Form finds us. Form founds us. Blaser’s Holy Forest is a blaze of allusion without symbols, quotation without appointment. In the forest of language, every tree is a poem, every leaf a word. The poet sings the songs of night, jumping from branch to branch to a syncopated beat, never, ever, finding home. “To wit—to woo— to wound—,” Blaser writes in “Oh!,” one of his late, short, I want to call them anti-­lyrics. Citation, citation everywhere: the utter prism of his care. No other moment exists but this one. This one. This one.

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The Holy Forest is wholly secular, for only the secular allows the promise of an end to what Blake knew as the Totalizing Oppression of Morality. (“We have paid far too much in terror,” Blaser writes in a note to his Dante poem, “for our totalities.”) Each line of The Holy Forest is a glimpse into the unknown, each poem a new way of entering the holiness of the everyday. The frames are restless: no conclusion nor solution, the only resolution the necessity to go on. “We enter a territory without totalities where poetic practice is our stake and necessity.” “This World is not conclusion / A sequel stands beyond,” writes Dickinson. Neither is the poem the end of the poem, nor is the idea of the poem its origin. The poem is the possibility of possibility. In his exquisite articulations of the flowers of associational thinking, Blaser has turned knowledge into nowledge, the “wild logos” of the cosmic companionship of the real. In Res Robin, Nibor Resalb I n s crip sit Mentastrum ( XXC) Matter over mind or anyway mattering, muttering, sponge warp, cup, meld, then again clutched, shred, shrift. Blister origins (orangutans) in souped-­ up monkey-­wrench. Prattling till the itch in pines becomes gash (sash) in the pluriverses of weft & muck (wept). Pleat as you may, fellow traversers on the rippled road to hear & however, ne’er so near.

Robert Creeley Hero of the Local

On March 30, 2005, as the sun rose across the mountaintops surrounding the highland plains of Marfa in southwestern Texas, Robert Creeley died, surrounded by his wife, Penelope, and two youngest children, William and Hannah, who had arrived at the regional hospital in Odessa just in time to see him through the dawn. The poet who made the struggle for breath a central part of postwar American poetry, who turned the wheeze and gasp and the stutter and the feint into an exquisite art of intimate articulation, had struggled for his own breath throughout March. In e-­mail messages he sent to dozens of his friends during his last weeks, Creeley spoke of living off “champagne” bottles of pure oxygen and even sent pictures by e-­mail in which he looked dapper as ever, with an infusion tube darting across his face like an upside-­down mustache. Creeley also sent out pictures of the mountain views of Marfa, where he was staying on an arts residency. This quintessential poet of New England, born in Acton, Massachusetts, and whose ashes are interred at Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, died a sojourner in the American West, near the border of Mexico, in a scene that evokes nothing if not the climax of a John Ford film. Creeley, who was born in 1926, was active right up to his last weeks, both writing poems and giving readings. His last appearances in New York were at the Cue Art Foundation gallery on January 19, 2005, and the next day at a memorial celebration for the saxophone jazz innovator Steve Lacy at the Poetry Project of St. Mark’s Church. Creeley’s connection with artists and musicians was long-­standing, going back to his days at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Indeed, Creeley was a prodigious collaborator, working with visual artists such as Susan Rothenberg, Francesco Clemente, Robert Indiana, R. B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, Archie Rand, Elsa Dorfman, Marisol, Jim Dine, and many others. At Cue, Creeley remarked on how often he appeared at memorial services; he no doubt felt himself to be one of the last left standing from his generation of poets. But his reading was as vivid and particular as ever, and there was no sign of what was to come, though anyone who has read Brooklyn Rail, May 2005.

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Creeley’s poems of his last two decades will not miss the intimations of mortality that appear, like pointillist dots of grass in a Seurat painting. Creeley’s final talk and reading was one month later, on March 19, at the University of Virginia, home of Thomas Jefferson. But perhaps of more significance for Creeley was Edgar Allan Poe’s ever-­lit dorm room on the edge of the campus, a spectral reminder of the black soul that possesses the poetry of this too often dark land, a darkness that Creeley did not so much dwell within as engage in an ongoing, often defiant, conversation. (He wrote his only libretto based on Poe’s Ligeia.) Creeley had come to Charlottesville as part of a Walt Whitman celebration, and one of his last essays was on Whitman’s late poems. The foundations of American poetry are often said to rest on two radically different approaches: Whitman’s expansive, sexually explicit, and exuberant verse and Emily Dickinson’s philosophical, hermetic, introspective poems. One measure of the genius of Creeley’s poetry is that he synthesizes these two directions—outward and inward—by creating a body of work that has at its heart a formal paradox. Call it quantum poetics. This quantum poetics is nowhere more evident than in Creeley’s radical use of the line break. Creeley reimagined the poetic line as a means of registering microtonal inflections. His achievement in this respect is just the opposite of the “minimalism” that was often used to mischaracterize his work. Creeley’s exquisitely precise lines measure the pressure of reality through their articulation of emotional rupture or turbulence. Breaking every two or three words, his lines also—and in contrast—can be read as materializing the language (making it linguistically concrete, heard as words as much as for what the words might mean). What from one perspective is an extremely fragmenting prosody is, from another, a highly charged music of felt intensities. The experience is one of rhythmically charged, exhilarating oscillation, as waves of thought break into particles of sound. While this achievement is present in his earliest work, it reaches its initial height in two collections, Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). Creeley’s poetry is as much about enunciation as instance of it; here again the bifurcation of being in and beside reveals a dynamic conflict at the level of form. With Words and Pieces, he began a process of bracketing the “I” so that the poems treat the “I” as a third person (“As soon as / I speak, I speaks”): the direct expressive voice of the poet yields to the articulation of voicings in the poem. Creeley’s earlier poems, collected in For Love: Poems 1950–1960, explored regions of male sexuality, aggression, anger, frustration, futility, loss, and disorientation (as well as tenderness and love) in a way rarely, if ever, articulated in American poetry. Creeley’s poems of this period didn’t try to cast the darker part of male consciousness in a positive light: his

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interest was not in a moral discourse that condemned or condoned but in an active poetry of thinking and encountering. The result, startling in the context of the 1950s, was a form of men (to reverse Creeley’s title A Form of Women) that expressed weakness and uncertainty and linked it, contingently, to violence and love, eros and disaffection. Creeley’s often gloriously stuttering poetry of the 1950s used many of the trappings of lyric poetry, but he played outside the tune, as surely as Charlie Parker, only to come back around to it again, making it strange and familiar at the same time. From the 1970s to the his last years in Providence—he began teaching at Brown in the fall of 2003—Creeley continued to write poems with the intensity and unexpectability of his earlier poems. If readers grew to expect this from him, that too is a measure of his achievement. Over these years, Creeley published dozens of books, usually gathering recent work in small editions from micropresses across the USA, and subsequently collecting the poems in a series of major publications from New Directions. During the 1980s and 90s, Creeley ceaselessly toured North American and Europe, giving dozens of readings each year—an apparently quenchless, not to say restless, desire to be on the move. For Creeley, the test of the poem was in its performance, the particular insistences that makes a poem different as it travels from place to place, ear to ear. Throughout this period, too, Creeley was immensely responsive to a wide range of poets, supporting their work through encomiums and recommendations—or just plain listening. In his late work, Creeley composed some his most formally elegant and structurally complex poems—“Helsinki Window” being a perfect example. Meanwhile, his “loops”—poems whose tails eat their heads—­ emphasized a continuing interest in charm and riddle forms. Throughout, he used his distinctive line breaks to mark a frequent subject of his poems, the transitory nature of the daily and the ties that bind and blind. Creeley’s late lines flicker and pop, like the snapping shudder of a photojournalist shooting the blank. Along with his poetic hero, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley is the great twentieth-­century American poet of the everyday. For Creeley the ordinary is not something represented but rather something enacted word by word in each poem. His works combine searing emotional intensity and mind-­boggling linguistic invention, proof that lyric intensity is dependent on formal ingenuity (and the other way around). Creeley was exemplary in his support of younger poets who rejected a poetics of complacency that reigns now, as it did in his time. He championed the radical modernists of the generation before him. And most important, he was

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necessary company to those of his own generation who risked the most in their successful transformation of postwar poetic thinking. Of third-­wave modernist poets (those born in the two decades following 1910), Creeley was one of the greatest champions of the New American Poetry (from the Beats to Black Mountain, New York School to San Francisco Renaissance) and, with Jerome Rothenberg, one of the most consistent adversaries of official verse culture. He took his charge from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky, each of whom offered a specific model of poetics that he transformed into a powerfully resilient core that remains central to contemporary practice. Creeley’s enormous public energy on behalf of other poets in his essays, prefaces, and encomiums, and through his many decades of teaching at SUNY-­Buffalo (where Susan Howe and I worked with him for fourteen years), stems from a set of poetic principles that he often reiterated and elaborated in “quick graphs”—as he called an early set of essays that formed the basis of an activist approach to poetics that remains a bulwark against poetic uniformitarianism and complacency. Creeley’s poetics were not designed to generate a specific type of poetry, either stylistically or formally. They are pro-­vocative rather than proscriptive. And they fomented an approach to poetry that remains the antithesis of the neatly laundered poems of the poet laureates and Pulitzers. Let me make a quick graph of my own. Creeley’s first principle is that you find out what you have to say in the process of saying it: poetry becomes a way of making, not representing. This presents a stark challenge to an approach to poems that begins with ideas or sentiments or messages and then represents or approximates them in the poem. Composition (including editing and recomposing) becomes the active agency of the poem. Immediacy and immanence of expression precede essence. A couple of great one-­liners underscore the concept. The first was picked up by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse,” an essay central to mid-­ twentieth-­century US poetry: “Form is never more than an extension of content.” But Creeley’s corollary is the ringer: “Content is never more than an extension of form.” The other one-­line koan for the poetics of process is an answer Creeley gave to a question from an audience member after a reading—“Is that a real poem, or did you just make it up?” He just made it up. By the same token, a poem is not a summary of something thought but an arc of thinking. This is the temporal dimension of poetry, in which words move in time; in this sense, poetry is allied not to the visual arts but to music and film.

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Creeley’s next principle follows on the first, not like the night follows the day but like one foot follows another when walking: Poetry’s made not of ideas but of words. Creeley was not without his Poundian don’ts, especially: Never write in generalities if a particular, a detail, a specificity would do. Not “the tree” nor “the father” nor “the poet” nor “the right” nor “the tradition” nor “the conventional,” but particular instantiations of any of these. (And yes, Matilda, even abstractions can be given concrete form.) The poet best averts universal truths in favor of the nongeneralizable specifics of form and rhythm and vocabulary. (This is what Gertrude Stein called insistence.) Creeley’s equal emphasis on both the particular and the common is another one of his paradoxes: for it is the particular within the common that is the obscure object of his desire and frequent frustration. The common is not one thing (or one idea) believed by all but a shared space in which our individual differences converge without disappearing. A commons is a place of dispute and provisional agreements—a convention, not a conversion; a particular place, not a universal claim. In Creeley’s prosody—and here the mark of Zukofsky is evident—we count by ones: a serial order in which the contingency of the next is honored and each word (nouns no more than prepositions) carries its own weight. This is a poetics not of subordination but of the sublimity of the modular and the local. Each part doing its part against an horizon of a whole that never arrives. For Creeley, a poem is the fact of its own activity: it exists in itself and for itself, so that we can relate to it not just as “expression” but as enactment. This is not so much an objectification of the poem as a placing of the poem in the world as a thing requiring not mute appreciation but active response. Of course, American poetry has never been, and could never be, Dickinson versus Whitman. There is always the x factor (poetry that combines the Dickinsonian and Whitmanian)—call it by the name of Poe, or Crane, or Loy, or Williams, or Stein, or Blaser, or Rich, or Scalapino. Or Creeley. A few days after Creeley’s death, Charles Alexander spoke of Robert Creeley as our poetic “connective tissue.” So many poets had an intimate relation with Creeley; he had a way of connecting with each of us in particular and, through that connection with him, to a company of poets in the US and around the world. In his quick graphs, Creeley also connected us to a set of poets who constitute a living past for our art. From this perspective, Creeley is not only one of the major innovators of postwar poetry; he is one of the great American poets. As he vanishes from our everyday life, where, for me as for

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so many others, he was a palpable presence in an ongoing conversation, Creeley joins that company of poets who have invented and reinvented the conversation of American poetry over the past two hundred and more years. If he can no longer be our companion in the way he has been—for many of us for our entire lives as poets—his companionship is inscribed in the words he wrote in his poems and essays and letters. then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill.1

1. Robert Creeley, “The Language,” from Words, in Collected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 384.

Larry Eigner’s Endless Song

The Imagined, Returning1 Larry Eigner was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1927, and spent most of his life in nearby Swampscott, midway between Boston and Gloucester, just a few blocks from the ocean. Eigner lived in his parents’ house in Swampscott until 1978, when, shortly after his father’s death, he moved to Berkeley, where he lived until his death in 1996. These facts are bare, commensurate to Eigner’s poems, which bear witness to the preternatural spareness of his life, just as they bear the weight of a gravitational aesthetic force field unprecedented in American poetry. That’s an extravagant claim for a poet who averted extravagance. And it’s an incredible claim too, given Eigner’s obscurity: despite legions of fervent readers, Eigner’s magisterial four-­volume, almost two-­thousand-­ page Collected Poems received virtually no public recognition when it was published by Stanford University Press in 2010. With this volume, Collected editors Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville have created a perfectly scaled introduction to the full scope of Eigner’s work.2 To be an obscure poet is not to be obscure, to invert John Ashbery’s quip that a famous poet is not famous. Eigner’s work has made an indelible impact among the generation of poets brought together in the iconic 1960 New American Poetry anthology. Eigner’s poetry was recognized early on by Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Cid Corman and was subsequently published by hundreds of small press editors in pamphlets, books, and magazines. In 1978 Bruce Andrews and I put an 1. Foreword to The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, in press). 2. Eigner also wrote essays, which have been collected as Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954–1989, ed. Ben Friedlander (New York: Roof Books, 1989). Additional material online at EPC, including biographical notes by Grenier and Friedlander and an autobiographical compilation by his brother Richard Eigner, epc​.buffalo​ .edu​/authors​/eigner. Recordings of Eigner reading and talking, including an interview by his friend Jack Foley, are at the Eigner PennSound page (linked at EPC).

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essay by Eigner on the cover page of the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Ron Silliman dedicated his related anthology In the American Tree (1986) to Eigner. Robert Grenier, his greatest champion, has placed Eigner’s work at the center of an American poetry tradition that begins with Pound and Williams, a view shared by the prescient French poet Claude Royet-­Journoud. Grenier writes of Eigner’s work (and his own) as “words in space,” noting the significance of the visual spacing on the page as distinct from concrete and visual poetry but no less inextricably linked to the technical means of alphabetic reproduction, in this case the manual typewriter. As in the Collected, the editors have remained true to the page space and typewriter font that is intrinsic to Eigner’s practice. His poetry is, to extend a motto of Olson, composition by typewriter page. Eigner’s pages can be seen as etchings on a “blind glass” (to use a phrase of Gertrude Stein’s) or opaque windowpane: it is as if the words float in an infra-­thin emulsion. As you sit with the poem, letting it slowly emerge, its depth becomes as incalculable as “the sustaining air” Eigner evokes in a February 1953 poem.3 The play of depth and surface, figure and ground, metaphor and linguistic materiality, thought and image, description and event, and, above all, duration and instantiation is everywhere in these poems. The poetry of Larry Eigner was profoundly shaped by his cerebral palsy that resulted from a difficult birth. A wheelchair allowed him mobility, but his speech was slurred, and he wrote and typed with just his right index finger and thumb. While Eigner rarely mentions his physical condition in his poems (which mostly involve looking out from, rather than looking onto, himself ), the ontology of the poems, the way they lay bare their embodiment, is everywhere informed by the physical circumstance of his being in the world. A worthwhile exercise is to read an Eigner poem with and then without the frame of his disability. This toggling will begin to activate his poetry’s 4-­D potentiality (the fourth D being duration): the poems follow the modernist principle of imitating not the look but the conditions of nature, and as such they are able to reflect serial projections without being determined by any one of them. Eigner rarely uses the conventional “I” of lyric poetry; in that sense, his work is an extension of the poetics associated with Mallarmé, Stein, and the Objectivists. Eigner does speak through his poems, just as his gaze, like his awareness, is a constant companion in reading. But these poems are grounded not in the poet’s expression but in each reader’s perception. 3. The Colected Poems of Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1:87. Subsequent references to this collection.

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As Eigner puts, it, the poem is “an / event in your eye” or “on the eyeballs.”4 Eigner creates poems that provide active thinking fields for perception (or to reverse that, perceptual fields for reflection). The poems are proof of a daily, meditative practice. For those looking for plot or props or effortless reading, just as for those not looking for those things, this book will push against sensations of entropy, tedium, sameness, emptiness . . . until the features that gave rise to those sensations set off aesthetic endorphins, opening doors to the sublime. It’s a question of scale. A snail’s pace is not slow to a worm. Even geologic time has a rhythm. The particular circumstances of Eigner’s worldly life are the ground of his writing. I await Jennifer Bartlett’s biography to illuminate the daily life of the poet. Eigner, who stayed in his childhood home much of his life, had a lifestyle that was markedly different from that of his fellow countercultural New American poets, with their drugs, lovers, and rock ’n’ roll. Eigner spoke in a way that was hard for the casual or new listener to comprehend, but he came in loud and clear if you gave him the time. His primary relationship was with his parents, and especially his mother, Bessie, who must be acknowledged for supporting her son in a way that heroically defied 1950s norms about his prospects. Eigner’s work offers exemplary realization of an alternative to the sexual politics that lacerates much twentieth-­century poetry. He is a key American Jewish poet, though he rarely makes references to specifically Jewish subjects (“my mother is Jewish / she thinks so”).5 Eigner grapples with a poetics (and immanence) of the ordinary that connects him to Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Weiner, and Ted Greenwald. In this respect, I think also of Lorine Niedecker, James Schuyler, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Grenier. Eigner seems to be evoking William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls” when he writes, “between walls the light / to give / blankness in shadow.”6 I read these lines as an ars poetica: the play of light and shadow creating the animated blankness of the page. Is this a literary allusion or is it a Zen koan? I think of Philip Whalen (to whom Eigner dedicates a poem), Norman Fischer, Leslie Scalapino, John Cage. You don’t need these overlays to appreciate Eigner, but after a while, you get to play. For example, Dickinson’s “You cannot solder an Abyss / With Air” and Blake’s doors of perception 4. October 3, 1967 (3:804) and December 1–6, 1972 (3:1128). 5. June 9, 1976 (3:285); this is the complete poem. 6. January 25–29, 1961 (2:447). “Between Walls,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 453.

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both come to mind with Eigner’s “refresh the eyes / against the abyss”: note, not your eyes or my eyes.7 “Refresh” brings to mind blinking, a serial scanning akin to moving frames of film. Each moment anew. Eigner’s sudden paratactic leaps / syntactic-­synaptic jump cuts—the basic prosodic movement of his poems—are electrifying. Following Dominique Fourcade, I think of Manet’s motto “Tout arrive”: everything happens in the blank space of the page. In place of the poem as a record of psychodrama beyond the poem, action in Eigner arrives at the level of the phrasal hinge: a reinsistent prosody of shift / displacement / reconstellation. Textual slivers shimmer. The poet drops away as the world keeps arriving: a be-­in of the beginnings of middleness (in medias res). A leap of faith, this to that: “suddenly / . . . / (to leap / and break.”8 Eigner’s radical ordinary averts symbols and confessions. The intensifying movement of fragments-­in/as-­appositions, Eigner’s algebra of connection-­in/as-­inflection, is never abstract or dissociated: poetic feet land on the perceptually concrete. These poems sublime the sublime. Only this and nothing more. The imagined, returning what is endless song9

On My Eyes10 Larry Eigner was the least cosmopolitan of people in the 1950s, and Frank O’Hara the most. And yet O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” provides a point of 7. October 1959, 2:353. Also cited: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), #546, 2:419. William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790): “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” (www​ .blakearchive​.org​/exist​/ blake​/archive​/ work​.xq​?workid​=​mhh). 8. 1955 #j7 (1:157). 9. June 19, 1970 (3:957); this is the complete poem. 10. Adapted from a presentation at “Poetry in 1960,” a symposium organized by Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, on December 6, 2010, jacket2​.org​/feature​/poetry​-­1960​-­symposium. Each speaker was asked to pick one book published in 1960; I chose Eigner’s On My Eyes. It followed a talk by Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” which, while written earlier, was published in 1960. The talk was transcribed by Michael Nardone and published in Jacket 2 (May 2, 2011), jacket2​.org​/feature​/poetry​-­1960​-­symposium.

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intersection with Eigner’s work in terms of the phenomenological approach both poets take. As I’m listening to my fellow poets speak of 1960, I keep thinking somebody else is going to listen to us not in terms of what we’re saying about the poets we are talking about, but in terms of the nature of this event itself: the affectional preferences that we are showing and what that says about our generational unconscious and, to some degree, conscious. For those of us born immediately after the Second World War, the poets we are talking about today are of our parents’ generation, and whether positive or negative you have that agonism played out. So I have been thinking about the generational difference between me and Larry Eigner: why I chose Eigner, why I have such a strong affectional connection to him, along with a number of other poets of his generation, some associated with him or more loosely affiliated with the New American Poetry. But I am keeping in mind the frame that Al Filreis provides in The Counter-­Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960. I always say, and so those of you who have spent more than a couple of hours with me will know, that I’m stuck in the ’50s, so this event is the perfect thing: we’re all together, we’re all going to be stuck in the ’50s now because while the books come out in 1960, we’re really talking about work done in the ’50s, that comes out of the ’50s and the deep Cold War. I think beginning with Stanley Kunitz was wild on Al’s part: I think of Larry Eigner and Stanley Kunitz as two possible uncles, one more like (but far to the left of ) my father, Stanley Kunitz. And then there’s Stanley Kunitz in Worcester, early on dealing with Sacco and Vanzetti. There’s Charles Olson born one hundred years ago in Worcester. And Robert Creeley in Acton, Massachusetts, and Larry Eigner in Swampscott. So you have a kind of New England matrix. On My Eyes was published in 1960 by Jargon Press, Highlands, North Carolina, in an edition of five hundred. It’s Eigner’s first large collection, and I think that it’s notable for the way it really brings him into the world. And, again, to add to the tributes to people, Jonathan Williams’s having the foresight to publish a substantial collection of Larry Eigner in 1960 is extraordinary, with an introduction by Denise Levertov. And with beautiful Harry Callahan photos, so the book itself is beautiful. There was just one earlier book, very small, from 1953, that Creeley published, From the Sustaining Air, which echoes again something that Al said in the beginning about what kind of air, the sustaining air. If you compare this book to the first volume of the Collected, you really get a very different sense of what was going on. The work covered in On My Eyes goes back to ’53, so it’s really a lot of earlier stuff than one might imagine for a book published in ’60. When you read the whole set of what Larry was doing, it’s much dif-

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ferent from the sense you get from the book. Not that these poems in the book are necessarily literary in any conventional sense, but in some ways there are more literary picks of the poems than when you read the whole body of work from the period. In the Collected you see work starting out from when Larry was in junior high school. You really get a sense of the impact in his own mind, first of all, very importantly, of the typewriter he got for a bar mitzvah present when he was thirteen, and the fact that because he suffered from palsy when he was born, because of the way in which he was delivered, he could only type with the two fingers. Once he learned to type for himself—his mother had earlier typed for him—he could express himself, and spent all of his time working on that typewriter page. I mean, it’s one of the really monumental achievements of American art in my view, what Eigner achieved that way, and actually in an entirely familial but otherwise largely unsocial space of the ’50s. So you see work that seems so cosmopolitan, so cosmically vivid, done by somebody who really hadn’t had that much contact with anybody else outside his family. In ’49 he hears Cid Corman on the radio. He writes him a letter saying, “Your reading of Yeats is not emphatic enough. What’s wrong with it?”11 And after that, he meets Creeley and others, and he starts to move into the space created by the “opening of the field,” and he writes these extraordinary poems. He ends “from the sustaining air,” which could be my motto as a writer of verse—“I am finally an incompetent after all.”12 1953. “I am finally an incompetent after all.” A stunning comment at the end of a very beautiful poem. However, I want to turn to another poem. “So what if mankind dies,” he writes in On My Eyes—on my eyes, what I’m seeing: so what if mankind dies? the birds the croak and whistle has no future so what? so what?

11. Based on Eigner’s biography in Don Allen’s New American Poetry (New York: Grove, 1960). 12. February 53 (187).

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the future arrives the end of stick in my crotch toward the speed of light13

It’s an extraordinary poem about the nature of the phallus, a hard-­on, being just about as far as where the future is gonna go for Eigner. Again, a 1955 comment on progress from Swampscott. And I want to end with a quote from a poem of his, the name of this piece is called Eigner’s Fierce Calculus

. . . but please, in the transcription, keep the title right there because this is a talking essay. “The Dead dog” poem that Eigner writes in 1957, I think he answers, in a way, generationally, for me what I like so much about these poets of the 1950s, and Eigner answers Corman, too. At the end of “The Dead dog,” he says, “but someday the grandmothers may grow wise / and speak the calculus”—and “calculus” is a term for him which really pervades, and it’s an alternative to “another time in fragments” and Benjamin’s constellation, it’s the idea that these individual, discrete, burning particulars together make a calculus that’s a three- or four-­dimensional calculus—and ends “making a fierce language.”14 Frank Sherlock: This question is for Charles, or anybody who wants to jump in on this. Given that Larry Eigner was not that cosmopolitan of a guy, what do you make of the cosmopolitanism in the poems and maybe where that comes from? That’s the extraordinary space of the blank or the silence that he faced and actually his commitment to listening. One of the striking things about Eigner is the radicality of the work. I wouldn’t compare it for better or worse with his contemporaries, but I don’t think there’s anything that’s more radical in terms of the calculus in the imagination of relations, and the force in which those come together. So I think there are a lot of ways or

13. 1955 #k’ (1:160). 14. December 57 #2b (1:266).

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terms in the future through which Eigner’s work will be thought of. Certainly in terms of disability and Michael Davidson’s important reading, and in the wider sense of a queer existence, which, surely . . . There’s a poem in there about his mother that is just amazing, which reminds me of the Anacin commercial from the early ’60s: “Mother, please, I’d rather do it myself!”15—where Eigner says (I should quote this exactly): “I can eat the food myself, just give me the time.”16 And you read this, and that’s amidst all this other stuff. So maybe the microcosm of the social space for him is as macrocosmic as it is for everybody else. Maybe the problem that we have to think through is who these people are as they emerge. That’s why, and this is what I said in response to the ’50s issue, the poem I read about the future, that’s an antiapocalyptic poem. There are a lot of issues around the apocalypse, the bomb, the extermination process of the Jews that certainly would have haunted a Jewish American family in Swampscott. And what he is saying is something about adhering to where you are and just doing the best you can with the moment that you’re in. It sounds a lot like a whole range of other things from the ’50s that I mentioned, and Eigner was able to come to that—he did read extensively, he was obviously a kind of genius, no question about that, because otherwise how could he have done what he did?—but at the same time he was able to have that consciousness just by being where he was when he was, thinking about it and thinking with every word that he articulated. Surely, Robert Creeley got a letter from him and wrote him back, and that is a kind of miracle. Rod Smith: The Eigner-­Creeley correspondence starts before the correspondence with Olson, actually. It’s nowhere near as voluminous, but it’s clearly important to both of them. Al Filreis: I just want to say, also, and I invite anybody to say more about Eigner, or to switch the subject, I just want to say that I felt confident until tonight, I felt confident doing era-­related, historically contextual readings of all of these books. I mean, I’m not bragging, I think one can do that, and it was Eigner I thought I couldn’t because I had this stupid idea that Eigner is a bit out of time or out of context, and your remarks and what you just said now and the exchange you just had with Rod makes me want to go back to Eigner and see how this really is a book of its times, these are poems of their time, ’53 to ’60. 15. One commercial from the ad series is online at youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =​ Lpnj6iqfnFE. 16. Circa 1954, #g7 (1:143).

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His work really comes together with Another Time in Fragments, the Eigner that most of us know, though there are these other poems in there. But Another Time in Fragments, like “calculus,” is partly a response to what we were talking about, which is difference and connection. Surely, Eigner was about as differently abled as anybody could possibly be. He was in his own space; balkanization doesn’t cover it. He was completely in another time. When he says another time in fragments, he means that, but he also gets you to rethink what all of those terms mean. That fragments don’t separate us but are able to link us together if we understand poetry as a calculus and social space as a calculus. Filreis: And he is still revising at the last minute, but some of that stuff goes way back, and the dream that generates that very first poem goes back to at least ten years before that, or something like that. So yes and no. Guilty but also innocent. Charles. The nostalgia issue goes back to what I said initially, just listening to everybody else: what are our affectional relationships? One of the first things I thought when I heard “1960” as a year, was, you know, “Where was I?” And I made a list, which I didn’t get to, of the television shows that I would have been watching at the time, from The Jack Benny Program to Gunsmoke. Filreis: And, by the way, Charles Bernstein does a fabulous Jack Benny imitation, with the timing. Well, I always loved Benny’s pause after “Your money or your life.” But nostos, if we’re going to talk about it, is going back home. And it isn’t a negative term necessarily. I think certainly there could be a nostalgia, but it would depend upon what it was for. Curiously, in Eigner, one of the things that’s most attractive about his work is the utter absence of nostalgia or sentimentality or victimization, which, surely, I pro­ject in whenever I read of him. I’m always astounded that he doesn’t have that. I guess he can’t really afford to. The other thing I want to say, though, is that a historical study of 1960 for me—and I assume this as a kind of talking point with Al—has to do with the ’50s despite anything else. That’s what 1960 means to me: work that was done in the ’50s that might have been published in 1960. It’s a curious fact that Eigner’s first book was published then. I would say that if we talk about the 1950s, while it’s important to be as harshly critical as we can possibly be about all the things going on, and we ought to extend

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that: I don’t expect poets and poetry communities to be any better than their times. The deformations of the ’50s are very powerful, as are the ways that people respond to those deformations. So, it isn’t a shock to me. “I’m shocked, shocked, that there is gambling [misogyny, homophobia, racism] going on in this establishment!” That was the nature of the times. I would also want to say, thinking of Michael Davidson’s San Francisco Renaissance book and Guys like Us, for example, that in reflecting on that particular moment in San Francisco, that culture there was responding to some degree—they were white gay men—to enormous violence in their everyday lives that I never experienced; so I hear the criticisms, and it’s right, but also I’m not in a position to criticize. I mean, I am and I am not. But I think in the ’50s, in that context of what’s going on, one has to imagine what those communities were. And why they often became paranoid, isolated, and even misogynist. . . . Then again, as Davidson has described so well in Guys like Us, Creeley is as much a part of a male culture as Olson and so on, which one has to understand within that frame. And we need to read these poets, and ourselves, in terms of their social dysfunctions. But as to whether we are better now, I don’t think so. I think there are some advantages, but when we look at the macroculture now of what’s going on, when we have a Congress now, a Republican Congress, that refuses to respect the civil rights of gays or women . . . And our own microcommunities are surely not without their problems—anyway mine have plenty. So I would say, contextualize and historicize.

John Ashbery The Meandering Yangtze

If you didn’t know what was going to happen next, would you live your life any differently? Now everybody knows that you never can tell what will actually happen next. But for the most part, and barring emerging conditions, it’s possible to go on from one day to another as if everything was happening, if not according to plan, then at least as expected. Then again, you could go on the road or out to sea or just be out to lunch and the surprises might pile up like slices of baloney on the manager’s special. A more promising model might be the weather, unpredictable in its changes, but over time fractal patterns may be discerned. In the stadium of explanation, each complete thought follows the next under the regime of logic. Explanation abhors weather. I am writing this sentence on a chugging, uncomfortably musty ship that is making its way down the Yangtze, China’s longest river. The boat glides on a thick ribbon of brown, sometimes garbage-­strewn, water, bounded on both sides by tall green mountains. The river makes its way without making sense. The mountains seem imperious, as mountains usually do, beholden to nothing and to no one, except perhaps the river at their feet. I am a part of neither, mountain nor river, a foreign visitor to a foreign land, where many of those I meet speak English as a foreign language. They know the words but not what they mean in use: it is an English without cultural conConjunctions 49 (2007). Brad Morrow and Peter Gizzi asked contributors to write about one Ashbery book for an eightieth-­birthday tribute. I focused on “The Skaters” from Rivers and Mountains. Page references to “The Skaters” are to the 1974 Ecco Press (New York) edition of Rivers and Mountains. The title is a line from a poem in the collection, “Into the Dusk-­Charged Air”; the line does not appear in the version collected in The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poems, published by Ecco, 1997 (evidently an error). See the digital edition of “The Skaters” from Text-­Works, in which I had a hand: www​.text​-­works​.org​/Texts​/Ash bery​/JA​-­Sk​_data​/JA​-­Sk​_text​.html.

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text, a machine language version not programmed to recognize figures of speech, social tone, or local inflection. The distance is as deep as one of the Three Gorges upon which I slide, like a skater dreaming she is a waterfall. There is a method to his madness but also a madness to his method. Certain pervasive features in John Ashbery’s work make their first appearance, full blown, in Rivers and Mountains, which was published in 1966, four years after The Tennis Court Oath and the same number of years before The Double Dream of Spring. In the poems of this collection, and especially “The Skaters,” Ashbery introduces a nonlinear associative logic that averts both exposition and disjunction. Ashbery’s aversion (after The Tennis Court Oath) to abrupt disjunction gives his collagelike work the feeling of continuously flowing voices, even though few of the features of traditional voice-­centered lyrics are present in his work. The connection between any two lines or sentences in Ashbery has a contingent consecutiveness that registers transition but not discontinuity. However, the lack of logical or contingent connections between one line and the next opens the work to fractal patterning. “The Skaters” brushes against this approach by suggesting that the point of contact between the lines is a kind of “vanishing point.” In order to create a “third way” between the hypotaxis of conventional lyric and the parataxis of Pound and Olson (and his own “Europe” in The Tennis Court Oath), Ashbery places temporal conjunctions between discrepant collage elements, giving the spatial sensation of overlay and the temporal sensation of meandering thought. Skating is the adequate symbol of this compositional method. In the meantime, the Yangtze cruise boat loudspeaker continuously blares a music soundtrack alternating with piercing announcements, so that our view of the pristine wilderness of the gorges is overlaid with tour guide chatter alternating with the muzak. The loop includes “I’m Never Gonna Dance Again” from Footloose, “Auld Lang Syne,” and the theme song from Titanic. Not to be too heavy-­handed (or ham-­fisted or grandiose) about Ashbery’s aversion of the heavy hand, but . . . his wry references to system as idiom, incident, overlay operate in a minor key against the major chord of Big Systems and their teleological tyranny. In Rivers and Mountains the primary transition (or hinge) phrases are but, ever since, and, now, when, which, yet, so, or, so that, and so, and together we, and yet, still, near by, and now, nevertheless, but still, where was I?, sometimes, anyway, somewhere, also, and slowly, outside, only, now, therefore, because, as long as, nearly, in reality of course, that, if, for, in the meantime, outside, above, but to return, and what if, and, at the heart of it, meanwhile.

John Ashbery: The Meandering Yangtze : 149

And yet one can also find some of these textual pivots in Some Trees. Not so in A Worldly Country, Ashbery’s most recent book, where the rough edges of the transitions are smoothed over by a genial colloquiality; or is it like rocks at the beach sanded smooth by time, or old buttons on a cardigan? I can go anywhere and never leave the page. A river divides me from the other shore. Or I am on the other shore and the river divides me from myself. “And the voyage? It’s on! Listen everybody, the ship is starting! We have just enough time to make it to the dock” (46). What if the poem wanders like a river, widens its ken, contracts, is sometimes deep and sometimes shallow, has its periodic rapids, yet sometimes the current goes dead? The symbolic dissolves into the idiomatic. Let me deform a brief passage from “The Skaters,” first casting it into conventional lyric voice: Sleepless, I dream of my father’s farm and of the pigs in their cages at dawn. I wake up and go out for a walk on the street of the Cathedral. I see so much snow but I am afraid that soon it will be littered with waste and ashes and my prayers will have no white sanctuary

and now deformed into a disjunctive mode: pigs in cages / snow waste, ashes / towering cathedrals

and now Ashbery: . . . The pigs in their cages // And so much snow, but it is to be littered with waste and ashes So that cathedrals may grow. (36)

Suddenly, it must be 7:00 a.m.: a loud alarm sounds and the cruise boat docks. Once off the ship, we are put into bright orange life jackets and then herded into small boats to go up one of the river’s little gorges. A sign warns those over age fifty to be sure to travel with an able-­bodied compan-

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ion. At the end of the passage, we are directed to walk on a narrow floating plank of perhaps five hundred feet, at which point we are issued hard hats and sent scurrying up a steep staircase into the mountains. All the while, the tour guides are barking on their portable megaphones, and there is a faint whiff of muzak from speakers lodged deep in the landscape. At the peak, we are directed to look at an acrobat riding a bicycle across a tightrope strung across the river, from mountain to mountain. I think of La Strada. The experience is less sublime than outward bound. Speaking of “leaving out”: one thing Ashbery leaves out of his work is the overheated, hyperbolic, charged-­up, emotion-­laden style associated with the prophetic, confessional, “beat,” “projective,” and political poetry of his generation. His deflationary diction provides a powerful counterforce— a negative dialectic—to fighting fire with fire, anger with anger, outrage with outrage, suffering with expressed anguish, self-­righteousness with self-­righteousness. Moreover, Ashbery’s poetry is a (literally) breathtaking swerve away from the bombastic rhetorics of the years of his coming of age, during the Second War, of the apocalyptic thinking associated with the Extermination Process, of the H-­bomb, and of the strident anti- and pro-­communism/capitalism of the Cold War. In “The Skaters” there is a wry comment about the “professional exile” who is used to taking in the news—this week’s revolution—as just one more spectacle in an endless series (“Here, have another—crime or revolution? take your pick” [57]). The passage captures a postwar ennui and disaffection often associated, and sometimes condemned, in Ashbery’s dis-­engagé verse. But the poetic logic of the passage is different: its (dys)engagements are a form of Emersonian aversion; the refusal to be baited by events packaged as commoditized news opens up a space not of confrontation and reaction formation but of reflection, interiority, privacy, imagination. A space of freedom (Freiheit!, as “The Skaters” insists, lapsing into a German too startling to be ironic [59]). I’ve always understood David Lehman’s title The Last Avant Garde, which focused on Ashbery and his most immediate poetic company, to mean last in the sense of the one before this one. For avant-­gardes are always and necessarily displaced floating flotillas, out on a nameless sea that everyone is always naming. Lehman makes the rhetorical mistake of advertising his subjects as apolitical, in the process mortally undermining Ashbery’s fundamentally political and ethical engagements and disengagements (his clinical value, in Deleuze’s sense). The politics of Ashbery’s poetic form is its cutting edge. Even the tallest mountains have tops and the deepest rivers bottoms, but we will never know them because we are too much part of them. We? I hardly know you. Stay for a while.

John Ashbery: The Meandering Yangtze : 151

In “The New Spirit,” the first section of Three Poems, Ashbery notoriously remarks, “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.” A keynote passage from “The Skaters” anticipates this formulation: . . . This leaving-­out business. On it hinges the very importance of what’s novel Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention Isn’t the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not, Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still. Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves. (39)

In this ode to the hinges of elusive elision, the poet circumnavigates a case against explanation and “plain old-­fashioned cause-­and effect,” while giving a nod to, if not autopoesis (the poem devouring itself ), then to Lear’s tragic disavowal of Cordelia’s refusal to speak the “costly stuff of explanation”—“Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” Like Cordelia, Ashbery does indeed speak again, but on poetry’s, not explanation’s, terms. This is a poem that knows how to make use of nothing. The passage is less ars poetica than ars abscondita. After a while, our boat stops at a thousand-­year-­old temple to the poet Qu Yuen, located very near the Three Gorges Dam. Long tapering candles of incense burn in front of a bronze statue of the poet, who committed suicide in 278 BC by drowning himself in the Miluo River, as a protest, so the story goes, against the cultural climate of his times. In the next few months, the monstrous dam, the great emblem of China’s relentless modernization, will totally flood the site. I’m asked if I will write a poem about my trip to China. Perhaps I will call it “The Poet Drowned.” You get the sense that you could start anywhere in “The Skaters” and move around in whatever direction. The stanzas are interchangeable because modular. The lines of the poem make endless figure eights. In “The Poetic Principle” Poe says that the long poem cannot exist, and “The Skaters” shows why: it is composed of many small poems, call them discrete sensations, that are fused together. Ashbery, like Poe, is a poet of sensation rather than emotion, sensibility rather than big ideas.

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The only other Westerner on the boat, a man from Scotland, tells us he took the trip ten years ago, before the Chinese government flooded the gorges as part of a huge and ecologically disastrous hydroelectric project. Where before the line of the river slit through the sheer mountains the way a knife slices through a tall chunk of thick butter, now the experience is more like a cruise on a lake. The new paths everywhere leave an echo of the older and deeper gorges. “The Skaters” samples a series of textures, never resting at any one locus. The continuous flow of discontinuous perceptions. Winding eddies. Confluence. Lateral thinking. The essential feature of parataxis is the absence of subordination; Ashbery’s is an associative parataxis, elements joined by perceptual, aesthetic, and philosophical connections and family resemblances. Constant but gradually shifting, asymmetrically kaleidoscopic; a stream of dissolving shots. “But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes” (34). It is as if these poems are part of me: not as if I wrote them, but as if they wrote me. In June, just before my trip to China, Ashbery and I read together at Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction in the East Village. The young woman who hosted the event, perhaps nonplussed to say something about John, awkwardly announced that she could not “describe a poet before they are about to read because they will tell you who they are.” She then added that Ashbery had written some “thirty-­odd books of poetry.”—How odd, indeed, these books really are, and how crucial that oddness, and specificity, has been for me as a poet. Oddness that stays odd. Ashbery is an exemplary poet of privacy, of nondisclosure, of an other mind that stays an other mind. His poems reveal not universal human emotions but quirky passages and unexpectable associations. They provide not moments of identification but company along the way. But not for everyone. I still remember a September 6, 1981, Sunday, New York Times Book Review piece by Denis Donoghue that wrongly describes Ashbery, in Shadow Train, as “secretive”: Even in one of the more available poems, “Or in My Throat”—though the title is opaque to me—Mr. Ashbery catches himself in the act of being sweet and gives sourness the last words: That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey, stupid! (6)

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What’s opaque to the reviewer is not Ashbery’s syntactic or free-­associative difficulty but the title’s reference to oral sex and how this in turn relates to the lines quoted; all of a sudden, the “opaque” becomes both explicit and outrageous. I’m not suggesting that “everyone” would catch the meaning of “Or in My Throat,” but then that’s the point. The lines of Ashbery that are cited make a wry comment on the situation—the situation of meaning and of the opaqueness of the New York Times toward poetry of the past quarter-­century. And the moral of that is: What’s opaque to one bursts out at another. That’s not, as this review and many others suggest, a problem for poetry; it’s the promise of poetry. But where was I? In the elevator in a hotel in Chongqing there is a sign for a special dish at the restaurant: Jellyfish with Jew’s Ear. At the restaurant, we see a large picture advertising afternoon tea, decorated with images of onion-­, ­sesame-­, and poppy-­seed bagels. We point to the picture and ask for one. About a half-­hour later the waitress appears with a bowl of Cheerios. Around the bend is another bend. When Peter and Brad first asked me to write something on one of John Ashbery’s books for Conjunctions’ eightieth-­birthday tribute, I suggested a commentary on an imaginary work of Ashbery’s for which I would make up all the quotes. But then I realized that maybe my books, in my mind, are just such imaginary works of Ashbery’s, from my own distorted perspective; volumes to which I have, without license, affixed my name. In Rivers and Mountains, John Ashbery crossed the Rubicon in American poetry. Actually he double-­crossed it. And then some. Meanwhile . . .

Hannah Weiner’s Medium

Hannah Weiner has been so much a part of my life as a writer that I find that her death hasn’t ended my relation to her but moved it into another dimension. I don’t mean anything supernatural about that—I always played the resolute skeptic to Weiner’s more heterodox beliefs; but I never doubted that she was a visionary poet, and I found her insistence on her clairvoyance to be a welcome relief from the heavy-­handed rhetoric of poet as prophet that she so utterly rejected. While Weiner befriended, and was admired by, many poets of my own generation, her poetry begins to make a different sense when considered in the context of some of the poets of her own generation. Like many of these poets, she was deeply influenced by Eastern thought and was in search of a poetry of everyday life. In this, her project resonates with John Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Eigner, Robert Creeley, John Wieners, and James Schuyler. Like Jack Spicer, she understood that if the heart of poetry were a radical foregrounding of the medium of writing, then this would also mean that the writing, and possibly the writer, became a medium. But a medium of what, for what? One of Weiner’s most enduring achievements as a writer was her unflinching, indeed often hilarious, inclusion of what from a literary point of view is often denigrated as trivial, awkward, embarrassing, silly, and, indeed, too minutely personal, even for the advocates of the personal in writing. Indeed, Weiner’s work is a striking combination of radical formal innovation and intensely personal content. She is one of the leading practitioners of the “poetics of everyday life”—poets who have rethought how to pre­sent the experience of daily life in the most vivid possible ways. For Hannah Weiner, nothing was too minute to merit recording, but she decisively rejected all the extant literary models for recording personal thoughts or feelings—from the single-­voice lyric to the narrative-­ driven diary. The motivation for Weiner’s charting of her personal space was not primarily self-­expression—any more than the motivation for Descartes’s meditations were primarily self-­expression. Rather, she used her The Poetry Project Newsletter, 1997.

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self as the most ready-­to-­hand site for her experiments on the relation of language to consciousness. Weiner’s work is an unrelenting synthesis of radical formal innovation and intensely personal content. Her best-­ known work remains The Clairvoyant Journal, written in 1973 and 1974 and published by Angel Hair in 1978. In this work, Weiner used a three-­voice structure to record not only her own diaristic impressions and notations but also—scored in italics—a voice commenting on what she had written and—in capital letters—giving commands to her. This highly original fugal structure—an explicit alternative to the more conventional monologic lyric—found vivid realization in the three-­person performances that she gave in the 1970s and 1980s. Hannah Adelle Finegold was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 4, 1928. She graduated from Classical High School in 1946 and went on to Radcliffe College, class of 1950 (magna cum laude), where she wrote a dissertation on Henry James. After several jobs in publishing, she became an assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s. In the meantime she married a psychiatrist; the marriage ended in divorce after four years. Subsequently, Weiner got a job designing lingerie. She began to write poetry in 1963. Her best-­known work of this period is The Code Poems (Open Studio, 1982), written using the international code of signals (nautical flag signals). These works were also the basis of performances she gave in the 1960s, and she was a participant in the downtown performance scene of the time. After 1970 she devoted herself to writing, emphasizing that all her works written after 1972 were based on “seeing words.” As she says in an epigraph to The Clairvoyant Journal: “I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page.” Her other books include Little Books/Indians (Roof Books, 1980), Spoke (Sun & Moon, 1984), Silent Teachers / Remembered Sequel (Tender Buttons, 1993), and We Speak Silent (Roof, 1997). It is an irony, perhaps, that the writing that Weiner will be best remembered for coincided with a period in which schizophrenia made her everyday life increasingly difficult. Weiner’s illness was often shrugged off as eccentricity, as in “we’re all a little crazy, after all.” But few us suffer from our craziness in the way Weiner did, and her schizophrenia was not merely metaphoric, despite the fact that Weiner resisted any characterization of herself as mentally ill. Surely there was the fear that since Weiner’s work was predicated on hearing voices and seeing words, her identification as schizophrenic would discredit the achievement of a poetry in which the very idea of a stable, expressive lyric self is exploded into what might indeed metaphorically be described as a kind of schizophrenic writing. This may be less a problem for work such as James Schuyler’s, where mental illness is explicitly figured, or for writers like Hölderlin, in his late poems,

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or John Wieners, where the lyric voice may be read as a kind of sanctuary from schizophrenia, or, to put it another way, where the psychic disturbance is registered by the lyric voice. In any case, Hannah Weiner’s work is not a product of her illness but a heroic triumph in the face of it. Her personal courage in refusing to succumb to what often must have been unbearable fear induced by her illness, her persistence in writing in spite of her disabilities, is one of the legacies of her work. And if her schizophrenia gave her insight into language, into human consciousness, into the nature of how everyday life can be presented rather than represented in writing— well, we all have to start from where we are. While Weiner’s last few years weren’t easy, she continued to produce amazing writing, pushing her own poetry and the possibilities for poetry into new zones of perception. What else are poets for?

Haroldo de Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)

I do not guide because I do not guide because I can not guide and don’t ask me for mementos just dwell on this moment and demand my commandment and do not fly just defy do not confide defile for between yes and no I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes place the no in the ee of me place the no the no will be yours to know H arol d o de Camp os, tr an s. A. S. Bessa1

Haroldo de Campos is a defining figure for the poetry of the Americas. His work is essential not just to an understanding of Brazilian poetry but also to the geography—conceptual, intellectual, cultural, and social—of postwar poetry in the world at large. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the world at small, for de Campos is determinedly peripheral to the large-­scale cultural and economic forces that have, more often than not, wrecked havoc on the possibilities for poetry’s indomitable sprit as local, resistant, rebarbative, intractable, radiant; as infra- and cross-­cultural rather than pancultural; as intellectual fire rather than sentimental noise. De Campos is best known as one of the inventors of Concrete poetry in the 1950s. But concrete, or visual, poetry is only one aspect of de Campos’s work, and his identification with this movement may obscure his overall achievement. The dynamic of this overshadowing, however, is a central part of the social meaning of his work. De Campos wrote literary and political essays, which often appeared Crosscurrents (Poetry Society of America), December 2003. On January 12, 2002, Sergio Bessa and Pablo Helguera brought a group together at the Guggenheim Museum in New York to talk about Haroldo de Campos’s work. The event was part of the museum’s exhibition Brazil: Body and Soul. This essay is adapted from my talk at that occasion. A video of the event, with Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, Bessa, Helguera, and Odile Cisneros, is available at PennSound, writing​.upenn​ .edu​/pennsound​/ x​/De​-­Campos​.php. De Campos died on August 16, 2003, at the age of seventy-­three, just months before a planned trip to the US. 1. From Galáxias, in Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 125.

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in São Paulo’s daily newspapers. He also created poems in many new and old forms, including abstract lyrics (resembling in some ways the early work of Clark Coolidge, such as that collected in Space) and a new form of prose poetry that he called Galáxias, which is characterized by the pervasive use of portmanteau words (along the lines of late Joyce) and absence of periods, and is possibly his greatest literary achievement. Yet perhaps de Campos’s most resonant work was his writing about, and his practice of, translation, what he called transcreation. Indeed, the poetics and politics of trans- and re-­creation inform not just de Campos’s incredible range of translations into Portuguese—Genesis and Ecclesiastes, Homer and Dante, Joyce and Pound, Mallarmé and Mayakovsky—but his work overall. De Campos believed that translation was a key issue for Brazilian modernism. And Brazil itself is a necessary starting point for consideration of de Campos as poet and transcreator. I approach this topic with both enthusiasm and trepidation, for what I know about Brazil is determined, to a great extent, by what has been exported—indeed, what’s available to me in translation. The problem is translating de Campos without losing the Brazilian. According to de Campos, the literary work in Brazil starts full blown with the baroque, and you can experience this in a very striking way at the Guggenheim show. After ascending through floors and floors of baroque art, all of a sudden you end up in a display of formalist modernism. There is practically no transition. Speaking today amidst this profusion of Brazilian art, we can see that de Campos is both baroque and antibaroque. For de Campos, however, it is perhaps more cogent to speak of polyglottism, or what might also be called the syncretic. Indeed, the tensions among the polyglot, the multilingual, and the syncretic are manifestations of the overlay of a reductive yet elegant modernist formalism superimposed on a baroque foundation. And indeed this is the backstory of de Campos’s poetry. At the Guggenheim Museum’s 2001 Brazil: Body and Soul, such cultural contradictions were displayed in the most dramatic way in the conflict between the Norman Rockwell show, in the new side wing of the museum, and the Brazil show in the main atrium. The Rockwell show suggests a vision of America which is opposite to the syncretic and polyglot: an art of America, not the Americas. Rockwell is constantly reiterating a unified and idealized image of what American (United States) culture can be; looking at these images brings this America into being. On the Brazilian side, there is no similar singular image of national unity. The first book of poetry published by a Brazilian author was Música do Parnasso by Manuel Botelho de Oliveira (1636–71); it was written in four

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languages—Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. If one reads that book as a virtual ground for de Campos’s project, it puts into play a very different framework from those of his North and South American contemporaries who conceive of poetry as monolingual. But de Campos’s polylingualism is not simply a measure of his internationalism—for both the apparent extroverted internationalism of Concrete poetry and of transcreation has another, intensely introverted, dimension, which is a crucial dynamic of de Campos’s work. In the Brazilian modernism of the early 1920s, there was a focus on the specificity of Brazil but also on the fact that Brazil—its culture, its art— was unknown to the outside world. And at this point a fundamental conflict emerges between exporting and refusing to export “Brazil.” The fear of exporting culture is that one may end up extracting, reducing, translating (away), sacrificing the heart for a hollow representation. Moreover, there is the sense that one must have a culture in order to be in dialogue with other cultures; so first there is the need to build your culture into something substantial. Dialogue, in other words, export, comes into conflict with self-­development. Or put it this way: internationalism comes into conflict with willed isolation, the insistence on cultural solitude, which necessarily entails remaining unknown to the outside world. This issue, so central for de Campos, and other Brazilian poets, was addressed in the 1920s by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), when he writes of anthropophagy or cannibalism. Cannibalism is a way to deal with that which is external. While related to both translation and assimilation, cannibalism goes further: when you eat that which is outside, ingesting it so that it becomes a part of you, it ceases to be external. By digesting, you absorb. In 1952, when he was twenty-­three, de Campos cofounded the Concrete poetry movement, the most visible Brazilian international literary export up until that time and, as a result, also very well known, even if initially controversial, inside Brazil. Simultaneously, he was writing neo-­baroque poems, poems that remain unknown outside Brazil. Concrete poetry was a successful Brazilian export: it became part of, insofar as it could be assimilated to, the international modernist style. You can look at a Concrete poem and get the sense you understand it without knowing Portuguese or anything about Brazil, or indeed anything about the author. The design of the words on the page, the evident lyric wit, made de Campos’s Concrete poems tremendously appealing. In their initial guise of minimalist reduction, these poems look international, suggesting a utopian possibility for postwar literary modernism, connected, for example, with both the architectural style and the left politics of Oscar Niemeyer. The fact that a radically experimental visual poetry has been Brazil’s best-­known poetry ex-

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port, and as a result achieved a significant measure of acceptance within Brazil, reverses the dynamic in almost all other places, where comparable forms of innovative poetry work have been the among the most marginalized. The situation of Concrete poetry echoes the double bind of Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s zaum (transrational) poetry. On the one hand, zaum was able to transcend language barriers, as a kind of Esperanto. Everyone would be able to understand transense or made-­up words because nobody could understand them. In other words, like Concrete poetry, it appears to need no translation. On the other hand, in its materializing of the word, zaum is completely opaque: untranslatable. It is this other side of the coin that is related to de Campos’s turn from his earlier sleek international modernism to baroque transcreation, as he moved toward a capacious opacity by a process of absorption and cannibalization. Within the light of de Campos’s subsequent work, his Concrete poetry takes on a double life, for its very lucidity is the surface reflection of its refractory, ludic otherness; it’s like the sun shining on the surface of a body of water whose depth has not yet been sounded. Indeed, in many of de Campos’s poems an immediately appealing play of sound, on the order of sound poetry for the non-­Portuguese-­speaking listener, doubles with a semantic complexity unavailable in the sounds themselves. In other words—I keep coming back to that phrase, in other words—we have to translate even, especially, de Campos’s translations. The words alone are not enough; what is required is an act of cultural transcreation and poetic exchange. If I were to situate de Campos within an American poetry context, the contemporaries of his that would come to mind immediately would be Robert Creeley, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin. When we consider Brazil’s export culture, among the best-­known work is the bossa nova, as created in the magnificent rhythmic asymmetries and lyric understatement of Antonio Carlos Jobim (1925–94) and Vinicius de Moraes (1913–80), both roughly contemporary with de Campos, and continuing on with what has come to be called MPB (música popular brasileira). Indeed, de Campos’s movement away from assimilable export, as he backed away from the window onto (or out of?) Brazil provided by international abstraction, might be contrasted to the tropicalismo of that most gifted singer/songwriter/poet Caetano Veloso (born in 1942), who has achieved a phenomenal international success over the past two decades. Haroldo’s brother, and fellow Concrete poet, Augusto de Campos created a small storm among Brazil’s innovative poets by once suggesting that tropicalismo was more interesting than any of their work. I don’t know what Haroldo thought of this, but I read his approach as being quite differ-

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ent. For Haroldo, the 1950s crystallized a moment of political possibility, of utopian extroversion; after that he turned toward a nonutopian grappling with social complexity—what he called “sign materialism.” Sign materialism provides a way to read his journey from Concrete poetry to linguistic concretion by means of transcreation. Translation then becomes a bridge, going back to his earliest work and drawing on his interest in Pound’s, Zukofsky’s, and Benjamin’s radical approaches to translation. What de Campos calls transcreation is, in effect, re-­creation: in translating the poet (cannibalistically) creates an original work in its own right, one no longer beholding to the source. In terms of dependency, and in terms of Brazil, trancreation/re-­ creation becomes a metaphor for refusing dependency. The poet resists exporting—resists, that is, becoming dependent on what’s exportable. At the same time, the poet resists importing—resists, that is, developing a subsidiary relation to the powerful literatures beyond. Trancreation is a means of appropriating and remaking in one’s own right. In the process, the work made becomes refractory, opaque. It must itself be translated, and yet it can’t be translated. De Campos’s translations are not subsidiary or secondary to some original but have themselves become original work. His elaborations and extensions around a shifting center are the baroque element of his work, with its insistence on the materiality of its languages and holding to its own specific gravity. It comes to this: de Campos’s work resists translatability through its cultural and linguistic thickness. In this way, de Campos reverses any reductive understanding of his internationalism. The work exemplifies what de Campos calls concretion, in contradistinction to “concrete”: a neo-­baroque complexity that stands with its back to the internationally absorbable simplification represented by his best-­known work, his primary export item, “Concrete poetry.” The work of de Campos is a dream of and by translation, but with no bottom language. De Campos thou are translated (knot).

Jerome Rothenberg Double Preface

Triptych1 Before Auschwitz, the extermination camp was unimaginable. Today, it can be imagined. Because Auschwitz really happened, it has permeated our imagination, become a permanent part of us. Im re K ertes z 2

Jerome Rothenberg was born in America in 1931. That year, 1931, marks also the beginning of the poet’s parallel, imaginative, investment in the Central European world of his parents, a world that had ceased to exist by the time Rothenberg had moved from babe to boy. Triptych is haunted by this double consciousness. It is as if written from the other side of this imaginative divide, so that the dead might come back and speak to us: saddlesore I came a jew among the indians vot em I doink in dis strange place mit deez piple mit strange eyes could be it’s trouble could be could be3

The poems in Triptych envision a place neither there nor here: they build a liminal dwelling of betweenness, populated by ghosts and goblins, where objects are disguised as words and words are used as objects of resistance. 1. Preface to Jerome Rothenberg, Triptych (New York: New Directions, 2007); the book collects Poland/1931, Khurbn, and The Burning Babe. 2. Imre Kertesz, interview by Eszter Radai, trans. Reka Safrany, Sign and Sight, August 22, 2006, signandsight​.com​/features​/908​.html. Originally published in the Hungarian weekly Elet es Irodalom, July 28, 2006. 3. Poland/1931 in Triptych, 139.

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All of this is presided over by historical personages brandishing indelible facts and syncretic figures making the only sense we may know this side of heaven. The Jewish world of Poland, evoked in the first poems of this collection, survives in three magical places: the historical record; the memories and testimonies of survivors from the time; and works of the imagination such as Poland/1931. Triptych is both a testimony to and proof of the necessity of imaginative acts over, and indeed against, fixed memorials. Its three-­ part structure works as a counter to the binary thinking of good-­bad, us-­ them, here-­there, dark-­light, theism-­disbelief. In these poems Rothenberg swerves away from binary thinking toward the dialogic, toward, that is, a third term that is always on the horizon but never grasped. In this way Rothenberg forces lyric poetry to splinter into songs, like sparks escaping from fire. With the full force of lyric enunciation, Triptych articulates the otherness of the known and the familiarity of that which is foreign. Rothenberg’s poetry actively resists closure, unity of design, and singleness of method. The commitment is to viscerally grapple with that which is difficult to confront and impossible to contain in any single image or icon. In the trilogy Rothenberg employs an exemplary range of styles: there is no one voice, no one kind of representation. Indeed, Triptych is full of radical changes of perspective, angle, tone, and format that never entirely add up so as to better remain restlessly on the move, troubled as much as troubling. For this is a poetics of discrepancy rather than mimesis. Rothenberg notes in his preface to Khurbn, the second poem of the trilogy, that he visited Poland for the first time in 1987 and could find only ghost traces of the Poland that he had so memorably brought to life in Poland/1931. This absence, the vanishing of the Jewish world and the negation of any way to make sense of the agency that caused it, is at the heart of Khurbn. Khurbn is one of the few American poems to figure the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews. Yet so much depends upon the terms of this figuring. In Khurbn, Rothenberg turns Adorno not so much on his head as on his side. Negative dialectics (the negation of any expressive representation) is the poet’s starting point, since there is never a question of representing the totality of the desecration. But Rothenberg moves from the groundlessness of negative dialectics toward a series of concrete expressions, notations, responses, and images that are serially constellated in a way that never fails to open onto a void or negation or absence:

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They covered the mirrors with towels, drew the blinds, knocked over the chairs, broke the dishes, & stopped the clock. Then he put on a pair of felt slippers, to accompany the coffin.4

The method is already anticipated in Rothenberg’s 1968 working of a Tibetan source in Poems for the Game of Silence: a man without lips who is speaking who sees without eyes a man without ears who listens who runs without legs5

Khurbn was written in the late 1980s, when Rothenberg was in his late fifties. In his preface Rothenberg writes that in Poland/1931 he had come up to the edge of the catastrophe but not gone over it. This conscious, and no doubt unconscious, refusal or evasion or “repression of war experience” (to use the title of Siegfried Sassoon’s haunting poem) is an acknowledgment that the modes of representation available or even inventable were inadequate or themselves evasive or repressive of the trauma. The problem is inherent even in the name. The extermination of the European Jews was not a sacrifice, which is why Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning catastrophe, is often used in preference to holocaust. Rothenberg, however, uses a Yiddish word, khurbn, meaning destruction, which retains, for him, the power of the vernacular. Triptych ends with The Burning Babe, a series written, very consciously, in the first years of a new millennium and some of which was first published in an illuminated book with a Pandora’s box of vivid images by Susan Bee. Who is “the burning babe”? No doubt it is the poet’s doppelgänger, the Jewish baby born in Poland in 1931. The baby as ash, negation, empty, hollow (and so as alter Christ). Ghost, avatar. Who can speak for this infant? It is not as if Rothenberg asked for the assignment. He was chosen. These poems are everywhere in touch with what Stevens calls “the pressure of reality.” And wherever this pressure is felt, you will find a hole. Where there is no possibility of a whole, there dwells the holy.

4. Poland/1931, 123. 5. New York: Dial Press, 1971, repr., New Directions, 1975, 124.

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morning “But that which weeps is the mind”6

The Burning Babe becomes cinders in the holocaust of our imagination. We have been forced to imagine the unimaginable and face that to which we cannot give a face (Demon, Golem, the Dark). The burden for poetry after Auschwitz may be as much what we have to unimagine—negate—as what we must reimagine, in other words, reconfigure and reconceive. This is the ethical foundation of Rothenberg’s stunning series Triptych.

Writing Through7 The significance of Jerome Rothenberg’s animating spirit looms larger every year as his pioneering work on neglected American modernist poets, on native American and other oral poetries, and on Jewish identities has come to seem more and more prescient for contemporary poetics and literary studies. Rothenberg is the ultimate “hyphenated” poet: critic-­anthropologist-­editor-­anthologist-­performer-­teacher-­translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator’s insistence on transforming a given state of affairs. All of these Rothenbergian emanations are present, in full force, in Writing Through: Translations and Variations. In 1979 Rothenberg provided a rationale not just for the scope of his translations but for the ethics of his poetics: My passion is to maintain and shore up what comes to us as a larger human memory, and to preserve as far as possible—and not in a museum sense— the real, continuous and localized cultures, the diversity that still exists in the world: to thwart by all means possible the other process toward homogenization of cultures into a single monoculture.8

A key to Rothenberg’s poetics of translation is his ethically charged imagination of collage as both a social and an aesthetic principle. This is at the heart of his great anthologies, including the collaboration with 6. Silence, 62. 7. Adapted from the foreword to Jerome Rothenberg, Writing Through: Translations and Variations (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 8. Pre-­Faces & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1981), 221. In 2008 the University of Alabama Press published Poetics & Polemics: 1980–2005, ed. Steven Clay, an expanded version of Rothenberg’s essays.

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Pierre Joris Poems for the Millennium, as well as Writing Through. The syncretic is the alternative to the dogmas of religion and of national and racial identity. Rothenberg’s work, resolutely situated in the zone of the secular, in contradistinction to the hieratic, offers scant comfort to the new spiritualisms that constantly reinvent themselves in and as American poetry. For Rothenberg, ritual without innovation and disruption, like spirituality in the service of fixed religious doctrine, is a barrier to the sacred. As he notes in a 1983 interview with Eric Mottram and Gavin Selerie: I am in fact anti-­“religion” as a fixed & inflexible set of beliefs. . . . At the same time I find the strongest response to . . . a tyrannical form of religion may come from the arena of religion itself—from the language of religion—in a kind of glorious clash of symbols. I am in that sense a religious collagist—more specifically, as a poet, an anti-­religious collagist. As a state-­of-­mind, it may amount to much the same thing.9

Extending this principle of collage to the social space of poetry as translation and translation as poetry, he writes that the value of poetry is “not the making of single, isolated masterpieces but of a larger work in common” (Riverside, 87). And indeed this larger work in common can be seen as the link between Rothenberg’s poetry, poetics, anthologies, and translations. The translation of poetry is never more than an extension of the practice of poetry. Rothenberg’s translations are integrally and inextricably bound to his poetry, something made explicit in the section of variations and “otherings” in Writing Through, in which poems are not so much given English equivalences as extended into new poems. But then, many of Rothenberg’s translations question the idea of accuracy, insisting on a “total” translation that necessarily brings over from its source the full verbo-­vocal-­visual spectrum. Rothenberg’s “17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell,” his greatest realization of total translation, emphasizes the transcriptive dynamic of much of his translation from oral sources, since it is more score for performance than poem to be silently read on the page. An audio recording of Rothenberg performing this work is a necessary complement to the printed text. Total translation suggests that the smallest unit of translation is not the word or line or phrase but, as Keith Waldrop wryly notes, the whole poem, or, as Rothenberg might add, the whole-­poem-­in-­performance.10 As a general rule, translations are published under the name of the au9. The Riverside Interviews 4, with Gavin Selerie (ed.) and Eric Mottram (London: Binnacle, 1984), 74. 10. Keith Waldrop, “Translation as Collaboration,” unpublished manuscript, 2002.

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thor being translated and not the translator; sometimes the translators, even poetry translators, are hardly acknowledged at all, as if their very “invisibility,” in Lawrence Venuti’s term, were a mark of the translation’s success.11 The translator disappears so that the original can take center stage. But the “pre-­text” of translation is as much the poetics of the new (or target) language as the linguistic material of the old (or source) language. Translation is always a form of collaboration: between two (or more) poets and also between two (or more) languages. For Rothenberg, the total translation creates not a secondary representation of that which lives primarily elsewhere but rather a poem engaged in—and of—its “own” “new” language. This is the underlying logic of including, side by side, poems from analphabetic cultures and poems from the postalphabetic European modernists and contemporaries. The analphabetic provides technical means to realize the postalphabetic (Rothenberg’s “new-­old”), just as the postalphabetic opens avenues to traffic in the sight/sound/mind of cultures long ago superseded by the inevitable (and inevitably destructive) course of history. Rothenberg shows that translation can be a goad to invent new forms, structures, expressions, textures, and sounds in the (new) poem being written. Translation is not a secondary activity to be subsumed under the name of its antecedent but an active working in the present, as original to Rothenberg as collections of his poems or essays. In the Riverside interview he says: “What has come to us, then, at ground-­zero is the ecological and economic crises now upon us. . . . The threatened wilderness is in our minds as well—in our homes and in our language. We are all endangered species, & the exploration of the depth of our endangerment some of us have called the work of the ‘new wilderness’” (88). Rothenberg’s “writing through” marks a flickering path of transitions to this new wilderness.

11. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (New York: Routledge, 1995).

“And autumnstruck we would not hear the song” On Thomas McEvilley

When autumn lay like a drawn sword in the hills And chilled us with its deathly radiance, We flushed like leaves that beauty’s fever kills And asked what lover loves with permanence. And rising to the trail we rode away From fever of that blade, and would not see Where all around the dreams of lovers lay Which once the summer guarded jealously. And autumnstruck we would not hear the song That echoes in the painful hearts of these Who lingered by love’s fountain overlong And lost their dreams among the fallen leaves. Tho mas McEvilley

Everyone talks about working outside the box, but most of us don’t even know what box we’re boxed in by so we box ourselves in all the more. The work of Thomas McEvilley not only shows the imaginary fly the way out of actual fly bottles but also shows that preposterous insect, who represents our homing instincts (nostos), how to get back in, even though the “in” is not what it was or what it will be either, once you sit down, take the several loads off your mind, and think about it. Scholar, poet, novelist, art historian, critic, and translator, McEvilley was born July 13, 1939, and died March 2, 2013. He grew up in Cincinnati; he studied Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and classical philosophy in the classics programs of the University of Cincinnati (BA) and the University of Washington (MA). In 1969 he received a PhD from the University of Cincinnati in classical philology. He taught at Rice University from 1969 to 2005, commuting there for many years after he moved to New York. In 2005 he Preface to Thomas McEvilley’s The Arimaspia (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2014).

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founded the MFA in Art Criticism and Writing Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His art essays are collected in several books published by Bruce McPherson of McPherson & Company: Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (1991), Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium (1992), The Triumph of Anti-­Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-­ Modernism (2005), Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth Century Art (2010); and Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay (2010). His other books of art criticism and history are Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (Allworth, 1999) and The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-­modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition, McEvilley wrote monographs, catalogue essays, and critical reviews of James Lee Byars, Carolee Schneemann, Julian Schnabel, Les Levine, Pat Steir, Antoni Tapies, Sigmar Polke, Dennis Oppenheim, Kara Walker, Nancy Spero, Thornton Dial, Leon Golub, Richard Tuttle, Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, Paul McCarthy, William Anastasi, Susan Bee, and many other artists. In 1984 McEvilley published in Artforum a critical account of William Rubin and J. Kirk Varnedoe’s 1984 Museum of Modern Art show Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. This essay, and the exchanges that followed, illustrate McEvilley’s rhetorical power to show the willfully parochial world of institutional high art that there is an outside to their jealously guarded inside, an outside that, for the moment, let’s call non-­Western cultures. This outside continues to exist not only adjacent to our inside but also under it: is the ground on which we walk. McEvilley’s more important, harder to grasp, teaching is that our erection of the dog-­and-­pony show of Western Civ has disconnected us from the living Western tradition that is our classical inheritance, an inheritance we have systematically misrecognized, squandered, and disfigured. In 1987 McPherson and Company published McEvilley’s North of Yesterday, which, like The Arimaspia, or Songs for Rainy Season, is a Menippean satire. These two literary works are closely related to each other and distinct in genre from McEvilley’s other works. McEvilley also published two monumental philological studies that bear directly on The Arimaspia: The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Allworth, 2001) and Sappho (Spring, 2008). At the time of his death, he was working on a study of The Greek Anthology, which overlaps with The Arimaspia. The Greek Anthology is a gathering of about forty-­five hundred short Greek poems by about three hundred poets. The poems cover a millennium of Greek verse, from the seventh century BCE to the sixth century CE

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(from the time of Homer to the Roman age). As a source for The Arimaspia, McEvilley used the Loeb Classical Library edition, which published a set of translations by W. R. Patton in 1916–18. Meleager of Gadara (first century BCE) was the most important compiler of The Greek Anthology, and Meleager included his own great poems in the collection. McEvilley seeds The Arimaspia with a set of ten of his own arresting Meleager translations, many of which were composed in the 1960s (these can be identified fairly easily in the narrative since they are framed by references to Meleager). The narrator of The Arimaspia is a poet/philosopher from Gadara, a latter-­day follower of Meleager, who journeys from Gadara to India with “the idea of . . . of establishing a philosophy school in India and fomenting a synthesis of Greek and Indian thought.” Perhaps the narrator—who went to college in Antioch (Greece, not Ohio!) and graduate school in Alexandria, and who is serially reincarnated over the hundreds of years of the story—is an avatar for the author. For in The Arimaspia, palimpsest displaces continuity: the unreliable narrator is a figure of imagination. Gadara was a Greek city in ancient Syria (it sits at the border of present-­ day Jordan, Israel, and Syria). Apart from Meleager, Gadara’s most famous son is Menippus (third century BCE), and though the work of this wit does not survive, his followers established the genre of Menippean satire. Menippean satire is a speculatively mixed-­genre genre: it is an essay in the sense of a trying or testing. The Menippean moves from socially satirical prose to lyric verse, philosophy to fiction, often touching on current topics. McEvilley’s version of Menippean satire is digressive, wild, and fantastical, and has shifting points of view; it is intermittently comic, with strong narrative threads. The Arimaspia and North of Yesterday are exemplary contemporary Menippean satires. North of Yesterday was labeled as a “novel,” and there is much to justify calling The Arimaspia a novel. But I prefer to think of The Arimaspia as a picaresque epic poem because it continually pivots on lyric poems that unhinge plot while casting the narrative like a fisherman casts his line. Bahktin saw the hybridization in Menippean satire as germinal for the carnivalesque novel, and Menippean is sometimes just used to mean broad social satire. As company for McEvilley’s sense of the Menippean, beyond Sterne, Pound, and Joyce, who were key writers for McEvilley, I’d propose (in American literature) William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A, Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It, Nathaniel Mackey’s epistolary poem/essays/novels, Susan Howe’s mixed-­genre works The Midnight and The Nonconformist’s Memorial, Madeleine Gins’s Helen Keller or Arakawa, and Leslie Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear to Unfold and Zither & Auto-

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biography, as well as my own My Way: Speeches and Poems and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Then again, with all the sophists who populate The Arimaspia, it might be just as well to think of this work under the sign of ’pataphysics, Alfred Jarry’s swerve-­inducing science of imperceivable solutions to opaque problems. The Arimaspia is filled with mind-­twirling Zen dialogues and epigrams, suggesting if not Heraklitus on acid than Homer retold by Thomas Pynchon. The title Arimaspia comes from a lost ancient road trip poem of that title by Aristeas of Proconnesus, from the seventh century BCE. Herodotus says that the Arimaspi were a one-­eyed people from Scythia who fought an ongoing battle with the griffins to capture their hoard of gold. This book is the site of that battle. The Arimaspia is a work of grand collage and radical pastiche, in which McEvilley’s own poems, translations, and narrative are hard to distinguish from the cascade of borrowed materials. Indeed, The Arimaspia is replete with citation and quotation: even the material that was not appropriated sounds as if it could have been—and each rubbing (as of an epitaph) comes across as fresh insight, made new for new time. Stunning in its archaic originality, The Arimaspia is a work of extraordinary learning, steeped in classical references that go well beyond the ken of most readers. At a certain point the dance of the sources gives way to an immanent experience of refamiliarization, in which long-­elided classical works come to life. It’s Greek to me! The marvelous conjuring trick of The Arimaspia is to take up Isocrates’s notion that to be Greek is to absorb Greek thought, a Hellenocentric idea adopted by Alexander the Great, whose concept of merging East and West in his campaign to Hellenize (invade rather than colonize) India in 326 BCE is central both to The Arimaspia and The Shape of Ancient Thought, which can be read as twin works (and indeed the narrator of The Arimaspia follows an intellectual and geographic itinerary— from Greece to India—similar to that of The Shape of Ancient Thought). The Arimaspia incorporates extensive sampling and adapting of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca (from the fourth or fifth century CE), often in italic inserts. This long poem chronicles Dionysus’s voyage to India (Zeus ordered Dionysus to conquer India) and as such is especially relevant for McEvilley’s engagement with the crossover between Indian and Greek culture in the Axial era, to use Karl Jasper’s term for the period hundreds of years before and after Homer. Because of the extensive quoting from this source, Dionysus might be the presiding spirit of The Arimaspia. McEvilley uses W. H. D. Rouse’s translations from the Loeb Classical Library (1940),

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usually adding lineation to Rouse’s prose translations. Other sources include Homer, Orphic lore, The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, sophist Philostratus the Elder, and essayist Clement of Alexandria (both from the second century AD), along with Greek Anthology translations by McEvilley of Anacreontea poems and poems by Philodemus (like Meleager also from Gadara). Amidst the narrative and the web of citation are two startling poems by McEvilley, published here for the first time though probably dating from 1964. One of these is the epigraph to this preface. Listen to the other: About his head no dark no dark blooms dove, Confusing his passion invulnerable and so Blossoming cruel flowers of the grave. But pacing among the slain he sought the grove Whence stirred the dreams in which those sleepers lay about whose heads the dark, the dark blooms dove. So underneath his body and above The blood made pitiful armor where he lay Strewn with scarlet flowers of the grave. Then we, like restless sleepers who, alive, Scream for the rest that laid that hero low About whose head the dark, the dark blooms dive, Bore him away, laid by the breaking wave, Safe, safe in the gracious fingers of the sea that proffered splashy flowers for the grave, and laid on his whitest breast the gold, the mauve, grand robes of innocence, and then we knew about our heads the dark, the dark flames dove; blossomed hideous flowers of the grave.

• In early September 2013 I got a call to come visit Tom. He was sick with esophageal cancer. I got off at the wrong subway stop—it was after nightfall, and the rain was coming down so thickly I couldn’t read the street signs or see more than a foot ahead. Often disoriented, I proceeded to walk many blocks in the wrong direction. When I finally arrived at Tom

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and Joyce’s apartment on the deep Lower East Side, late and soaking, I found Tom in a big hospital bed that had been installed in the living room. He talked with me about the surgery he would be having at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I saw him one more time at home and then began visiting him in the hospital, where he went in and out of intensive care. Tom stayed in the hospital a little over four months, and his hospital rooms became a shadow world between death and life. While his death often seemed imminent, so did his recovery; and it went like that, with hope undercut by close calls, Tom taking this final journey—alive to each moment of consciousness he could fight for against the rapacious clutches of his afflictions. One day in early March, I tried to call Tom at the hospital but could not get through to him or to Joyce. Late that night, sleepless, I began to write a poem sparked by two lines in the fifteenth-­century ballad “The Not-­ Browne Mayd,” which had been going through my head, though I didn’t know why: Wherfore I wyll to the grene wode go; Alone, a banished man.

As I was finishing the poem, I got a note from Joyce. Tom was sleeping. He died two days later. The Green Wood is the imaginary space of the outlaw and of banishment, from which we can begin our voyages of return (nostoi). It is, like all Tom’s work, a testing ground. Song of the Wandering Poet For Tom I must now to the green wood go And make a house of clay and stone And lay upon the barren floor And weep for what I have no more. There will I make a diadem Of broken glass and borrowed hemp Remembering true times I’ve spent In wasted moment’s sweetly scent Torn by maelstroms, frail, unkempt.

Leslie Scalapino’s Rhythmic Intensities The poet dies, the poet’s work is borne by her readers. When I first encountered Leslie Scalapino’s work I was hard hit by its psychic intensity, formal ingeniousness, and rhythmic imagination. I felt I came to the work late; the first book I read was The Woman Who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, which, while published in 1976, I didn’t read till around 1981. The psychosexual dynamics of the work and its ability to make dislocation a visceral experience immediately became, once I had taken in the magnitude of Scalapino’s project, a capital point on the mapping of poetry associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, one that deepened and enriched that survey. When North Point published Considering How Exaggerated Music Is in 1982, Scalapino’s work became an indelible part of my poetic firmament, that imaginary company that each of us chooses but that also chooses us. That is, I feel as much chosen by Scalapino’s work as that I was doing the choosing; her work entered into and changed my consciousness about what was possible for poetry, changed the terms for all of us working along similar lines. Every once in a while I would say something to Leslie about Considering How Exaggerated the Music Is. She would shake her head, slightly laughing, “Oh Charles, not the music: considering how exaggerated music is.” As in her music, the music of her poems. Not exaggerated in the sense of hyperbolic or overstated, but as in extravagant, wild and wandering. Starting in my earliest conversations with Leslie, when I would try to describe qualities I found in her work, she was adamant in resisting interpretations that she believed to countermand her intentions. When I would say, “But you know, Leslie, readers will respond in many different ways to a poem,” she would give no ground; for her, how a work is to be interpreted was part of the poem: not just her intention but part of the integrity of the work itself. I felt her rebuke to my more porous view of interpretation to be magnificent and improbable, for as much as Leslie set the bar for interpretation a bit higher than actual reading practices will ordinarily sustain, Sibila, June 22, 2010. Presented at the Leslie Scalapino memorial, Poetry Project, New York, June 21, 2010.

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she demonstrated her fierce commitment to poetic meaning and also the truth in the form and materials, sincerity in Zukofsky’s sense: that reading is a social bond that necessitates the reader’s recognition of the formal terms of the work. So there was a right way to read, not in the moral sense but in a very practical one, as in a right way to operate software so that it works, does the job for which it was made. And you could say that Scalapino created a new and thrilling poetic software, allowing for a phenomenological unique experience, something like a 3- or 4-­D poem. Her overlays, repetitions, and torques enable proactive readers to enter the space of the poem as something akin to a holographic environment. The present time of the work is intensified by her echoes (overlapping waves of phrases) of what just happened and what is about to happen, so the present is expanded into a temporally multidimensional space. Her undulating phrasal rhythms are in turn psychedelic, analytic, notational, pointillistic, and narrational. Think of it as deep-­space syncretic cubism. And Scalapino’s performances of her work, many collected at PennSound, are crucial guides to entering this hyperspace. Scalapino’s poetry was central to my poem/essay Artifice of Absorption, which I wrote starting in 1985. In Artifice of Absorption I noted that Scalapino’s rhetorical repetitions create a disabsorptive/affective charm: the slight accented shifts in similar statements operate as modular scans of the field of perception, building thick linguistic waves of overlay and undertow, the warp of a thematic motif countered with the woof of its torqued rearticulation. When I visited Leslie and Tom in Oakland a few weeks before Leslie died, her luminous and effervescent stoicism, the nobility in which she acknowledged death lurking in her garden, was fused with her refusal to give up on life and her urgent, tragic recognition of the work she still had it in her to do that she would not be able to do. She spoke of how much she wanted to come to New York to read her new work, and so together with Stacy and Tracy we made plans for her to read here tonight. In Oakland in May, we laughed together at the moment’s literary gossip and we talked about her just finished book, The Dihedrons Gazelle-­Dihedrals Zoom, written in the late style of Floats Horse-­Floats or Horse Floats; she knew it would be her last. I sent her my response to this work just days before she died, trying to do justice to the work and hoping that she would accept my description as apt, which Tom tells me she did. The Dihedrons is an ekphrastic implosion inside our severed human-­body/ animal-­mind. “Memory isn’t the origin of events,” Scalapino writes early in this magisterial work, which restores the synthesis of events to its place as

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meanings’ origin. The Dihedrons Gazelle-­Dihedrals Zoom—as much a work of grotesque science fiction as a poem—cracks open the imaginary reality astride reality. In the stadium of its visionary composition, the everyday floats vivid strange: in time, as time, with time, beside time.

Scalapino’s poems, from her first book to this last, probe politics, memory, perception, and desire, creating hypnotically shifting coherences that take us beyond any dislocating devices into a realm of newly emerging consciousness. Like a sumo wrestler doing contact improvisations with a ballerina, Scalapino balances the unbalanceable poetic accounts of social justice and aesthetic insistence. Every once in a while, I’d say something to Leslie about her book series, calling it O Press; she would shake her head, slightly laughing: “Oh Charles not oppress, O Books”! “Oppression is our social space.” Leslie, with the support of Tom White, created one of the great small presses of our time. I keep thinking about her titles, which are among the most amazing, fantastic, and unexpected of anybody ever . . . And her essays, which are models of a nonexpository, exploratory style that remains foundational for any activist poetics. Like a ballerina doing contact improvisations with a sumo wrestler. The poet dies, the poet’s work is borne . . . by us, in us, through us, as us. It’s the longest day. Considering how exaggerated music is.

Maggie O’Sullivan Colliderings

Every poem was once a word. If culture were an accident, then the job of the poet might be to write the report rather than rectify the wrong. If culture were the product of a supreme fiction, then the poet’s job might be to find the authors and clue them into things—not as they are but as they appear. Maggie O’Sullivan begins one of her readings by invoking an “unofficial” word (also the title of one of her books). In this sense, and perhaps paradoxically, O’Sullivan is in a mainline of British poets, a line that swerves, with clinamacaronic speed, from William Blake to Algernon Charles Swinburne, Hugh MacDiarmid to Tom Raworth, Lewis Carroll to Caroline Bergvall, William Cowper to Mina Loy, Linton Kwesi Johnson to Basil Bunting, Dante Rossetti to Allen Fisher. In their own way, each of these is an antirepresentative poet: one who takes the office of poetry as the creation of spaces between sanctions—outside, that is, received categories. You can’t make a poem unless you are willing to break some verses. In Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics, Andrew Welsh makes the distinction between “song melos” (with its externally derived regular meter) and “charm melos” (whose more chaotic sound patterns emerge internally).1 O’Sullivan’s poetry is unmistakably charm. In “riverrunning (realizations,” she put it this way: “A Song Said Otherwise, half sung / half said sings”—where “Otherwise” is also a music that is “Edgewise,” wise to edges and others and also edgy, othering and auditing rather than authoring.2 To half-­sing a song is to stutter into poetry and back to music, your back Foreword to O’Sullivan’s Body of Work (Hastings, UK: Reality Studios, 2006); an earlier version appeared in Ecopoetics 4/5 (2004–5). Quoted phrases not otherwise credited are from “all origins are lonely” (London: Veer Books, 2003): “pressed synaptic,” “Plover bodying,” “MAPPING OF LONGINGS / we never arrive at,” “hap-­ hazard UNCLENCHINGS,” “carnal thickness,” “errmost,” “TO BEGIN A JOURNEY, / enunciate.” 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. 2. Palace of Reptiles (Willowdale, Ontario: Gig, 2003), 59.

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to the music, part incantation, part pleat. “Stammering before speech,” O’Sullivan writes in “riverrunning (realizations” (Palace, 60): not just prior to but in the face of. The beat is off mark so as to be on tangent. A stone thrown into a pond (pound, pun) produces rings of concentric circles around the point of entry. The charm is to create a rhythm in the counter-­ current, via the interference (the event): the shortest distance between two waves is a sign. This is what O’Sullivan calls “colliderings” (Palace, 63). Compared to the magnificent hieratic credo of Bunting, “Take a chisel to write,” O’Sullivan sounds our poetic a-­anthem of the Unofficial Word: beat, bellow me Cloth / Shakings of chisel/ Chounded all pitches—3

The shaking chisel (trembling, warbling, stuttering, faltering) marks a radical shift not just of aesthetic but of ethic. The legitimate aspirations of pitch, not our tent, but our voicings. Chounded: a collidering of hounded, bounded, & founded with chow, with chew, what we eat in our mouths, the visceral words of the unofficial world we make by inhabiting. O’Sullivan, in a 1997 interview, puts it this way: My work is driven by the spoken, sounded or breathing voice. Particularly I have always been haunted by issues of voicelessness—inarticulacy— silence—soundlessness—breathlessness—how are soundings or voices that are other-­than or invisible or dimmed or marginalized or excluded or without privilege, or locked out, made Unofficial, reduced by ascendant systems of centrality and closure, configured or Sounded or given form & potency; how can I body forth or configure such sounds, such tongues, such languages, such muteness, such multivocality, such error—& this is perhaps why the non-­vocal in mark & the non-­word in sound or language— make up much of the fabrics & structures of my own compositions.4

On October 27, 1993, O’Sullivan performed “To Our Own Day,” from Kinship with Animals (book 2 of In the House of the Shaman) at SUNY-­Buffalo.5 O’Sullivan called the poem “my favorite of all the pieces I have ever writ3. Body of Work, 304. 4. Interview in Binary Myths 2, ed. Andy Brown (Exeter, UK: Stride, 2004), 90. 5. In the House of the Shaman (London: Reality Street, 1993); performance: writing​ .upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/ x​/OSullivan​.php.

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ten.” The poem takes O’Sullivan just over forty seconds to read. I keep listening to it in a loop, dozens of times. Each listening brings something new, something unfamiliar; and the rational part of my ear has a hard time comprehending how this is possible, how such a short verbal utterance could be so acoustically saturated in performance. To be sure, this experience is produced by the performance of the poem and not (not so much) by the poem’s text, where fixed comprehension (however illusory) comes sooner. Each time I listen to “To Our Own Day,” I recall best the beginning, the first several words. But once the poem gets under way, I listen anew, almost without recall, the combinations of unexpectable words create a sensation of newly created, permutating sense-­making at each listening. I keep thinking I will “get it” (and be finished with it), but I hear different things, make different associations, each time I listen. This is the primary condition of “charm” in Welch’s sense. In the Buffalo performance, the tempo moves from a fairly quick speech tempo (some space after each word) to a more rapid song tempo (almost no space between the words) and then ends with the slightly slower speech tempo. The intonation (pitch) sounds consistent throughout; as a result there is no change in the inflection: each word is receiving a just measure of care. (I mean to relate this to “just intonation” in music, as well as to chant.) The circular shift in tempo created a toplike effect, quickly gaining speed and slowing down slightly at the end. The words seems to trip on one another, gaining acceleration first through the echo of the accented vowel sounds and then, near the end, by a string of intense alliteration. The effect of word modulating into word is partly the result of the way O’Sullivan extends the vowels: it is as if a continuous stream of mutating vowels were punctuated by a counterflow of consonants, as if the consonants were rocks skimming in the water, surrounded by concentric circles of rippling vowel sounds. O’Sullivan’s words lead by ear. Hers is a propulsively rhythmic verse that refuses regular beat, an always morphing (morphogenic) exemplum of Henri Meschonnic’s distinction between the ahistoricity of meter and embodiment of rhythm. But O’Sullivan’s is less an embodied poetics than a visceral gesture (“pressed synaptic”): not an idea of the body made concrete but a seismographic incarnation of language as organ-­response to the minute, shifting interactive sum of place as tectonic, temporality as temperament, self is as self does. “Birth Palette” (Palace of Reptiles): in the beginning was the enunciating; words are the residue of a hope. So often O’Sullivan avers syntax for axial iteration, word / ord / wo / rd / drow, as if Adam grooved on applets

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and sugarcane, always on the eve of being able. Naming, here, is an avocation, kissing cousin of invocation and melody. This is a poetry not of me/ me/me but it/it/it. Ecopoetics as echopoetics. “Knots, whorls, vortices”—O’Sullivan quotes this phrase from Tom Lowenstein’s study of the Inuits;6 this trinity is emblematic, not of O’Sullivan’s forms but of her stamp. Which, in turn, suggests the connection between her project and the intimations of the archaic that infuse her poems: a cross-­sectional boring through time, whirling the sedimentary layers into knots. The archaic material pushes up to the surface. Collage and pulverization are at the service of a rhythmic vortex. O’Sullivan’s engagement with James Joyce, especially the late work, is both intimate (in-­the-­sounding) and explicit (in-­the-­naming). If Joyce’s words are like refracting, crystalline black holes, O’Sullivan’s are trampolines. “Plover bodying”: in flight; “irre-­reversible ‘almostness’ ”—no more irritable striving after permanence (irreversibility), the inevitability of the not-­quite, the now in neither. “MAPPING OF LONGINGS / we never arrive at”: almost is itself subject to reverse—there, not there; here, not here. The inebriation of fort/da, the stadium of the “hap-­hazard UNCLENCHINGS”: Fort DaDa. There is no rhythm without song, and yet song codes the acoustic surfeit that is O’Sullivan’s ore. “Iridesce!” O’Sullivan’s visceral vernacular (“carnal thickness”): autochthonous verse, tilling the inter-­indigenous brainscape of the Celtic/Northumbrian/ Welsh/Gaelic/Scots/Irish/Anglo/Saxon transloco-­voco-­titillated strabismus. It’s not that O’Sullivan writes directly “in” any one of the languages “of these Isles,” but that they form a foundational “force field” out of which her own distinctive language emerges, as figure set against its grounding.7 Native to the soiled, aberrant (“errmost”), aboriginality. “At this point, they merge & are.”8 Dialogic extravagance in the articulated, dithrombotic, honeycomb pluriperversity. “to begin a journey, / enunciate.” You say utterance, I say wigged-­in, undulating, wanton specificity. Utter defiance as language-­particle pattern recognition system. Defiance as deference to the utterly present, actual, indigestible, sputtering imagination 6. Epigraph to “Doubtless” in Palace of Reptiles, 31. 7. I quote two phrases of O’Sullivan (“of these Isles” and “force field”) from a conversation we had in London in July 2004. 8. Un-­assuming Personas in Body of Work, 61.

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of the real as punctuated rivulets of fragrant nothings in the dark dawn (stark spawn) of necessity’s encroaching tears. The medleyed consciousness of these sounds, these languages, is made palpable in O’Sullivan’s poems, which lend themselves to recitation, while resisting thematization. Her words spend themselves in performance, turn to gesture, as sounds wound silhouettes and rhythms imbibe (“reaspirate”) incantation. O’Sullivan cleaves to charm: striating song with the visceral magic of shorn insistence.

Johanna Drucker Figuring the Word

During the 1960s and 1970s, the New York Public Library acquired an admirable collection of contemporary small press magazines, including many of the Xerox, mimeo, and side-­stapled publications featured in the 1998 show, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960–1980. This was the heyday of a writing storage medium called microfiche, which the librarians embraced as a space-­age space saver: no sooner had they committed these publications to fiche than they disposed of the cumbersome objects, as one would discard the husks around an ear of corn. However, it wasn’t too long before the library found itself recollecting, and prominently displaying, the material artifacts that it had earlier so abruptly deaccessioned. What difference does it make? What’s the fuss about these material imprintings of language—isn’t it the content that matters? Does the method of storage really make a difference? The work of Johanna Drucker reflects a radical change in understanding the semantic contribution of the visual representation of language— not just for visual poetry or artists’ books, not just for poetry, but for all forms of written language. To be sure, Drucker has focused her attention on language works in which visual materiality is foregrounded. But the lessons she has to teach—historical, philosophical, and aesthetic—apply to all the technologies human beings have invented to store and explore language. All language is visual when read. In her work, Drucker reverses a common assumption even among writers, typographers, and visual poets that the visual dimension of writing is ornamental, decorative, extrasemantic—a matter of design, not signs that matter. “The single, conservative constant in my work,” she says in Figuring the Word, “is that I always intend for the language to have meaning. My interest is in extending the communicative potential of writing, not in eliminating or negating it.” In Figuring the Word Drucker presents herself as a visual artist, a literary writer, a scholar/historian, and an aesthetician. In each of these Introduction to Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics by Johanna Drucker (New York: Granary Books, 1998).

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areas, Drucker has made substantial contributions. But it is her synthesis of these fields that is her most extraordinary achievement and that links her late twentieth-­century work in the United States to the work of two towering British scholar–­book artists of the previous fin-­de-­siècles: William Blake of the late eighteenth century and William Morris of the late nineteenth. Like these “men of letters,” this modern-­day person of books bends and stretches the nature of art practice well beyond its conventional generic constraints. She questions and transforms the gender codings of the intellectual, the polymath, the scholar, and the printer. Indeed, Drucker is more a satirist than a visionary or utopian, reveling in, rather more than reviling, the “carnival of grotesque human folly.” For all its extraordinary detail and formidable erudition, Drucker’s work is rigorously antisystematic, emblematically anti-­authoritarian, and often giddily eccentric. Figuring the Word is a work of poetics rather than criticism or theory in that these essays are the products of doing as much as thinking, of printing as much as writing, of designing as much as researching, of typography as much as composition, of autobiography as much as theory. The mark of the practitioner-­critic is everywhere present in these pieces: it is as notable in Drucker’s insistence on discussing her process of making things as it is when she reveals her process of hiding things. Moreover, even as she has learned the history of her medium, she remains insistent that current practice, not precedent, is her guiding impulse: “The idea that there were precedents for such activity seemed a lot less important than that there was a future in it.” Figuring the Word is a wide-­ranging collection of Drucker’s essays from the early 1980s to the present. Written in a variety of styles and presented in a variety of formats, the book reflects many divergent aspects of her work and thinking, while at the same time demonstrating how cohesive her project has been. Drucker begins with a wonderfully digressive discussion of her work as a book artist in which she gives an account of what led her not only to her book art but also to her related scholarly investigations. She then provides a series of close readings of the work of a number of contemporary language artists, providing in other essays overviews of the historical precedents for this work. The book includes not only a perceptive essay about the use of language in the landscape but also a prescient essay about the use of language in the new electronic frontier of cyberspace. In several sections Drucker narrates her personal history as a way to explore the affinity with the genre fiction and tabloid prose that underlies much of her writing. And throughout the collection she interrogates the role and significance of gender, not only for her own work but for the genres within

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which she works. Drucker insists that “the place for women is not as the Other but as the one who shows that that Other has always been present,” a position that is, to a remarkable degree, analogous to her view about the material features of language. Susan Bee and I first met Johanna Drucker in 1977 in a large tent in Bryant Park, on the grounds of the New York Public Library. That ground had been reduced to mud by hundreds of us participating in the Small Press Book Fair. Drucker was exhibiting her first few letterpress books, which immediately caught my attention as just the kind of work that I wanted to focus on in a new journal Bruce Andrews and I were just starting, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Indeed, I reviewed Drucker’s from A to Z in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, commenting on its uncanny fusing of constructivist constraints (she had set every piece of type from a set of forty-­ five type drawers she had acquired), sumptuous physical detail (a vision of textual excess and density), and wry metanarrative commentary. Drucker’s works, including her unlikely and necessary creation of an awe-­inspiring body of scholarship exploring the history of alphabets and the theory of the visual representation of language, have remained central to my own sense of writing in the years since. In a wider context, her work has become ever more relevant with the introduction of new writing reproduction and distribution technologies. When we met, Drucker already knew what the folks in the library would celebrate two decades later: what matters in language is not just the edifices that we make to rise toward the heavens or bore deep below ground. The mud on the floor at Bryant Park that day may have dirtied our shoes, but it also kept us in mind of the material ground of our writing practices—of the significance of making by marking. That language only means if it also matters.

Contemporary Literature with A llis on C umm ings and Rocco Marinaccio

RM & AC: We talked in a glass room overlooking Lake Mendota. There was a tape recorder, but no tape. RM: It seems appropriate to begin with your reflections on your role as a critic and the issue of authority. Both your poetry and your prose assert your discomfort with the traditional authoritative voice of criticism. This idea of linguistic authority and power calls to mind your discussion, in “Optimism and Critical Excess,” of de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and his distinction between the strategy of the powerful and the tactics of the dispossessed. While any questions of authority with reference to poetics need to be considered in terms of the relative lack of authority that poetry, especially radical poetry, has within the dominant culture, it is also true that within a specific community of response you assume an authoritative position. How do you conceptualize this bifurcated position? Do you see yourself as a tactician or a strategist? If I were to say that I conceive of myself as a tactician, I’d be saying that only in the most strategic way because, while I appreciate the distinction, I find it (fruitfully) impossible to claim either position. In this way I pursue both a strategy of tactics and a tactics of strategy, though not necessarily at the same time. In de Certeau’s sense, a person operates in a tactical way because that’s the only cultural and political space that is open. In poetry and poetics these are really questions of rhetoric: the issue is relationships of particular forms of rhetoric to authority and the relation of authority to power. I’m fascinated by how poems disclose or hide their authority. The Objectivists, like the romantic poets, claim a poetry of sincerity with a poetics that is antirhetorical and also antisentimental. Operating as we do now under the regime of poetic sincerity, sincerity has become a duplicitous, which is to say, cryptoauthoritarian strategy. (As David Bromige puts it: Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000).

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“sure of himself // in that respect, not to be trusted.”)1 Indeed, seen in this harsh light, the poetic desire to go beyond rhetoric is the worst kind of rhetoric: a rhetoric that denies its own rhetoricity. So a poetic strategy—or is it a tactic?—would be to expose, to turn up and over, the authoritative and rhetorical structures in the work as you are making it. But this quickly turns into musical and rhythmic dynamics; it gets tied up with just my specific aesthetic attractions, say my senses of humor. I like poetry that talks about itself, that uses that kind of turning and inversion as part of its content, as part of its prosody. I like it very sincerely. RM: What about the critic’s claims to “sincerity” or “truth”? How would you characterize your relationship to the conventional authority that critics assume? There’s an authoritative difference between the poet who speaks the truth and the critic or the nonfiction writer who proposes to do the same thing. The truth of poetry is, so one powerful tradition tells us, the truth of imagination, not “facts.” My genre is deeper than your genre or, as we like to say in these waning days of Century 20, marginal waters run deeper than you can shake a stick at who’s counting. [Editors’ note: RM & AC would surely have chuckled here, had they been in the room.] Which is to say, all writing, like all forms of knowledge, lives within genres, and when a particular form of writing (or of knowledge) wishes to make claims for itself that exceed the means of its genre, it must do so on credit; and certainly lending truth is one of poetry’s major profit centers in the current communications environment. Still, poetry’s assets would have been overdrawn long ago if it did not have, as a genre, the authorization to coin new money. This new currency has underwritten both the greatest and the most reprehensible poetic projects of the past years. Of course, science is the only really blue-­chip truth stock, but poetry is a good investment because it remains significantly undervalued. I would certainly recommend including it in any diversified epistemologic portfolio. In other words (are you sure this microphone is working?), a particular genre has no claim to truth in and of itself. So that Dashiell Hammett is not working in a form which is further away from revealing the truth than Big Tom “The Pope” Eliot or John-­John “Mr. Fair and Square” Rawls. Nonetheless, I’m speaking with a special kind of authority when I make these claims (hence my Special Theory of Poetic Authority). I’m count-

1. Bromige posted this poem to the University at Buffalo Poetics List on June 2, 1997: epc​.buffalo​.edu​/ poetics​/archive​/ logs​/ txt​/1997​_06​.txt.

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ing on the authority of my medium, call it sophistry or poetry as you like. It’s a practice, and after all I was born in this particular briar patch: What some may call the thorns of my contradictions I take to be pipes to blow against the wind. Then again, isn’t this a bit like the poet saying “All poets are liars”? Or “Only liars can tell the true from the not-­so-­true, the blue from the not so blue.” AC: Critics sympathetic to work such as yours—Marjorie Perloff comes to mind—tend either to theorize experimental reading and writing practices or to interpret specific passages. Do you think that such criticism, which tries to make “anti-­absorptive” texts more accessible to readers, is misdirected—­ perhaps too enclosing? Critics, like poets or other writers, often are most interesting when they pursue their own intuitions, when they articulate what most strikes them about the work they are discussing—whether or not it conforms to what the artist or other critics might say is the right approach. The right approach, tuning your argument to professional standards—all that’s a diversion. At the same time, all criticism is methodological at some level. Marjorie Perloff has an acute sense for locating fundamental issues, for finding crucial passages (both in poems and in literary history), and for writing with an infectious engagement about what compels her attention. Her criticism is inductive: she starts with something that engages her attention and goes from there; she doesn’t use poems to prove points so much as to make points with them. I feel a sense of collaboration when I read her essays. When Perloff engages in what I call “close listening,” reading/hearing a poem in great detail and trying to give a vision of what and how it means . . . that’s something that fascinates me: to note down, in an almost impressionistic—or is it phenomenological?—way, how possible associations read in conjunction with one another. While it may seem like that’s taming the poems, it’s actually very close to the process of writing poems. But I don’t take these interpretations as prescriptive of how to read the poems or of what a particular poem means. The fact that you can’t define and exhaust the potential readings of a poem doesn’t mean that you can’t trace possible trajectories, call them lines of reading, or what Nick Piombino calls “currents of attention.”2 There’s a polemical intent here. Perloff is responding to people who say that you can’t read such poems, that they are not even poems but just conceptual ideas about

2. “Currents of Attention,” in Boundary of Blur (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991).

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poetry, by saying, “Of course you can read this work; indeed you must if you are to get at what’s interesting about it.” At the same time, you can react to any such tracing by saying, “I didn’t read the poem exactly this way; I read otherwise, I read it differently.” I think of my poems as echo chambers for meaning in which multiple (but not indiscriminate!) readings are actively invoked and one reading is not meant to displace or supplant the others. Indeed, I take it as a given of the genre of poetry that there can’t be definitive readings, whether the poem is conventional or not. Criticism, like translation, does not have to be understood as so dogged a pursuit (even if the positivism and thematic orientation encouraged by professional standards often push criticism in exactly the wrong direction, from my point of view). After all, it’s not a matter of equivalence or adjudication but of response, and often responses that are hard to support rationally—hunches, let’s say—are the most useful responses a critic can make. A criticism of close listening—like the most resonant forms of translation—is a form of conversation, and a conversation doesn’t have to stop. So there is a method in Perloff ’s mindfulness: in tracing the process of reading, she is providing, by example, an exemplary reading theory, which to me is as useful as an abstract reading theory that never gets around to talking about particular poems. AC: I’m wondering if alternative values of taste are already emerging from the study of experimental poetry. It seems that critics seize on certain poets and ignore many others, particularly women, in my opinion. Inevitably, certain things end up being promoted as the best experimental writing because they are best known. Does your own role as prominent critic and poet help normalize certain values of taste? I think it might be more accurate to say that I have helped pervert certain values of taste rather than normalize them; perhaps it amounts to much the same thing. But then, as you know, I am as hung up on the sin in sincere as the verse in perverse. But don’t let me shimmy my way out of this one—only, only please don’t throw me back into that briar patch. I love that Poe story about Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, you know the one where the inmates take over the asylum—and the doctors are so perfectly suited to be deluded patients, telling the visitors with obsessive urgency that they are really the sane ones. As we say in Buffalo, “Sure.” My own editorial and critical projects have always been about judgment, selection, preference, partiality, advocacy. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published a wide range of writers not previously brought together, but it wasn’t eclectic. The Electronic Poetry Center is all about curation and

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selection. I am particular, not catholic, in my taste in poetry, but I do like a great many contemporary poets, and these mostly turn out to be poets who get little or no attention for their work. I wish there was more I could do to increase the readership for these writers, to find more funding for publications, because there is so much work that deserves the attention, and many potential readers who are “underserved,” as we say in the education biz, by their lack of access to this poetry. The culture is undeserved by its lack of access to this poetry, a situation that is the result not of any shortage of merit or appeal of the poetry—’cause let me tell you this stuff is immensely appealing—but by its essentially noncommercial orientation in a society that pays attention first and foremost to commercial enterprises. So if the poetry and poetics to which I am partial have begun to get a hearing, I am delighted. The selection process you mention means that some poets have greater recognition than other poets of comparable worth. Clark Coolidge may in some sense, in some milieus, be better recognized than many poets of his generation, but I am more stuck by the appalling lack of recognition for his poetry, which seems to me one of the most important bodies of work in postwar American poetry. But that raises the question of recognition by whom. For most of the poets with whom I have been involved, it is the exchange with other poets, and the acknowledgment by them, that has been the social heart of the activity, providing the crucial encouragement to go on. From the outside, it is sometimes hard to realize how substantial the infrastructure of this poetry world is, because you almost have to be part of the webs of exchange to know that they are there. Now if I question evaluative language, how can I say, as I just did (can you read me back the transcript, please?): “one of the most important . . .”? My friend Bob Perelman wonders about that in “Write the Power” in The Marginalization of Poetry . . . But do we really have time now to get into such a complicated question? I mean, before lunch? In any case, flippancy is the gamma globulin of poetic minds. (Or then again, maybe not.) Oh, and as to the term experimental: I too dislike it [sips Pernod]. But see my list of writing experiments (based in part on Bernadette Mayer’s experiments list, but here with a more structural orientation).3 Perhaps it would have been better to call the list “nontraditional poetic forms.” Experiments is the term that gets used for such lists, to contrast with the ubiquitous books of writing “exercises” for creative writing classes; in this sense, “experiments” are exercises with different poetic motivations and

3. writing​.upenn​.edu​/ bernstein​/experiments​.html.

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lineages. [Loud sounds from organ grinder and monkey obtrude from lawn below.] The common dislike of the term experimental poetry among [grotesquely grimacing] experimental poets can, I think, be traced to such work’s being disparaged as mere “exercises,” preliminary and incidental to the “actual work” of poetry. [Conversation interrupted to look out the window.] [Editors’ note: At this point, CB discovered we were not in the room. He tapped on the window and we dutifully returned, though not before feeding the monkey.] In this way, both exercise and experiment are deployed, positively and negatively, against assumptions about intentionality, related to that other binary pair, process versus product. But perhaps more relevant to your question [noise abates]: A few years ago the press Exact Change ran a striking half-­page color ad (black-­and-­ white dropout lettering on red background) in the New York Review of Books headlined “Classics of Experimental Literature” and featuring books by Aragon, Roussel, Lautréamont, Stein, Cage, de Chirico, Soupault, Apollinaire, Kafka. But the term experimental does not appear in the Exact Change catalog. Its inclusion in the ad suggests an active, indeed commercial sense of the term, at least in the (considerable) judgment of the publishers Damon Krukowski and Naomi Wang. Of course one could easily note that “experimental classics” is a touch, well, oxymoronic; but let she or he whose rhetoric is without oxymoron complain; I certainly am in no position to. In contexts like this, “classic” is a way to undercut the assumption that “new” or “experimental” works are undifferentiatable in respect to quality—how can you tell one from another? (Pay attention is one possible answer.) “New classics” plays off the sense of “classic” as having enduring value against the sense of “classic” as being traditional: I’d translate the expression as, something like, a work of untraditional value, valuable in part because it is untraditional or unconventional, but not exclusively for this reason. [Drinking more Pernod, eyes closed, in reverie.] I remember going to a marketing meeting when I was working for Modern Medicine in which they told us that the readers (all physicians) were most likely to read an article if the word new was in the title. This will come as no surprise to any who drinks New Coke in their New Chevrolet, even if we are still bedeviled by the fact that Madison Avenue understands “make it new” quite well— yet, against all odds, I would still say, understands it differently. In Modern Medicine the spin had a different moral imperative: “new cure for,” “new protocol for,” et cetera, so that the audience felt compelled to read these items in order to be competent, or, negatively, in order not to be sued; at the meeting we were urged to say “new” whether or not the item was new. This works because there actually are new developments in medicine with which physicians need to keep up. New is open to manipulation not

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because it is meaningless but because it is a marker of “practical” value. To say that marketing capitalizes on the claim of the new does not mean that newness is an empty claim: the difference between Madison Avenue’s claims and poetry’s practice is one of motivation and ethics. So, echoing Williams, I would say there is still news from poetry, and that women and men do die from the lack of what is found there (but not only there, and it is surely not the only thing they die from the lack of ). . . . But no, no, that doesn’t really get to it. Can we delete all that? . . . I mean, I wish we could just rewind the tape and erase that last part and start again . . . RM & AC: Don’t worry: everything can be changed later. In the end, I don’t think it is valuable to imagine that one overthrows taste or judgment. Sometimes one’s judgment holds, enters into a social space in which it is shared by (some) others. Sometimes that forms the basis of a collective judgment that is shared by a number of people. At that point, a judgment takes on an authority that, while contested and contestable, still carries some social weight. That’s something desirable. At the same time, you can interrogate the criteria for your judgments, hold them open to question, to reformulation, to others’ formulations. But you can’t do that if you don’t make judgments, or if you imagine your judgments as simply personal or insubstantial. For me writing poetry is all about making judgments, articulating tastes, especially (but not exclusively!) those which are not “officially” sanctioned (by grammar, by conventions of sense-­making, by literary tradition, by realpolitik, by social propriety, by commercial imperatives). But also making fun of, fun with, them. And not imagining that those judgments—my judgments—are the world’s, or ought to be. AC: What kind of values, then, do you see yourself exemplifying as a poet and critic? One thing is . . . I have an interest in bringing into poetry . . . I’m not sure it’s my taste . . . things that seem clumsy or awkward, and also that seem overblown, purple passages and so on. I like that aspect of Hart Crane, for example. Most days I have an aversion to tightly bound, aestheticized, very tasteful poetry. OK, but to say that is already for me a highly reflected aesthetic view. Partly, it’s a reaction formation regarding my inability or unwillingness to see myself as being assimilated within a “high” culture of refinement. So rather than try to write poetry that makes it seem that I’m aiming for this sort of thing, as has often been the case with poets, I’m trying to assert the beauty in a lack of grace—of disgracefulness, you might

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say, but often in a highly elaborate, possibly even refined way. [Tips chair back and loses balance, falling to floor.] [Editors’ note: crash brings RM & AC back into the room.] The best example I can give is Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. I’ve liked that film since I was twelve and certainly would have related to it strongly as I was about to go to high school at Bronx Science. Buddy Love—with his slicked-­back hair and easy moves—isn’t he an image of the winningness of lyric poetry? Then there’s Steve Martin in The Jerk. So I do have a taste for the asymmetric and the off-­balance, the spastic, which in my work is very often transformed into a rhythmic element (flat-­footed, lost in rime), taken as material to spin in different ways, oscillate, create shapes that give these dis-­positions a buoyancy and a lightness that they don’t necessarily have when you’re feeling awkward or stupid or inept. So a transformation is involved there . . . the poem as Rube Goldberg malapropism machine . . . [Struggles to get up from floor.] AC: Are there other poets whose work demonstrates this awkwardness or ­turning? Well, somebody I think is one of the most elegant poets of the time is Michael Palmer. Palmer has a gracefulness, a fierce poise, in his writing that I like and admire. But what interests me about his work is the loathing he has for the merely elegant—that is a very powerful undertow in his writing. So that while he has this grace of line and so on, it turns almost into a rage against the sort of mannerism with which it might otherwise be mistaken, and this creates an enormous and powerful tension in his work that I am very attracted to. So what’s the company in this exposure, recitation, repetition—or is it celebration?—of awkwardness, flailing, disbalance, arrhyththmia, dysraphism, what I call in my introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word the prosody of dis-­stress? Certainly there are roots in vaudeville (the tumlers tumbling through their material), and you can see this as it moves forward in the work of the Allens (Gracie and Woody) and later John Cleese. In poetry, I think of Larry Eigner and Hannah Weiner especially, but it is there in much of Jackson Mac Low or, in a very different way, Ted Berrigan. It’s there in Susan Howe’s stuttering and Bruce Andrew’s wobbling, Tom Raworth’s velocity and Leslie Scalapino’s (dis/ re)orientings. And more recently, I think of the ways that Stacy Doris and Juliana Spahr are working outside of poetic diction. [The editors have asked me to stop making these facetious asides.] [Editors’ note: We never asked him anything.]

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RM: How do you see this work positioned against the poetic mainstream, one which you basically identify with mass culture? Conventional poetry is not mass culture, but perhaps mass culture’s “high culture” pet turtle. This pet turtle is supposed to stay in tune and to know its place and have an attractive shell. The only postwar American poetry to enter into mass culture in a big way is “Beat” poetry, but the part of Beat poetry that crossed over was, to some extent, an extraction of the social attitudes of the poets, leaving the textual practice as a discardable pulp on America’s living-­room floors. I’d say that what’s rhetorically compelling about most of the poetry I read is that it tries to articulate meaning without using the hooks and ladders, tackle and bait that are de rigueur in mass media. This leads to the familiar claim that such art is elitist. In contrast, it would be unusual for a supposedly “unintelligible” poet to blanketly attack TV shows or films or popular music as worthless; the response of such poets to mass culture ranges from wild enthusiasm for some works to indifference to most to hostility to some. But there is something about the logic of mass media that doesn’t allow space for any noncommercial art and implicitly derides this work with the idea that only the most popular is really any good or certainly any fun. Or to put it another way, only writing that makes money has any real value. So which is really the elitist position? In this cultural space, Pet Turtle poetry often takes on the role of aesthetic Geritol—it may be unappealing at first, or always, but it’s good for you. It sets a pall over the whole genre, to such an extent that I would want to emphasize most about the writing I like—say that of Johanna Drucker or Erica Hunt—is how much fun it is to read, how pleasurable, how maximum cool. At the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire in September 1996, Denise Riley made the point that she considered her work and the work represented by the conference as mainstream. Reminded of Phil Ochs singing “I declare the war is over,” I immediately embraced this position. Of course we are the mainstream, no question about it. But there was something that began to trouble me. Why does mainstream poetry so rarely get any of the big literary awards and prizes? Why don’t the mainstream poets get more reviews in the big-­shot newspapers and national periodicals? Why, when this work does get mentioned in passing, is it so often dismissed as drivel by reviewers who seem to have been assigned to cover poetry because of their proud ignorance of mainstream literary values? It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t believe that the best work surfaces over time. On the contrary, I think a lot of work is lost or buried, a lot of work is destroyed, a lot of the

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best artists give up out of discouragement. Critical intervention doesn’t produce poems, but it does, at its best, create space for poems to be written, to be heard. In my experience, the most far-­reaching work in this regard has been done by poets working as editors, publishers, critics, translators, reading series coordinators, and the like. Take the incredible scope and achievement of my friend and publisher Douglas Messerli at Sun & Moon Press—a person whose significance for contemporary literature is enormous, and goes well beyond that of the editors at the big US publishers. And Messerli has done what he has done without capitalization, without access to the publicity machine that fuels commercial publishing, without the private funding that sustains other major cultural institution, although, crucial to note, with some significant help from public arts funding along the way (during the days when the National Endowment for the Arts played such a positive a role in the national culture). RM: Let’s talk about these ideas of recovery, of picking up personal interests, and introducing them into critical discussion in terms of modernism. You’ve talked a bit about how the people you designate as “radical modernists” have tended to get erased from dominant constructions of modernism. And that what we’ve been left with is this modernism that’s depoliticized. What I call “high anti-­modernism” or the “counter-­modernist tradition.” RM: Right. How are you conceiving the modern era now? What representation of the modern poetic scene do you offer to counter that which is conventionally represented in the classrooms, the anthologies, and the critical literature? Well, I don’t want to respond to that as if I were a literary historian trying to objectively represent modernism, since so much of what I try to do is to complicate and disturb accounts of literary history, hopefully my own included. I tend to think about modernism in the economic and social context of modernization, but also to think about it in terms of issues that go back to the Enlightenment—so two well-­known perspectives, one medium range, the other longer range. For me, the most striking feature of literary modernism during the period 1910–40 is the multiplicity of approaches to poetry. The forms being used, being invented, being resuscitated, were so disparate. Moreover, the polydictory logics of the poetry of this period offer a useful model for what people these days tend to call “diversity.” Diversity, as it’s now often thematized, is culturally and politically important because it foregrounds the potentially enormous heterogeneity

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of writers—of who can write and who can make writing that counts. Now there are times when I can find this somewhat sentimental, but that’s because I get caught up in what I am doing as a writer, not who I am or where my grandparents came from. But thinking of modernism, the remarkable fact of the rise of mass literacy over the past one hundred years cannot be acknowledged enough, since it democratized both readers and writers. In this sense, English-­language poetry in the twentieth century is far closer to a mass- or popular-­culture form than any poetry written for individual readers since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, notwithstanding the enormous popularity of any number of individual poets in the intervening years. The audience of potential readers (rather than listeners) has greatly increased. In a sense it has taken five hundred years to realize the radically democratic potential of the printing press. Even if the audience for a particular book of poetry is small, the pool of potential readers is vast, and, more important to my point here, the spring of potential writers is deeper and wider than it has ever been in alphabetic Western society. This radically democratized horizon of poetry is fundamental to modern composition. When I think of literary difference, what I am primarily interested in are differences of form, which are not unrelated to identity politics but are also much more specific than that. What most compels my attention is the range of different forms that the modernist writers deployed, throwing them out into the culture like test balloons going up into the sky. And I would include in that the multiplex poetic languages and local dialects and idioms, the investigation of the visuality of language, the resurgence of performance, the concern for the relation of politics to writing, and on and on. To put this more flatly, as I have before, modernism in poetry stands for radical heterogeneity of forms, and this makes a sharp contrast with, say, modernism in architecture, which seems to pre­sent an image of formal homogeneity. And the reason these can stand as opposites is the material base of each activity. Modernism in the senses I am attending to here suggests an ongoing project of using the medium of poetry not to thematize but to formally explore questions of identity, meaning, reading, culture, audience—indeed the relation of the individual to the society or the effect of technology (including the technology of alphabetic literacy, of printing, of the web) on knowledge. RM: Right, right. I’m curious—you know, you say that you’re not a historian, and that your interest is to fuse our notions of history and to complicate them. What does that do to your own sense of your position in literary history? In “Time Out of Motion” [in A Poetics] you discuss the way our language

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changed, and our relationship to letters changed because of the colonization of American English by immigrants. And you talk about the way that the radical modernists—Stein and Williams and Zukofsky—develop this kind of associative relation toward language, as opposed to the etymological, and created a distinctively, if not singular, American style separated from island English. And since you trace these individuals, in some way, as your poetic influences, I’m wondering what you see as American about your work, in any way. Perhaps this idea of a radically democratic horizon for poetry is American, or the idea that poetic authority is made, not received. Anyway they are American for me. It may also be that my movement, Nude Formalism, is a kind of American doggerel. Or that the grace and even charm of awkwardness can be framed this way. And, still thinking of Rube Goldberg, I guess, there is that tradition of North American “iconoclastic” artists who make up their own rules—­ composers such as Colin Nancarrow, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, Morton Feldman . . . Charles Ives. Or, more recently, John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Carla Bley, Cecil Taylor, Robert Ashley, Ornette Coleman—to name a few. Of course I am also thinking the two composers for whom I’ve written librettos—Dean Drummond and Ben Yarmolinsky. Maybe what makes any of these ideas or artists American is simply that the work is done here or, as with an expatriate like Nancarrow, heard as American. Similar work done somewhere else takes on a different meaning. I prefer, against the harsher reality, to think of America as process, not a state. That we don’t ever accomplish “America.” In this sense, “America” is not restricted to the United States. Say the idea that one can transform oneself from a klutz to a poet, that one isn’t imprisoned by the identity that one is given, or that one is stigmatized with, or even that one chooses as one might a name. Which doesn’t mean that anything has to be denied or renounced either. RM: But you do imagine a kind of democratic space—for example in “The State of the Art”—in which we all stop worrying about being able to talk to each other and just listen each other? I never really imagine a time when we stop worrying. I think worrying is the best thing we do. It’s the lack of worry that scares me. But I’m trying to talk about this idea of space in America as pluriform or multiplex—a braided overlapping of multiple realities that need to be partitioned or

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adjudicated, not merged or melted. But this social space cannot be represented; it can only be enacted. Group identity can be as problematic—and also as interesting—as self-­ identity in poetry. But if one critiques the voice of the individual poet, one must also forcefully worry about group identity as a voice in poetry. Or the way poetry is read through various aggregate groups, including literary movements, for that matter. AC: I wonder if your critique of voice poetry and its political pitfalls is similar to your critique of group poetry. Would you say that the political pitfalls for the white male subject are the same as those for a black female speaker, if the poetry is representational? Representational or not, the interesting thing about poetry is that it thrives on asymmetry: the same line is not the same depending on who said it or what the context is. But yes, I am interested in the analogy between those two things, that’s for sure. The problem is the single fixed voice, as opposed to voices or voicing. The issue in poetry is voicing—musical, phrasal, intonational, but also velocity and diction. Voice is already a reification (an ideological construction)—we see these particular configurations of syllables, or let’s say alphabetic characters, and we say that’s a voice. But these are also words; there’s a materiality to it. The problem is this assumption that these words are there primarily to represent something called a voice and that we read poems with that interpretive grid overlaid. This reading in terms of the “I am” is just as constraining as reading primarily in terms of those other iambs. In many cases, this is a denial of human voice and its thickness, tone, gruffness—its fluctuations. And this is also a problem for a group voice. Groups are representations that humans create—with great facility and with often ferocious commitment. But here I am not talking about groups like labor unions or other voluntary associations of people that are acknowledged as provisional. The problem with ethnicity—we see it graphically these days in Yugoslavia and Russia—is that, like genre, which it relates to—there’s a sense that there is a superiority to your genre and your bloodline. This superiority is often implicit in “deep” ethnic or racial memory, which generates a sense of immutable destiny, which, I mean, it’s—“everyone is beautiful in their own way.” Knot! Because if you’re really committed to the truth of your genre and only your genre, then ultimately you become a supremacist. Or, you become an ethnic cleanser. The democratic space of America becomes a more vital, political, and poetic tool of the imagination at a time in which the resurgence of ethnic

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nationalism is so strong in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. We’re lucky that we don’t have ethnic strongholds associated with cities or regions, because ideologically we’re far too close to that, but as this ideology hits ground, everything is so mixed up here. That mixed-­upness is good; we should celebrate being mixed up. We should celebrate being confused. We should celebrate mixed dominance. We should celebrate hybridity and every other form of syncretism. These are our democratic vistas. We should celebrate the pluralities even within the “purest” of ourselves, because none of us is anything other than plural. But, hey, I know—there’s this cart before the horse (or is it house?) thing I’m doing. A historical value of poetry in this culture is to allow those who are not given voice in the dominant media—television, radio, and so on— to use the small presses and other alternative media to get their voices heard. That’s one of the great vitalities of poetry. But how any or several of “us” give voice, what signifies being one thing or another, and the complexity of that signification, is what interests me. Poets who are [ ] are, of course, many other things too, and yet does the poetry therefore signify primarily that they’re [ ]? Indeed, many of the [ ] poets of my generation and the immediately previous generations tended to elide their [ ] identification, at least in terms of their poetry. And yet it’s very important to recognize the relation of one’s work to [ ]; I would never say this has no relevance. But the question isn’t just how much relevance, but how that relevance plays itself out in a poetic work. It’s that issue that seems to me to get elided. RM: What is your own sense of identity within the various groups with which you might identify? I’m nobody, who’re you? Chuck Q. Nobody. Nice to meet you. Or let me put it this way: questions of identification are so totally asymmetric in this culture that most types of identifications I might have, I’m not interested in affirming. For example, the men’s poetry movement I think of as being hilarious, absurd— RM: Redundant. “Redundant” is a nice way to put that. I’m interested in exploding and critiquing and ridiculing—and sometimes just plain ignoring or repressing—lots of the group formations with which I could be affiliated (including ones that I’ve forged myself ). That’s my inspiration. Other people would not have that project. Much poetry of course affirms one’s community, nation, people; certainly that has been one of the primary values of

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epic poetry. Then there’s that tradition of poetry that abhors the values of its own culture—but, hey, like my main man says, opposition is true friendship; or is it Donald Trump who said that? Basically I am a very affirmative poet. In fact I’ve been with the firm for over twenty-­five years, same vocation. It was around that time that they told me my job was redundant, but I said OK, I’ll just keep doing it over and over again until it becomes resplendent, even with those flouncy sleeves. What’s interesting about poetry very often is that it’s destructive, it’s sarcastic, it’s demeaning, it’s undermining, it’s ugly, unpleasant, unaccommodatable, incomprehensible. And beloved, at the same time. AC: But poetry is very often “beloved” of many readers—particularly those outside academe—precisely because poetry invokes a group identity, represents experiences or beliefs that they share with others. Students often seem to read that way. How, then, do you value, construct, imagine, the response of the inexperienced or “lay” reader of poetry to the kind of group or voice poetry you criticize? Oh, I suspect that there’s a pretty big nonacademic audience out there who can identify plenty with what I am talking about. I think that it’s just as likely English teachers—high school and college—who get hung up on this affirmative stuff and that it often alienates students from poetry. If I started to write poems about how great my five-­year-­old son Felix is, I suspect many of my readers would turn elsewhere for their poetry needs. But let ’em: Felix is great! What a terrific idea for a poem, I don’t know why I never thought of it! Then I’m gonna write one about the pleasure of playing catch with Felix . . . but do you think that means I would actually have to play catch with him? AC: While we’re on the subject of the audience for poetry, how do you think the audience is changing? What is the effect of the Internet—and such projects as the Electronic Poetry Center? As Garrett Morris might say, “The World Wide Web’s been very very good for poetry.” Poetry has a very strong affinity for the textual spaces of the web, and the low overhead of web publishing has been an enormous attraction for poetry publishing. But we are still at the very beginning of the development and exploitation of this space, and the more exploitation the less visible the poetry. The Electronic Poetry Center had been a largely volunteer operation, under the magnificent command of Loss Pequeño Glazier (but with crucial support from the University at Buffalo in terms of overhead and hardware). At first the idea was to create a central poetry

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switchboard, with links to other poetry web resources, as well as extensive archives of magazines, publisher’s catalogs, and Poetics Program material (including syllabi, which lend themselves very well to HTML). The next big project was to start to get a lot of sound up—RealAudio poetry readings and most particularly the series of thirty LINEbreak radio shows that Martin Spinelli produced, in which I interview a number of poets and writers. But I think what is now the most interesting is the textual space of HTML, creating hypertexual works that combine text, links, sound, and a range of visual possibilities. It’s wild after a writing lifetime of assuming black ink on white paper to start to pick your background image—and not just your font and point size but the color of the font. But the fate of poetry is not based on how many hits poetry pages get on the web or how many copies of a book of poems are sold or the audience at a reading. It is and remains difficult for individual poets to survive, for poets to get their work published, for poets to have an audience. That’s a very important social dynamic of being involved with poetry and poets. But at the same time, I do think that there are a lot of people listening. As Shorty Petterstein says, “They come, man, they come.”4 There is an audience for poetry. It’s very vital. Poetry as an art, even more important than its audience, is very exciting right now, and very vibrant—partly just because of the number of practitioners. There’s an extraordinary number of people writing in very thoughtful and complex and multiple ways. And that’s almost unprecedented, the number of people doing interesting work, work that isn’t written with commercial or popular aspirations, but just because of the interest in and integrity of the particular poems that are being written. RM: Well, that seems like an affirmative note on which to end; should we undermine it before we turn the tape off? What, you mean you’ve been taping this? RM & AC: You bet.

4. Henry Jacobs and Woody Leafer, “Two Interviews” (Fantasy EP 4051, 1955).

Musica Falsa On Shadowtime with Eri c Den u t

What does it mean to be a poet in our time—in the North American society? I’ve answered this question a lot in my life. I’m interested in the social context for poetry, what poetry becomes within the process of “doing” poetry. In the 1970s, a number of us were engaged in an activist, indeed interventionist, approach to poetry, through our poems, of course, but also through essays (which were often non-­, and even anti-­, expository) and, moreover, through small press publishing, organizing events, giving “talks” . . . through all this insisting on poetry as a social activity, and not simply as a formal ludic exercise. We were very focused on the ideological dimension of language, as a direct result of antiwar activities of and around 1968, and we were especially concerned about the abuse of language that was involved in the state politics of this time (unfortunately not so different from the present time) but also in the official organs of “truth,” whether on TV or in the newspapers: how the control of language led to a very effective administration of everyday life. In sum, we saw poetry as addressing, or perhaps better to say redressing, the relationship of consciousness to language. Which is to say we imagined the role of poetry as thinking in, around, and about the premises of (verbal) language: to explore, indeed to demonstrate, the formal dimensions of language, without the necessity of creating a rational, expository, or directly expressive presentation about language or poetics or ideology. Poetry’s social function is to imagine how language works within its culture, while pursuing a critique of the culture; this suggests that poetry can Musica Falsa 20 (Paris, 2004) on the occasion of the performance at the Festival D’Automne of Shadowtime, the Brian Ferneyhough opera in/around/about Walter Benjamin, for which I wrote the libretto. The libretto was published by Green Integer Books (Los Angeles) in 2005. The quotation from Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” at the end of the conversation, is from scene 2 of the libretto. An extensive compilation of reviews, photos, and related information about the opera is available at epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein​/shadowtime. Transcribed and edited from a conversation in New York in July 2004.

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be a countermeasure to the reinforcement of cultural values at the heart of both popular entertainment and consumer politics. At the same time, poetry’s aesthetic function is to refuse even this “value” in the pursuit of what Louis Zukofsky calls the pleasures of sight, sound, and i­ ntellect. Does it mean that poetry has to be correlated to theory? I’ve had different responses to that over time. I remember an aphorism in an essay that I wrote for the Paris journal Change in 1981: “Theory is never more than an extension of practice.” When we—the poets around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—were first centering on nonnarrative and non-­voice-­ centered paradigms, we were often accused of being too intellectual, that is to say, not emotional enough: too difficult, too complex, and also too theoretical. Now, all those epithets are OK by me; I think it’s best to take on their negativity, to wear such stigmas as badges of honor. Indeed, they suggest the problem with the kind of poetic practice that was dominant, and still is, in the United States. In the 1970s, to be directly expressive, lyric as they like to call it, in free verse was the sine qua non of poetry. That remains the dominant theory of poetry, and it is far too complacent, too dogmatic, a theory for my taste. It’s not that “theory” prescribes the alternative, but rather poetry and poetics both emerge out of a conflict with a given state of affairs. Poetry and poetics, theory and practice, are interrelated. Poetics is an extension of the practice of poetry, and poetry is an extension of thinking with the poem and also the reflection of poetics. Let me introduce Walter Benjamin here as a good example of multipolar, rather than linear, thinking. Benjamin’s form of reflective writing suggests a poetics of multiple layers or figures. A line of thought may seem to go off into one direction but then drops back to follow another trajectory, only this new direction is not a non sequitur but rather echoes or refracts both the antecedent motifs and—this is the uncanny part—the eventual ones. I mean this as a way of rethinking what is often called fragmentation or disjunction. Think of fragments not as discontinuous but as overlays, pleats, folds: a chordal or echopoetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones. You find this in the Arcades Project as well as in Benjamin’s early essays: an openness to the multiplicity of connection that exhibits not discontinuity but a verbal and paraverbal echoing between interrelated motifs that, on a rational level, do not at first seem related. Yet as you go into details, as you begin to listen to the essay as you would a piece of music, you begin to register how intricately everything is connected. Theory is as theory does. If I prefer to write poems that are exploratory and intuitive, still there is always a great deal of conceptualizing that leads

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up to any intuition. Intuition can be informed, and it can also be practiced (ars de faire). Then again, in writing poetry and poetics, I resist what I understand or what I can formulate too well. So theories are a little bit like crutches, to be tossed off the moment you are able to walk, and yet a comfort in times of stress. I’m trying to go through a process of connections as I’m moving along in a poem (or even in answer to your questions): it’s much messier than if it were the product of a theory (if we think of theory as a rationalized outcome of reflection and research). At the same time, I’m interested in talking about the process; it seems to me important for poetry not to be just on an emotional sleeve (“I’m a poet, I’m emotional, I’m writing about my feelings”). The art of poetry is just as much the navigation as the boat. Which is why it’s important not to valorize one side or the other, poetry or poetics. I leave theory to those far more confident than we who stumble from point to point, finding ourselves in the blank spaces in between. One medium of culture, one genre of writing, cannot in and of itself be secondary to any other. Journalism, for example, is not secondary to literature. As social forms, both have their limitations and possibilities. But in our time, the point that needs making is that a good poem is just as good as a popular movie. Since the mass scale of journalism and movies and pop music undermine the criteria of evaluation in our culture, it’s important to emphasize that a singular value of poetry is the freedom, complexity, and depth that derives from its small scale, the fact that it has few readers, that it is difficult to access, that it’s not a mass art form. The Library of Congress just announced that our new US poet laureate “writes of universal themes in an accessible manner.” That sounds like an ad for soap. I’d rather our poet laureate wrote of particular themes in a complex manner; but then we have a president, selected by a minority of the voters with the help of a antidemocratic Supreme Court, who impugns the value of “nuance” in foreign policy. Within our culture we need, desperately need, small, difficult, rebarbative art forms. Poetry can do many things with language that can’t be done with conventional storytelling. And as William Carlos Williams says, people die, every day, for the lack of what is found there. Could you describe the economic apparatus of poetry in the United States? The economy of poetry is antipathetic to profit; it’s a “negative” economy. As James Sherry once remarked, if you take a sheet of plain white paper, perhaps it’s worth a penny, but if you write a poem on it, it’s worth nothing. It can no longer be sold. But then again, that nothing is worth quite a lot. You’ve created negative value. Put a different way, that just shows

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that there are different kinds of economies and that poetry is an exchange economy. Many people imagine, because maximizing cash profit is not the motivation of poets and their publishers, that poetry is a utopian space, without hierarchies, without power relationships. But, happily for poetry, this is a grand illusion: the values and judgments, the networks and interconnections, are formidable. And the infrastructure is very resilient, going far back, sometimes a hundred years, from person to person, magazine to magazine, exchange to exchange. The symbolic exchange that takes place in the poetry polis is immensely valuable for the people involved. Then again, the attitudes within the field also can be very belligerent and irrational, arrogant and destructive. It’s not a world that is free of any of the problems of the rest of the culture. However, the aesthetic stakes are high—higher than in many more commercial endeavors, where aesthetics are a means to an end—and these values are measured by work produced and the value that it has for the exchange. Given the particular economy of poetry, the exchange often takes place with the cheapest possible means of reproduction, from a photocopy to a reading in a bar to a website or MP3 file. In an economy in which direct profit is not the aim, losses from the cost of reproduction are minimized in an effort of maximize exchange value. The exchanges that result are models of “democratic social space,” and so very American in one sense, but also deeply foreign to a culture, in the US, for which monetary profit or prescribed religious principles are the main sources of value. You might say the value is in intercultural—or even intracultural—relationship. The very distance that separates poetry from the dominant forms of the macro economy of accumulation give poetry a social, political, and aesthetic power, because—at least potentially— poetry’s realizations of, and reflection on, its “host” culture are not only trenchant but otherwise unobtainable. A culture that despises its artists may need them even more than one that embraces them. Is poetry, in this sense a model, a utopia, for another world? Yes, but that other world is always, anyway, this world; the utopian is just a momentary pattern of disorientation before the real work of reinhabitation begins. That is, poetry—some poetry!—may help to uncover hidden aspects of our everyday world. I say hidden not in a mystical but in a social and psychoanalytic sense: repressed, forgotten, denied, obliterated. Let’s take a concept like “weapons of mass destruction.” How do these words operate to create delusion, mass hysteria, to create, indeed, an imaginary

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world that replaces the real world through the colonized consciousness of a dystopia? Brainwashing can’t be reversed by reflection, by commentary, by critique, by poetry alone. But still, all these are necessary. At the same time, poetry exists in the face of the fact—harrowing as this may be—that the world isn’t changing, at least not the way we might like. The world (inevitably!) always remains just as it is. I can imagine another world, and do hour by hour; but I’m not interested in the delusion that this other world replaces the “real world.” That imaginary world exists in the spaces between the real and unreal. Let’s call it the shadows. How would you describe your work on Shadowtime? One of the themes that I focused on in the libretto is translation. There are several levels of translations going on in Shadowtime. For one thing, even if my text exists by itself, what is more interesting is that it becomes absorbed, subsumed into the music of the opera—the Shadowtime of Brian Ferneyhough. That subsuming is a process of translation. Another level: I love Heine and Schubert’s setting of his poems, but I was also aware that Benjamin, who was a distant relative of Heine, would have been less enthusiastic; and I presume Brian would not imagine his vocal work to have any connection to Schubert’s Heine. Keeping in mind that the setting of a poem is always also a translation of the poem, I was interested to see what Brian would be able to do with my distressed translations of two of Heine’s most famous poems—“Die Lorelei” and “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht.” In effect, I was asking him to make a second setting. How would Brian confront the problem of lieder and song? In the end, what he did in scene 6, “Seven Tableaux Vivant,” was not to set the text as songs but to push back in the other direction, poetry scored for recitation and musical accompaniment, not exactly Sprachstimme and not exactly jazz or “performance” poetry, and not sound poetry either, but something that exists in a remarkably articulated space that pushes the vocal recitation into a shaped soundscape, complete with a marked distinctness (in terms of tempo and pitch) of voicing. Other translation motifs in Shadowtime are directly related to Benjamin. For example, I say “Benjamin,” pronouncing the hard “j,” and not “Ben-­ya-­ min” as I should if I were speaking in German or, in an academic context, about the historical person. The “Benjamin” in this opera is a product of our imagination. We translate the historical figure into different social and aesthetic contexts. I’m thinking of Benjamin from the point of view of an American afterlife for him (and maybe for the secular European Jews whose world ended with his). Shadowtime opens up with the appar-

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ent historical figure of “Benjamin,” dying. After that opening scene, the historical figure becomes an avatar and enters the underworld or shadow world (through a portal in Las Vegas, no less). By the way, I don’t necessarily think Benjamin committed suicide. No one knows, there is no absolute proof, we only know that he died. In the opera we suspend that question. In fact—in life—he was killed by the Nazis, in one way or another; for me, the word suicide does not capture what happened to him. In a sense, Shadowtime offers an alternative “hearing” on what happens to Benjamin. Brian Ferneyhough opens our ears to that interrogation, since after this first scene we have twenty-­two minutes without a word, only music. That’s wonderful, because it leaves space for thought and for questions: What happened? What should happen? Why should narrative be any kind of action at all? Why, just because we set up the frame of an opera, can’t we have a sustained section of music alone, without any plot-­ driven stage action? Ferneyhough’s choice is appealing, charming, powerful. What interests me here also is the relation of song to speech and of speech to poetry. Think of the final act of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, which Schoenberg never set to music, implicitly resisting the reification of song in a way that connects song (not Sprachstimme) to Aron and the Golden Calf. The refusal—or inability—to set the text to music marks also the refusal to allow the ethical discourse of Moses to be reified as song. If Schoenberg necessarily left the final act of Moses und Aron unset, then Ferneyhough reverses this dynamic by placing a long untexted movement at the beginning of the opera, the guitar suggesting unworded song, the reverse of Schoenberg’s unsonged word. After this scene, the opera envisions a journey for “our” imagined Benjamin, as told, largely, through a chorus of angels, the angels of history (invoking, as it does, Benjamin’s possibly final essay “The Concept of History”). Just about the whole secular Jewish culture in Europe was wiped out between 1937 and 1945, along with the rest of European Jewish culture. What would have become of all these intellectuals? We have to imagine our character “Benjamin” living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where we are now. It is interesting that two people living in America created an opera in English, commissioned and premiered in Munich, on this character. Our “Benjamin” is born in the space of contemporary American thought. The historical person leaves the face of the earth but not our imagination. How do we “hear” him? How do we hear the wings of history? That’s also a translation: how is “Benyamin” translated into “Benjamin”? Which parts of the opera have surprised you in the musical setting?

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“The Doctrine of Similarity,” scene 3, is the first section I heard performed. In the libretto, scene 3 has very little in the way of mise-­en-­scène, or imagined action, or voiced characters. It is a set of thirteen texts (canons, as we call them) of various lengths, connected through thematic and numeric associations. It’s close to a serial poem and is as far from the text of a dramatic opera as is Brian’s wordless scene 2. My approach was to leave things wide open, and very various, for Brian. The texts could be set in many different ways. I remember once asking Brian what the relation of my own performance of the libretto of Shadowtime—I had sent him a tape of a reading I gave from the libretto—would be to that of the text as performed in the opera. He answered none. I loved that response because it meant that what he wanted to do would not be possible within the confines of a solo voice recitation, which I am well able to do on my own. This was going to go somewhere else, something I could not imagine. I was not disappointed. For one thing—and I find this one of the most remarkable aspects of the vocal setting in Shadowtime—Brian has sometimes overlaid the text: different parts of the libretto are sung simultaneously. So the verbal matter becomes part of the acoustic layering of the sound composition. Eventually, if you know the words it might be possible to hear the distinct verbal strands, but in composite one hears not the singular threads but their composite. So here is an example of what I mentioned before, “a chordal or echopoetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones.” “The Doctrine of Similarity,” like the last scene, “Stelae for Failed Time,” is performed entirely by the chorus of the angels of history. The chorus in Shadowtime has the role of the chorus in Greek drama: they take on the burden of the telling. The last part is a “solo” for the angels. Why a “solo” sung by a chorus? It’s a solo because if you are outside of time, the multiplicity is understood as a single voice. In the actual time of performance, it is heard as multiple voices, a cacophony. It’s another way of figuring multiplicity and fragmentation, though ultimately it’s not fragmentation. In the libretto I have the angel of history say the opposite of what Benjamin writes in “The Concept of History.” Benjamin writes that “the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” Our angels, in contrast, ask that we “imagine no wholes from all that has been smashed.” Because for me, to answer again your question about “utopia,” it’s very important to imagine not a totality but rather a multiplicity, the shards, and the sparks around the edges. We don’t live in a messianic moment, the scales have not fallen from our eyes, our seeing is double and triple, not unitary. The Benjaminian “now time” ( Jetzt­ zeit) lets us hear the cathected material moment amidst the multiplicity of

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omnivalent vectors. By intermittently stopping the development of music tonalities and progressions, Ferneyhough creates the sensation of hearing individual notes released from their tune, sounded, that is, in a series of nows, moment by moment. I hope that you hear that also as a way of figuring what people call the “complexity” of Ferneyhough’s music. “Extreme polyphony” would be a better category to explain what Brian does, combining several layers at the same time. If my words are not immediately intelligible at the level of hearing, there is a higher level of intelligibility available. Having vocal text and musical motifs superimposed creates something that cannot be heard in a real time but is, let’s just say, polyphony at an advanced level. It’s an example of an allegorical working of music and text on Benjaminian themes. The last scene of Shadowtime ends with an insistence on negative economy: “The best picture of a picture / is not a picture / but the negative.” This applies to the genre of opera itself: the relation of verbal language to representation, information to poetry, narrative to music, discourse to song.

Foreign Literature Studies with Nie Zhen zhao

What are the aesthetic principles and writing rules of Language Poetry? You are asking the wrong person, or should I say the wronged person. Each poem can set forth its own rules, and my primary aesthetic principle is to intensify the experience of the aesthetic. I left school as soon as I was able. I am working on my own now. OK, but are there any rules or defining qualities of Language Poetry? Dominique Fourcade proposes Be ready but not prepared. I guess I could say also Be prepared but not ready. Discrepancy is the key. I want a poetry that makes up its own rules and then doesn’t follow those either. Well then, how about in terms of practice? What are the most distinctive artistic features/techniques of the poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E? You’d certainly notice some strong stylistic tendencies in work from around 1980: lots of disjunction (one phrase or line or sentence having no obvious logical connection to the next); an absence of simple lyric expression purporting to be the poet’s feeling or expressing her or his subjective experience; structural and formal novelty (invented forms); a feeling of the constructedness of the poem’s form; an exploration of discrepancies between word and object, metaphor and representation, truth and logic. But none of those things would be defining except maybe to say, paradoxically, that the lack of assumption about what defines a poem as a poem is perhaps defining.

Foreign Literature Studies (Wuhan, China) 29, no.2 (April 2007), and subsequently published in Convolution: Journal for Critical Experiment, no. 1 (2010). E-­mail exchange.

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Some people believe that Language Poetry is deeply involved politically from the very beginning, with a clear agreement with neo-­Marxism and New Leftism in America. But others thought that Language Poetry is detached from real life. These two opinions seem sharply opposite to each other. As far as you are concerned, which do you think is true? And what do you think is the cause of such a difference? That’s a useful problem to contemplate. Within the hyper-­empirical American approach to reality, ideas, ideologies, theories, philosophies, psychic structures, psychoanalytic or economic or linguistic structures, indeed the imaginary, are all debunked as removed from “real life.” I try to stay out of the way of people who have this view of the real, because, in the end, for them what’s real is a fist in the face or a gun against the temple. I prefer my imaginary life. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is generally regarded as a renegade brand, but in what way is it rebellious and to what extent does it have connections with English poetic traditions? The English poetic tradition—just like the European and North and South American traditions—has a long line of renegade poets. Let’s just say renegades for the particularity of individual human experience and against both (1) the uniformity of “correct language” that imposes preformed orders on live thinking and (2) moral and religious laws that unnecessarily regulate individual behavior and expression. Dissident thought is valuable just because it is dissident. The wildness of the imagination is the greatest guarantor not only of freedom but also of reality. What is the relationship between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other postmodern poetic schools such as New Formalism? There is an immense variety of poetry being written in the US at this time, from highly conventional to astonishingly inventive, from professional to amateur, from rural to urban to posturban, from spiritual to erotic, from materialist to antimaterialist. It would probably make more sense to assume that these different approaches to poetry have little or nothing in common than to think of them as part of the same activity, which tends to level some of the most interesting differences. New Formalism is one among these many contemporary manifestations of American poetry, as is “Language Poetry,” and perhaps they are most easily understood as opposites, one emphasizing the invention of new forms, the other empha-

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sizing the use of traditional forms, but that would make it seem almost like the old line between “free verse” and metrical verse. Most American poetry is now written in free verse formats, including much that is fairly straightforward at the level of form. I’ve always been interested in fractured, demented, asymmetrical, incongruous textures, and indeed what I call “dysprosody”—the prosody of distressed sounds. Chinese poetry has influenced modernist American poets such as Pound in a unique way, but do you think it has any influence on contemporary American poetry? If so, how? At present, the exchange between contemporary Chinese and American poets has not been thick enough to allow for the kind of mutual cross-­ pollination that we have with, well, most obviously, French poetry. Though in saying that, I leave aside the emergence of poets whose parents or grand- or great-­grandparents have come to America from China, since these poets are now a major presence in American poetry, and their own connection to Chinese culture and Chinese poetry is likely to be different from that of European Americans. As is well known, the influence of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy has been profound for American poetry from the nineteenth century onward. But how well we—Americans who don’t know Chinese—really understand Chinese classical poetry is to be questioned, and has been, by scholars such as Yunte Huang. I am thinking not only of Huang’s illuminating study of Pound but more particularly his work SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, where he breaks the translation down character for character, so one gets a very different, and indeed more montage/ disjunctive, feel for the poetry, that aesthetically and semantically reopens the classical poetry in an compelling way.1 Then there is the whole question of the presentation of the poetry, especially in terms of calligraphy. I am a devoted habitué of every show in New York of Chinese calligraphy and poetry/painting and have been affected by every aspect of the work, from the performative aspect of the making of the calligraphy, to the exhilarating visuality of the approach to writing, to the interaction of word and image, to the mind-­expanding horizontality (especially but also, of course, verticality) of the writing space of the scrolls. I think all of us interested in poet–­artist collaborations and books—and I have done a number,

1. An excerpt from SHI (New York: Roof Books, 1997) is available online at jacket2​ .org​/commentary​/shi​-­radical​-­reading​- ­chinese​-­poetry​-­yunte​-­huang.

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mostly with my wife, the painter Susan Bee, but also with Richard Tuttle and Mimi Gross—are very affected by the Chinese examples. In a related way, I have also been very taken with the work of Xu Bing. Generally speaking, the poetry you focused on in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E puts more emphasis on the written (visual) dimension of poetry than on the spoken (oral) dimension. Maybe this partly accounts for why you have collaborated with visual artists. However, in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, which you edited, you emphasize the sound of poetry. Does this reflect a shift in your own approach? I think as I began to perform my work more and more, and also as I organized more and more readings and poetry events, I began to feel that I had not sufficiently addressed the performative and sound dimensions of the poetry with which I was most engaged. Also I became interested in sound not as a natural extension of the written word but as a discrepant element, another layer of the complex that is the poetic work. Then how do you think of the relationship between poetry and other forms of art? I remain a diehard formalist. I think there are things specific to poetry that can be done only in poetry. In your “30-­second lecture” called “What Makes a Poem a Poem?” you reply to the question in your title by saying: “It’s not rhyming words at the end of a line. It’s not form. It’s not structure. It’s not loneliness. It’s not location. It’s not the sky. It’s not love. It’s not the color. It’s not the feeling. It’s not the meter. It’s not the place. It’s not the intention. It’s not the desire. It’s not the weather. It’s not the hope. It’s not the subject matter. It’s not the death. It’s not the birth. It’s not the trees. It’s not the words. It’s not the things between the words. It’s not the meter. It’s not the meter . . .”2 The piece ends at precisely thirty seconds with the punch line “It’s the timing!,” right after the timer alarm goes off; this is the punch line of a famous remark about comedy: it’s not the joke, it’s the timing . . . But what is, really, a poem? Would you mind giving a definition to poetry?

2. “What Makes a Poem a Poem”: writing​.upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/x​/Bernstein​ -­What​_Makes​_a​_Poem​.html.

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Verbal art? David Antin has a marvelous answer to your question, relying on the American adolescent sexual metaphor of going to first base, second base, and so on. He says poetry is kind of writing that goes all the way. Poetry is a porous term that means different things to different people. It’s not a honorific term that distinguishes verbal art from something lesser. Bad and boring poems are still poems; song lyrics, great or terrible, meant to be heard as part of a song, are not. Veronica Forrest-­Thomson, in Poetic Artifice, lays this out this argument persuasively. She points out that if you can take a newspaper article and break it up into verse lines, you’ll read it as a poem, but not necessarily as an especially good or interesting poem. Framing a text as a poem may call on us to read it differently, but such a designation does not assume or convey value. I would say what makes a poem a poem is the context—that we choose, or are cued, to read or hear a work as a verbal construct, as a poem. In “Sentences,” the first section of Parsing, your 1975 book that is collected in Republics of Reality: 1975–1995, you start each line of each poem with “they,” “I,” “you,” “it,” or “was.” Why do you deliberately choose the same word to start a line and to adopt such a grammatical structure? In the conventional structure of the poetic line, poets try to avoid recurrence of a same word in the beginning of all lines in a stanza for the aesthetic variance of reading. So why do you intentionally use the same word to start a line, or to compose a stanza, for example, the stanza consisting of “contextual disruption,” which could be, to me, a feature of your poems? Parsing is one of my earliest works. The title refers to breaking sentences or phrases into their syntactic parts, itself a form of contextual disruption. In Parsing all the lines begin with a pronoun, some of which can operate as “shifters”—that is, they take on different references depending on the context. There are two sources for “Sentences,” both oral histories: Working by Studs Terkel and Yessir, I’ve Been Here a Long Time: Faces and Words of Americans by George Mitchell. I lifted and arranged lots of those “I” and “You” sentences from these vernacular speech transcriptions, and placed them amidst sentences I mostly generated myself. The final poem, numbered 1 & 2, is all first lines of Emily Dickinson’s poems. In this work I was interested in repetition as a form of reiteration, insistence in Gertrude Stein’s sense. There is also a relation to the minimalist music of Steve Reich and also his own interest in repetitive and highly rhythmical chanting. One of Ron Silliman’s most influential early essays, “The New Sentence,” discusses the nonsyllogistic logic of this kind of sentence organization. In “Sentences” I was interested in getting to a basic

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unit of speech and then using that to make rhythmic compositions. Much of the content of the sentences is plaintive, so that is part of the pull for me. A kind of collective plaint of despair or melancholy or disappointment or separation, which is something that threads through my work and connects it, perhaps unexpectedly, to fado, blues, mourning prayers, or other forms of lament that also use repetition. In “Space and Poetry” in Parsing, and in many other poems, we can conclude that you fracture discursive language by rearranging phrases into lines that together produce nongrammatical sentences. It seems that you divide a sentence in parts and then reconfigure these parts. Here is a sentence in “Space and Poetry” as an example, “space, and poetry dying and transforming words, before arbitrary, period locked with meaning and which preposterousness,” which you divide it into five lines. I wonder how to understand the special poetic quality of this fractured sentence. Could you give me some hints? This is phase two of Parsing, after “Sentences.” You could see it as a kind of analytic cubism. Apparently prior sentences (no original set of sentences is provided) are divided (cut up) into component parts, and these are opened up into a field layout (not flush left, spread over the whole page). The lines form a kind of music of changing or shifting parts that cannot be parsed on a linear level. This opens the page out to something that is not a two-­dimensional Euclidean space but a curved space, a space with n-­dimensionality. Let me now reinsert the space you deliberately subtracted for your question, so you can feel the torque: space, and poetry dying and transforming words, before arbitrary, period locked with meaning” and which preposterousness. Still3

In some poems such as “Roseland” (Parsing),“Of course. . . .” and “St. McC.” (Shade),“Some nights” and “Type” (Stigma), you intentionally omit punctua-

3. Charles Bernstein, Republics of Reality, 1975–1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 2000).

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tion marks just like James Joyce did in Ulysses for expression of stream of consciousness. Of course, there are many poems composed by other poets without punctuation marks, but their grammatical structure is clear for us to read and interpret. Compared with them, it seems that you fracture the regular grammatical structure to compose lines to create new meaning, which could be difficult for readers to get. What is your aesthetic purpose for using this technique to compose poems? How can we get your exact meaning of a poem without punctuation marks? There is no exact meaning, no prior meaning that I transform into verse, no single or paraphrasable meaning for the reader to grasp. A structure, or perhaps better to say an environment, is created for the reader to respond, to interenact. This is frustrating if you are reading to try to extract a meaning, pleasurable if you are comfortable trolling within meanings. By the way, “Roseland” has as its source some phrases from David Antin’s “the sociology of art” from talking at the boundaries, so it’s cut up from Antin’s transcription of his original “spoken” talk. That’s a very specific example of the kind of speech–­writing tension or disjunction I was interested in for Parsing. From some of your poems I realize that you admire irregular arrangement of lines or like to fracture sentences to form stanzas and poems. For example, you break the sentences in the poems such as “The Hand Gets Scald but the Heart Grows Colder” in Controlling Interests and “The Puritan Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalization” in Rough Trades into many parts and then organize them into a new poetic form. Do you have rules when you fracture a sentence and rearrange the fractured sentence? What kind of poetic art do you strive for? Mostly I work intuitively, arranging the words on the page so as to maximize the ping and pong of word against word, phrase against phrase, to intensify the visceral verbal sensation, to find sense, indeed make sense, with what is at hand. Many of the poems that may seem to be rearrangements of prior texts—cut-­ups—are actually freely composed, though sometimes they have gone through a series of erasures and rewritings and rearrangements of my own original seed text. The formal prototype for the poems you mention is “Asylum,” which is one of my first poems, from 1975. In that poem I cut out snippets from a source text, Erving Goffman’s Asylums, mostly focusing on the words just before and after the period, in other words the interstitial dynamics of the text, the literal place of transition from one sentence to the next. Another way to look at it would be to say I took a prior text and erased most it, or that the only parts “left”

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are the nodal points around the sentences. So then the process resembles sculpting from a slab of stone, creating the work by means of chiseling away at the surface of the rock. These poems, then, appear to have gone through a process of textual erosion. “The Puritan Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalization” is the most eroded of these works. The title comes from Max Weber’s turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century sociological study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which emphasized the connection between accumulation, capitalism, and the Protestant ethic. The poem enacts an erosion of accumulated meanings or perhaps simply a turn away from a semiotics of accumulated meaning. “The Hand Gets Scald but the Heart Grows Colder” is somewhat more typical of my work from Controlling Interests and the period immediately following, which has a mix of eroded (or erased) textual fragments, aphorism, lists, metacommentaries, lyric strains, instructions, found language, commands, et cetera— in other words, a collage of various elements, which are fused together through thematic, rhythmic, associational, and structural dynamics, most of which are come upon (that is, just made up) in the process of writing the poem. Generally speaking, to understand a poem is to understand its meaning; therefore the title is significant as the guide for understanding or topic of the poem. However, some titles of your poems are different from those we read in the conventional way. I can take your poem “Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis” (from “Residual Rubbernecking” in Republics of Reality) as an example. From the conventional reading, we should understand this poem first from understanding of its title, but the title seems to have nothing to do with the content of the poem. How do you think of this question? What is the function of “Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis” as the title of the poem? There are several other names mentioned in the poem. Are Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan the well-­known American singers and songwriters? And is Perry Como one of the most popular American vocalists? What is the significance of their names mentioned in the poem? What is your intent of Thunderbirds and the lions in the poem? In this poem, some lines are printed in black, some in capital letters, and some in italic; what do you mean by acting like this? In general, could you help to show us the meaning of this poem? The difficulty of this poem for you is probably more related to its local (American) cultural references than to the kind of aesthetic and formal issues we have been talking about. Although I do often like titles whose relation to the poem is oblique, oblique more than dissociated. In this case, the poem refers to a set of ads by the Gap clothing store chain, a brand of clothing that emphasizes “informal” styles, denim jeans being the quint-

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essential example. The ads featured blow-­up photos of all kinds of hip artists and intellectuals, including Allen Ginsberg, Miles Davis, and Jack Kerouac, with the tag line “. . . Wore Khakis.” Needless to say, Chairman Mao was not included in the ads, though didn’t he wear khakis too? The references to Bob Dylan are a bit obscure even for the entertainment news junkie of 1994; at the time the poem was written, Dylan chose to go to a more commercial Woodstock twenty-­fifth-­anniversary concert in Saugerties, New York, rather than the “alternative” celebration at the site of the original festival. Perry Como, a decidedly square singer of an earlier generation, is compared to the presumably hip McCartney. The poem is a sonnet, and there are some procedural interruptions including a warning message from the then current, now hopelessly outmoded, e-­mail system of the time. The Thunderbird was a cool car (and now also an e-­mail program, but not then). The lions are still on the loose. I am confused about the style of some of the works in Poetic Justice (collected in Republics of Reality):“Palukavlle,”“Lo Disfruto,” “eLecTrIc,” “Azoot D’Puund,”“Out of This Inside,” “Hotel Empire,” “Lift off,” “Appropriation,” “Faculty Politics,” and “The Taste Is What Counts.” Could you tell me whether they are essays or poems or what kind of other style we should call them? They are poems but in a prose format, though as you can see many different approaches to the “prose” format, to such an extent that prose becomes, rather than something neutral, something visually specific, what Marjorie Perloff recently calls “concrete prose” (thinking of Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias). Poetic Justice is the companion collection to Shade, which had mostly very thin poems; the poems in Poetic Justice are so thick as to exceed the margins. A few of these are serial sentences prose, what Ron Silliman dubbed “the new sentence”: a quick succession of complete sentences, juxtaposed one to the next, without logical connectives (paratactic). Ron’s Sunset Debris is a prose poem made up of all questions. “Palukaville” (named after Joe Palooka the cartoon boxer, in the sense of “punch drunk”) is made up of all answers, responding to the questions of Sunset Debris. “The Taste Is What Counts” and “Lo Disfruto” are imploded-­ syntax prose, made up of periods, not sentences, where phrase is grafted onto phrase to make intricately recombinant rhythmic patterns. “eLecTrIc,” and “Out of this Inside” are more closely related to free-­associative diaristic/journal writing, though with some visual overlays (the expressive use of capital letters in the middle of words) and other structural elements added to create more traction/tension. “Azoot D’Puund” is written with entirely invented words, so it’s a sound poem, but again in a prose format. “Lift Off,” in contrast, appears to be something of a visual poem, though it

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looks like prose, it is actually lineated. It is based on a series of letters on the “lift off ” or correction tape of an IBM Selectric II typewriter. I originally published this book as an offset edition, typing the pages myself on my Selectric. So the right margin is ragged, but mostly the lines go to the end of the page. Still, those versions of the work were ambiguous as to whether they were prose or verse lines. But for Republics of Reality, we set most of the pieces as prose, meaning we did not respect line endings. Still, as you noticed, there are many different paragraph and line arrangements: the visual space of the “prose” is plural. The prose is arose. I can see that you use a number of different formats for your poems. As you have discussed, some are written in prose but you also have some with a mixture of prose poems and free verse. Although you don’t work with traditional metrical forms, I believe that you have your own prosodic rules, because I can feel strong rhythms in the poem, which I can’t describe conclusively. I don’t know if my intuition is right or not. Can you say anything about the meter and rhythm of your poetry? Metricality is an ideal system that is independent of performance and, to some degree, independent of pronunciation (the articulation and duration of syllables). In contrast, rhythm is something heard. Metrical verse emphasizes symmetry and uniformity. My own impulses are toward asymmetry and syncopation: the off-­balance, the slant, the microtonal, but still with a pulse. It’s possible to create a strong acoustic rhythm with dissonance (clashing sounds and clashing sound patterns). Patterns don’t have to be linear; they can be fractal. I use all kinds of forms and also count in a variety of ways. If you look under the hood, from time to time you will see patterns in the words per line or lines per stanza, syllable counting that is ametrical, and many passages with traditional metric but right up against ones that are not. Poems whose rhythm is driven primarily by alliteration. And when I perform the poems the sonic shapes are all important, but I want that shape to stretch, bend, snap, break down into a virtually acoustic vocable noise, lapse into song by day, lullaby by night, interrupted by the whirring and wailing of the fire engines I hear outside my window. You mentioned that in “Lift Off” you used characters from the typewriter, but these included not only letters but such symbols as @, #, *, $, ¢, •, and =. Why do you choose to emphasize such symbols? You mention in an essay or interview that you are influenced in your poems by modern computer technology. In what way?

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My poetry reflects the language environment that I am in and the verbal material that I use. Sometimes I am interested in making these means of verbal reproduction visible, and indeed audible. Much of my work takes language activity that is normally left to the background and brings it to the foreground. It’s that reversal that is at the heart of the poetic function. William Wordsworth says that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; in fact, feelings have been always made much of in poetry from the Greek poets till now. What would say about the role of feeling in poetry? I am more interested in sensation than in feeling, if feeling is understood in a narrow sense as the expression of a limited set of predefined emotions: happiness, sadness, grief, et cetera. I don’t have a feeling that I, the poet behind the words, want to convey to you the reader. The feelings emerge in the process of the poem, both in writing it and in reading it. Turbulence, uncertainty, ambivalence, exhilaration, fear, loss, groundlessness, falling, guilt, error—these are a few of the overlaid feeling tones I explore. I have some small questions. “The Manufacture of Negative Experience” in With Strings begins from the third stanza and ends at the 788th stanza, but factually there are only thirteen stanzas. Why do you number these poems like this? “The Order of a Room”(in The Sophist) is the most particular poem in its form, I suppose. It seems that you borrowed techniques from concrete poems somewhat, but I am not sure. How to read this poem composed in irregular alignment of words with figures? And how to understand this kind of poem? Could you give some advice? The many stanzas that are left blank in “The Manufacture of Negative Experience” leave room for thought; they are the blank spots of a negative dialectics, writ large. “The Order of Room” uses many different sources to contemplate what we have been discussing throughout this interview: What makes for order? Can you have nonlinear order? Is order something fixed and controlling, as in “law and order,” or do our imposed orders make us dead to other, harder-­to-­perceive orders, orders of the universe but also of our souls?

The Humanities at Work with Yubra j Aryal

Since you are one of the founding members of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the movement related to it, let me ask you how the movement marks a new shift in American poetry, and how the movement goes against the mainstream tradition in the American poetry. I would be happy if you begin from a brief introduction of the language poetry movement for our readers. Language Poetry is a term that has come to stand for a rather raucous period in American poetry, from the mid-­1970s onward, in which a group of writers, mostly (but not only) in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, engaged in a large-­scale collective effort to champion poetic invention both in our own work and in the work of other twentieth-­century poets. Because most of the established magazines, presses, and poetry organizations favored a different approach to poetry, we relied on our own resources as far as publishing and presenting our work in performance. This was collective action without dogma, perhaps brought together as much by we didn’t like as by what we shared stylistically. And while from time to time someone would try to impose order or a neat history on our unruly and diffident practice, many of us took those interventions as an opportunity to define ourselves against just such labeling and schooling. There is no one history here and no one poetics. In 1978 Bruce Andrews and I started L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a forum for poetics and discussion, something we felt was crucial and also lacking, both in the mainstream and in the alternative poetry scenes, in which there was an antipathy to critical thinking bordering on anti-­intellectualism. The poets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and there were dozens of us, were interested in both a historical and an ideological approach to poetics and aesthetics and also a stance of dissent, both to prevailing poetry norms and to US government policies. We questioned all the “given” features of poetry, from voice and expression to clarity and exposition, and advocated the The Humanities at Work: International Exchange of Ideas in Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature, ed. Yubraj Aryal (Kathmandu, Nepal: Sunlight, 2008). E-­mail exchange.

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invention of new forms and the use of found (or appropriated) language. In the process we came up with many different, indeed contradictory, approaches to poetry and poetics. Our desire to link our poetry and poetics with the contemporary critical, philosophical, speculative, and political thinking—with a visceral connection to the civil rights movement, feminism, and the antiwar movement—has become a significant mark of our work, and one that has perhaps given rise to our various collective names, which have been both praised and condemned. You have been neglected and unrecognized long by the mainstream tradition. But your language poetry movement has earned sporadic popularity. What discontent do you share with the traditionalists? I shared with my most immediate poetry comrades—Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Susan Howe, Nick Piombino among others—a dissatisfaction with the official verse culture of the 1970s and early 1980s, with its blandness and conformity, and with its high-­handed rejection of the historical and contemporary particulars in poetry that most motivated us to write. Collectively we explored alternatives, going back to radical modernist innovations while at the same time championing the work we found most interesting in the immediately prior generation. We actively exchanged ideas about ideology, arts, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy, expressing our engagements through intensive small press publishing of books and magazines. Deep friendships developed in the course of these exchanges, and lots of disagreements, collective engagements, and concerted actions. I am not sure what to say about what all this “shared” with the traditionalist except perhaps to say that I am as much engaged with some threads of the poetry tradition as anyone else. Too often those who claim to speak for “traditional values” forget that radical innovation in form and content is a fundamental part of the literary tradition of the West, from Blake to Baudelaire, Swinburne to Mallarmé, Poe to Dickinson and Melville. I really appreciate the generative novelty of your poetry—in a way Marjorie Perloff does—but find no strong reason to counter Marxist and cultural critics who [characterize] your kind of avant-­garde as regressive and retrogarde. How do you defend yourself against their objections? I am in the enviable position being attacked for being too leftist by some and not leftist enough by others. Poetry is not a form of political action and by itself won’t change the world. But leftist politics that doesn’t engage with the way language works to shape our perceptions of the world

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and our responses to it will be hoisted on its own positivist petards. Language is shot through with ideology; poetry can provide a means for that ideology to come out of the closet. The problem for politics, as much as for poetry, is how you define the real, how you describe the state of things. We see reality through metaphors and respond to those metaphors. No writing is innocent. Poetry marks the end of innocence for writing and the birth of the imaginary. But in the case of the spatial world like Nepal, which has been still striving to free itself from the grip of feudalism, how can your poetry promise the dream of new social (maybe artistic) humanism? I often wonder what I have in common with some of my closest poetry friends. Over time, I see how much difference there was in the 1970s between the poetry climates of New York and San Francisco. I have this no doubt perverse interest in accentuating differences as a way to find what might be common. Common ground scares me because it is so often imposed, by either the most control-­driven people from within or the most paranoid, or maybe both. Or maybe better to say that what we have in common is a willingness toward conversation with a resistance to conversion. For that reason I certainly can’t say what value this work might have for you, except as a model for a poetry that is not universal, not the truth, not righteous. But open for exchange and for use. Then how does language poetry absorb the basic tenets of poststructuralist theoretical orientation? Please bear with my having to go back to this again: Language Poetry does not exist. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine published its first issue nearly thirty years ago; it was an interesting project but not one that defines the poetry of the time or that which comes after, including my own work. Our magazine, and some of the other magazines and presses of the time, represent a particular constellation of concerns in a shifting landscape. But one thing I stood against then, as now, was any set of “basic tenets” defining a poetry or poetics. As for poststructuralism—that’s a common view based on the fact that many people are more familiar with these cultural developments than they are with what was going on in poetry. In truth, you can say that our work was contemporary with those other developments but not derived from them, although, in the long view, mutual interactions and cross-­ connections will be more apparent. The poets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E often offered a very sharp critique of structuralism, poststructuralism, and post-

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modernism; certainly that was a significant part of my critical writing of the period. But all of us shared much, if contrasted with technorationality, religious fundamentalism, and market supremacism. Doesn’t it become too theory laden? Mayn’t one blame you as a theoretician? Here I want to underscore that I am, however, an advocate of theory and perfectly hold to your claim that “theory is what theory does.” The danger is not being theoretical enough, of slipping into the assumptions of the mediocracy: the tried and true all over again. I often make the point that I prefer the terms philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics to theory. In that sense I am not so much a theorist as a practitioner who reflects on his practice. Much of my poetics is pragmatic; none of it is systematic. This distinction between poetics and theory, though, would fall on deaf ears among those who are against “thinking” or against critical reflection, favoring instead what they claim to be unmediated personal expression. I won’t get into a chicken-­or-­egg debate here about which comes first— poetics and poetry are mutually informing; but those who wish to deny the conceptual basis of their writing in favor of unmediated expression risk falling into a dogmatic rigidity about writing. I am especially interested in extreme forms of poetry, odd and eccentric forms, constructed procedures and procedural constructions. I never assume that the words I use represent a given world; I make the work anew with each word. Poetry is as much a product of delusion as illumination, illusion as reality. There is an often misunderstood relation of theory with avant-­garde, of which you are one of the greatest advocates. Is avant-­garde work a theoretical (and critical) piece or a literary piece formed by creative imagination? When literature or art become heavily theoretical and complex, readers miss the chance of enjoying aesthetic pleasure. What would you say about it all? Should we need theory to express our creative impulse? Should we need theory to appreciate a work of art? My old illiterate grandmother does not know theory but wonderfully appreciates a ditty she often hums. Is she mediocre? Yes, of course, we now live in the postliterary age (except people like my grandmother). Theory is never more than an extension of practice. That’s my motto; I’d have it monogrammed to my napkins, but I use paper. I have always resisted the word theory: I don’t have theories, I have aesthetics and ethics. And I’m not interested in explaining anything, just continuing the conversation. I have an old-­time sense that it’s ideology we need to talk about, not theory. Blake says “A Tear is an Intellectual thing.” In other words, I

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find a good deal of conventional poetry, with its commitment to theatricalizing emotion, is far too theoretical for me. I want verbal matter, not representations of feelings; I want aesthesis, not ideas; sensation, not refried (reified) emotion. I can’t speak about your grandmother (mine was born in Russia and came to Brooklyn by herself when she was nine), but mediocrity surrounds us in the palaces of culture and the thrones of mass media; literacy is no protection. The problem with theory is that it needs to be cured by theory just as education needs to teach unlearning (and I don’t say that idly). Class values are not classy. The mediocracy of which I speak all have degrees in spades and wear their learned ignorance with pride. Smugness and condescension are the problem, and you don’t need no theories to smell that.

Bomb with Jay Sa nders

If poets are said to be “painters with words,” then Charles Bernstein would surely moonlight working in a custom frame shop. With samples lining the walls—from the gaudiest fake-­gold scrollwork to the most austere black lacquer finish—I imagine him testing the clients’ nerves by frantically holding every outlandish sample to the edge of their pictures to assess the overall effect. A cheap clip-­frame for a museum’s masterpiece, gilded silver leaf for a baby’s doodle, exotic wood for a crappy poster won at a carnival. His is a poetics of framing and reframing, with a guarantee: if you end up liking it, he’ll quickly try something else, for free. We met last December (2009) to talk about his new volume of selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven; this is a segment of our ongoing conversation.

• I remember reading a short piece written in the late ’70s by Jackson Mac Low for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He recounts how you mailed him a list of questions about his procedural, chance-­derived poetry and then proceeded to nudge him a bit to ensure a response. His characterization of you stuck with me ever since . . . the degree to which you discourage isolationism among poets, for whom, maybe, it’s natural. [ laughter] Their natural habitat might be more toward curmudgeonliness and isolation. That was around Jackson’s sixtieth birthday in 1980. I organized, with Anne Tardos, a huge birthday tribute to him; he would have been about my age at that time. We had an incredible lineup, including artists such as John Cage and La Monte Young. Jackson was part of an intense performance network, but he wasn’t sufficiently accepted as a poet. His personality was not such as to push against that lack of recognition. So that’s where I came in, because when Bruce Andrews and I were doing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, starting in ’78, Jackson was acutely important for us. Bomb 111 (Spring 2010). Thanks to Mónica de la Torre for her editing. Transcribed and edited from a conversation in New York on December 13, 2009.

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It’s your particular manner of “coming in” that Jackson so keenly expressed. I wouldn’t understate the importance of that aspect of your early work: the championing of highly eccentric writers such as Hannah Weiner and Robert Grenier, just to mention two whose work has heavily impacted my thinking thanks to your efforts. If you closely examine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—which gets historicized as a militant aesthetic break—you find that it’s actually as much about this connectivity that sets the stage for your continued activities as a booster, promoter, anthologist, and archivist of exotic/esoteric poetries. In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, you invoke the metaphor of a latticework. The image distributes power differently from, say, a line or a thread, which might point to a calculated tethering toward your own poetic practice. The term is Bruce’s, but we share the concept. When we started L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E we were trying to open up conversations across divides. As you say, rather than trying to narrow things down, the journal was about dialogue not just among poets of the same generation and the same perspective but among poets of different generations, and also with those in the other arts. Still, the reaction in terms of the parochial world of poetry was that somehow something exclusive was being launched. We proposed an alternative to what then dominated as respectable poetry. Ours was a poetics of (some of ) the excluded. And a rearticulation of temporarily closed-­down possibilities, an effort to animate connections that were there to be made but that others couldn’t see. We tried to trace a history of radical poetics, taking up the model presented in Jerome Rothenberg’s Revolution of the Word, and later by Rothenberg and Pierre Joris in Poems for the Millennium and Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment. When you go back thirty years, you see that poetics that now are widely accepted as foundational for contemporary poetry were harshly rejected then. Poetry’s center of gravity has shifted to the poetic left, to call it that, though not everyone has heard the news. Even in the more mainstream poetry magazines now there’s a certain amount of work that is far looser and formally radical than you would have seen in the mid-­1970s. In your and your poetic peers’ early work, you feel that intensity of purpose, of provocation, amidst what was perceived as a staid poetic and political climate. Drawing on peculiar inspirations and tactics, that anxiety or struggle of reception seems implicit in the actual textures of your work—its key attribute. As your combined efforts have gradually opened the field, that shift in

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reception can be felt too, mirrored in the poetry that’s subsequently emerged. You find more work now that can calmly execute formal disjunction. That’s right; the difference that I would point out is that some recent poetry and poetics concertedly take out the contentiousness from formal invention. This comes up with the Norton American Hybrid poetry anthology; while the editors welcome a certain kind of elliptical, fragmented style, they also try to find a happy mean between extremes. For me, it’s the extremity, the eccentricity, even the didacticism, that shakes things up. When poetry becomes normalized and more oriented toward craft, it loses the point. I’m not interested in any of the styles, per se, that were developed in the ’70s and ’80s—my own or anybody else’s. The issue was never stylistic technique as such. You have to read that era in the context of the intense resistance to nonlinear poetry, to algorithmic forms, to appropriated language and non–­“I”-­centered poems—all of which are now accepted. Even the procedural is just one technique or form that emerges, sometimes zombielike, to reveal hidden codes, or other times just as textile, as generator of texture. The first experimental poetry I totally connected with was Cage’s and Mac Low’s—their procedural forms were also in discourse with conceptual-­art practices of the ’60s. They were overt and strict about their compositional processes, no matter how odd the result. I initially had a tougher time with writing that was more hybridized, writing that was procedural but dealt with formal issues in an attenuated way—moment by moment within the shifting context of the poem itself. Procedures and compositional strategies were at work, but they weren’t spelled out for you. Yet increasingly it’s these hybrid forms that I find most interesting. That’s almost the opposite from the use of hybrid in the Norton anthology: that’s the delicious irony. As a certain “high-­bred” ellipticism becomes more mainstream, it risks leaving out what for me is the most radical dynamic: putting together seemingly unlike things to create unassimilable textures and experiences. In the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E interview with Mac Low (he called it a “museletter”), I ask him, “Do you ever cheat?” By which I meant, not use the unexpurgated results of his text-­generating procedures. I think that’s what you mean by hybridization. I would prefer the word syncretic rather than hybrid, the latter being a problematic organic metaphor. That’s my obsession, to put together apparently incommensurable things that in combination take on an uncanny force or intensity. Mac Low answered in a genial way: “No, that’s not what I do. I set up the rules. I may make an error . . .” Once he set up the system, then he ac-

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cepted what it reaped. I tend to read his work in an aesthetic way and say, Well, I love the texture of this, and to create it, I need to change that word to bring out some coloration, some discrepancy that is insufficiently articulated by any single system. My work is bricolage. I do what I like at any given time. Occasionally there might be a few strictly procedural poems, but even those tend to be ironic in the way that they use or deflect the procedure. I’m a pataphysician, looking for the swerve and the particularities rather than anything that could be created in a single, totalizing form. If you go back to Mac Low’s generation—not just in poetry but also in the visual arts, music, and performance—you see the emergence of procedural work. My work, right from the start in the ’70s, has been postprocedural or postconceptual. That’s the work we were doing in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as well. Several years ago, you introduced me to the playwright and director Richard Foreman. With aleatoric, chance-­generated composition, knowing the rules or system at play allows you to relax in the face of its difficulty—there’s nothing hidden from view. But Foreman actually composes a similar multitude of ambiences, shifting the tone and perception at every step, despite the fundamental looseness of his writing and the ad hoc nature of his staging. That’s exactly the affinity that I feel with Foreman’s work. I’ve seen every piece of his starting in 1975, when I moved back to New York after being away for seven years. In an interview I did with him in 1992, we hash through some of these issues.1 You seem to always stand in the doorway, vacillating between theory and practice, criticism and art. The voice of the poet and the voice of the critic are performed, almost like hand puppets that you occupy for a little while, manipulate, and then abandon. I don’t see you stepping outside your poetic practice to speak in a declarative way when articulating aesthetic issues. Instead, that spectral range between making a poem and responding to one becomes a wide field of activity. I love that you call this vacillating! Thinking of those oscilloscopes on science-­fiction television of the ’50s: I’ve called the rhythmic impulse of my stepping inside and outside the frame oscillating, to be quasi-­scientific.

1. Charles Bernstein, “A Conversation with Richard Foreman,” TDR: The Drama Review 36, no. 3 (Fall1992), www​.ubu​.com​/papers​/foreman​_interview​.html.

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Oscillating suggests something formal, whereas vacillating suggests fear, ambiguity, ambivalence, wanting different things. That’s more accurate to the experience, and to hand puppets . . . You know, one of the reproaches I’ve often received—and I’m not alone—is that my work is much more interesting as theory. From my point of view, I never write theory. However, I am not interested in breaking down the distinction between essays and poetry: as a rhetorician and sophist I am committed to those genre distinctions, although one genre is not subservient to the other in my queer practice. I think of it as a swerving between holding stations, and even as a vying to undermine the authority of both. It’s true that on the one hand I mock and destabilize the foundation of a commitment to lyric poetry as an address toward truth or toward sincerity. But on the other hand, if you’re interested in theory as a stable expository mode of knowledge production or critique moving toward truth, again, I should be banned from your republic. (I’ve already been banned from mine.) My vacillating poetics of poems and essays is a serial practice, a play of voices. And by exaggerating the inherent performativity of each of these voices, you reveal the ways in which each is fundamentally manipulative. You poke holes in their illusions. You mentioned genre, and in looking at All the Whiskey in Heaven. I was thinking also about your relationship to genre within specific poetic forms. Filmmakers come to mind—those who work within the constraints of genre but transfigure them too, to reveal just how much formal innovation they can sneak in through the back door. That’s central, but it becomes more apparent over the course of my work. I think of poetry as the field of potential writing, as a supergenre that is striated by subgenres but is also hyperabsorptive—it can sop up an infinite range of linguistic styles and forms. It’s more interesting to me to think of the lyric poem (or pastoral poem, urban poem, found poem, disjunctive poem, epic poem, constraint poem) as a genre, in the most debased and self-­conscious sense, like thrillers or detective fiction, than to think of poetry as an intrinsically high art form. Creating such debased genre poems—that’s fodder for whatever activity I’m involved in, but that activity operates within the supergenre, the pluriverses, of poetry, consciously reflecting poetry’s very long and dubious history. Poetry as a supergenre, rather than as a subgenre, can be understood, as David Antin likes to say, as the language art. It’s the verbal art, the research-­and-­development arm of language. Yet despite its history, the possibility of poetry still remains a surprise, because, in a way, the fact of poetry as art remains unknown.

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Your poems acknowledge that they’re creating their own contexts, building their own frames as they go along. At the level of each book there’s a focus on interior site-­specificity and a composed series of tensions throughout. The prospect of a volume of selected poems must rouse these matters, as the poems fall out of their settings. With each of your past books so highly choreographed, what about the structure of All the Whiskey in Heaven? It’s a selection of work from 1975 to 2005. I’d been resistant to doing a selected, partly because I’m always so absorbed in my present work. But there is a more structural reason: each of my books is a constellation of chosen poems that give the book a specific gravity. Up till now, I couldn’t imagine excerpting parts of those books; it would be as if you asked a novelist to do a “selected paragraphs.” (Though I’d enjoy a selected paragraphs of Paul Auster, Peter Straub, Lydia Davis, or Samuel R. Delany any day.) I’ve never composed my full-­length books chronologically, I’ve always put them together as a “group show,” with works drawn from a range of time and exhibiting a variety of styles. Then I realized the obvious: why not just think of all this past stuff as material to create a new constellation? This approach freed me from the idea of “the best,” about which I don’t have a perspective. I decided to create a new book that would have its own character, not just as a retrospective. It’d be different from any of the other books that I’ve done and yet would still have one major structural similarity: the maximum difference of one poem to the other. I ended up dividing the work evenly over the thirty years, and rather than including more than a few of my long poems, or some of my favorite poems that do somewhat similar things to other poems included, I picked poems that have their own strange aesthetic, their own formal, cultural, and social logic. The first poem in the book, “Asylum,” from the mid-­’70s, is a cut-­up entirely from Asylums by the sociologist Erving Goffman, mostly focusing on the last few words of a sentence and the first few words of the next, and then constellating these clips into a field or array. Asylums is about environments cut off from the outside: insane asylums, monasteries, prisons. After that first poem, I selected works in terms of how they contributed to this particular book. The sequence creates an environment in which poems bounce off one another rather than build up a narrative or reinforce a theme. It’s almost like ping-­pong. I’m looking for maximum concatenation based on the principle that each poem prior creates a context for the next poem, which then in turn shifts the context, and so on. So in that sense the poems are situated within specific contexts and are not experienced just in and of themselves. Their meanings are always rhetorical and performative.

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Speaking of performance, in your work there’s always a complex engagement with entertainment in its numerous forms: comedy, shtick, voice, popular music, and poetic clichés. You jumble together amusement and rigor, and what emerges is a bedraggled form of sincerity that’s comedic and tragic, dead serious but off the wall all at once. Tan Lin talks about an ambient poetics—thinking of Brian Eno in part— that would provide an easy-­listening experience in contrast to the ostensibly more demanding disjunctive, abstract poetry associated, say, with Pound and Eliot (but also some of my immediate company). I find this an incisive and witty critique of difficulty in poetry. Yet the work that Lin envisions may be even more incomprehensible for some readers than difficult poems from earlier periods. In my work, difficulty is a texture, not a goal. Sometimes I’m interested in difficulty and sometimes I’m interested in things that slap you in the face with their obviousness. I’m also interested in all of the textures in between; the movement among these textures creates the poem’s rhythm. If difficulty is a rhythmic or textural mode, then accessible entertainment becomes another rhetorical possibility, another tone—or trope. But I wouldn’t want to rest in either one. In All the Whiskey in Heaven, a radical legibility emerges: the reiteration of the same structure, making it difficult to lose attention. Lin contrasts ambient poetry with the kind of poem in which, despite your trying hard to pay attention, you lose the thread. This creates an anxiety that can be interesting in itself. But can you also create a poetic experience in which you can’t get lost? I’ve tried that through a reiterative structure, where even if you don’t get how lines relate to each other, still each new line is like a rivet—it’s so radically legible that you can’t lose the thread. It’s a disturbing process because your mind can’t wander; the form is too commanding. Then again, the anxiety of missing something crucial can also be very entertaining (textual slapstick) when it’s staged within a context of other sorts of textures. A number of my poems play on the inability to follow, which is the closest I ever get to mimesis of my everyday life. My view is that nothing is an end in itself but only a means to another means. The passage from means to means is rhythm. My poems are “truth in the body of falsehood,” as Jerome McGann puts it.2 Sometimes the work will be entertaining—I never lose the opportunity to have puns, the forms of jokes as much as jokes, anecdotes, aphorisms, doggerel. But there are necessarily other patterns that I use, some of which are charming or en-

2. “Truth in the Body of Falsehood,” in The Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

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gaging or funny or lyric, but some of which are downright rebarbative and others of which are obtusely philosophical. As you know, dear Jay, this work would not make it in the entertainment industry, which demands a product that’s entertaining in the same way through the whole act. Still, I’m often unpersuaded by dullness!—where a particular idea is repeated or displayed in the same way throughout a single work. My approach might appeal to a reader or listener who likes shifting surfaces and intense modulations—vacillations—of tone, from the dark to the comic and back again, but where the overall structure pulls you into its sometimes melodious and sometimes cacophonous pulses . . . The discontinuities, as they meld, intensify the experience. Again, something you share with Richard Foreman a great deal: getting lost on purpose in the particulars, abandoning the point from the get-­go; turning something over again and again to shake out as many disparate versions of it as possible. The way Foreman poaches various performance, visual, and poetic discourses—from highly formalized choreography to avant-­garde film, Dada and surrealism, Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and vaudeville—to create a web of intensifications has been an incredibly powerful model to me. There’s no underlying system that explains what I do. (Lots of poetry and theater, of the more conventionally expressive kind, would likely naturalize their singular structuralizing principles, using an ideology of craft to enforce consistency.) My work is without principle, though not without its peculiar aesthetic, palpable sensibility, and patented ideological blinders. The absence of principle is a principle. My poetics is contingent and inductive; based on a stubborn desire to put one thing after another to create as powerful an aesthetic experience as I can within verbal language. Your poems make overt gestures to acknowledge that the audience is there; that’s key and emblematic of your work. The reader’s “being there” is specifically addressed, in countless ways. The sense that “the show must go on,” and is always going on, means that you constantly reveal how its illusions are created right there as they’re being created—the opposite of hermeticism, although, superficially, the work may seem, at times, hermetic. Hermetic works traffic in secrets; I prefer the scent of secrets to real secrets. There’s nothing up my sleevelessness. I’m not creating anything that’s hidden, as far as I’m concerned, though many things are hidden from me. I’m interested in making palpable the experience of accessing verbal language, whether performed or written, using that accessing as part of

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the poem’s extended social field. The audience is not outside the text but part of the poem—I work with how someone coming to written text or someone hearing a poem in performance is going to experience the language. It’s almost the phenomenology of reading, which is different from attempting to convey a meaning or express a feeling. My approach considers how the reader/listener enters a verbal space, and therefore it is more architectural. Verbal language is commonly associated with information giving, the law, and logical or discursive formations. Those associations die much harder than they do, for example, in visual or musical language. In a poem, in verbal art, we may avert those use values of language, negating their ostensive purpose for the purpose of reflection. But verbal language is such a powerful (and largely invisible) force in our culture, and so regulating of its perceptual systems, that its normative and symbolic force charges every aspect of the way in which verbal art is experienced. That expanded field of the verbal unconscious is the medium you’re working with as a poet: it’s not just the letters on the page, the squiggles, the meanings, the meter, but the way in which the social materiality of words is encountered, and grappled with, by readers. That is, the medium of poetry is not the ideas or the words alone, it’s not the poet’s private thoughts: it’s the words understood as a social medium with which the public interacts (I like to say interenact). The reader or listener enters philosophical buildings. The poet creates different shapes and spaces for the journey, with shifting landscapes and environments. When we first met, our conversations were oriented toward connections between verbal and visual activity, but there are, of course, tenacious differences between both art forms. At times I meet young poets inclined toward the art world who find it frustrating that there’s a tether on more radical work, as it must explicitly defend its experimentalism from a strong current of poetry that demands a natural language and lyrical verse. Meanwhile in the art world, going back now well over fifty years, you have abstraction, then minimalism, then conceptual and process art, institutional critique, et cetera, and these advances build atop each other fairly comfortably. Today you could scarcely imagine a visual artist being confronted for being nonnaturalistic. It’s a nonissue in the visual arts, but in poetry there seems to be a continual fight over this that can’t be put to rest. You’ll think I’m kidding, but it’s a terrible loss that in the visual arts there is no longer that struggle over “the real.” While it seems that the apparently ubiquitous acceptance of the nonrepresentational as well as the postconceptual and paraconceptual (we are not “post” anything but live

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alongside the history of our arts) would make the visual arts more radical, it hasn’t turned out that way. The visual arts are no more and no less radical than any individual artist makes them. Like you, I’m against any reductive comparison between the two mediums. Gestures toward verbal language or poetry in the visual arts are often embarrassingly weak, just as visual-­art gestures in poetry are often banal. Direct comparison of poetry and visual art in terms of notions like representation or conceptuality is a categorical mistake. We each have our own battles to fight, our own contexts to work within. If poetry’s advantage is its struggle over meaning, then for visual art it’s the struggle over presence and plasticity, a tension that will become only more imperative in times to come. It’s now nearly ten years since we organized the exhibition Poetry Plastique at Marianne Boesky Gallery.3 Our endeavor was to pre­sent poetic objects—to look in on contemporary practices that intensify the overlapping particularities of poetry and art, and revitalize the ongoing history of collaborations and corollaries between these artistic worlds. Visual art has an enormous power in terms of its fashionability, its market share, but it has the burden of seeming to be just decorative and not grappling with the issues of knowledge, ethics, truth, or power. Poetry, on the other hand, is so tied to the verbal realm’s information-­giving and representational qualities that any movement away from that still creates a visceral response—that is one of poetry’s great resources and also the reason for its being one of the unpopular arts (proudly so!). In Poetry Plastique we showed powerfully syncretic works in which both the verbal and visual dimensions were in full force. It’s hard to think of anyone who’s worked more tirelessly for the cause of innovative poetry. At this moment, can you reflect personally on that long-­ standing resistance against the kind of work you find most engaging, including your own? Yeah, the entrenched conservativeness within the institutions of poetry is discouraging, but it goes with the territory. I’m working with a medium that people have deep predispositions about. So it’s—bracing, as they say when you go into very cold water in Cape Cod. As I say in another context, capitalism may not be destiny but it sure feels like it. It’s always an uphill battle, always starting from scratch with each new reader. Yet there is

3. epc​.buffalo​.edu​/features​/ poetryplastique.

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great exhilaration, the potential feeling of discovering anew how our verbal language constitutes the meanings in the world. At its best, poetry becomes a fantasy space, a rarefied setting where the full range of language’s potential, including all its inherent cultural baggage, can be put into free play. While in your work you’ll try every trick in the book, including tricking the book, you always let the poems speak for themselves. In light of our discussion here, I can see how the emergence of what’s being labeled “conceptual poetry” points to the impatience of some poets for their work to be seen as art. It forces the issue more directly by aping the vernacular associated with appropriation art of the 1970s and ’80s and grafting it upon their poetry practice to see what might still be potent in these tactics. Yet this way of working risks drawing attention back toward the author and his or her deft power to reframe and display what’s been appropriated, estranged by the magic of nonauthorship. I like work where you can’t see the signs of control so clearly, where the author appears to have willfully relaxed the conventions of control or the initial focus amidst the actual experience of the work. I feel implicated by what I’m doing rather than outside it. I am complicit with the deep structures and the superficial overlays of the social world I engage. Perhaps what’s characteristic of me is the (necessarily impossible) evasion of doing the same things again, which is its own form of repetition. The dynamic of my work is to try to push beyond the little I’ve been able to understand at any given point. If I understand how to do something, then that ceases to be as interesting—I’m looking for work that’s beyond my understanding. If I start with “Asylum” in this book—a closed system—then I’m trying to find a series of other systems, verbal constructions, within which I am enfolded. I don’t feel superior to the materials that are being quoted, cited, or ironized; I am made by the tissue of their textuality. I have no place to stand outside of the circuits I inscribe. I’m not striving for critical distance; I’m trying to overcome it through writing new poems. I don’t imagine that I can get free of mystification. As Marlene Dietrich sings in bombed-­out postwar Berlin in Billy Wilder’s 1948 film A Foreign Affair, in that incredible historical moment of transition from one totalizing system of illusions to another one: “Want to buy some illusions? / Slightly used, secondhand?” I’m a satirist, but I’m satirizing something which satirizes me. I’m not outside of the flows of commodification. I want, though, to articulate how I’m always inside those flows, a fellow victim of the tides. I’m a ventriloquized voice from that inside.

Chicago Weekly with Daniel Ben jamin

Could you say something about how your upbringing and early exposure to poetry shapes and has shaped your work? No doubt my upbringing underlies the proclivities and unconscious obsessions and fascinations that I pursue. I’ve lived all my life pretty much in the same neighborhood in the Upper West Side, so I think that being from that place, the look and sound, social attitudes, the implicit imaginary of the neighborhood, is very important and informative, though I don’t necessarily represent it or much talk about it. I avoided early exposure to poetry. But at some point I did get the infection, which took a viral hold over me that I couldn’t shake despite common sense and against all odds. I write poetry because I can’t do anything else as well. In college, I studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell and Rogers Albritton. My undergraduate dissertation, “Three Steins,” focused on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein.1 (I was a lone “steen” among the Steins.) Sometimes it scares me how little I have strayed from my engagements in that early work; but then, I am easily frightened. At the time, I wrote a little bit of what might be called poetry, but I would have said I was interested in writing: verbal stuff. The concept of poetry that was in my mind was too narrow. Over the years I’ve gotten much more engaged with the history of the genre and am inclined to think of poetry, in the broadest sense, as art made with (or near) words. I wanted to ask more about Wittgenstein actually, because he appears a lot in your early essays. So I was wondering if you could talk more about his influence on you.

Chicago Weekly, February 18, 2010. Transcribed and edited from a conversation in Chicago. 1. Later published as Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature (1972): jacket2​.org​/commentary​/ three​- ­compositions​-­philosophy​-­and​-­literature​-­1972.

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At Harvard I found an asylum in Emerson Hall, because I couldn’t abide the literature classes: the axiomatic claustrophobia of the professors was intolerable, but far worse was the quick and contemptuous dismissal of modern and contemporary art in all its forms by my overwhelmingly (or so it seemed) prep school, or prep school wannabe, classmates. I remember a class on Celine’s Mort à credit (Death on the Installment Plan)—such incredible use of ellipsis, such a dystopian imagination, so hilariously grotesque. My classmates—the future leaders of American culture and industry—had never read anything like this; they didn’t like it. At the time I was young enough to feel wounded by their responses. So I found my way over to philosophy. While the analytic side of philosophical discussion was of only modest interest to me, I didn’t have that same visceral revulsion, maybe because I didn’t care as much about abstract philosophical arguments as I did about art. So that’s how I drifted into philosophy. I enjoyed especially the history of philosophy—the Greeks; Augustine and Aquinas; Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; Kant, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche . . . And then especially Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s turn to language had me in its spell: his perception that words are not just mapped onto “things” in a one-­on-­one correspondence (slab for slab, slop for slop), but that the texture of language, as we use it in conversation, provides a syntax or dialect for our ways of seeing. Language operates as a lens or filter or map or probe with which, and through which, we negotiate the world. It never drops away and leaves us the world, nor do we perceive the world without the echo of language. It’s this dimension of aesthetics in terms of poesis that is attractive to many poets, if not through Wittgenstein then through John Dewey or Roman Jakobson or George Lakoff. Wittgenstein encourages intuitions about significance of sound, that metaphors are not expendable (we don’t just see but see as), that syntax is a perceptual system. So even though Wittgenstein is the poet of the everyday and of convention, for me he also provided a foundation for an engagement with the practice of abnormality, “aversion” as Emerson puts it, or swerving away in the Heraclitean or Alfred Jarryesque sense: the odd or queer turn of phrase that might suggest a way of life. I also swerved from Wittgenstein, toward more sociohistorical and ideological frames of reference and also toward faktura, constructing verbal objects for reflection. I’m also more interested in interest, in Habermas’s sense in Knowledge and Human Interest, though unlike Habermas I believe you never can divest yourself of those—let’s say—vesting interests. Whatever amount of self-­reflection we do, we’re still very much inside of interest values. But it is possible to become partially aware of them and to serially rotate through vectors of awareness.

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With the idea of the “linguistic turn,” one might see Language poetry and Ordinary Language philosophy as two paths that came out of Wittgenstein in very different ways. One more expected and the other a surprise, the illegitimate child. I associate the linguistic turn with Stein, Mallarmé, Joyce, Khlebnikov, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Woolf, Beckett, and Benjamin, and behind them Blake, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Poe, and Dickinson, among many others. Those writers invented ways of reflecting on how beliefs are constituted and how verbal language operates in that process—and what motivates different sets of beliefs (or worldviews or imaginaries). Despite my interest in extraordinary language, Wittgenstein’s and J. L. Austin’s focus on ordinary language is foundational. If a person’s eyes are a window onto their soul, then a person’s ordinary language is a window onto their worldview. I think of philosophy the way I think of poetry, as a genre like detective fiction, rather than as a truth-­seeking activity in and of itself. The truth-­ seeking activity is the genre. Could you talk more about editing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine and the beginning of Language poetry and maybe how that related not just to things you’ve been talking about but to previous avant-­garde movements in poetry? I keep saying it: Language poetry doesn’t exist. It’s a chimera robed in allusion. Imaginary. Or perhaps it’s an oasis: you’re in a desert and there seems to be a pool of water just over there. Something like the enticing, if wintry, Lake Michigan just out the window from Regents Park, where we’re talking. People on different shores are looking at it from different perspectives and seeing different things they want or don’t want from it, and it becomes those things. So it’s plural (a plural that includes those who think it isn’t). Or then again: Language poetry is a social construction; a performance, not an essence. Collective and collaborative. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E rejected the modernist avant-­garde model. It was a bricollage of related poetic, philosophic, and political works; we were exploring a tendency, not defining a set of principles. We were trying to connect disparate groups, individuals, and formations and by so doing to advocate approaches to poetry, modernist and contemporary, that we felt were undervalued, or indeed that were stigmatized. In particular, I was scanning for poetry and poetics that were formally eccentric, diverging from literary and linguistic norms, poetry that was weird and queer and extreme and very self-­conscious about how its forms were provisional and imaginary and invented.

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What we did in the ’70s was specific to what was possible at that moment, building on the work of radical modernist and New American Poetry, but also reflecting the cultural possibilities of the moment, following the antiwar movement and taking some cues from an emerging counterculture of dissensus. From the point of view of Cold War neoliberalism—post history, post ideology—our insistence that poetry was not removed from ideology . . . well, it made some folks see red. We were accused of being dogmatic precisely because we refused the prevailing verse dogmas (PVDs). L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E assembled a compendium of samples, a range of activities that had no natural place of their own, no proper place. Here I would use the term of Michel de Certeau and say we were about tactics because we were not able to have a strategy.2 Certeau speaks about strategy as being for someone that has the high ground, the proper space; tactics are activities that undermine those controlling interests. Although I’d also say that it’s not just tactical, that what’s needed is a poetics of tactics, so there is a larger reflection on the nature of how those tactics operate. In that sense, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a constellation of tactics without an underlying principle, except perhaps Joe Hill’s: don’t mourn, organize. The absence of an underlying principle is, I think, what I mean by “imaginary” in my initial reply to you; I think it’s crucial to why the magazine may have resonance now. Often poetry groupings have more to do with commitments to a specific style or to a particular social milieu. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!,” as Seinfeld would say. But either I wasn’t interested in that, or maybe it’s just that in New York in the mid-­’70s I was too much on the periphery of the art and poetry and performance subcultures that I found most attractive, and I didn’t find any one style that I wanted to marry either. So we made something up! But eclecticism was not our thing either. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is montage. We were about constellation through juxtaposition. It was all about picking and choosing to create a palpable, compelling, even tantalizing sense of the possibilities for poetry, all the time acknowledging the history we felt ourselves extending. And forging friendships and commitments as we went along. I understand this kind of approach isn’t for all poets, or maybe even for most poets, many of whom would find so much organizing a distraction. But for me—and this takes me through the rest of my life—organizing is a poetic practice. I think of poetry, marginal though it is, as a fundamen-

2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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tal activity within our culture. I think of it as historical, cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic work. Because I think that, I try to put things together that might not go together at first—but then, after not too long, it might seem they were—almost—a natural fit. And for me it also means mapping poetic work onto multiple cultural spaces, some expected, some not—the Internet, universities, reading series, the visual arts, music, film, little magazines, performance, publishing, radio. With L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E there were a number of poets who were in conversation, engaged in a discussion of the linguistic turn, of the significance of verbal language as a perceptual membrane that changes the way we see the world, of the possibilities of continuing formal invention within poetry and the social implications of such invention, and of the relation of voices to voicing, found materials to made patterns, parts to wholes, standardization to conformity . . . L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is syncretic. Our conversations melded into an alloy. And there is one more crucial element, maybe most important of all: our commitment to nonexpository modes of discursive thinking; to new essays forms engaged with nonlinear thinking. Essays, poetics as a crucial part of the work of poetry . . . Your work is formally very varied, spanning poetry, essays, libretti, online placards. And even within the “poetry” your work takes very different form. I’m wondering if you could talk about whether you’re conscious of working in form, and whether it’s a mistake to divide your work through that kind of formal lens. I am interested in poetry as a medium for exploring the possibilities, and resistances, to expression, not as a vehicle to express a message I have already formulated. My poetry doesn’t convey what I know; it explores the conditions of how I know it. A lot of the kicking-­up-­dust aspects of 1970s discussions about poetry were, not surprisingly, centered around the problems of language and description. The word poem doesn’t delimit all that much. It used to drive me crazy when people whose work I thought was terrific would say “poetry does this” and “poetry does that.” I remember writing a letter to Jerome McGann saying “I love this essay but I don’t understand why you say poetry in this way; isn’t it some poetry or this particular poem?” And then I found myself doing exactly what I was complaining to McGann about, and for the same reason that McGann sometimes does it, as an expression of desire. For me, poetry is a form of sophism and of rhetoric rather than of truth and sincerity. Our terminology or typology for poetry is inadequate to the proliferat-

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ing and contradictory range of approaches in the postwar years. I want to talk about hue or tone; about satire versus irony versus sarcasm versus humor; about bumpy versus smooth surfaces; about thirteen ways of looking at rhythm in nonmetrical poetry; about the difference between form and its inflections. Narrative, prose poem, lyric, epic, personal, performance, long, short, elliptical, sound, visual, identitarian, disjunctive, projective, formalist, objectivist—just like “language” or “conceptual”— don’t account for the wild divergences within the rubrics and unexpected affinities across them. I count on recognition of genre distinctions, including these subgenre categorical distinctions, even when I pull the rug out from under them. This was crucial to me in putting together my All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, where a stanza can be a short poem or then again part of a longer serial work; and where the poems, taken from thirty years of work, are repurposed to be part of this new serial work, with the book as organizing principle. For the selected, I wanted to suture together disparate, even opposing, forms, in order to create a mobius rhythm out of the movement among the discrepant parts; the meaning is as much in the space in between as in the poems themselves. Each poem does have its autonomy, but the book as a whole works more as an installation than a collection. In the promotional material for your new book some lines struck me as interesting. You are called “both trickster and charmer.” And your poems “provide equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection.” What are your thoughts on being read as a satirist? My work has a lot of comic elements. In some way I think of poetry, in its expressive and figurative quests, as comic—if not outright bathetic, then the pathos of its desire for decorum. Yet I’ve resisted the terms satire and irony, even though some of my poems most surely do appear to be one or the other, maybe both. One way to say it is that my books and performances are never wholly ironic or primarily satiric. Other aspects of the work relentlessly undermine the satire and irony. Satire and irony don’t feel to me like distancing devices so much as visceral: things don’t always mean what they seem to on the surface, nor do they mean the opposite. My work is pierced by ludic sarcasm. “My humor is so dark you can’t see it.”3 “Thank You for Saying Thank You” in the selected and “Recantorium” [in Attack of the Difficult Poems] are packaged as satire. But what gives the

3. As Lenny Paschen puts it in my libretto for The Lenny Paschen Show, in Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Queens, NY: Factory School, 2008).

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works their edginess, and makes me uncomfortable rather than giddy, is how they flirt with, if not succumb to, condescension or bad faith. It’s tempting for poets to profess pride in being difficult or to imagine that the unpopularity of our genre is comparable to political or economic adversity. While “Recantorium” traffics in, and then turns on, the bad faith of its satire, “Thank You for Saying Thank You” satirizes the belief that poems should be accessible. In “Thank You” it becomes impossible to take seriously the ostensive content because the text’s apparently hyperaccessible style is patently undermining what the poem is saying. At the same time, the poem is making a relatively straightforward point. But the straightforward point of that poem (the contravention of its ostensive content) isn’t what engages me. It’s not that I’m not annoyed about certain kinds of superficial dismissals of difficulty in poetry. For poets of any stripe, or even of no stripe, issues of difficulty or “getting it” are unavoidable, because poetry as a genre is difficult. Even poetry that tries to be as user-­friendly as possible can’t overcome the problem that it’s a poem, for Pete’s sake. Poets have a vested interest in either saying, “Oh no, it really is accessible, just give it time,” or claiming to want to be inaccessible. The issue can’t go away because—nothing to do with any given poet—poetry is such a socially marginalized activity that even the concept of doing poetry itself is obscure to most people. Puzzling. “What is that, I sort of like that, but do you do that for a living? Can you publish work like that?” So it comes back to this: as a social form, poetry has a kind of ludicrous and pathetic aspect to it. A trickster is kissing cousin to the sophist. “Thank You for Saying Thank You” and “Recantorium” are examples of what I call anti-­bachelor-­machines.4 Anti-­bachelor-­machines are a motif in All the Whiskey in Heaven, starting with the first poem, “Asylum,” from 1975, which considers the language of self-­enclosed, self-­canceling, self-­ rending systems. The words we use, and that are used for us, can connect us to the world or cast us adrift, enlist us as participants or make us voyeurs of (even our own) everyday life. I try to rub up against, even mess with, the metaphoric or ideological structures we all live inside of, including, especially, my own (the ones that own me); I try to make these disciplinary imaginaries manifest, tangible. What is being satirized? “Thank You for Saying Thank You” and “Recantorium” can be described as sarcastic; sarcasm is their subject. But neither 4. Other examples anti-­bachelor-­machines include The Nude Formalism, “Emotions of Normal People” (The Sophist), and “War Stories” (Girly Man). A fuller account of anti-­bachelor-­machine is provided in “The Pataquerical Imagination,” in this collection.

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has a “proper” point of view that replaces the ostensive deformed order. Both works replace a deformed order with a bent and weird and unstable othering. I’d say they are sarcastic about satire, but that’s not right either, since they indulge in both. While there is a recognition of bad faith in both works, there is also an acknowledgment of being enmired in it, of complicity. They’re quite performative and aggressive: they mean to do something, not do something that means. Poetry—see, here’s that overly abstract usage!—well, my poetry, allows me to think through conflicts and agonisms in a space that isn’t directly involved with outcomes or solutions; I can dwell in ambivolence and disability. It’s a truism to say poetic decisions are not necessarily the best ones in nonpoetic realms, such as those of the state. But poetry allows us to imagine alternative and even counterfactual or impossible outcomes. Because poems take place in symbolic space, it’s possible to dwell in and around, but not necessary work through, troubled attitudes in a way that would not be acceptable outside the poem. Poems (and other forms of imaginative writing and art) are able envisage the dark—trauma, violence, hatred, self-­regard, and abjection—without solution. Poetry is, or can be, space for thought and for reflection that averts moral resolution. You have been a critic of “official verse culture.” What constitutes official verse culture, and would you say it has changed significantly in recent years? Since it is a successful dynamic process, official verse culture lives by change, much as vampires live by fresh blood. Official verse culture in 2010 has adapted to many things that it repudiated twenty-­five or more years ago: it is, after all, at its heart, eclectic, incorporating the good, the bad, and the ugly. Are the changes in official verse culture legible through an ideological analysis—by which I mean, can we track the changes in official verse culture simply by tracking the changes in the economic and political conditions? Yes and no. My generation has been riding a wave of significant cultural change, and poetry, at all levels, tracks, reflects, foments, and impedes those changes. Demographically, neither your generation nor mine has the same prejudices or assumptions about gender, race, and sexual orientation, or for that matter about marriage, as did my parents’ generation. At the same time, the question would be: does capitalism still work? Capitalism wasn’t exactly dependent on those cultural issues, which doesn’t mean the changes aren’t of the greatest value. They are. But also we shift our prejudices from one group to another—then the Reds, now the terror-

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ists—without coming to terms with the terrorism we create or the class inequities that have increased. And with official verse culture the problem is the systematic evasion of the criteria for judgments and the repression of the cultural and political interests that underlie the hierarchies being created—in other words, the fantasy that poetry is not a field made of competing and agonistic poetics and so the repression of that agonism. Every aesthetic judgment entails inclusion as well as exclusion of works based on criteria that can be explored, if perhaps never fully explicated. The task of poetics and literary history, at least of the kind I’d like to see, is not to crown the winners but to explore the history of taste and conflicts over differing tastes. Official verse culture is characterized not by its choice of poets but by its repression of the ideological criteria for its judgments. Its dogma is that it has no dogma and those who question this no-­ dogma dogma are dogmatic. Official verse culture plays referee to a game where it validates only those following its rules, despite the fact there is more than one game being played and that each of these games has multiple sets of rules. Meanwhile, in poetry, certain styles that were forbidden thirty years ago are now fodder for the creative writing mill, while the Associated Writing Programs is more about containment than ever, partly because it sees ahistorical humanism and anti-­intellectualism as a way to increase its footprint in the university and thus its economic base. As if the AWP is going to save the imagination from the MLA (in which case, God help the imagination). Official verse culture continues to incorporate teaspoon doses of the kind of poetry I want. And when that happens, I am delighted and just want more, more instanter: tablespoons, buckets. I don’t back away from those encroachments into the mainstream, I seek them out. Because I think poetry matters, and I think the recognition poetry receives in the “larger” culture matters too. My critique is institutional. Poetry is striated by intense aesthetic and ideological conflict. That’s what needs to be acknowledged. Official verse culture attempts to neutralize such conflict, often with the pathos of the true believer. I have a more Blakean vision that pushes smack against the constrained imagination for poetry in official verse culture. Marginal though it may be, poetry is a mind-­bending historical-­cognitive-­philosophical-­aesthetic intervention in contemporary culture. A lot of poetry doesn’t want to be that, sometimes for very good reasons, such as an aversion to just such grandiosity. But for a visionary poetry, you need to bring together works and worldviews that are discrepant and stay discrepant, all the while forming a syncretic sphere of aesthetic action.

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It seems as if there’s a consolidation of a lot of interesting avant-­garde poetry groups—the EPC, PennSound, the Poetics List, and Jacket are all sort of centralizing. You have an early essay that is critical of “groupings.” I’m wondering if you’re worried about a new kind of grouping coming out in the poetic academy which might have a specific kind of power and force as a mold to be broken. I am worried about the consolidation of “intellectual content” in the hands of large corporations. With PennSound, perhaps more important even than the poetry readings we have made available is the fact that we have put this vast archive of poetry in the public domain (for noncommercial use)—that is, kept it from being privatized. Everything on PennSound and the EPC is free, downloadable; there are no ads. With PennSound, I’ve been fortunate to work with Al Filreis, whose commitment to creating and maintaining alternative poetry spaces is extraordinary. The imperative to me is to make the most of the institutional resources available to me. The problem for me is not that we’ve done too much but that we are not doing enough. And I hope and trust that the models we have created will encourage other people to respond to what we’ve done and especially what we’ve failed to do—and to create their own comparable sites.

FSG Poetry All That Glitters Is Not Costume Jewelry with A l an Gilbert

You’re the author of over a dozen books of poetry containing a wide variety of styles—from rigorous avant-­garde techniques to a form of disjunctive lyricism to rhymed doggerel. How did you go about selecting the work for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, which stretches across more than thirty years, beginning with a poem from 1975? Jackson Mac Low called his 1986 selected poems from Roof Books Representative Works: 1938–1985. The idea was that each included piece represented a particular structure or form he used. I think of All the Whiskey in Heaven as a sampler or array. It’s a constellation of approaches to poetry. Beyond the experience of the “poems themselves,” I hope the book brings to mind the possibilities of poetry. I’ve done only one other collection of otherwise published work, Sun & Moon’s 2000 book Republics of Reality: 1975–1995, which brought together the full texts of a number of out-­of-­ print books and pamphlets, plus one new series, Residual Rubbernecking. Rubbernecking is when you slow your car to peer at an accident; residual rubbernecking is when you stop and stare at the site of an accident no longer present. So I guess you could say that All the Whiskey is a product of my residual rubbernecking. In the poem “Let’s Just Say” from 2001, you write, “Let’s just say that the truth is somewhere between us.” Ignoring for a moment the rhetorical equivocation of “Let’s just say,” I’m wondering if you can expand upon the idea of the “truth” being “somewhere between us,” in terms of both your own poetry and poetry more generally. Some people say poems are about truth; but I say you can bring a reader to water, but you can’t make ’em drink. I could just as well have said truth is neither here nor there; but I prefer to say that about love. I am tempted to say I don’t know much about truth but I know what I like, but I am tired of being a smart aleck. So I guess I will just say it’s a manner of speaking. The Best Words in Their Best Order, FSG Poetry, April 27, 2010. E-­mail exchange.

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Poems are neither true nor false, but they can reflect on the difference between truth and truthfulness, saying and meaning, listening and hearing. My poems are neither monologues nor soliloquies; they initiate a dialogue. You don’t extract the meanings but find them, not by figuring them out (like puzzles) but by responding to what’s been said. It’s right before your ears. You titled a book of poems from 1987 The Sophist, and in interviews and talks you proudly declare yourself a “sophist.” Given the somewhat negative connotations this word tends to have, can you explain your embrace of it? I’m not proud of it, Alan, just realistic. But I’ve stopped feeling sorry for myself, for ourselves. It took me a while to realize that all that glitters is not costume jewelry. But then again, the only kind of gold I ever cared about is fool’s gold (buyer’s remorse). It’s the liar’s paradox all over again (the poet is a liar, I am a poet . . .). “Beware of a sincere man selling fish.” My fish are fresh, but don’t take my word for it, try them. And they’re not exactly mine anyway. (Beware of a sincere fish selling man.) Truth is not singular, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth; but truth is trampled by those who take its name as their own badge of valor. I’ve taken to contrasting morality with ethics. Morality tells you what to think, what’s right to think; ethics asks what makes us think it’s right, and right for whom? right in what way? I’m not telling you what you can’t do but what you can do. My poems are selling you on the fact that they are not selling you on anything. I’ve often argued (till bluish in the face) that poems are rhetorical, that this is where the pleasure of poetry lies. Could it be that the Orphic power of poetry is rhetorical? that it’s all in selling you a bill of goods? Can we talk? How about another drink? All the whiskey in heaven is still not enough. T. S. Eliot’s original working title for The Waste Land was “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” When I read your work, and especially when I hear you perform it, Eliot’s discarded title occasionally pops into my mind. Can you talk about the use of different voices in your poems? At times your employment of these voices borders on ventriloquism. In Eliot’s provisional title I can’t help but notice the reference to the “police.” Is there a relationship between ventriloquism and a wrestling with authority—whether one’s own or other versions of it? I often think of Eliot’s great “do the police” in voices. Controlling Interests—a book of mine from 1980—plays with that idea in the title: how the language that surrounds us (I’m thinking of Creeley’s “The darkness that

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surrounds us”) informs and often controls. My idea was that poems might weave together such “hidden persuaders” (as Vance Packard put it at the height of the Cold War), bouncing “controlling interests” off one another and creating woofs and warps of ideological display. And you’re right that these controlling voices are not just, or even primarily, heard from outside; one of my obsessions is that the distinction between outside and inside is topsy-­turvy. The polyvocal texture of my work is one of the main things that go through All the Whiskey in Heaven from beginning to end. When I was writing Controlling Interests (there are several poems from that collection in the selected), I was going to a lot of Verdi and verismo operas, listening to the arias (which provided a model for my early poetry performances) but also the chordal arrangement with multiple overlapping voices. Of course, the voices in my poems are not contrapuntal but serial; there is recurrence but more often echoes of recurrence (via distortion and extension) and asymmetric scoring, fragging, eight types of enjambment, “distressed” citation. In this sense Bakhtin got it wrong when he wrote that poetry is monologic and the novel dialogic; the kind of poetry I want (one kind of it) is polylogical and contradictory. So I was ready, some years later, when I got the chance to write libretti, first for Ben Yarmolinsky, now collected in Blind Witness: Three American Operas, then for Dean Drummond, Café Buffé; Brian Ferneyhough, Shadowtime; and Anne LeBaron, “Breathtales.” This brings me back to the problem with the old—and sometimes unfairly maligned—workshop shibboleth about finding your own voice: unfair because voice was never the issue, the problem was the univocal insistence that a particular rhetorical and stylistic construction of the voice was true or natural. So is the task of the poet—finding your own voices?—a lot of them voices are neither yours nor mine. They come from somewhere between us.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses Editing as Com(op)posing with Man uel Brito I am very happy to have been involved in some of your work through publishing The Absent Father in Dumbo with Zasterle Press (Canary Islands, 1991). This led me to understand your poetry as a cultural force in American avant-­ garde writing. Your experience as editor has not been limited to print publications—L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, “American Poetry after 1975,” boundary 2, 2010; Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford University Press, 1998); The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (Roof Books, 1990); or “Language Sampler,” Paris Review 86 (1982) and “43 Poets (1984),” boundary 2, Fall 1985–­Winter 1986—since you are the cofounder and coeditor, with Al Filreis, of PennSound, and editor, and cofounder, with Loss Pequeño Glazier, of the Electronic Poetry Center; and you are the host and coproducer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series.1 Would you explain your explicit purpose for editorship, if any, and how this tropes some acts of reading experience, discussion, et cetera? I don’t know where editing ends and poetry begins, when teaching stops and essays start, when organizing is set aside and contemplation takes center stage. The relation of one to the other is rhythmic: an oscillating rhythm. Maybe it’s a derangement of personality, my inability to draw boundaries or adequately shore my borders against the waves of poetic energy I feel engulfed in and by, and which, by a kind of wind energy, power what I do. Or maybe it’s a kind of textual weaving, warps and wefts, sparks and crests, cunning and conundrum. It’s all of a piece in any given day (and the days not given too, the rare days that are earned). It started early for me. I was the editor of my high school newspaper (Science Sur“Small Press Publishing: Absorbing New Forms, Circulating New Ideas,” ed. Manuel Brito, in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, no. 62 (April 2011). E-­mail exchange. 1. “Language Sampler” and “43 Poets (1984)” are now online at EPC Digital Library, eclipsearchive​.org​/ projects​/SAMPLER and writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Bernstein​ -­Charles​_43​-­poets​-­1984​_​_boundary​-­2​_1986​.html. PennSound (writing​.upenn​.edu ​/pennsound) archives both “LINEbreak” and “Close Listening.”

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vey) and two literary magazines at college (the official freshman lit mag, The Harvard Yard Journal, and an entirely ephemeral affair, Writing, when I was a senior). A small press editor, first with Asylum’s Press in the 1970s, where Susan Bee and I published ourselves, but also Peter Seaton, Ray DiPalma, and Ted Greenwald; then in the later ’70s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Bruce Andrews, which also had an out-­of-­print book photocopying service, which morphed into the Segue Distributing service (with James Sherry), where we did a catalog of a dozen related small presses and magazines.2 This was all very intensive work, involving endless time in production and mailings. Jump to the present, where I edit, with Eduardo Espina, S/N: NewWorldPoetics, a print journal; with Régis Bonvincino, Sibila, a web magazine from São Paulo (formally print); with Al Filreis and Michael Hennessey, PennSound, a digital sound archive; and still the Elec‑ tronic Poetry Center, with Loss Pequeño Glazier, a website; as well as my own “web log.”3 And that leaves out quite a bit in between. It seems like much of my day is spent on one or another of these things: bringing disparate stands together, or, better to say, making an imaginary space for those works for which I’ve developed a great enthusiasm. The key thing with editing is the desire to bring things together, in the same place, that otherwise might not be; to make constellations; but also to archive, collect, display, acknowledge, appreciate. To mix all these metaphors: a way of weaving a context into being. Maybe that context was there and it’s just recognizing it—that’s probably the most reasonable way to put it—but it can feel like you are making the context by the force of the activity, the editing itself, and that is why it’s a kind of poetics: something like making poems via constellation. For me editing always has a fundamentally aesthetic dimension: not doing something already prescribed but making it—well, not “new” necessarily but making it happen, making it come into being. My first impression is that as editor you have painted a scene that located the poets in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which, as you mention, also had an out-­of-­print book photocopy service: poets mobilizing both the concept of the text and social issues, sometimes even before your books came up for discussion. No group of contemporary American poets demands more 2. These catalogs are online at jacket2​ .org​ /commentary​ /segue​ -­ distributing​ -­catalogs​-­1980​-­1993 and jacket2​.org​/commentary​/ language​- ­distributing​-­service​ -­catalog​- ­c​-­1978. 3. S/N, epc​.buffalo​.edu​/presses​/SN. Sibila is now a web publication, where I edit the English portal, Sybil, sibila​.com​.br​/category​/english. My web log moved from the EPC to Jacket 2 in 2011: jacket2​.org​/commentary​/charles​-­bernstein.

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sustained effort in figuring out what you have done, and why, than the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets over the last forty years. Even though the group designation is controversial, most everyone agrees that many conceptual and formal elements were in common in these poets. How have you assumed the evidence of becoming more credible, marketable? L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an editorial project: willing something into being more than mapping an already existing formation. Something of a fantasy, bien sur. Or a temporary autonomous zone, to use Hakim Bey’s utopian term. That was the fun. In retrospect, it seems more fixed, more of a school or coterie, and it’s hard to find a gracious way to get out from under that, like the statue that replaces the damp air of the dawn. Resisting school and coterie (the dog-­and-­pony show of the avant-­garde) was the inspiration, though I see from a recent memoir by one of our New York company that a fatuous sense of entitled boys’ club remained a viral presence in our midst, so that brings me back to the less-­than-­idealized reality that I helped to form. But that’s why for me subsequent editorial projects have been as much a swerve as a continuation. The hard part is responding to present conditions. As I get older, I find myself stuck in the agonisms of youth. That partly serves me well, especially in terms of a kind of paranoid grounding in the Cold War and resistance to an official verse culture of which I have long been a marquee name (though not top billing!); but it also can make it difficult to see emerging formations, which is why it’s best to let the current lead, to go with intuitions of the moment rather than received ideas—even my own!—from the past. And teaching offers the benefit of being around more young people than people of my own generation, younger people for whom what I have long taken for given is not a given. Though I do think I might be better off at the beach in Boca, getting the early-­bird special as the waiters come and go, talking of Art Basel. Editors and publishers cannot afford the increasing difficulties involved in today’s economic crisis. Prestigious small publishers have disappeared or simply been taken over by larger companies. Is this a time for a promotion of new products, a new publishing ethos? How do you see the controversial issue of print culture versus digital culture? Poetry in North America in the postwar years has remained remarkably mobile, entrepreneurial, ingenious. The social networks and publishing methodologies of the alternate small-­press poets are a valuable model, structurally, even apart from the aesthetic achievements of the poems. Radical small-­press poetry has been astonishingly versatile in sustaining

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small-­ scale, unpopular/unprofitable cultural products—indeed, thriving in the face of their unpopularity/unprofitability. Talk about epaté la bourgeoisie. There has been an exquisite response to available publication technologies from mimeo to photocopy to desktop to the web. Unfortunately, due to the fascist dictatorship in Spain you were not be able to fully participate in this, and that took a great toll, as it is not so easy to make up for this lost history. For the last fifteen years, innovative small-­ press poetry has been moving inexorably to the web, where production and distribution costs are minimal, compared to print and postage; the focus can be on editorial selection and distribution. Much web space promotes the absence of selection as the democratic vista: everybody gets their say in unlimited comment fields. But everyone getting their say on a prescribed set of issues may effectively block dissent against the terms in which the “issues” are posed. And of course that “everyone” is in the comment boxes below the official content. iPads and iPhones turn the computer revolution toward consumption rather than production. Yet poetry remains an extraordinary area of independent noncommercial production on the web. And the number of readers/listeners is probably bigger than we ever had with the small press. Millions of MP3 downloads every year on PennSound. You have pointed out in your essay “Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation” that some difficulties derive from management, and especially the threatening standardization of literature for the bulk-­buying public. Homogenization of product! Even the forms of the unconventional get conventional. I don’t mean just in others, I mean primarily in ourselves, in myself. There are lots of formulaic products that are so appealing, so seductive. And the unformulaic and nonstandard can seem messy, chaotic, disturbing, and self-­indulgent. And sometimes it is. There is always a risk, and the odds are none too good. But like the man says, “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Within this context, is it important that poets understand that there is, after all, no money? Absolutely. I always say: don’t think about how much you will make but just not to lose too much. Stemming your losses: that’s the key. But there is cultural capital too, which is quite real. And the work you make, if outside of the capital economy, is part of a semiotic economy that is far more sub-

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stantial and sustaining than those outside it realize—like the gray economy in some ways. Today is the one-­hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where so many mostly young women workers died in a sweatshop where the owners had chained the exits. So I think of James Oppenheim’s 1912 poem: As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread; Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew— Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!4

How do you understand editing, as a lonely activity, focused on becoming innovatively competitive? Generally speaking, I should say that my view on your role as editor is that of creating communities—am I too wrong? Communities is a vexed term: you can’t live with and you can’t do without. Literary communities are, at best, “uncommunities” in Jean-­Luc Nancy’s sense: they are elective affinities. In your neighbourhood or school or precinct or political alliance, the community is given and present in a way that may underlie the concept of literary community but that is fundamentally different. You don’t choose your neighbors, while a literary community, at least one with aesthetic rather than regional or local commitments, is all about choosing. You might come together with like-­minded people in a political alliance, but, at least in a progressive context, the criteria for the community will be toward collective action or policy goals, such as forming a union or fighting environmental destruction. The beauty, if I can use that word here, of a poetry community is that it can be a constellation of unlikeminded individuals toward an amorphous aesthetic horizon. It is based on taste, on preference, not explicit goals or shared geographic/ civic space. But I agree with you that these poetic constellations, so necessarily provisional, are indeed created, are syncretic. Poetry communities are speculative and imaginary; they form a kind of counterreality to the actual communities and families and alliances that make up the fabric of our everyday life. Your own involvement as editor in the Electronic Poetry Center, founded in 1995, has served to see how practitioners have shared their creativity within a transnational and transcultural context. Was this center modeled for both

4. The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, ed. Upton Sinclair (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1915), 247–48.

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networked creativity and a forum for research? I mentioned the term transnational because you are editing the print journal S/N: NewWorldPoetics, which is intended to reopen the dialogue between the South and the North. Once again you are focusing on interacting communities . . . Yes; and I’d add also an archival space. So much of the web imagines itself as transactive; at the EPC, as at PennSound, our first attention is to the archive. You are also quite right to note the transnational aspect, though I like to think of it as nonnational more than trans-­. My work with Régis Bonvicino in Brazil (as in our magazine, Sibila), with Eduardo Espina, of Uruguay, in S/N: NewWorldPoetics (the Americas: everything translated from or to Spanish, English, or, to a lesser extent, Portuguese), or with Leevi Lehto in Finland is as much my poetics “neighborhood” as those in New York and Philadelphia. I should also notice that the over-­twenty-­year existence of the electronic poetry centers in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and France has provided an allegorical dimension of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, that is, an international apparatus by interpretive circles subsuming your poetry and facilitating the critical gesture of the group. What do you think about this? You’re right to think of extensions of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, but where that early project is as much subsumed as subsuming. My key points of intersection also include the OEI group in Sweden and long-­term connections with poets in Canada, the UK, Russia, and Portugal (through my affiliation with Graça Capinha in Coimbra). One of the problems is the tyranny of my own abysmal monolingualism: so much of what I do takes place in English, so my conversational partners are bilingual while I am not. I see how much this limits what I do. But then English has become very common among poets in Europe. Still, I couldn’t have the close relationship I feel with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko if he didn’t speak English. (When I said something like this to Marjorie Perloff, she said, “Then why don’t you learn Russian?” The truth is probably as simple, and indefensible, as “Because I don’t have to, so other things take priority.”) I should mention also a strong connection over the last decade with China, including forming an association, with Marjorie and Nie Zhenzhao and Luo Lianggong for exchange between Chinese and American poetics and scholars, involving conferences, translations, and a stream of visiting scholars at Penn.5 And then out of the blue this fall I was given a book of my essays translated into

5. writing​.upenn​.edu​/ news​/CAAP​.html

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Burmese—totally unexpected. But when I contacted Zeyar Lynn by e-­mail, his reply was so totally current with developments in poetry here, well, I could have been writing to you or a friend in Los Angeles.6 So there is a kind of warped space going on here where poetic affiliations are bringing us together in ways that would have been difficult in the past. These are not networks or communities, exactly, but virtual constellations. We’ve cast our fate with the stars, as if our quest was for cosmology as much as communion, the cosmopolis as much as the heteroclite. Let’s call them cosmogonic contraptions.

6. Charles Bernstein: Interviews and Writings, trans. Zeyar Lynn (Rangoon/Yangon, Burma/Myamar: Eras’ Publishing House, 2009); Zeyar Lynn, “Language-­ Oriented Poetry in Myanmar,” 2011, jacket2​.org​/commentary​/ language​- ­oriented​ -­poetry​-­myanmar.

Études anglaises Poetry’s Clubfoot—Process, Faktura, Intensification with Penel ope Galey- ­Sacks I would like to take the editorial project on language poetry as defined at the beginning of “The Expanded Field of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” and see where you have gone with it. What seems important to me is what you were interested in yesterday in relation to what you are doing today. So my first question concerns process. In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book you and Bruce Andrews say you do not take for granted vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program or subject matter. But for me, in fact, process encompasses all that. That’s true. In this list, process is a cover term that includes concept and method. To what extent then is process, for you, an inclusive concept? That’s my first question. Would you like to reflect on it from both a creative and a critical stance? Process understood as a philosophical concept has a crucial connection to method, as I first wrote about that term in an early essay in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 called “Writing and Method.” The entire New American poetics, from which my work emerges—the poetics of the generation before me that includes Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and David Antin—is focused on process, and especially John Dewey’s thinking about process in Art as Experience, or—for Charles Olson and Robin Blaser— Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Jackson Mac Low fits here too, even if his work seems to more directly engage procedure and the conceptual. The New American poetics was very much grounded in doing (in the sense of process), rather than ends-­directed, or goal-­directed, or craft-­ oriented composition. The poems were to be facts of their own coming

 Études anglaises 65, no. 2 (2012). Transcribed and edited from a conversation in a Paris café on March 4, 2012.

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into being in the moment of writing, not deduced from prior or received forms or ideas or conceits figured prior to the making. So, famously, process, not product. This binary opposition was sometimes presented as the raw versus the cooked in the immediate postwar period. It is a convenient way to distinguish the New American Poets from Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Still, process, as it was worked out through the specific poems of that earlier generation, seemed to rule out some of procedural and lexical choices that a number of us were interested in the 1970s. Thus while you could say that we were also working through process, the term was too vague or perhaps too closely related to the specific styles of our predecessors. In addition, some of the more procedural or artificial or structural interventions made within a poem seemed at odds with “process” in the sense of an improvisatory, seat-­of-­your-­pants approach to composition. So the idea of using prior external texts, found material, appropriation, constraints, artifice, wild shifts of tone, syncretic syntax, derangement of the representation, and so on looked very different from process as so compellingly practiced by the New American poetry. But really what we were doing, with our emphasis on method, was not turning away from process but opening onto an expanded field of process. It’s still process, not product. You still don’t know exactly where you are going to come out before you are finished. It’s a turning away from a preconceived beginning, middle, and end, a rejection of closure, in Lyn Hejinian’s signal phrase. As I engage process, it is integrally tied up with poesis and with faktura: I am just as interested in the function of making as in doing anything, so there is built in an enhanced self-­reflection on the devices of poetry. Process as it becomes aware of itself is method. Yes, as with Pound and Eliot, the function of making and doing is an overriding preoccupation. So do you see process as both inclusive and open ended as a concept? Absolutely. Inclusive in the Emersonian sense of “more perfect”: not moving toward a final all-­encompassing end but accruing and shedding particulars, one by one, hourly changing.1 With the well-­made poem, you start with a preconceived idea of subject matter and a prescribed form and prescribed diction, and then you work with that to create the poem, revising until it’s the most perfect object that you can create. The kind of poem I am talking about—not the most perfect poem but the more per-

1. “Worlds / hourly changing / sparring with cause to an / unknowable end”—in “Sunsickness” in Dark City (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994).

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fect poem—necessitates new kinds of reading. You could say the function of writing the poem is not to create a beautiful object (though it may be a beautiful object) but to foment new forms of reading. In that sense, you could think of radical modernism from Stein and Williams onward to the present as being involved with concept, process, and poesis as opposed to making a finished, crafted product. Necessarily you do have a completed poem, as when Stein says “a completed portrait” (of Picasso), but not a complete portrait. The poem is not the end but a springboard, an energy field that intensifies the reader’s fantasies, reflections, projections, and introjections. So for you, where language is radically new conceptually is that you are challenging Aristotle’s basic poetic principle that there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending by saying there is perhaps a beginning, perhaps a middle, but that there is certainly no ending. Yes, but you stop. And then begin again. Well, that’s also Stein. A hundred years after Stein’s beginning and we’re still definitely offering an alternative to Aristotle, that’s for sure, and to Plato to boot. But as Olson would say, a turning away from Plato but not from Heraclitus, not from the Pre-­ Socratics, if you want to think archaically, and perhaps not from cultures where poetry is less oriented to a rationalistic and linear order. There is a set of specific historical developments that I am necessarily eliding. Blake, for example, is crucial to this way of thinking about poetry. David Antin makes the distinction between story or plot and narrative. In the 1970s I would not have thought of narrative in this way, I was wary of the term, but now I am convinced by Antin’s argument that process-­oriented work does allow for narrative while not being driven by plot (or story). Narrative, for Antin, is the transformation that occurs when one is moving through a series.2 In that sense, I construct my books as plotless narratives. That’s why I am stressing that a process orientation doesn’t preclude the making of objects. Poems are objects, albeit semiautonomous ones, that we encounter in the world. The object quality of the poem is more important than the “poetic” quality. But that, again, marks a shift in the mid and late 1970s and the 1980s: there was a greater interest in making poems that had object density, that were lapidary, that you could hit your head against, like machines in

2. “The Beggar and the King,” in Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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William Carlos Williams’s sense, machines made of words but with the emphasis on artifactuality—well, not only their artificiality but weirdness, or then again systematic or programmatic or conceptual quality. Contraptions small and large made of verbal matériel. (Emphasis on trap as in the Venus flytrap.) No plot—a beginning, middle, and end that give a thematic logic to why a thing happens—but plenty of dynamic narrative surges, as the elements of the text undergo a transformation: Ladies and Gentleman!—Believe It or Not!—right before your eyes. I’m saying this because there was a lot of interest in the mid and late ’70s and ’80s in parataxis— that is to say, discrete units of language juxtaposed to one another without logical connectors. Nevertheless, they do start to connect. They just don’t connect in a linear or plot-­driven way. Yet as the particulars concatenate, sometimes along musical lines, sometimes as motifs, transformation occurs and the text becomes a work, the poem comes into being. And that is narrative. One of the most striking examples of this, in a work of this kind and from this period, is Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. It’s so palpable because it’s an autobiography, even if it’s a nonlinear one. Lyn wrote the first version of the work when she was thirty-­seven: there are thirty-­seven sections of thirty-­seven sentences each, often with the same sentences permuting. But that organization in no way prevents the affective quality of autobiography or the narrative transformations you experience when you see the same sentence in a different context. The process is not without a container. It’s not without a structure and a form that push back against the process to allow this kind of transformation to occur. You said something interesting at the conference yesterday: that the intimations of verse occur on the teleological horizon of the possible. Yet you’re also presenting language poetry as breaking with convention, and I imagine you mean breaking with American convention specifically? How does this idea of continuity tie in with the idea of rupture, the idea of breaking? You said yourself that there was a continuity in your work as well as an evolution—an expansion of yourself. You are yourself an expanding poet, and you are expanding through language . . . how do these intimations of verse occur on the teleological horizon of the possible? To cite Eliot, how do you connect your beginnings with your endings? There are different overlapping strands that twist and loop back, as in a Möbius strip or Klein bottle. The issue of convention is an important one, and it relates to the idea of process. The best formulation for me is one indebted to Emerson by way of Cavell: “aversion of conformity in the pursuit

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of new forms.”3 The concept of aversion—which is a swerving-­away-­from— is more appealing and also more accurate than the idea of breakage and transgression. Still, in poetry the difference between those terms is more about emotion and desire than accurate philosophical description or decision. And so there are reasons why some poets talk about transgression and breakage, or coupure, blows (Les quatre cents coups). And in France you have that, of course, partly with the French Revolution itself versus the British Revolution; when you’re cutting off heads, that’s a vivid image for this spectrum. But what’s interesting about aversion or swerving—to think of it in Lucretian terms—is that you actually feel the process of moving away and moving toward rather than a splitting or disconnection or decoupling. That’s what I’m interested in as a poet. I’m interested in the rhythmic relationships that occur, moving in, around, and about convention. Because my work is entirely dependent upon convention. I don’t write traditionally crafted poems, that is true; and I do a lot of odd things that can be described as nonconforming. But nonetheless what I do brings to mind conventions; it is a constant convening and reconvening of language. I thought it was funny when a web detractor recently accused me of using clichés, as if clichés were not language in its most sublime, or anyway sublimated, form: fossil language. So you don’t really—you can’t and I don’t want to!—obliterate conventions. But you can call them into question, voice them, or flip them around. So this is where I must bring in Walter Benjamin’s chordal poetics, with its acknowledgment of fragments and discontinuity, absolute breaks in the fabric of history. Yet Benjamin speaks about constellation, the (nonsensuous) connection among discrepant particulars (something like Antin’s idea of narrative). My work is connecting that which appears discrepant, to call those discrepancies into account and in the process create a new modalities of configuration. That is, the desire is for not just the constellations but, more, the possibilities for configuration. Reconvening brings to the table emergent or unrecognized or stigmatized conventions. So while there is a swerving from convention, there is, at the same time, a reorienting to the possibility of conventions as provisional, as democratic social space. This is the essence of poetic rhythm. 3. This is the way I put it in “State of the Art,” A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1. Compare Emerson: “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-­reliance is its aversion” (“Self-­Reliance,” 1841, www​.emersoncentral​ .com​/selfreliance​.htm). In This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989), Cavell pitches this as “Self-­reliance is the aversion of conformity” (69).

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Imagine the convention of a fantasy political party where you determine those conventions you’re going to observe and those you’re not, or you reorder or conceptualize what your conventions will be. Reality—it don’t work that way, you rightly say. Reality slams us again and again, as much with the clash of signs as with the impossibility of anything else but what history tells us, with its cruel face, is the case. What’s necessary about poetry, the kind of poetry I want, is that unlike much of the rest of life, it is a provisional space or holding area in which we consider alternative formations, alternative modes of convention and constellation, and live with these imaginal realities for the duration of the poem. Poems can create acutely intensifying connections in and through an immersive verbal experience. It’s not dissipation, not emptying out, nor voiding, nor creating something that exists primarily at the level of abstract form. I want the visceral experience that comes from the construction of the poem as a psychic experience of dwelling in such language intensities—with the ever imminent (that is, intermittent) possibilities for transformation. You speak of the poem within the language experience as an object, an artifact, which it is, unquestionably. But you also speak of its affective intensity, of emotion and of desire. How do you work with these concepts which, contrary to appearance, do not clash, because they work together? You work with the poem as an object, you work with the word as word, and you work with the word, I mean with the expanding word. And at the same time you are working with effective/affective intensity, because that is something that grows as well. Are you conscious of this, or does it come through the work in spite of yourself? To me, as someone who also writes poetry, poetry speaks itself, speaks through you, speaks you, despite the fact that you are continually keeping it at a distance in order to construct as perfect an object as possible. Do you agree with this idea? I worry about claims about poetry that seem to put it in the realm of the irrational, or supernatural, or the religious. The problem is that when poetry is underwritten by religious or supernatural claims, the psychic and intuitive intensities are often (not always) compromised. The minute you start to talk about religion, there is a risk that the work loses its magical qualities and feels stale and staid, an extension of a set of beliefs separate from the poem (including the belief in God). When poets talk about spirituality, it often (not always) makes the work seem like pointing to transcendence without doing anything about it. (The Zen poetics of Norman Fischer and Hank Lazer are exemplary in the way they address, and avert, this issue.) I maintain a deep affection—perhaps it’s nostalgia—for the realm of rea-

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son, a realm that goes beyond rationality but that is not irrational. Reason incorporates intuition, including what Jack Spicer calls dictation,4 or what you described as the poem writing itself. I also have that experience when I am writing poems. You set something up, certain conditions let’s say, and then, well, it starts to happen. It’s not entirely controlled by a rational intelligence; Otherwise you wouldn’t write poems; you would write another kind of work. Although I also channel this energy when I write essays, and sometimes when I talk. Surely it involves the unconscious, but the unconscious is part of the mind and part of reason. In my practice, certain kinds of unexpected and unpredictable associations occur when I think peripherally (aslant). I have learned to potentiate those associations. There’s also a kind of sound and rhythmic or musical patterning that occurs, concomitant with less-­than-­ conscious mental states. Just as when puns occur to me, or rhymes, assonances, I’m not looking for them. They come to me because I’m in that zone of consciousness. I spend a lot of time entering into and also expanding the zone specific to poetic thought and verbal fancy. I spend a lot of time with streams of words going through my head. In the right circumstance, I can tap into those streams in different ways. Poems are ways of creating containers or structures or forms that channel those verbal/semiotic/symbolic/psychic streams. The poem is the medium in the double sense that it’s a material ground but also something that receives signals. Channel is another resonant word—you can think of a channel like a river or a stream; but a channel is also a site for external reception. As you create the form or structure of a poem, it creates a channel for a flow of perception, a verbal stream concatenating unconscious associations manifesting themselves through words, as well as channeling, from outside, other sorts of material. Now what’s channeled from outside is not coming from Mars, as Spicer said—though I rather like that metaphor— but from the social and historical world we share—but also from memory, psyche . . . The social and historical world enters into the poem, and that entering in—from the outside—is not something I consciously figure out; the connections are the result of a hunch or intuition or something even more subliminal: it just occurs to me. My mind’s a blank, then something occurs to me in the moment. It’s like the way allusion works. A song or an associated literary line invades my mind, bonds with a perception: I don’t seek it out; it just appears. I usually change that initial allusion, distort or reverse, but I couldn’t explain why or how the allusion came to mind in the first place. I catch it, I 4. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

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transform it, then I move on. Being receptive is the fundamental talent— the ability not to go with what you figure is right but rather where your associations lead, where language leads, letting the rhythm of the poem channel itself into a flow that takes you over rapids, irregular or jumpy movements, curves, bumpy patches. And then sometimes you flip out of the rapids and you’re just drifting . . . But you just keep on going with it to see what happens. It’s something like shooting a film. You are out there and you just shoot a lot, and then a lot takes place postproduction, during the editing. And sometimes you can really edit in the camera, as they say. At this point in my life, I have so much experience doing this work, which to me is similar whether writing essays or poems, though the two are very different genres. So sometimes I know where I am going and I stop—I have enough of that and begin something else. But I am aware that I am not committed, as far as process goes, to what I come up with when I’m writing. Because I can continue when I edit. Whatever works best. We talked about hybridity in connection with your work, and the other question in connection with this, is the following: for you, does form follow function or does function follow form? In Attack of the Difficult Poems, I write about the theories of Henry Petroski, a historian of industrial design who has rewritten the famous Bauhaus formula as form follows failure, which I love. Petroski is referring to the fact that inventors of “useful” things often make their innovations in response to the perceived failures of objects around them. When I was at college, in my most anti-­Bauhausian phase, when writing a paper for William Seitz, an art historian who did the Assemblage show for the Museum of Modern Art, I made a sort of collage-­assemblage paper with the motto form follows fun—seems silly to me now, appropriately sophomoric for a sophomore— but I do remember what I was thinking at the time: premonitions of the neobaroque!—that the Bauhaus stuff was too reductive and rigorous. You mean restrictively minimalist? Yes, so I just eliminated the five last letters of function to have (some) fun. But in fact this also brings to mind another aphorism which was influential with American poetry, which is Robert Creeley’s “form is never more than an extension of content,” and the extension of that is that content is never more than an extension of form.5 But I would say, still, the most fun5. Creeley discusses the reversibility of his remark, quoted by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse” (1950), in Autobiography (New York: Hanuman, 1990).

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damental of that f-­u-­n core issue around the Bauhaus doxa is the concept of function. One of the great things about poetry is that it doesn’t have to have a function, doesn’t need a function. I’m always looking for the useless—to make poetry less functional, or simply more purely aesthetic. Of course, that’s a horizon. Yes, indeed. The word aesthetic is such a complex notion, because it includes who you are as a person: your stance and position in the world as a creator, philosopher, or critic. So you could say poetry has no purpose, but that is not its purpose. It’s a kind of a conundrum: poetry has no function and that is not its function. You spoke of the centrifugal forces in poetry, and you said this is the primary mode. Yes, because the centrifugal pulls different disparate elements together rather than projecting them outward. Do you see performance poetry then as the perfect answer to the centrifugal mode? to the extent that the written page, or the projection of the alphabet on the page, or stabilized forms of alphabetical language, all work toward a relative fixing of reading, of interpretation? Do you think the performance liberates the fixed form and that each performance renews, rewrites, re-­presents, reenacts? For you, is performance in fact the ultimate expression of the expanding field of language? One of the fault-­lines of poetry performance is between the centripetal and the centrifugal. It’s my sense that a highly projective centripetal performance is potentially less interesting than a performance that is contained. The centrifugal performance is like a piece of metal getting red-­hot but collapsing into itself rather than exploding outward. I am more interested in that implosion or introversion than in explosion and extroversion. Performance is typically—whether in spoken-­word poetry or method acting—oriented toward projection, an outward movement. So it is against this that I propose a combination of introjection and centrifugal energy. Tracie Morris’s “Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful” works that way, as do many of the performances of Maggie O’Sullivan or, in a different key, Mei-­mei Berssenbrugge. Though an extroverted performance by Christian Bök is exhilarating, partly because he plays on wild mania of the performative energy. But to switch to another level: “performance,” like “translation,” is an appealing, and sometimes liberating, metaphor

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for most the qualities of poetics I profess. It’s well known that nowadays you can say everything is a performance, from having coffee by yourself at home to performing the role of King Lear on a theatrical stage. So it is a very expansive idea . . . Yes, but I am applying it specifically to performance poetry or the type of language poetry that is meant to be performed. Bien sûr. Performance can be a model for a way of understanding everyday life, as when performing an identity. It’s not just reciting a poem that is a performance; reading is a performance as well; the double sense of “a reading” speaks to this. Poems can provide performance models that can then be stranded into the world. The poem “itself ” is not the end but the beginning. I have a few more questions, but here’s perhaps the one that’s uppermost in my mind. With respect to Hannah Weiner’s juxtaposed fonts, in Clairvoyant Journal, and here I quote you from “The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,” consciousness mapped on page “through a melded clashing of voices”: How can you meld clashing voices? Isn’t this an oxymoron? Also, I’m just thinking of Apollinaire’s idea of juxtaposing voices rather than clashing. That’s the issue I raised with Benjamin—disparate elements not as disconnected bits but having chordal relationships, interconnecting through constellation. So my use of melding or melting is another way of understanding this centrifugal poetics. A constellation, after all, is made of distinct elements that form a pattern, which for Benjamin can be “nonsensuous,” which is a both evocative and allusive.6 My poetics of melding is a form of syncretism, the basic modality of the poetics of the Americas, thinking of the way syncretic is used in Latin America to refer to religious practices that are partly native, partly Catholic, partly invented. But the voices individually clash, and yet they all come together. Instead of speaking of hybrid language, or pidgin, or dialect, we can call the often violent clashes of language in the Americas syncretic or miscegenated. The Clairvoyant Journal has three distinct voices, which we could perhaps understand psychoanalytically as id, superego, and ego. These

6. “The Doctrine of the Similar” [Die Lehre von Änlichkeit] (1933), which is echoed in “The Doctrine of Similarity,” scene 3 of Shadowtime.

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distinct voices are bouncing off one another, creating a syncretic space of consciousness. I find Ron Silliman’s Ketjak a fantastic written illustration of the expanding poem because it’s expanding literally, I mean exponentially. It’s also integrating mistakes into itself, because it does start out by following an equation. Ketjak is a perfect example of what I am talking about here. Perhaps we have time for one final question here, before I squeeze the lemon dry, as they say. To what extent do you think extreme-­constraints poets are influenced by OuLiPo and Perec? There’s no question that they are. There’s been a real revival of interest in OuLiPo in the United States. Perec is primarily a novelist, so while he remains perhaps the best-­known OuLiPian writer, the greatest interest in OuLiPian work right now is among poets. The most notable example is Bök’s Eunoia, which is entirely a lipogram—every section is written with a single vowel, and there are several other constraints. Eunoia uses conventional syntax and grammar, has various predetermined narrative elements. A tour de force. Do you personally see this type of writing as really creative? I mean I myself don’t see you at all as an OuLiPo-­influenced poet. I’m not, though I am interested in OuLiPian work and in ’pataphysics more generally. Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style interests me a lot. And indeed among my exercises in style are constraint-­based works: it is a part of the spectrum of what I do. But I am more about bending or breaking or melting rules than in strictly following them. Yes, I wouldn’t really put you with the extreme constraints poets. I don’t like to follow rules—not even my own rules. I teach an undergraduate class at the University of Pennsylvania called Experimental Writing that is constraint-­based, although constraints are not always as controlling as they appear and I include many non-­OuLiPian experiments as well. I try to conduct a writing class more like a plastic arts class. Constraints and experiments give writing students the opportunity to work outside normalizing narrative constraints; they learn to create numerous pata-­ structures and pata-­narratives. But even then I say to the students, “If I were you I wouldn’t follow all the rules, even if the teacher told me to.” Be-

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cause for me a signal moment, especially when you are coming into your own as an artist, is to know when to turn away from a plan; that is even more important than learning to make or follow a plan. The way I work is usually to modify things on a moment-­by-­moment basis and to create swerves within any form that I’m working on. What you’re referring to in a way is what Robbe-­Grillet does with his slippages of language. Yes, but slippages of language in the French sense is for me a little more high-­toned and modulated than what I have in mind. I’m really interested in a more vaudevillian sense of the word, like slipping on a banana—that is, the intrusion of the world, disrupting your movements, such as what began our conversation here, you losing your heel on the sidewalk. That’s the kind of slip that I’m interested in: pratfalls and real falls and— Intrusion of the really and truly accidental, rather than the error? Yes, rather than what a conceptual idea of error is. Because error is also losing your way, which happens to me quite a lot anyway because I have an abysmal sense of direction. What you are saying then is that with Robbe-­Grillet, the slippage of language is a concerted conceptual endeavor and what you’re going for is more—say— the purely accidental? Well, more the disruptive, let’s say—though sometimes I do create schemes to generate errors, so there is nothing pure about it, including purely accidental. But as I say, I end up with something more vaudevillian, showing off the more vulgar or visceral or intrusive aspects of slipping. Mispronunciation, slips of the tongue, puns: that is my poetics of the everyday. It’s the way I perceive everyday language; such things are constantly intruding into my perception, like it or not. Susan says “Open two cans of tuna,” and I see an image of a toucan; then I have to duck because the toucan’s coming right at me. In my writing I tend to go more toward more uncomfortable puns, puns that don’t seem that elegant. Because they de-­range? Yes, because they derange. But also because it’s a way to bring into play everyday experience, which is constantly filled with disruptions and obstacles that you don’t overcome, that trip you up. I’m compulsively drawn

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to tripping; slippage is also bewitching, as one particular dissolves into another, as with word transformations and metamorphosis and substitution, the slips and slides within language. But you might not feel the bumps. I’m obsessed by the clubfoot, pied-­bot type of bump. It’s the rhythm of my poetry. What occurs to me here with the notion of slippage the way you define it is that it renders the creative act extremely vital. The metamorphoses appear more spontaneous, more vital, more dynamic. Does this to you make the poem more present in terms of its dynamic existence? Does it intensify existence itself? Is it for you a way of making the poem more alive, making yourself more alive, making the thing more alive? I don’t know about what it makes me. That’s a hard question. OK, let’s cut you out and just talk about the poem. You’re opening a whole other can of worms, a veritable Pandora’s box! I am certainly interested in intensifying the experience of language, and therefore potentially perceptual experience, in a poem through rhythmic oscillation, odd shifts, awkward transformations in the work. Whether that actually affects—or how that affects—life outside the poem, I wouldn’t want to say. But it affects the poem? Yes, the proprioceptive intensification certainly affects the poem, and it certainly affects me when I’m working on it. It potentially allows for a changed/charged perception when you’re reading the poem or hearing the poem performed that—if you hear it in the way that I would hope that a reader-­listener would, and as I think some people do from their accounts to me—then yes, you will have this extended n-­dimensional experience during that aesthetic moment. That could be described as aesthetic pleasure, but it is both more visceral and more conceptual than sometimes suggested by that phrase: more psychedelic (or psychodynamic). That occurs during the duration of the poem. What effect does that have outside the poem? It might simply be a reminder that you can have those kinds of experiences, and that’s probably sufficient. Or it may just simply be that those moments are experienced that way, and nothing else, and that also would be sufficient. Beyond that, conceptually and philosophically, poems are models for

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other kinds of social organization, other phenomenologies of perception, other perceptions of consciousness. To go back to this one more time: poetry can offer ways to understand the relationship between apparently discrepant particulars—configuration or constellation or overlay of discrepant materials. This is a possible model for democratic social space in the Americas, where we have incommensurable languages, consciousnesses, people living side by side and creating something beyond the sum of the parts. We call that the New World, a work in progress. How can we imagine that? Or how can we avoid imagining it and, instead, live it? And how does this relate to tolerance and assimilation? Poetry has the possibility of offering perceptual models for a range of philosophical and social problems. Not solutions, rather reflections on . . . which can deepen our conversations. This is not policy. The kind of poetry I want doesn’t tell you what to do, but it does help you to think about the issues, to reconceptualize the problems, again going back to the site of the convention, which helps us to reconvene/rethink the terms of our mutual coexistence. I love your notion of clubfoot, and I’d like you to go into the concept. We can think of clubfoot as an impediment, as a state, or we can think of it in terms of motion, in terms of movement. Like a clubfoot moving along in a hobbling fashion. Could you perhaps define what clubfoot really means for you? Pied-­bot is the title I came up with for Martin Richet’s translation of two of my early books, Shade (1978) and The Occurrence of Tune (1977), along with the preface to Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984.7 It’s a line from the preface to Content’s Dream: “Rumination is the soul’s club foot, by which it beats the rap.” One thing about clubfoot, of course is that it refers to a physical condition. And therefore to a disability—but you’re turning it into something else as well. I want to acknowledge that it’s not just a metaphor, that disability causes hardship and those viewed as disabled are often stigmatized or overlooked. Moreover, there are particular histories, states of being, and capacities, positive and negative, associated with the range of conditions that fall under this rubric. Still, like performance and like translation, disability has wider resonance. The poetics of disability is foundational for

7. Pied-­bot (Nantes, France: Joca Seria, 2012).

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me: poetry that comes out of what cultures mark as deformed or impaired, and by extension poems also so marked. Like queerness or race or ethnicity, disability connects to an expanded field of consciousness and the possibility of articulating aversive perceptual intensities. Poetry, as I practice it, begins in disability, which smacks up against language as something palpable, thick, resistant. The materials of language don’t easily give way to my will but push back, trick me, trip me. Clubfoot suggest a kind of prosodic foot: offbeat or syncopated, which has rhythm but not meter. “Beats the rap”: beats could be metrical beats, but beats the rap is also slang for getting out of a crime. When you beat the rap you’re off the hook. Rap is what you are charged with by the police or by extensions anything you are accused of: Did you take the car keys? It turns out that you didn’t, so you beat the rap. But rap also is wrap, so then beating it means getting beyond the container. So in fact you use rap as an umbrella concept . . . Rap also means sound the container (“as of someone gently rapping” in Poe). We are beating the form, making the form itself sound out. Also rap is a performance poetry genre, one with a heavily accented beat. But getting back just to pied-­bot: clubfoot is awkward, jerking or spastic motion, poetic textures I keep returning to . . . Because it’s disquieting? Also off-­balancing. I am not romanticizing debilitating limitations, but trying to stay real. I’d rather not be so spatially disoriented, going west when I want to go south. But everyone has limits. There are our individual points of origin. Language is a limit; the self is a limit. And rather than try to overcome the limits through transcendence, or a universalizing humanism, I prefer bouncing off them. That way I stay closer to the ground. But this is perhaps what all art is about: seeing the limit and bouncing against it, beating it, complying with it? But it is not quite the same for people. If I could go to the airport tomorrow morning without any time constraint, I certainly would do that. It’s not like I really want to go through the process of getting to the airport from the city center. But in a poem, indulging in an impediment can be sublime. I don’t celebrate derangement per se, Rimbaud notwithstanding, since I know plenty of people who suffer greatly from derangement

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of the senses and would just like it to stop. I feel that way a lot of the time myself. But I do think it’s important to recognize, acknowledge, and explore derangements (and so rearrangements) as part of a human common ground. I mean not to celebrate the poète maudit but to find my bearings as a poète chetif.

Evening Will Come Off-­Key with Josh ua Marie Wilkinson

If you say my singing is off key, my love You will hurt my feelings, don’t you see, my love? I wish I had an ear like yours, a voice that would behave All I have is feeling and the voice God gave You insist my music goes against the rules Yes, but rules were never made for lovesick fools N e w to n M en d on ça / A n tonio Car l os Jobi n , trans. Ge ne Lees, “ Desafinad o” (1958 )

What are the goals of the critic of poetry? In my parallel universe, the goals of the critic of poetry are to find and put forward poetry that has the most resonance, that transforms the art of poetry for the ever-­transitory contemporary moment, that connects the work at hand to other works, historical and contemporary (no poem is a paradise or purgatory entire unto itself ), and that articulates the work’s values and histories (real and imaginary) as particular and contestable rather than universal and assumed. To challenge the complacent and merely competent and encourage the untried, radical, unexpected, impossible, odd, and pataquerulous. Never underestimate the value of disruptive invention or of assimilationist refinement. What’s your take on all the positive reviewing that happens of new poetry books? Is that a misnomer? Should there be more negative reviews? I am troubled by the lack of context in the routine reiteration of this question, which takes on a disciplinary odor. I’d welcome more negative commentary on what deserves it and vice versa. But it don’t usually work out that way, do it? My motto remains, should never say should should you? Evening Will Come, no. 35 (2013). E-­mail response to set questions.

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I’ve gotten many positive reviews and prefer those to the negative ones. Some of the negative reviews have been substantial, engaging with problems that my work creates or its far-­too-­many-­to-­enumerate failings. But more common, the negative reviews start from the premise that the work is not poetry but noise, and fundamentally unworthy, if not fraudulent, or hypocritical. Sometimes it seems like the official verse culture enforcers (OVCEs) have as their modus operandi going after any bodies (of work) found alive and kicking: Undeaddom abhors a resistance. Still, the OVCEs to fear are not the one out to get us but the ones in ourselves. ControversialVerse provokes controversy more than ConformingVerse (keeping in mind that the controversial at first quickly becomes the conforming at second). Most of the debates over the lack of negative reviewing are a symptom of conformist culture’s desire to enforce conformity. The contrarian provokes controversy; nonetheless, the tabloidization of poetry “news” has the same problem as any other type of tabloidization (we may enjoy it at the time but are left hungry [and without respect] in the morning). The problem with many poetry reviews is not that they are positive or negative but that they are not aware of (or naturalize) their assumptions, that they are written as if the style and form of the review were less significant than the style or form of a poem, and that they desire to say very little. How do you handle what many have deemed a glut in contemporary poetry, and how do you keep up with what comes out? There can never be too much poetry; is there too much prose? too much musicmaking? But there is a glut of articles saying there is (or claiming or refuting claims that poetry ain’t as good as it used to be). At the same time, there is always a shortage of poetry that goes beyond the given, poetry that changes the terms of what poetry is or what it could be while opening up new vistas of consciousness for readers and nonreaders. (I’ll tell you what there is too much of: poverty, incarceration, Republicans.) What advice do you have for critics and poets new to review writing who’d like to get started writing book reviews? Do not retell in mediocre prose what has already been done in good poetry.

Wolf with S te phen Ross

I’d like to begin with an Emily Dickinson poem: By homely gift and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing— ​“Nothing” is the force That renovates the World—1

I think this poem speaks to your work in several ways. First, there’s the appeal to “hindered words” to lay bare the (doggerel) verities of the “human heart.” But there’s also a socially minded torqueing of the “Nothing” that emerges from this practice. You’ve spoken elsewhere of the “negative economy” of poetry, and your work often features broken and “bad” poetic language. In your latest book, Recalculating, you write: “Poetry should be silent, unread, invisible, inconceivable. The true poem can never be written or heard.” I wonder if you might have anything to say about “Nothing.”

Wolf 28 ( June 2013). E-­mail exchange. 1. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), no. 1563, 3:1076. Facsimile of the ms at www​ .edickinson​.org​/editions​/2​/ image​_sets​/76231​?image​=​2771 suggests: By homely gift and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing— “Nothing” is the force That renovates the World—

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I love this poem, which seems so much like a Celan poem. According to Johnson, it’s from around 1883, very near the end of Dickinson’s life, when she was fifty-­three. Read as an ars poetica, it feels so close to me it’s hard for me to consider it on its own terms. Forty years ago, in 1973, I pored over that three-­volume Johnson edition in the only class I took after college—a seminar on Dickinson taught by Robin Blaser at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver; but Dickinson’s first impact on me was as a junior in high school, when I studied her work with Richard Feingold (who later went on to teach at Berkeley). Dickinson gave me a fundamental sense of what a poem could be (be, not do, as I would usually say). And just this fall I returned again to Dickinson for my Poetics of Identity seminar, with Marta Werner speaking to us on the late manuscripts, letters, and fragments— the way Dickinson would write on the back of envelopes, transforming scrap to talisman. Werner and Jen Bervin call their recent Dickinson book The Gorgeous Nothings, referring to this same poem and also what Werner calls, marvelously, Dickinson’s “ ‘Sudden’ collage made of two, possibly three, sections of envelope”: “the gorgeous / nothings / which / compose / the / sunset / keep.”2 The first thing to say about this poem is that it is a gift: first to Susan Dickinson, to whom it was sent in a letter, and then to us, readers from a beyond that Dickinson could address with more freedom and ferocity than perhaps any of her contemporaries because unconstrained by the demands of publication, or, perhaps, better to say, constrained by the demands of nonpublication, what she called eternity. The possibility of any one of us receiving this gift is absolutely precarious (if you can accept the oxymoron—I have a feeling you are up for it), given the precarious state of her manuscripts or even the recognition of her poems as poems (rather than as sweet nothings, notings). The poem is a (hindered or delayed) gift both into and—that supreme fiction—for the unknown (“eternity’s vast pocket”). Poetry makes nothing happen (don’t even THINK of nothing here!), manifest in the cracks (delays, blanks) between words and the frictions of gift. A gift (this gift) is a present made present; as for reciprocity: nothing is given in return. Mine is a homely poetics, both odd-­looking (unattractive, disagreeable, low) and intimate (even private). The doggerel and generally deformed (as 2. Marta Werner, “The Flights of A 821: Dearchivizing the Proceedings of Birdsong,” in Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, ed. Raimonda Modiano, Leroy Searle, and Peter L. Shillingsburg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 299. See also Werner and Jen Bervin, The Gorgeous Nothings (New York: New Directions, 2013).

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you rightly say, hindered, averse, thwarted, delayed, backward) rhythms and rimes, bathos, peculiarity, and solecisms, have a double function of being unheimlich while also being homesickness even at home and at home with homesickness. I know this sends mixed signals. But I don’t think I am alone in feeling that the unknown is most familiar or that the normal doesn’t feel right. I am not talking about alienation, but quite the opposite: an alien nation, making a ground where you find yourself. Recently a reviewer dismissively assumed a hindered lyric of mine was mocking— because, for him, awkwardness signaled parody or more simply badness. But awkwardness is home ground. My motto has long been Dickinson’s “Don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”3 That’s different, if related, to Zen. I agree with your sense of “socially minded” but also because it suggests socially unminded. Mind the gap. Unmind in the gap too. I have nothing to say and I am not saying it. I have nothing to not say and I am saying it. I have nothing to not say and I am not saying it. I read Dickinson’s poem as close to negative dialectics. Nothing in the sense of not one thing: variants around a blank center. To be told about nothing is to come face to face with loss, despair, grief: the irreparable. Nothing repairs the world. Renovates is something else again: making new again, making new now. The revolution of the word is the force of nothing. As a follow-­up to the first question: Agamben says all his books are prologues to the one he can’t write. Is there a work you can’t write? What prevents you? My poems are mired in inability and disorientation as much as enthusiasm, sarcasm, exuberance, the ridiculous and the ecstatic (often the same). I think this is what puts me at odds with so much other poetry and also from what so many people seem to want from a poem. I don’t know what I am saying until I say it, and I don’t know how to say it until I do. A poem for me is finding a way after losing my way, where myopia is a manifestation of grace, thinking of Reznikoff ’s poem about walking in the fog: “the solid path invisible / a rod away— / and only the narrow present is alive.”4 Then there is also pragmatics: writing what I am able to, what I have a 3. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), L562 to Judge Otis Lord. 4. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918–1975, ed. Seamus Coony ( Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow / David Godine, 2005), 197.

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knack for. I take advantage of my disadvantage (which is the same as to say I work from the vantages given). And rather than try to move up and out, I have just drilled down. My poems are a prologue to nothing. Nothing without youse. Your work has meant a lot to me and other Jewish American friends of mine (including a young relative of Charles Reznikoff) who were brought up hearing about “heroes” like Sandy Koufax and Steven Spielberg but had to discover Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Stein, Oppen, Rakosi, Rukeyser, Rich, Rothenberg, and many other poets on our own. Being a Jewish poet, experimentalist or not, seems to entail the awkward position of speaking for a marginalized group from a marginal position within that group. In this sense, it’s no different from being any other kind of poet, I suppose. But of course, there’s also something very Jewish about that tragicomic awkwardness; as you write in Recalculating, “I am a Jewish man trapped / in the body of a Jewish man.”5 How do you feel about American Jewish culture’s relationship to its great poets and artists? And, to follow on from that: you use the phrase “Midrashic Antinomianism” in several essays from Attack of the Difficult Poems, including your “Recantorium,” in which you hilariously denounce its “false doctrines.” Often your poems sound like “midrashim,” or Jewish parables, gone awry. In this sense, it seems possible to read them in a long fabulist tradition extending from Reb Nachman of Breslov to Franz Kafka and Edmond Jabès. Do you consider yourself to be in dialogue with these figures? What does it mean to be a Jewish poet in their wake? Jewish jokes riddle my writing. While I sometimes link that to a specific set of Jewish comedians, I think the context you propose is accurate: my work is in dialogue with the writers you mention and their “bent” methodologies—and we can fill out the list with many other names. Kafka, after all, is my father’s milk (“The Penal Colony” is a source for “Recantorium”). A number of people seeing me canting “Recantorium” say it looks like a cantor davening. “Oshamnu” (“Ashamnu”), the Yom Kippur prayer of atonement for wrongdoing, is hardwired into the piece.6 5. “Unready, Unwilling, Unable,” in Recalculating (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 129. 6. I reimagine this prayer in the eighteenth section of “A Person Is Not an Entity Symbolic but the Divine Incarnate,” in The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987): epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein​/ poems​/oshamnu​.html. “Recantorium (a Bachelor Machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)” is the final work in Attack of the Difficult Poems.

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As far as Jewishness goes, I am chosen more than choosing. And that goes pretty far, just not all the way. That is, I am interested in Jewishness as a specific response to the condition of being Jewish (the circular reasoning is liberating)—and as an argument with that condition. Like other identities, Jewishness is a product of Jewish culture, it’s imbibed, a contact high, a mass hallucination, as real as a belly flop from the twelve-­foot diving board at the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami, circa 1962. Nothing more real than that; that is no other form for being a Jew is any more real or authentic or legitimate, if I say so. I am the happy genius of my own identity (to echo Williams, lonely, dancing naked in “Dance Russe,” proclaiming, “I am the happy genius of my household”).7 I fear a reaction formation in which Jews adopt the racial definitions used by our exterminators in determining who is Jew and who Mischling. But I won’t reject such external tattooing; I can’t. If you don’t want to be a Jew, then don’t be—and good luck to you. But there is no such thing as a lapsed Jew. Nor do I accept that Jewishness is exclusively defined by religious belief or Zionist affiliation. I see Jewishness as mutating and reconstituting, a trace as much as a set of beliefs, in aversion to its history as much as a shadow of it. Haunted because hunted but not giving up the marker of difference no matter how infrathin it might be, just out of sheer, exhilarating (or paranoid or debilitating) stubbornness. The path of unmarked assimilation, having been tried for centuries and fatally failing during the war, doesn’t seem viable, much less desirable. That’s the dilemma. Jabès says all poets are Jews—but mostly not the ones I read about. And all Jews are surely not poets; for most the practice of poetry, as I imagine it, is irreconcilable with Judaism (putting aside the commentaries we could produce to argue the opposite). Those of us who don’t link our Jewishness to (or only to) religious observance might say so from time to time. Anyway, it’s a thought. Recalculating includes a number of translations from Portuguese, French, Russian, and Latin, and acoustic transliterations from German and Finnish, in the spirit of Zukofsky’s Catullus translations. Your version of Apollinaire’s “Le Pont Mirabeau” is notably—and uncharacteristically—beautiful. Does beauty matter to you?

7. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 87.

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I don’t know much about beauty, but I know what I like. Is there a difference? Over the years I have struggled with the enormous differences between what I value in poetry and what others seem to. I often feel about much prize-­winning poetry: who could possibly like that? I was at a memorial service for a friend last weekend, and the widow, an artist herself, read a poem that must have affected her deeply but seemed to me disturbing, flat, and unbeautiful as a tribute to a person whose own art seemed so opposed to the aesthetic of this poem (fortunately he was not there to hear it!). I tell this story not just to expose my crankiness but rather to acknowledge how powerful aesthetic judgment is, for me and my mourning friend. In Attack of the Difficult Poems I write about Henry Petroski’s theory of invention: “form follows failure.” The translations in this book are often provoked by my sense that other translations don’t get at some beauty in the poem being translated (as I expect others will feel about mine). You started with a question about the homely, and now we are on to beauty. I have an affection for homely beauty, or anyway homemade beauty, hindered or damaged or fragile or fleeting, a queer or peculiar beauty. The beauty in the recognition of loss, where elegy acknowledges that which is gorgeous as it becomes anything but nothing. And nothing all the same. I think of Baudelaire’s “maigre nudité,” in “À une Mendiante Rousse,” a Baudelaire translation in Recalculating— Go then, without any other ornament— Perfume, pearls, diamond— Than your scrawny nudity, Oh my beauty!

I like how, as you note, our conversation has gone from homeliness to beauty, propelled by nothing. This raises the topic of transitions, an important concept in your work. One of my favorite essays of yours is the piece on Rivers and Mountains (1966) for the Conjunctions special issue on John Ashbery. As you “meander down the Yangtze,” you observe that in Ashbery’s third collection he “introduces a nonlinear associative logic that averts both exposition and disjunction.” Elsewhere, you appropriate the medical term dysraphism (“a congenital mis-­seaming of embryonic parts”) to characterize this method of “contingent consecutiveness that registers transition but not continuity.” Your poem “Dysraphism,” in The Sophist, embodies this practice, too, as do many others. Would it be fair to say one of your primary units of composition is the

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“transition,” rather than, say, the line or the sentence? How has your thinking about poetic transitions evolved? It would also be fair to say that transition is a metaphor I lean on perhaps too much, as implicitly quoting Emerson in “The American Scholar”: “The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.”8 But I also think of Langston Hughes’s epigraph for Montage of a Dream Deferred, quoted in Recalculating, about being a people in transition, which evokes for me the life on the streets of New York, where dramatic shifts in neighborhood occur sometimes block by block; or the subway station (echoing Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”): the palpitation of these races in the crowd / clashing colors on a whirligig’s brow. There’s a short poem in Recalculating, “Two Stones with One Bird,” dedicated to my friend and Penn colleague the Pound/Joyce/Lacan scholar Jean-­Michel Rabaté, which could be recast “Exposition / comes / and / exposition / goes / but / transition / is / here / forever” (substituting exposition for redemption and transition for transience—yet how unoriginal as I seem to have just paraphrased Emerson in “Circles”: “Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit”9). Another version of this could be “transmission is mine, sayeth the Lord.” (So the guy in the garage tells me, you need a new transition. I just dropped in to see what transition my transition is in.) Or: I don’t know what I like, but I know a lot about change. One obsession of mine (one obsession must lead instanter to the next) is assimilation and its malcontents, maladaption to assimilation being, for me, as you’ve suggested, a rocky road to song. Assimilation is a form of transition from one set of cultural markers to another, which can go marked or unmarked. People talk about transition in the queer sense and also as a euphemism for dying. And there’s the transition we make in the face of death, the grief that necessitates recalculating. For every bait and switch there is the countermeasure of derive. (Situationist drift rescues art from rote détournement, and vice versa.) The patterning in my poetry—the rocky bent beat—comes from the degree of, and the quality of, the transitions: hard or soft, invisible or obtrusive, abrupt or seamless, jerky or cool, wild or logical, plausible or inscrutable, contiguous or brute, mirrored or echoic, happy or unfortunate 8. “American Scholar” (1837), www​.emersoncentral​.com​/amscholar​.htm. 9. “Circles” (1841), www​.emersoncentral​.com​/circles​.htm. The final quotation in this conversation is also from this essay.

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. . . Parataxis is such a blunt term for an infinite field of exquisite and extravagant nuance and metamorphosis. Transitions occur not just image to image or sentence to sentence but sometimes word to word or phrase to phrase or phoneme to morpheme (this is the contrast I make between serially disjunctive sentences and imploded syntax poems, even if both are “prose”—the emergence of prose-­format poetry in the 1970s was itself a way to mark and organize transitions). (I won’t stoop so low as to make a play on morpheme and morphine.) In a poem, I want to feel the transitions viscerally—that’s why all that talk of the cerebral and theoretical strikes me as an inability or unwillingness to take the ride the poem offers ( just as calls for affect are often prophylactics against sensation). Wittgenstein uses the term queer when a transition, which would normally go unnoticed, obtrudes. The pataque(e)rical would be a way of fomenting such moments. But the end is not an awareness of misfit—as if the poem was a one-­note-­Johnny-­come-­lately. Here’s the rub: the foregrounding of disjunction is an obstacle to the kind of poetry I want. This is what Ashbery realized (as I discuss in the essay you mention) and explains his aversion to “hot” rather than “cool” transitions (to adapt McLuhan’s famous terms). Me, I never met a transition I didn’t like. But you have to go against the flow and with the tide or keep stepping twice into the same river on all sides of the current, or else, like Zeno, you’ll get nowhere faster than Coyote gets to Lyric Corners. Transgression is boring and pretentious and so useful if that is what you want as a tone, which I sometimes do; but to hear bumps as beats—that’s different. David Antin says the difference between plot and narrative is that in a narrative there is a transformation (something like the difference between story and allegory). Transitions do things, not just mark changes. But then again, marking time, is that not a noble office of poesy? Kind of like turning brickbats into gold bars of malady. Emerson again—and to return to a theme broached in this conversation: “Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature,—a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-­back—is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed.”10 But as I was saying, my long nose, sharp chin, and humpback anchor me to earth, as the spaceship is tethered to the graven image of the spaceship. Adorno was wrong ( just as Emerson is): reification is as inevitable as high TV ratings for disaster coverage. 10. “Beauty” (1860/1876): www​.emersoncentral​.com​/ beauty2​.htm.

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And if thine eye offend thee, get used to it: it is better for thee to enter into life with three eyes, rather than casting away any part of your psyche or any part of the world. I hate transition and want it to stop. Just not here, nor here, or here. Not now, anyhow. This might be a tokenistic question (if so, please accept this parenthetical aside as a token of apology), but I wonder how you feel about the legacy of Language poetry in 2013. As I ask this question, I’m not even sure which rubric to use: “Language poetry,” “Language-­oriented,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” In “The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” I do my best to provide an account of the sources, approaches, and trajectory of this work; it is filled with lists of names, ideas, and contexts. I have often been asked this question, and while I am well placed to answer, I have a preference for being evasive or indefinite. I don’t want to repeat what I have said before, and that presents me with a curious challenge of trying to say something else (and not fall back on the fact that repeating does not produce sameness). I don’t answer questions in interviews; I take the form as an opportunity to create a series of short dialogic works. But then I create a problem: explanations are needed for my explanations. “Language Poetry does not exist,” and that may be its greatest virtue. Not that virtue is necessarily a virtue, and in this case it may be a deficit, or maybe the problem is my saying this and it’s not true. I am not eliding collectivity or positionality but trying to adapt both to a poetics of transition that resists characterization and fixed principles. That is the position and the principle, though also subject to internal dissent. In contrast, the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E certainly does exist and is made of related, even if contradictory, poetics and what I see, maybe through prose-­ colored flashes, as phantasmagoric cornucopias of possible poetries. To see the warp and weft of the field, you have to find a way to accommodate such different poets as Mei-­mei Berssenbrugge and Steve McCaffery as constitutive, as keynoters. I have had a hard time coming to terms with the minor outbreaks of nostalgic regionalist autobiographical revisionism. (Everybody talks about memoir, but nobody does anything about it.) But then again all I am is revision. Literary movements that succumb to insularity risk stagnation (in the way that Quaaludes may inhibit sociality). Anyway for me the movement of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is centripetal, outwardly nonnational in its affinity-­ seeking trajectory. At a bilingual reading in Brazil several years ago, Régis Bonvicino (who

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read translations of my work) got us matching black T-­shirts, with “traidor do movimento” inscribed in white Helvetica lettering, and black facemasks (such as those worn by prison gangs in São Paolo) on which were written original (for me) and traitor (for the translator).11 Faithfulness is a fickle business. And diffidence is the price of fidelity. As a theological matter, I prefer low-­fi to high-­fi. That’s been my view all along, but I recognize it as contestable and contested. Which is my point. Legacy is what you call outmoded computer code that has been replaced by new and better code that won’t run on older applications. As you get older you are confronted by the specter of being outmoded or redundant—and that is an almost biological anxiety, irrespective of the actual poetic environment, which just adds injury to the underlying insult. If you lived by creating a space for yourself (yourselves) by undermining what came before you, then you die by that. I don’t think I quite did that, but it goes with the territory no matter how much I may protest. It’s interesting to see some in the younger generation so comfortable embracing group monikers. I was always too hung up for that. I wouldn’t join a group that has members. But then I have done many things I wouldn’t do. I saw the field around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as a temporary constellation aimed at opening up different reading and writing practices. In many ways, the most powerful dynamic was revisionist, pushing for a history of poetry that went against the then dominant one. People come together for a moment, then go different ways (even if they don’t realize they are). Resentment builds because the social economy of poetry is riddled with neglect. Some people become disaffected because things didn’t work out the way they planned. “Et tu, Brute” is practically a byword in my household, along with “have another mezcal.” From those old days new days dawn, darker, but new in spite of themselves. It’s sad to look out and see so much of the company, to use Robert Creeley’s apt phrase, long gone. Bob too. Any way you see it, the company reforms and we keep putting on more shows, which, after all, are as good as ever. As for my own work: I love the ploy where you respond, coyly, “That is for others to say.” It’s a coy ploy. I’m much too coy for that. Since I compose by book, I’d look at the transitions from book to book

11. epc​.buffalo​.edu​/authors​/ bernstein​/ blog​/archive​/cpfl​.html.

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and see what pattern that makes, a network of stoppages in Duchamp’s sense. My work has been peripatetic, and I haven’t repeated the same poetic form over and again, though perhaps I have repeated a set of them. Continuity persists through the variation. Now I am thinking about what I can do next that will be as alive to me as anything I have done. I am in the present of poetry, despite my pesky pasts. I love that some people like my last book as much, maybe more than, any; but I don’t see it that way. I am guided not by what I would like to do but by the limits of what I can do, or, more bluntly, what I cannot not do. In Maggie O’Sullivan’s piece in the recent Salt companion to my work (for which I am grateful to William Allegrezza, the editor, and Chris Emery, the publisher), she takes lines from one of my first poems, “Asylum,” with which I open All the Whiskey in Heaven. “‘Pulled’ failure” (akin to pulled pork, I suppose) is a syncretic phrase Maggie “marks” from the vocabulary of the poem; it might just as well refer to motifs in Recalculating, and— here is what I am getting at—it would have worked perfectly well to start Recalculating with “Asylum.” Maggie takes as her title the Emersonian last line of “Asylum”: “circles from which.” Or pata-­Emersonian—because the circles are vicious (but viscous too). Which contemporary art do you feel closest to? Which do you feel farthest from? I’ve lived a good part of my life with Susan Bee, who is a painter, and have spent lots of time in the company of visual artists and done collaborations with Amy Sillman, Richard Tuttle, Mimi Gross, Jill Moser, and Susan, among others. So painting is a second skin for me. One of the most elaborate collaborations I’ve done is the most recent, with Sillman. For “Duplexities” we did around one hundred image/poem works in which we bounced off each other, so that after a while we couldn’t say which came first, image or poem. Mostly we did “Duplexities” in sets, Amy sending me a series of images, my making poems for each and returning them one by one, then her responding to that by sending me more images. All Amy’s images were done with her pinky on her iPhone—and at first I would look at the image on my Droid and immediately type something back, though after a while I returned to my MacBook Pro laptop (I am hoping The Wolf can collect on the product placements, which I think is a key to small-­ press funding in the coming digital present). So while in most cases I had the image in hand when I was writing the poem, the image is itself a response to previous poems. It’s all echo. We even coined a word, iconophrastic, to go with ekphrastic, for those cases in which Amy was making an image in response to a poem. Out of this grew Pinky’s Rule, an animated

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drawing (on PennSound) with my poem, read by Amy, as soundtrack to her animation, which is made up of thousands more drawings. In that case I based parts of the poem on “stills” from Amy’s ongoing animation, but in the end she set the animation to the completed poem (which was in turn inspired by her images). It’s all very Möbius. As for the second part of your question: there are many genres of writing and media of art that I don’t pay much mind to, but as I try to be more explicit, I feel it reflects poorly on me, and I want to put my best foot forward in this interview. I shouldn’t like your readers to think of me as the curmudgeon I sometimes am. I once told a friend of mine I didn’t much like dance, and she looked at me incredulously, as if to say how can you be such a philistine as to not like something as multifaceted as dance. So let me pass on this one. Has a poem ever persuaded you of something? Poems have persuaded me of nothing, but we’ve been there and possibly even back, no? And then there are the poems that persuaded me while I was reading them, but I didn’t respect them in the morning. Pound did not persuade me about usury nor Eliot about Christianity. Creeley certainly persuaded me of the absolute necessity of his writing his poems in the way he did, that conviction makes poetic matter. And by that token I could say a number of poems have convinced me of the necessity of their forms; maybe that is a criterion of value for me. A lot of poems, most poems I read, persuade me of their lack of merit (not necessarily a bad thing, but often enough), their utter conventionality, their lack of care for the art of poetry. But then who I am to be so goddamn judgmental!? I assume you are asking not about being persuaded about the truth in the experience of the poem but about being persuaded of some didactic proposition. Would that mean the poem would have to be framed as wanting to persuade or else we’d open up a Pandora’s box of persuasive by-­products, aka the real? Jayne Cortez has a poem called “Rape,” and it makes an argument for vigilantism, for revenge, that does persuade me, even if I keep a measure of my ambivalence. Blake remains for me the greatest didactic poet. And he persuades me, over and again, of the danger rationality poses for reason, though perhaps I came to the poem already thinking that. More than likely for me, poems confirm rather than persuade. Yet I do think of my own poems as rhetorical. Is there such a thing as poetic virtue? Can it have a connection to ethical virtue, if such a thing is possible?

288 : Echop oetics

Yes. No. Yes: I think of the virtue in a poem as being the truth in its materials, something like what Zukfosky meant by “sincerity.” No: Not virtuous sentiment but poetic truthfulness. So I would not connect that to moral sentiment: it’s not the job of the poem, the kind of poem I want anyway, to be moral. Poems at their best are mired in compromise, desperation, cowardice, loss, ambivalence, aesthetic turpitude. The worst that has been thought or said: I don’t mean to just be flippantly anti-­Arnoldian; I mean to place the poem in the care, and the recklessness, of the imaginary. Poems, the kinds of poems I want, are not better than “us.” They are us. What are you working on now? Bits and pieces. I am trying to go day to day and see what I come up with, what comes up. I have in mind another essay book, to be called The Pitch of Poetry. Did Jon Lovitz really write the Yellow Pages? And, more importantly, how did you land a role as “The Critic” on those amazing Yellow Pages commercials from the late 1990s?12 I also note that you play a school principal in Finding Forrester—how did that come about? It all ties together. I got the role of Jack Simon in Gus van Sant’s Finding Forrester through someone who was involved with the Yellow Pages ads. Originally van Sant auditioned me for the role of the sadistic prep school teacher, played by F. Murray Abraham in the film. So the part of the principal was a cameo van Sant offered. I’d like to say it was like the William Burroughs cameo in Drugstore Cowboy, but in Finding Forrester the other cameo was by Joey Buttafuoco (for those who don’t recognize the name, I am afraid the sleaze factor is too great for the tone I want for this interview, and I will not, under any circumstance, mention Amy Fisher, no relation to Eddy). For the role of Jack Simon, I could sort of just play myself, after all; they even let me wear my own clothes. As for the Yellow Pages—the filmmaker Jeff Preiss, a longtime friend, and son-­in-­law of Susan Howe, had the idea when he heard me read “Log Rhythms”—which has a bit about all the stores named “Bob’s” in the phone book.13 In those ads I did play myself. But if anyone wrote the book on this, it’s Jeff. It was a fascinating moment for pitching the phone book, 12. writing​.upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/ x​/Yellow​-­Pages​.php. 13. www​.ubu​.com​/contemp​/ bb​/ log​_13​.html and page following. “Log Rhythms” was collected in With Strings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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as the web was basically making obsolete this paradigmatic exemplar of print culture. And my enthusiasm for the Yellow Pages was genuine. From time to time, I am scolded for selling out by doing those ads. I only wish I could sell out more. THIS QUESTION INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK “Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.”

The Pataquerical Imagination Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies A Fantasy in 140 Fits D ramatis P er sonae Edgar Allan Poe Emily Dickinson William Carlos Williams William Blake Hart Crane Walt Whitman Stéphane Mallarmé Ralph Waldo Emerson Ludwig Wittgenstein Fanny Brice Superintendent Fenza & the Graeae1 Countrymen, Cadets, Soldiers, Monkeys, a French Doctor, Porters, an Old Man, Apparitions, Witches, Professors, Poets, Lords, Gentlemen, Ladies, Officers, Murderers, Attendants, and Messengers La palabra más bella del idioma es extranjera Bárbara o Barbara

A preliminary sketch of this essay was presented at “Tendencies: Poetics and Practice,” City University of New York Graduate Center, February 24, 2010, at the invitation of Trace Peterson, and “Rethinking Poetics,” Columbia University, June 11, 2010. Versions of the work were subsequently presented as the Lahey Lecture, Concordia University (Montreal), October 25, 2012; Yale English Department lectures, February 27, 2014; EPC’s twentieth-­anniversary conference, September 12, 2014; and boundary 2’s “The Social Life of Poetic Language,” Dartmouth, May 22, 2015. The essay was completed in January 2015. 1. In this production played by Helen Vendler, Charles Simic, and Walter Benn Michaels.

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Todos los hombres son mortales también el shock lender es El concepto más bello de la lengua ¿Sabotaje? Prestábamos Se lo digo a Usted, no a ellos ​“Búsquense una nueva casi porque la vieja se está des” The most beautiful word of the language is stranger Barbaric or Barbara All men are mortal the shock lender is also The most beautiful concept of the mother tongue Sabotage? We used to lend I tell you, not them ​“Look for a new almost because the old one is dis?” Jorge Santiago Perednik, tr an s. Mol ly W e ige l , f ro m T he Sho c k o f the Lender s

Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic, and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied by) foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness. Ly n He ji ni an , “Barbarism” (The Language of I nquir y )

stehen, im Schatten des Wundenmals in der Luft. to stand, in the shadow of the stigma in the air. Paul Ce l an , tr an s. Pierre J oris

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold— Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Joh n M asefield , “A Con secr ation ”

I. [facsimile] A specter is haunting official verse culture—the specter of pataquericalism. All the forces have entered into a nepohumanist alliance to exorcise this specter: Associated Writing Programs and Pulitzer, New Yorker

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and New York Review of Books, elliptical lyricists and hybrid centrists.2 Over the past two decades, the stranglehold of Cold War scenic-­voice poems has loosened under the pressure of the literary in(ter)ventions of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its partisans to let a soupçon of flowers bloom in official verse culture greenhouses. The forms demonized a few decades ago are now embraced as a mark of new inclusiveness, a fair and balanced approach to poetry styles, marking not the end to poetic ideology but an indefinite cessation. It is high time that pataquericalists should openly, in the face of the whole poetry world, display their views, parade their aims, parody their tendencies, and meet this old husband’s tale of the specter of Bent Studies with a whoosh & higgly hoot & a he-­ho-­hah. The history of all hitherto existing poetry is the history of pataquerical struggles. Normal and perverse, highbred and vernacular, metered and unmetered, versed and averse, national and barbaric, couth and uncouth, proper and wrong, manly and unmanly, black and white, jew and goy, pigeon and sparrow, fancy and imagination, miscegenated and pure, assimilated and ideolectical, dominated and dominatrix—stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of poetry at large or in the triumph of the mediocracy. The modern necrohumane society that has sprouted from the ruins of the poetry wars has not done away with these antagonisms. It has established new hybrids, new conditions of normalcy, new forms of correctness in place of the old ones.

II. I told my wife the water is too shallow. She said, wait till you get to know it better.

III. Com(op)positionality In Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Simon Jarvis counters a corrosive assumption about ideological critique.3 In The German Ideology, Jarvis re2. Nepohumanism (also called necrohumanism and hypohumanism) universalizes one’s immediate preferences while stigmatizing as barbaric those that are not immediately intelligible. 3. Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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minds us, Marx takes to task the idealists known as Young Hegelians for their iconoclastic hubris: the assumption that by debunking false consciousness—idol smashing—they will free themselves from idols once and for all. The mistake of the Young Hegelians was to see debunking as an end in itself rather than as a part of a dialectical process of critique, to take an Emersonian rather than a Marxist swerve, a process that has no terminal point but, like a Klein bottle, doubles back on itself (or like sweaters at the old Klein’s department store, is always on sale at better price). The legacy of romanticism haunts the contemporary imagination of poetry. Romantic ideology, in Jerome McGann’s sense, underwrites the hegemonic ideology of postwar US poetics—that poetry, through its commitment to lyric sincerity (high lyric) and refined craft (high-­bred) can be a universal expression of human sentiment.4 Poetry, in its highest, and often dullest, forms, is able to transcend partisan bickering and divisive position taking. It is a bulwark against the inhuman tyrannies of hypernationalism, fascism, and Pol-­Pot-­Stalin-­Mao-­Tse-­Tung thought: regimes of totalitarian violence that are an affront to humanity. Except that these monstrous irruptions are entirely human and define us as much as moral sentiment or ethical conduct. In our time, the dominant strain of official verse culture is defined by its presumption of being above the fray of special interests, bickering movements, and groups. The recent rise of elliptical and hybrid poetics is a case in point, for this is not a movement but a strategy to contain disruptive and unruly ideological and historical—which is to say aesthetic—­ challenges.5 It is a poetics of assimilation and accommodation, and, as such, is very much in line with the traditional values of much American poetry and poetry criticism of the Cold War. There is no escape from aesthetic ideology, despite the fervent insistence of the fair and balanced idealists in their rejection of excess, dissidence, and oppositionality—that is, aversion of the three q’s: queered, quixotic, querulous. The repression of aesthetic ideology under the banner of convention, accessibility, compromise, refinement, or humanist literary values has the effect of naturalizing the idealists’ unacknowledged posi4. Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See “McGann Agonist” in Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. 5. See American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, ed. David St. John and Cole Swensen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) and Stephen Burt, review of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes, Boston Review 23, no. 3 (September 1998); American Letters & Commentary, no. 11, “The Elliptical Poets” feature (2007). See also Craig Dworkin, “Hypermnesia,” and Brian Reed, “Grammar Trouble,” in “American Poetry after 1975,” a special issue of boundary 2 that I edited (36, no. 3 [Fall 2009]).

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tions and group affiliations. This subliming fosters a poetry of capitulation and compromise whose telltale signs are often stylistic restraint and lyric self-­regulation, which as an aesthetic position could be promising but in a humanist vacuum are merely proto-­professional. This is the difference between craft and method, positivism and the dialogic, Christian universalism and Minute Particulars, homogenization and the syncretic. To imagine that there is a neutral space, a craft of poetry, that is free of ideological domination or contamination is positivism. In poetry culture, it is the most virulent form of ideological self-­deception because it cannot open up to contradiction, difference, or dialectic, that is, to com(op)­ positionality. To transcend ideology, aesthetic partisanship, movement, groups, and positions is to be blinded by idolatry. A poetics is valuable to the degree that it is able to engender other positions in response, both complementary and oppositional. The cyclical triumphalism of postpartisanship in postwar US poetry, insofar as it intends to end the argument rather than foment it, is the most disingenuous form of position taking. This triumphalism mirrors, rather than counters, the avant-­gardism of formalist progress, which eradicates the prior and the other almost as fast as it eradicates itself. Insofar as postpartisan cultural formations align themselves with the dominant forms of poetic practice, both more radical and more conventional at the same time, they will enjoy flickering moments of hegemony, having absorbed into their fold the insurgent counterhegemonic flows of the immediate past. But such postmodern turns in official verse culture can be successful only to the degree that they elide the most challenging and dynamic poetic innovations that are newly emerging or as yet unsettled (including ones that provoke bewilderment, disgust, hostility, and genre concerns). The degree to which the postmodern turn in official verse culture accommodates and contains the radical innovations of the recent past is the degree to which official verse culture is incapable of acknowledging the uncontainable inventions of the ever-­actualizing, ever-­shifting present. The task of bent studies is to move beyond the “experimental” to the untried, necessary, newly forming, provisional, inventive. Innovation resists maps. I want a poetics that rejects the historical avant-­garde’s colonic high ground of single best solution but also rejects its dark twin, the bottom-­feeding low ground of official verse culture’s lobotomization of poetic invention. Conflict is art’s quiver. The pseudoromantic idea of overcoming conflict, camps, antagonism, is the greatest provocation to partisanship. Indeed, the most aggressive

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position, most focused on dominance and control, is one that attempts to defeat conflict in theory, by fiat. The attempt to quell the poetic other is the ultimate provocation to write more poetry and write it otherwise.

IV. Poetry’s best that settles (pleases, eases) least. [False.]

V. Varieties of poetic experience The dialectical possibilities for poetry involve multiple overlapping and discrete sites of activity: the multilectical and multilingual site-­specific/fieldwork appropriation via transcription, reframing, and resiting web data mining ec(h)opoetics—exploring a reciprocal relation between the human and nonhuman, world and earth, as well as a practice of mimicry and repetition within and across human cultures and languages · omnidirectional, homophonic, and heterosemantic translation, transcreation, and remediation, including transposition, resetting, and restaging across media platforms · constraint-­based work · ESL (writing in English by those from non-­English regions, via web-­intensified global affinity clusters) · poetry in programmable media · sound/performance in/as recording (deformations/rearticulations of audio archive) · collaboration · syntactic involution · · · · ·

Along with these are newly emerging in the broad area of “bent poetics”: · disability and the defamiliar and imaginary body · identity formations as/in textual/sexual medium (queerencies) · nude formalisms (distressed metrics) · junk space · ambience · ideolect · sprung lyric

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· mixed/syncretic poetic genres · modularities · music/poetry · visual-­art/poetry collaborations, book art

VI. I like my poetry the way I like my fruitcake: nutty.

VII. The poetic principle The tomb of Edgar Poe is the birthplace of pataquerics. I love the irony that Poe’s poetics—Poe is, after all, an emblematic American writer (to use his term from “The Poetic Principle”)—remains largely unread, its aestheticism roundly rejected (“only this and nothing more”). “The Poetic Principle” (1848) is a founding document of the pataquerical line of American poetics. I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.6

Poe recognized early in American literary history that high-­minded moral and didactic principles suffocate aesthetic creation, as a body buried alive, even in a coffin made of the finest Brazilian mahogany and lined with pages of Longfellow, slowly and painfully loses consciousness. Worse, aversion to transient and nonproductive sensation cripples ethical judgment, as a steady diet of stale bread not only takes away the taste for fresh goods but also makes the habitué of the desiccated contemptuous of flavor. In Poe’s lampooning of poems with superstructural import that rely on ideas rather than “Taste,” moreover that view taste and sensation with suspicion, he echoes William Carlos Williams’s formulation seventy-­five years later, “Say It! No ideas but in things.”7 Ironically, Williams would insert the 6. Edgar A. Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” www​.eapoe​.org​/ works​/essays​/ poetprnb​ .htm. See Jerome McGann’s The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), which restores Poe to his foundational role for American, and nineteenth-­century, poetics; McGann’s breathtaking scholarship makes Poe’s work thrillingly present and hauntingly prescient. 7. William Carlos Williams, “Paterson,” in Collected Poems, vol. 1, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 263–66.

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relatively short multipart poem where his aphorism first appears—indeed he liked the aphorism so much he repeats it three times in that poem— into Paterson, his foray into the long poem form, which, to echo Poe, reads better as a series of short hits than as an epic. Poe’s deadpan insistence that the long poem does not exist rests on Zeno’s paradox by way of The Confidence Man. The logic is impeccable: no matter how much the long poem tries to make a whole greater than its parts, the parts, the “intense” “moments” of “excitement,” as he puts it in “The Poetic Principle” are “when”—not where—“the meanings are,” to quote Dickinson.8 This is a poetics of temporal nowledge rather than atemporal knowledge.

VIII. They say you can’t be a little bit pregnant. So what’s this about extra ­virgin?

IX. Only this and nothing more —Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident split, furrowed, creases, mottled, stained secret—into the body of the light—9

“Nothing but the blank”: while Williams is alluding to the bareness of winter, “nothing but the blank” is “the cry of its occasion / Part of the res itself and not about it” in Wallace Stevens’s famous formulation.10 “Nothing but the blank,” as Williams goes on to evoke it, is the pataquerical sublime: bent, split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained. The words reference themselves, mark their place in the poem, saying no more nor less than their bare enunciation. In “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” Gertrude Stein fires a series of blanks with a “Now. / Not now. / And now. / Now.”11 These nows and nots, which toggle presence and ab8. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), no. 258, 1:185. I discuss a variant reading of this poem below. 9. Williams, “Paterson,” 263, 265; p. 266 (the final lines) quoted below. 10. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” XII: “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it.” 11. Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923), EPC

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sence like a lovesick boy pulling at daisies, attain to a seriality that Poe, in “The Poetic Principle,” terms “brief and indeterminate glimpses,” as a strobe light makes a scene pulsingly vibrant with its flash moments of intoxicating intensity, what Emily Dickinson calls the “art” of stunning oneself with “Bolts of Melody.”12 Poe writes against the viral didacticism of duty-­bound poems. Is it a wild leap to see this quote as relevant to us now, or is that merely the error of an ahistorical rhapsode? It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

“This poem which is a poem and nothing more”: “Only this and nothing more” is Poe’s better-­known pronouncement, from a poem that wraps, rap, raps itself in kitsch to cast an indelible aesthetic spell.13 “Only this

Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Stein​- ­Gertrude​_If​-­I​-­Told​-­Him​_1923​ .html. 12. Poems of Emily Dickinson, no. 505, 2:387–88. I discuss this poem in “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Poe’s “brief and indeterminate glimpses” has a tenuous connection to Walter Benjamin’s observation, in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (On the concept of history), that memories, like pictures of history, occur in flashes: “Das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei. Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten” (The true picture of the past darts by. Like a picture that is never seen again in its instant of recognizability, the past is recorded when, precisely, it flashes up). Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), Bd.1, S. 25–26. 13. See Robin Seguy’s digital edition of “The Raven” interwoven with the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarmé at www​.text​-­works​.org​/Texts​/Poe​/Raven​_data ​/RavenEdNote​.xhtml.

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and nothing more” marks its words’ being in time, scores their presence, the utterance of immediacy, phatic (but not vatic) haecceity. It is the motto, as Poe insists, of art for art’s sake, art without ulterior purpose, in and as its presence in sound, its immediate, present (gift) of rhythm and “nevermore” echo. Nothing/never: an echoic negation of all but the event of sound and rime as sublime and blank, full and empty, here / not here. The thing itself: “Nameless here for evermore”? A present absence, now / not now, the “shivering” (Poe’s word) making loss palpable. Dare I name her? Lenore. A figure of speech, that is all. (Craig Dworkin takes up some twentieth-­century examples, such as John Cage’s “4′33″” in No Medium.) “Le Corbeau dit: Jamais plus,” as they say in France, at least in the signal translations of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Baudelaire translates: “Only this and nothing more” as “ce n’est que cela, et rien de plus,” while for Mallarmé the line becomes simply “cela seul et rien de plus.” In “Un coup de Dés” Mallarmé gives his own version of Poe’s insignia “cela seul et rien de plus” with silent insinuation: in the sixth spread, top left bottom right, mirrored, italic is “COMME SI ”—as if—but also like so and like this, nothing more, marking a self-­reflective “shivering delight” in the poem, if not to say in the echo, a perfect semblance of a mise en abyme.14 Four spreads later, on the upper left, on its own, is “RIEN,” followed by a possible commentary on the crisis of its occasion (“de la mémorable crise / ou se fût / l’événement”). After all, what might seem to be the first word in “Coup de Dés,” at the top of the third spread, is the Raven’s echo: JAMAIS.

Dickinson, the antinomian in Susan Howe’s account, hears it: “Nothing is the force / That renovates the World.”15

X. Farai un vers de dreyt nien. (Will make a poem of pure nothingness) Gu i l l aume of Aquatain e (11 th cen t u ry) , tr an s. Pi erre Joris 16 14. This is my son Felix’s current favorite term. Once you start to see them, they multiply like rabbits. 15. Poems of Emily Dickinson, no. 1563, 3:1077. I discuss this poem in “The Wolf Interview” with Stephen Ross, in this collection. 16. Pierre Joris, “The Work of Al-­Ishhk,” in Poasis: Poems 1986–1999 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 27.

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XI. Poetry is a weak thing and that is its strength.

XII. The human abstract

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There is nothing so rank it does not smell of man. The human is not an honorific but a transcendental stain, an animalady that shines brighter the more we rub it.17 Humane poetry partakes of the gospel of “Pity,” “The Human Abstract” in Blake’s sense: a viral form of “Cruelty” emanating from the “Human Brain.” Pity is a parasite nested in the humane, feeding off the abstraction of “Poor” to fabricate the feeling of being better off, call it the pharmakon of condescension. Emerson echoes Blake when he writes, in “Self-­ Reliance” (1841), “Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-­day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?”18 (Pity does not change income inequality, mercy does not change racially skewed incarceration. Human[e] is prophylactic against the human.) In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida dwells on the double sense of pharmakon (drug) as both poison and medicine. For Blake and Emerson, pity is a pharmakon for our animalady: salve (or remedy) for the desolation at the plight of the poor, poison (or malady) in scapegoating those so stigmatized.19 Our affective presence to the poor (sympathy) is also our affective absence (having paid off our obligation in sentiment or cash). It’s a relief the poor are on relief. Stigmatizing is a healing ritual of purification that poisons the ostracized. Affect, to come back to Blake on Pity and Mercy in “The Human Abstract,” is “the fruit of Deceit. / Rudy and sweet to eat”: a viral abstraction enfolded in “dismal shade.”20

17. Animalady might be defined, provisionally, as the human malady of being and resisting being animal. See “Close Listening” in My Way: Speeches and Poems. 18. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-­Reliance,” www​.rwe​.org​/complete​-­works​/ ii​- ­essays ​-­i​/ ii​-­self​-­reliance​.html. In his second Tanner lecture at Harvard University, “Myself as Stranger: Empathy and Loss” (April 9, 2014), Rowan Williams provides an illuminating commentary on Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love,” Cavell’s essay on King Lear in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969). Williams argues that empathy (when understood as a measurable cognitive state) is ethically insufficient because it rests on a model of affect as reception rather than acknowledgment as doing (or performance). 19. This double sense of drug is vernacular: the scourge of drugs versus miracle drugs. Pharmakós, as Derrida explains in his detailed account, is the ancient Greek rite of antiabsorption in which the pharmakeus (sorcerer, magician, poisoner, healer, druggist, sophist) casts out the pharmakoi (denigrated, scapegoat, exiled, ostracized). See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xxv, 70–75, 82, 97, 119. 20. Textual transcription of William Blake, “The Human Abstract,” from Songs

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Nor is the answer inhumane poetry: my transgressions comfort too, making me feel I am the better person on account of them. I pity those less daring than me. I pity myself, if truth be told. And make a pitiful show of it. The metaphor of the humanitarian or of universal human sentiment is based on a mythopoetic distinction between humans and nonhuman animals: our virtue compared to their barbarity, our self-­consciousness compared to their (relative, brute) unselfconsciousness. As Marc Shell has observed, those who subscribe to universal human fraternity cast out of the human family those who don’t adopt their universal religion.21 Humans may feel (or inflict) guilt or shame, but they just as often fail to feel guilty or ashamed. Is that a failure or a success? The absence of affect is an affect. The absence of feeling had itself to be felt. Language is a trait that differentiates human and nonhuman animals; as such it is a primary justification for human exceptionalism. Then again, language is like a pharmakon—a remedy and curse, a tool for truthfulness and for deception: there is never a document of culture that is not at the same time barbaric.22 If, as William Burroughs says, language is a virus, it is not because of its inherent metaphoricity but because of the denial of this all-­too-­human condition.23

of Innocence and Experience (1794),44; from the collection of the Yale Center for British Arts, reproduced in The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (2008): 21. See Marc Shell, “Marranos (Pigs), or From Coexistence to Toleration,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991). 22. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (On the concept of history), cited above: “Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein.” 23. Burroughs develops this idea in The Ticket That Exploded (1957–61): “From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-­vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.” Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove, 1998), 208.

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The unbearable sentimentality of human self-­regard. (“A Species stands beyond . . .”)24 It is not the truth of the human we seek but its animalady. (Our prehumanness may be more repressed than how we became posthuman.) “The Raven his nest has made,” says Blake, in the “thickest shade” of tree that “bears the fruit of Deceit.” Poe’s “nevermore” is an echo of Blake’s “Pity would be no more.” Williams again, the final lines of “Paterson”: They are the divisions and imbalances of his whole concept, made small by pity and desire, they are—no ideas beside the facts—

This is what poetry looks like.

XIII. We are most familiar with the estranged.

XII. “The Human Abstract” has several discrepant frames in the form of background images: there is no definitive version of the poem but rather a series of intertwined emanations. Each frame offers a variant reading of the poem. Indeed, the poem does not exist as a purely alphabet entity; there is no original poem, only these manifestations, a series of ostensive versions or aspects.25 “The Human Abstract,” one of Blake’s Songs of Experience, echoes “The Divine Image” in Songs of Innocence, where pity has a “human face” in which God dwells. Yet when Blake, even in his intimations of innocence, recognizes that the “human form divine” must extend beyond the nepohumanist horizon, that is, must recognize itself not only in fellow Christians or those inside a received circle of recognitions: And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk, or jew.

24. Poems of Emily Dickinson, no. 501, 2:384–85. 25. See Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-­visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1987).

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Blake begins in innocence. While I—I find myself in the company of those for whom innocence is an alluring—not to say blinding or incapacitating—fantasy emanating from the pitch of the dark, neither origin nor destination.

XIV. Tarr & Fether A Poe work crucial to Bent Studies is “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1844).26 As you will recall from our earlier meetings of the Society for the Devolution of Midrashic Antinomianism, Poe’s tale takes place at a “Mad-­House” in the south of France, though the literal translation of “Maison de Santé” is not mad house but the reverse, house of health. Poe’s tale rests on this reversal. The lunatic asylum in the story is radically progressive, practicing a method based on indulging the delusions of the inmates, neither punishing nor contradicting them. This “soothing” method is the basis for a pataqueroid utopia in which no standard of normalcy is enforced. As explained earlier (though perhaps you were out of the room): it came to pass that there was an insurrection in the madhouse. The lunatics imprisoned the keepers, whose liberal treatment via amelioration was replaced by the violent introduction of a harsher, symbolically dehumanizing/ostracizing treatment plan: tarring and feathering. Poe’s narrator, a naive visitor to the asylum, is deluded by the madmen’s claim that they are sane, and so he disregards the doglike howling of the captured keepers. But the visitor does find something “odd,” as he says, indeed “a little queer,” about the counterfeit sanity of his hosts. However, he is reassured that those now in charge are not mad by the putative “superintendent of the establishment,” Monsieur Maillard. Maillard, it turns out, is a former superintendent who had gone mad while working at the asylum and has now resumed his role as superintendent—but as one of the insurrectionists. Maillard is one of those perennial supers who can work for whatever regime is power. (The dear reader will recall that Poe wrote decades before Freud, and yet a certain relation of the figure of Monsieur Maillard to the superego cannot be completely shaken.) “Why, do you really think so?” Maillard asks the narrator: do you really think something is not right with us? “—We are not very prudish, to be sure, here in the South—do pretty much as we please—enjoy life, and all that

26. Quotations from the 1844 manuscript: www​ .eapoe​ .org​ / works​ / info​ / pt053​ .htm.

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sort of thing, you know.” At the end of Poe’s yarn, order is restored, or so we are led to believe. Poe’s narrator describes the scene in the dining hall at the time of the counterrevolution: “As for my old friend, Madame Joyeuse, I really could have wept for the poor lady, she appeared so terribly perplexed. All she did, however, was to stand up in a corner, by the fire-­place, and sing out incessantly, at the top of her voice, ‘Cock-­a-­doodle-­de-­dooooooh!’” The ostensive keepers regain control and return to their system of soothing. But there is a telltale sign that something is rotten in France (and not just as a consequence of the French Revolution or capitalism). The narrator describes a “fighting, stamping, scratching, and howling” among the counterrevolutionaries who, pele-­mêle, join the fray to successfully overthrow the usurpers and restore order: they are, he says, “a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-­Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good Hope!” Before jumping to conclusions, pele-­mêle, please keep in mind that many of the ostensive lunatics in the story imagine themselves to be nonhuman animals: frog, donkey, and rooster. As to Superintendent Maillard, it would be prudent to ask, “Why a duck?” For his double character—super turned sub turned sub playing super—turns on context. Poe invents Wittgenstein’s “duck/rabbit” avant la lettre.27 Poe draws his moral midway in the tale, noting that the greatest danger from the truly mad man is that he is able to conceal his madness: “If he has a project in view, he conceals his design with a marvellous wisdom; and the dexterity with which he counterfeits sanity, presents, to the metaphysician, one of the most singular problems in the study of mind. When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight [sic] jacket.” On its non-­Levinasian face, “Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” is a Hegelian parody of the master–­slave relation and of the mythopoetics of progress. The darker truth of “Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” is not the Foucauldian one that the insane and sane are not essential categories, that if you want to valorize a group designated as sane you need to stigmatize and scapegoat a group designated as insane. That parasitic relation is, no doubt, foundational for bent studies. Poe’s uncanny revelation is that the insane are perfect mimes of rational order, normalcy, reasonable authority, and 27. The figure was first published in Fliegende Blatter, October 23, 1892, 147, and formed the basis for Joseph Jastrow’s 1899 study, which in turn became the basis for Wittgenstein’s discussion of the ambiguous (“or reversible, or bistable”) figure in Philosophical Investigations. See John F. Kihlstrom, “Joseph Jastrow and His Duck—Or Is It a Rabbit?” (2004), socrates​.berkeley​.edu​/​~kihlstrm​/JastrowDuck​ .htm.

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medical compassion. They have convinced us that they have overcome the insurrection of the lunatics and restored order and they have taken over the reins of power. Our protests—that we are falsely designated mad!— are humored but rendered mute. That is our treatment. Our keepers have donned their “straight” jackets and rendered us all “queer” (in that “we enjoy life” and “do pretty much as we please”). That our society is in the hands of a “perfect army” of predators, primitives, is neither paranoia nor a metaphor. Whitman, in one of his greatest poems, and surely his most dystopian, knows how it works: Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak; Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions! . . . Let faces and theories be turn’d inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results! . . . Let the theory of America be management, caste, comparison! (Say! what other theory would you?) . . . Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! Every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!28

“Cock-­a-­doodle-­de-­dooooooh!”

XV. There is another train directly behind this one.

XXVI. Expression by other means Craig Dworkin, in his introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, the work he edited with Kenneth Goldsmith, emphasizes the importance of framing in determining the reading of any work. Dworkin’s focus on the primacy of framing brings to mind Erving Goffman’s exemplary practice of “frame analysis.”29 28. Whitman, “Respondez!”: 1867 version of “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness” in the 1856 Leaves of Grass, www​.whitmanarchive​.org​/ published​/LG​/1867 ​/poems​/126. See Vaclav Paris’s essay on this poem in Arizona Quarterly Review 69, no. 3 (Autumn 2013). 29. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Poetry (Evanston: Northwest University Place, 2011). Erving Goff-

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Goffman’s counterintuitive idea is that an “event” (including an art “object”) does not speak for itself but is recognizable only by its frame or context. For this reason, the discussion about an event can exceed the duration of the “event” itself. An event, or work of art, like a dream, may elicit multiple—incommensurable or discrepant—frames. Some frames are sticky, become stigma. Frames are cued or keyed, and, for Goffman, what is out-­of-­frame is often (in the end) most significant: what is is defined by what it isn’t. Goffman’s frames are related to ideology (in Louis Althusser’s sense) and also to “metaphors we live by” and categories (in George Lakoff ’s sense): frames are the lens, the language, through which we perceive/value. Think of how Wittgenstein proposes the fundamental nature of “seeing as” in Philosophical Investigations. One of the hallmarks of Frame Analysis is Goffman’s obsession with frauds, which he analyzes as undetected changes of frame: in a crap game, the mark keeps his eyes peeled on the handling of the dice, while out of frame are the winking eye signals of the con men. All poetry, IMHO, is a con, but some cons are more evocative than others. And some cons help us to learn to dodge better. Goldsmith, a trickster figure par excellence, touches on this in his introduction to Against Expression, where he makes fun of Oprah-­pitched memoir frauds.30 He notes that such literary frauds have not taken hold in the art world, which, at present, is less invested in subjective “originality” than in market signature. Which only means that in the art world you have to look for other kinds of fraud, perpetuated by a system that is based on establishing market values as opposed to discovering aesthetic merit. Dworkin and Goldsmith are good collaborators because, though they surely share an enthusiasm for the work collected in this anthology, their approaches to poetics have always been so very different. Dworkin’s social formalist commentaries and compendia are both provocative and mesmerizing. He gives detailed readings of forms, structures, and bibliographic codes (rather than themes and subject matter), with special attention to potentially unnoticed discrepancies, elucidating the warp and woof of a series of hard-­core and uncanny art practices in which the “remove of literature” (erasure of signal, voiding of medium, foregrounding of paratext) opens the floodgates of a sublimely nude poetics of blank: the noise of silence. (“Nothing but the blank”: “only this and nothing more.”) man, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). 30. “Why Conceptual Writing?,” xx. See my discussion of frauds in “Fraud’s Phantoms,” in Attack of the Difficult Poems.

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Dworkin is an ingenious reader; he shows a profound engagement with extreme textual practices, writing that stresses the limits of legibility, comprehension, and perceptibility. What’s profound about Dworkin’s approach is its ecstatic superficiality: he refuses to jump to conclusions, putting a conventional reading or envisionment of the poem in suspension so he can observe textual anomalies and counterintuitive semantic flows. Dworkin tells you not what you already know, or can see for yourself, but what goes undetected until recognized. There is an athletic struggle in many of his hyper-­close readings; one senses that his search for meaning requires singular focus and uncanny endurance. Dworkin’s essays are often about finding meaning—finding expression—in textual dynamics or traces that most of us would overlook, indeed, which the author might also have not been fully aware of (or aware of at all). Dworkin excavates meaning and expression in what Goffman calls the disattend track: the place where you are not looking. The result is that Dworkin finds a surplus of meaning in the folds of textual production; who or what is “expressing” this becomes an issue that he often, as a constraint, refuses to address. In contrast, Goldsmith sometimes likes to say you don’t need to read his work, all you need to do is get the concept. With Dworkin in mind, I take this to mean you need to reread the work, read it pataquerically, against the grain (against habitual reading habits), and look for the way it swerves from its proposed course. “By looking beyond received histories and commonplace affiliations one could more clearly see textual elements that otherwise remained obscured or implicit,” Dworkin writes in the anthology’s introduction. “The simple act of reframing seemed to refresh one’s view of even familiar works, which appear significantly different by virtue of their new context” (xxiv). Dworkin responds to those who may want to take the title Against Expression a tad too literally, imagining that the claim is that the works in the anthology are not as expressive as those in other poetry anthologies. For the last forty years, the argument has been that a certain formulaic linguistically I-­centered, conceptually sovereign-­self-­centered lyric is a barrier to affect and expression. Pataquerical poetry is not antilyric, antivoice, antihuman, antisubjectivity, antimeaning, antiself; it just doesn’t buy that the conceptually empty genre rules for much of official verse culture allow for expressions, voicings, and our “it’s complicated” selves. To be “against expression,” in the necrohumanist sense of expression, is to be for expressions in the wider field of the bent studies. Expression by other means. This is clear when Dworkin writes, “Our emphasis is on work that does not seek to express unique, coherent, or consistent individual psycholo-

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gies and that, moreover, refuses familiar strategies of authorial control” (xliii). The delightful polemic kicks in when Dworkin insists that methods of “noninterference” and “minimal intervention” are preferred: “Frequently, we had to admit that works we admired were not quite right for this collection because they were simply too creative—they had too much authorial intervention, however masterful or stylish that intervention might be” (xliv). A whole heap of masterful intervention was necessary to create the anthology. And while the intention may be more in complex framing choices than in individual word choices, stylish intervention it nonetheless is. I recall Jackson Mac Low being pained by his work’s being described as derived by “chance” rather than being, in his phrase, quasi-­intentional. That’s where I see Dworkin’s calling card as a critic: hyperclose reading, and classification, of quasi-­intentional linguistic phenomena. This is not an evasion of reading or intervention but a raising of the stakes and a sometimes ecstatic commitment to the power of framing. Dworkin writes that the poetry he anthologizes “is neither depersonalized nor unemotional. Rather, the formal conceit attempts to discover or more closely approach emotional conditions by avoiding the habits, clichés, and sentimentality of conventional expressivist rhetoric” (8).

XXXIII. Anaesthestics The turn away from beauty or emotion, like the aversion of identity or expression, may be both a response to the shallowness of what is accepted as beautiful or emotional and a mark of the search for beauty or affect, a beauty or affect not already trapped and tamed. For if you say what I find beautiful is worthless, then I may say I reject beauty, but that is just a measure of my recognition of how categories of the beautiful anesthetize you from the experience of beauty. For some, it is only in renouncing the beautiful that the possibility of beauty opens. And those of you who lament this turn away from beauty or emotion, compulsively proclaiming its return, do not and perhaps cannot understand what it is to be outside the script, dead as you are to sensation, oblivious to beauties that cannot be dreamt of in your moralities. And I mean that you in the most personal possible way.

XL. Disclaimer The views in this essay do not necessarily represent the opinions of, and should not be attributed to, the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department, Donald T. Regan, Ronald Reagan, Bernice Johnson Reagon, or the author. The views expressed are solely those of the essay.

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XLI. Irremediation [facsimile] Samuel R. Delany makes a compelling case that the homosexual dimensions of Hart Crane’s poetry are inadequately addressed in the critical and biographical literature. His two essays on Crane provide an interpretive frame for understanding Crane’s detractors. Extending Delany’s intervention, I would say that Crane’s “splendid failure,” as R. P. Blackmur puts it in “Notes on a Text of Hart Crane,” might more provocatively be understood as his irresplendent success as pataquerical.31 Perhaps the most careful account of Crane’s failure is first laid out in Yvor Winters’s quite extraordinary [1943] essay, “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X.” . . . There Winters relates Crane’s enterprise to the pernicious and maniagenic [sic] ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson via the irreligious pantheism (read: relativism . . .) of Whitman and the glossolomania of Mallarmé. . . . It is important to realize that the rejection—or at least the condemnation—of Crane, for Winters as well as for many of Crane’s critics, was the rejection and condemnation of an entire romantic current in American literary production, a current that included Whitman and Emerson, with Crane only as its latest cracked and misguided voice. (“Atlantis Rose,” 192)

For his moralist critics, Crane’s poem fails as a unified whole, becoming at best a series of overwrought highlights and disconnected lyric bursts that cannot sustain themselves. “Only this and nothing more.” But it is just this lack that, on Poe’s terms in “The Poetic Principle,” marks the long poem’s only possible attainment: providing unrequited moments of “shivering delight”: I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this 31. Samuel R. Delany, “Atlantis Rose: Some Notes on Hart Crane,” in Longer Views: Extended Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Delany discusses Blackmur’s essay on pp. 192–91. He acknowledges his debt to Lee Edelman’s Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987) on pp. 191–92. A related Delany work on which I have relied in this section is unpublished: Delany’s extended review and critique of Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane. “A Centennial Life from the Roaring Twenties” was first presented at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on January 25, 2007; audio available at PennSound, writing​.upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/ x​ /Crane​.php. Delany provided me a copy of the manuscript.

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elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal [sic] necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags— fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.

I want to apply Poe’s flashpoint aesthetics (“brief and indeterminate glimpses”) to Delany’s insistence on the fact that for Crane the Brooklyn Bridge was an active gay cruising site; that is, a place of intense, promiscuous, transient, nonprocreative sexual exchange. “Cutty Sark,” says Delany of the third section of Crane’s poem, “with its account of the unsuccessful pick-­up, is the true center of unspoken homosexual longing, the yearning for communication, in The Bridge” (221). The aesthetic power of The Bridge occurs not in spite of, but in connection to, its immediate (moralists would say perverse) bursts of sensation, analogous to transient sexual exchanges on the bridge. My point is not to use aesthetic process as a metaphor for sex but the other way around; indeed, Delany gives a very different frame for “failure” (animalady) as drawing a blank, in other words “unsuccessful pick-­up,” fueling the aesthetic fire (“only this and nothing more”). Moreover, this aesthetic of elevated, intense excitement, in Poe’s terms, let’s call it immediation, relates to Crane’s habit of listening on his phonograph, over and over again, to the climax of Ravel’s Boléro, as if bolts of melody could obliterate self-­consciousness.32 But a better word for what I am after is irremediation, which registers irremediable failure within an echoic poetics: “never more.” “Focus on the loss: I once was timed, but now I am fixed rate.”33 In poetry’s negative economy, loss prolongs intensification. Crane and Poe are in the same boat, without life preservers. The argument against Poe and Crane is pursued, with paradigmatic force, by Yvor Winters in Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937) and In Defense of Reason (1947) and extends to William Logan’s 2007 trashing of Crane’s, yes, “failure,” in the New York Times review of the Library of America’s magisterial edition of Crane: 32. Brian Reed, “Hart Crane’s Victrola,” Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 1 (2000). Re‑ searching any prior use of the term immediation, I discovered an article by Chris‑ toph Brunner, “Immediation as Process and Practice of Signaletic Mattering,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 4 (2012), www​.aestheticsandculture​.net​/ index​ .php​/ jac​/article​/view​/18154​/22833. 33. “Explicit Version Number Required,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems, 191.

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Much of “The Bridge” seems inert now—overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney. . . . His grandeurs might easily be mistaken for grandiosity. . . . He was drawn to a high-­amp schmaltziness he must have taken as the proper emotional tone for a visionary. . . . “The Bridge” remains a fabulous architectural blueprint that wanted a discipline Crane could never provide.34

Logan, the Times’s go-­to enforcer of Cold War ideology, becomes, by means of his ostensive Superintendency, a figure of bathos, trapped under a headline perhaps not of his own making—“Hart Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere”—unable to acknowledge that nowhere is just where Crane and his readers might want to be. Crane knew the type. As he writes in his 1926 letter to Harriet Monroe: The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past.35

“Cock-­a-­doodle-­de-­dooooooh!”

XLVI. Unlike sincerity, insincerity is at least pointed toward truth. That is where the sin is.

XLVII. I’m special, who are you? It’s funny. In Portuguese esquisito means something exquisitely different from exquisito in Spanish.36 Funny odd or funny peculiar? Pataquericals are markers of stigmatized difference. In order for a difference to be stigmatized or scapegoated, it first needs to be noticed, 34. William Logan, “Hart Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere,” New York Times Book Review, January 28, 2007, 18. 35. english​.illinois​.edu​/ maps​/ poets​/a​_f​/crane​/ metaphor​.htm. The letter also appears in the Library of America edition of Crane. 36. Christina Hesketh pointed this out to me: the Portuguese means bizarre, the Spanish is close to the English equivalent.

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much the way language is called to (or put on) notice when it is used in poetry (at least in one way of defining poetry). The pataquericals in my lists are negatives. But negatives have a queer way of becoming positives, especially for those for whom such tactical reversals might create a space of greater freedom, as Michel de Certeau discusses in Ars de Faire (arts of doing, or The Practice of Everyday Life). Reverse pataquericals are honorific rather than stigmatic terms for things that fall out or don’t fit in: innovator, rebel, extraordinary, exceptional, iconoclast, genius, or the one made so exemplary in its ordinariness by Mr. Rogers, special, which, after all, is not without its de Certeauian or Blakean spin, if we take special to mean Particular.37 Another kind of reverse pataqueasical is simply to take on the stigma as a badge of honor, if not with pride then with defiance (as when pataquericals become literary terms or, paradigmatically, in the case of queer). Stumpling clumpsiness for one, the eloquence of the gods for ’nother. However, a more frequent response to stigma is internalize it, which is the basis of what, in Jewish Self-­Hatred, Sander Gillman calls self-­hatred, a form of self-­scapegoating.38 Then again, the American way is assimilation: if thy nose offend, fix it (I am avoiding saying “cut it off ” as I don’t want to descend into a crude castration fantasy). In these investigations I am less interested in sexual difference than in aesthetic difference and, specifically, the way the sexual and sociocultural differences are articulated symbolically, or allegorically, within an aesthetic field such as a poem.

L. The extraordinary is never more than an extension of the ordinary.

37. “You are special / You are my friend / You’re special to me. / You are the only one like you.” Fred Rogers, “You Are Special” (1967), pbskids​.org​/rogers​/ songLyricsYouAreSpecial​.html. This inevitably also brings up the euphemism “special needs.” We’re all special and all have special needs. Pataquerical euphemisms substitute positive attributes for stigmatized negative attributes: challenged for deficient. 38. I discuss Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-­Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) in My Way: Speeches and Poems, 37, 188, 216. See also Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

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LVIII. Absorption’s a queer thing Ludwig Wittgenstein is the philosopher of conventional, ordinary, normal language, so it’s funny that he has been so fundamental to me, a poet of the pataquerulous kind. Wittgenstein is acutely conscious of those moments when ordinary language seems to fail as it falls out with the ordinary, for example, when a term of art (that is to say, a term in use) becomes abstractly metaphysical, or when we lose our way with words, becoming alienated or skeptical. Wittgenstein tracks the way words and expressions go from unremarkable to odd: the familiar becoming strange. Me, I love the rhythm of falling in and out of sense, like a needle skipping on a record. “Now. / Not now. / And now. / Now.” How exquisitely awkward. Wittgenstein practices philosophy as something dialogic; philosophical questions arise in response to perceived issues in the course of everyday life. The terms of philosophy take on their meaning in specific situations. Wittgenstein is wary of centering philosophy on a set of mastered abstract or monovalent technical names. When philosophy presses on words to become terminologically precise, something queer happens. The words fall out of everyday use, sticking out like sore thumbs. This is the obverse of what happens in poetry when language is defamiliarized. In poetry, the obtrusiveness (aversion to absorption) is the secret of rime and rhythm, and indeed to the art (or is it a kind of aesthetic shock treatment or method of intoxication?) of stunning with bolts of melody. Poetry’s magic, to call it that, is to transform the queer instantiation of wordness from malady to melody. In Wittgenstein’s time, queer would have meant gay, though he surely did not intend for that to be a coded reference to his putative homosexuality.39 For the first English version of Philosophical Investigations, Elizabeth Anscombe translated both merkwürdig and seltsam as queer, but neither of those German words suggests homosexuality. That’s queer. In the revised fourth edition of Philosophical Investigations, the new

39. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), Ray Monk reports that a friend of Wittgenstein asked “whether he thought his work as a philosopher, even his being a philosopher, had anything to do with his homosexuality. What was implied was that Wittgenstein’s work as a philosopher may in some way have been a device to hide from his homosexuality. Wittgenstein dismissed the question with anger in his voice: ‘Certainly not!’ ” (567).

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editors eliminate queer from their translation.40 That’s queer because in the letters Wittgenstein wrote to his Cambridge associates, he uses queer about twenty times in a way that is consistent with Anscombe’s translation, though in his letters he also speaks of feeling queer: I have occasional queer states of nervous instability about which I’ll only say that they’re rotten while they last. . . . I’m feeling queer. One cause of this is that my nights aren’t good, but there are other causes. . . . This is a queer letter, but no queerer than its writer.41

In German you might say schwul for gay, and it wouldn’t be queer at all to just say queer nowadays. Perhaps in Wittgenstein’s day you might hear such pataque(e)ricals as widernatürlich or unnatürlich (against nature or unnatural), abnormal, krankhaft (sick), perhaps even, and closer to the point here, ungewöhnlich (uncommon/anomalous).42 Wittgenstein uses ungewöhnlich just once in Investigations, where he speaks of an ungewöhnlich lighting that makes something familiar unrecognizable (§41). The only time he uses unnatürlich is to characterize using words out of context (§595). (Widernatürlich does not appear in Investigations.) (I consult Investigations the way some people consult the I Ching: as an oracle.) Merkwürdig means something that calls itself to our notice, that’s worth looking at, something strange, curious, odd, weird, or unlikely. Seltsam, normally a synonym of merkwürdig, suggests something rare, indescribable, or ungraspable, so incongruous, bizarre, funny, altered, unexpected, surprising, funny, something that doesn’t immediately scan.

40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edition ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Walden, MA: Blackwell, 2009). The new editors note: “[Elizabeth] Anscombe translated seltsam and merkwürdig by ‘queer.’ We have translated seltsam by ‘odd,’ ‘strange,’ or ‘curious,’ and merkwürdig by ‘remarkable,’ ‘strange,’ ‘curious’ or ‘extraordinary.’” (xiii). See also the third edition of Anscombe’s translation (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 41. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951, ed. Brian McGuinness (Boston: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2008): the first excerpt is from a letter to Norman Malcolm on May 2, 1948, letter no. 380, p. 422; the second is from a letter to Rush Rhees, August 20, 1948, letter no. 433, p. 392. 42. Information on German usage thanks to Norbert Lange, who responded to my questions in two e-­mails on February 15, 2014.

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94. “A proposition is a queer thing!” [Der Satz, ein merkwürdiges Ding!] Here we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves.— For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras. (§94, Anscombe trans.)

A phrase, a queer thing!43 When we look at language as “actual word stuff,”44 to use Williams’s phrase, it’s queered, averting the ordinary way in which phrases become transparent,—that is, it is sublimed (absorbed) in perception. Such subliming or immediation occurs even though language is conditioning perception: we don’t notice the lens in our glasses unless the lens is scratched or because of ungewöhnlich (unordinary) lighting. In poetry, this desubliming (failure to connect) may be rhythmically entwined to moments of intensification and, ultimately, resubliming.45 In other words, the desire for absorption is a desire to overcome, or counter, animalady (alienation or estrangement, irremediation). Wittgenstein uses one of the two words translated by Anscombe as “queer” in situations where there is a resistance to propositions/naming as fixed mapping of a word on a thing, at moments of tension between naming and that which is named. When we “sublime” the nature our language we idealize it: we think our nouns are the adequate symbols for the fluid world we live in. Naming, then, can be a kind of stigma if we sublime or idealize the fit between names and the world. When seen in their queeroid dimensions, Wittgenstein’s remarks take on an uncanny directness about the violence of naming and its connection to stigma.46 This person, the one standing before you, the one you are yourself, is never one thing. But some people, and from time to time all of us, become frame-­locked, stuck on one aspect of a “this”—causing what Wittgenstein calls aspect blindness (Aspektblinde). Once a single aspect is stigmatized, it becomes 43. Lange notes that with the removal of the comma, the comic element of the sentence is diminished. 44. The Correspondence of Williams Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 544 (1928). 45. This line of thinking is pursued in “Artifice of Absorption” in A Poetics: sublimed is absorbed; queered is antiabsorptive; pataquerical is syncretic hyperabsorption (oscillating absorption and impenetrability). 46. See “Characterization” in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1985).

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difficult to break free of the stigma. Wittgenstein wonders if this could be compared to color blindness: something that is often on display as aesthetic blindness, where work is stigmatized because the reader or viewer or critic gets hung up.47

LIX. This argument is a simulation for demonstration only. Actual arguments may vary. Do not attempt to try this simulation in your own vehicle.

LXI. Debunking debunking Pataquericals are aversive to what Wittgenstein calls “ostensive definitions”: manifest and fixed connections between names and things, meaning and objects, as when we point to a this.48 (Only this and nothing more.) It’s queer, he notes, that a figure will look one way in one context and another way in a different contexts. The duck/rabbit is the paradigmatic pataquerical figure because it is more than meets the eye: our “aspect blindness” may cue us to see it one way rather than other. What it “is” we never can see in a single moment in the eye. We may be able to perceive it all at once, but we see it serially (oscillating dialectically). Wittgenstein compares the inability to see things without contextual cues to not having “perfect pitch.”49 We don’t see the thing itself but see as, see with and through our metaphoric frames. It is our animalady to suffer from frame lock. Aspect blindness is a rigid adherence to one reading or interpretation of a figure (or poem), a repression of the necessity for context to establish meaning (and for different frames to establish potentially incommensurable meanings). This view is sometimes stigmatized as relativism, or in terms of poetry, as nihilism or aversion of meaning or affect. Wittgenstein suggests that the problem is not in the context dependence of meaning but in stigmatizing (getting stuck on) an ordinary feature of language.

47. Wittgenstein discusses “aspect blindness” in The Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment (formally called part 2 of Investigations) and included in the 4th ed.: §§257, 258, 260. 48. Philosophical Investigations, §§6, 9, 28–38. 49. §257, The Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, in Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed.

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In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer [seltsamen] process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.) (§196, trans. Anscombe)

What’s queer is that we sublime “the logic of our language” (§38) from its everyday, context-­dependent use into axiomatic system of rigid correspondences, which has the effect of creating chimeras (two-­dimensional stick figures) in place of living beings. The chimera that holds us captive is that perception does not require mediation: when we reach out to touch it, thinking it is the living proof, it dissolves in our hands, leaving a faint mist in its place. In Wittgenstein’s account, ostensive definitions map nouns onto the world, as if the fact of the existence of objects in the world pushes language toward deambiguation: a compulsive (dis-­eased) state of trying to strip language to its essentials, as if it were a set of labels for a preexisting world. But what, for example, is the word “this” the name of in [a] language-­game . . . or the word “that” in the ostensive definition “that is called . . .”?—If you do not want to produce confusion you will do best not to call these words names at all.—Yet, [queer / merkwürdigerweise] to say, the word “this” has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense. . . . Naming appears as a queer [seltsame] connection of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer [seltsame] connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word “this” innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the word “this” to the object, as it were address the object as “this”—a queer [seltsamer] use of this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy. (§38, trans. Anscombe)

Only this! Perception is evermore remediated: remediation precedes essence. Or as Preston Sturges puts it in Christmas in July: “If you can’t sleep at night it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk.” Debunking had itself to be debunked.

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LXVI. In unum pluribus Despite my misleading rhetoric, I am not suggesting that all differences are the same and form a unified aesthetic alternative of the experimental, unconventional, innovative, avant-­garde kind; indeed, these terms are themselves reverse pataquericals. No, I am interested in how stigma informs aesthetic practices, provides a context and social grounding for what otherwise appear as formal or abstract choices. I am also intent on stigmatizing—looking twice at—certain unmarked choices as a better way to read the formal choices made. I think of these antiabsorptive approaches in terms of Ostranenie (defamiliarization, making strange) and Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). In aversive poetics, the concept is the destabilization (derailment) of the norm or standard or dominant: stigmatizing the norm does not overthrow all values but rather returns values to “agreements in judgments.”50 This may involve reconvening. Counterhegemony is not an end in itself but a dialectical method toward, to invoke Stanley Cavell invoking Emerson, “this new yet unapproachable America.”51 Emerson approaches Poe when he writes, in “Experience,” that the “approaching traveller” is “first apprised of . . . vicinity to a new and excellent region of life . . . as it were

50. “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer [seltsam] as this may sound) in judgments.” “Zur Verständigung durch die Sprache gehört nicht nur eine Übereinstimmung in den Definitionen, sondern (so seltsam dies klingen mag) eine Übereinstimmung in den Urteilen” (§242). 51. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989). The title is taken from Emerson’s “Experience” (1844): “And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.” www​.rwe​.org​/complete​-­works​ /iii​- ­essays​-­ii​/ ii​- ­experience​.html. Gerald Bruns points to Cavell’s engagement with Poe (and I should add Emerson) in “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe)” in his 1988 collection In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bruns quotes Cavell—“to speak of something called the perverse as containing this imp [Poe’s ‘The Imp of the Perverse’] is to speak of language itself, specifically English, as the perverse.” Bruns comments: “The basic fact of language (and hence of poetry and literature generally) is what Plato, and many after him, warned us against, namely its demonic materiality.” Bruns, review of Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature by David Rudrum, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, December 1, 2014, ndpr​.nd​.edu​/news​ /54378​-­stanley​- ­cavell​-­and​-­the​- ­claim​- ­of​-­literature.

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in flashes of light. . . . But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequence.” We’re not there yet. Emerson begins “Experience,” “Where do we find ourselves? In a series . . .” Dickinson echoes: “A sequel—stands beyond.”52 In place of E pluribus unum (from many one), let’s try seriality’s motto, In unum pluribus, in one many, but also, In pluribus unum, within many one. We are all stigma now.

LXVII. Normalization is the perversion of the normal. The ordinary is bound to convention but not by it. The ordinary is not duty bound.

LXIX. Stray marks In “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values” (1993), Susan Howe makes a compelling argument that fundamental aspects of Dickinson’s poems fail to appear in the official editions of her work because the editors have been blind to them.53 52. This is a possible alternate reading of Dickinson, no. 501, cited above. 53. Susan Howe’s “These Flames . . .” was collected in The Birth-­Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer.upenn​ .edu​ / library​ /Howe/. Her sity Press, 1993). EPC digital edition, writing​ views have recently gained greater purchase due to the 2012 publication of reproductions and transcriptions of Dickinson’s writings on envelopes in The Gorgeous Nothings and the related show at New York’s Drawing Center. See Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-­Poems (New York: Granary Books, 2012), reprinted by New Directions (2013) with a preface by Susan Howe. The Drawing Center (New York) hosted a book party for Gorgeous Nothings at which Howe, Bervin, and Werner spoke (November 23, 2104) as part of an unusual show, in a visual art context of Dickinson’s holographic “envelope” manuscripts from the Amherst College collection (the Dickinson material was shown along with holographs of Robert Walser at Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches, November 15, 2013—Jan. 12, 2014). The adjacent, main show at the Drawing Center, Drawing Time, Reading Time, curated by Claire Gilman, focused on “exploring the relationship between drawing and writing as distinct yet interrelated gestures” and so implicitly underscored Howe’s view of Dickinson’s holographs as akin to (but not the same as) drawing. As part of the show I introduced a presentation by Robert Grenier of his hand-­drawn poems ( January 6, 2014). Note Holland

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Howe argues for the significance of the spatial arrangement of words and lines on Dickinson’s holograph pages (unlike the case with almost all other authors, there is no publishing history of Dickinson’s poems that can resolve the question of her intentions). Howe looks at Dickinson’s holographs as drawings, marks on a page; she applies this seeing as to her reading of the poems as linguistic works. To sublime, in Wittgenstein’s sense, the logic of sumptuary values into a system of semantic or publishing norms is to miss Dickinson’s unsettling antinomian swerves, which is to say, their pataquericality. While we can’t arrive at a singular, true, final version of her poems, reading the poems through possibly incommensurable frames opens onto their seriality. As Dickinson virtually writes, the world—but it is also true of any single version or interpretation of the poem—“is not conclusion / a sequel—stands beyond.” Walter Benn Michaels debunks Howe’s claim to find significance in Dickinson’s “stray marks” (Howe’s telling pataquerical term), for in his view stray stays stray and can be safely disregarded.54 He sees a kind of primitivism, a regression to nonhuman perception (of a “wild man”) in Howe’s “material vision” based on “sensory appearance” severed from use or purpose (Michaels gets his key terms here from Kant and Paul DeMan): “editorial activities like arranging the poems in stanzas and editorial decisions like ignoring ‘stray marks’ seem to Howe to limit Dickinson’s meanings by ‘repress[ing] the physical immediacy’ [Howe’s term] of the poems.” By reading what might well be “accidental” as significant, Howe (like Craig Dworkin’s reading against the grain) undermines intention and leaves us, for Michaels, with a valorization of “nonsense” and “gibberish”—two primary pataquericals. “Dickinson’s ‘meaning,’ ” says Michaels, is aligned with “grace rather than works”—which doesn’t sound kosher to me. But then we have seen the problem these textual wild beasts have caused before. Michaels is

Cotter’s sympathetic response to the Dickinson show in the New York Times, “A Poet Who Pushed (and Recycled) the Envelope: ‘The Gorgeous Nothings’ Shows Dickinson’s ‘Envelope Poems,’” December 6, 2013, C32. Werner has done the most significant research on this topic, following her work with Howe at SUNY-­Buffalo: Howe directed Werner’s 1993 thesis, “Quires of Light: Emily Dickinson—Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing” (I served on the committee and learned from both). See Werner’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996). 54. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2, 5. In The Secret History of the Dividing Line (Guilford, CT: Telephone Books, 1978), Howe situates herself between two Marks, her father and son.

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nothing if not dogged in his distrust of midrashic antinomianism, and like an American Sancho Panza he makes a habit of charging at chimeras. This is the price of being an aesthetic—“show me, I’m from Missouri”— nativist. In “The Poetic Principle,” Poe writes: “He must be theory-­mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.” For to be against theory is to be theory mad beyond redemption.55

LXX. Wee wee wee all the way homeless.

LXXIII. Anti–­bachelor machines As a term for poetic constructions, bachelor machine suggests nonproductive, nonprocreative, onanistic processes, vicious (or self-­enclosing/collapsing) circles, an apparatus that is unable to get outside itself. There is a connection to délire (delirium, with special reference to Jean-­Jacques Lecercle)—that which goes astray, deviates from the rational, errs, raves.56 Though perhaps it would be better to call pataque(e)rics an anti–­bachelor machine. The term “bachelor machine” (machine célibataire) comes from Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (the lower part of the “Large Glass,” e.g., “Chocolate Grinder”). Michel Carrouges (in his book Machines célibataires) extended the term to incorporate the disciplinary apparatus of Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony and also to Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, and some of Poe’s machines as well, and, crucially, to the work of Alfred Jarry. This formulation has been adapted by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-­Oedipus and also by Michel de Certeau in Ars de Faire.57 55. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 56. For more on dèlire, see Jean-­Jacques LeCercle, Philosophy through the Looking-­ Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985). 57. I provide a list of my own anti–­bachelor machines at “What, Me Conceptual?,” with special reference to “Recantorium: A Bachelor Machine after Duchamp after Kafka,” writing​.upenn​.edu​/ pennsound​/ x​/Bernstein​-­Tucson​.html. “Recantorium” was collected in Attack of the Difficult Poems. See Michel Carrouges, Machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954, 2nd ed. 1976). De Certeau discusses the “celibate machines” of Jarry, Roussel, Duchamp, and Kafka in The Practice of Everyday Life

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XC. Pataqueronormativities I just want to be like everyone else like me. The history of art, no less than the history of societies, is replete with the normalization of stigmas. From time to time, as moral and aesthetic values change, poetics and persons previously subject to negative judgment by those who evaluate poetry in terms of dutifulness and virtue are redeemed. For Young Hegelian debunkers, such redemption inaugurates a rule of renormalization (subliming), in which the aims of art remain duty and morality; but now it is a new, ethically improved morality and a radicalized, purified aesthetic duty that reigns.58 But aesthetics is not a tool of morality, nor is it bound to it or by it. Aesthetics is not applied ethics. It is practically an Ironclad® law of nature that new orthodoxies replace old ones,59 just as it is a delusion of starry-­eyed romanticism to think anything else is possible. Yet think we must for a growing imaginary.

XCIV. This section intentionally left blank.

XCVII. Who knows where or when? Some things that happen for the first time Seem to be happening again

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 150–53. Deleuze and Guattari discuss “celibate machines” in Anti-­Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 17–19. See also Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass. 58. For a case study, see “Disfiguring Abstraction” in this collection. The Hegelian orthodontics of the avant-­garde was exemplified in a discussion at a planning meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, discussed in the essay. My suggestions that the most radical and contradictory energies of modernist art were at risk of being contained by museum abstraction were rebuffed in a telling instance of how aesthetically challenging art can been subsumed into the new normal. Avant-­ garde poetry and art, by definition, are susceptible to the lure of the pataqueronormative: it is, for us, as powerful as the sirens for Odysseus. 59. “The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head / And became a Tyrant in his stead,” as Blake succinctly puts it in “The Gray Monk.” I read the poem here: www​.rc​.umd​ .edu​/pop​-­blog​/charles​-­bernstein​-­reads​- ­grey​-­monk​-­william​-­blake.

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And so it seems that we have met before And laughed before, and loved before But who knows where or when? L ore nz Hart

There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter afternoons— that oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral tunes— Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference When the Meanings, are— None may teach it Any— ’tis the Seal despair— An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air— When it comes, the Landscape listens— Shadows—hold their breath— When it goes, ’tis like the distance On the look of death—.60

According to all previously published versions, the eighth line of Dickinson’s “There is a certain Slant of light” begins “Where the Meanings, are.” However, the holograph manuscript seems to tell a different story. Dickinson appears to have written When, not Where, as the first word of the eighth line: But internal difference When the Meanings, are—

I see no internal difference between the three whens in the holograph. Here’s the eighth line: 60. My transcription of the Dickinson holograph (ca. 1861), from fascicle 13, reproduced in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and published by Johnson as no. 258, 1:185. A version of the work was first published in 1890 in the Roberts Brothers first edition of Dickinson’s poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, numbered XXXI but otherwise untitled; it is the last poem in the sequence titled “Nature.” The third line in this version is given as “That oppresses, like the weight.”

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Compare that to the beginnings of lines 13 and 15 in the same holograph, which are always transcribed as When:61

It’s a startling difference, suggesting that meaning is a matter of duration, not place, and that internal difference, including in the spacing and other material features of Dickinson’s manuscript, opens up meaning as a serial process that is wrested from acts of reading and interpretation. It is no surprise that Dickinson would sound this Emersonian note, anticipating as she does here, and in the fascicles more generally, what we have come to call serial poetry. Dickinson also seems to be suggesting, avant la lettre, that language is a system in which difference produces meanings, not synchronically, as in a where, but diachronically, across time, in a when. Vive la difference, bien sur: because the perception of difference as a when is engendered by an experience of difference, the acute angle, or slant, of perception that comes from a skepticism located in and as the gap between two people as they try and often fail to connect (irremediation). The resistance to reading Dickinson outside of assumed frames of graphic presentation and meaning is a version of what Wittgenstein calls “aspect blindness”: when/where (or the holograph / typographically standardized) is a textual version of the duck/rabbit figure. Different assumptions produce different poems; frame lock occurs when there is a resistance to acknowledging the possibility of other versions cued by different frames or to rule out the possibility there may be no single stable solution, no fixed “original,” but rather an array of versions. Certainly there is ambiguity in the choice, and which choice is made is 61. I queried Ralph Franklin on this alternate reading (personal communication, October 15, 2005); he replied that the where reading was supported by close differentiation of the way Dickinson formed her ns and rs and pointed to a comparison with “I know some lonely houses” in the same fascicle (p. 259 of the Manuscript Books): Where in the eighth line and the n in Wooden in the fourth line. However, other comparisons underscore a different reading. Consider the standard identification of when and where from fasc. 16, ca. 1862, the poem Johnson numbers 327, lines 16 and 20, where the two words are clearly differentiated and when looks as it does in “There is a certain Slant of light.” See these and other examples at writing​.upenn​.edu​/ bernstein​/misc​/ED​-­slant​.html.

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determined by our expectations: a picture holds us captive about what the poem should be saying and how it should look, based on our internalized models. It is an imperial illusion that admits of no variants, that discounts stray marks as so much poetic fluff. Incommensurable frames (external difference) create different meanings (internal difference). This poem is about versions, about highlighting one version to the exclusion of others, about suppressing difference—plurality—because of frame lock. It has taken so long to see and hear Dickinson. We know neither when nor where to encounter her work because it is projected outward, into a future that we keep coming toward, but at which we are unable to arrive. “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.” In Dickinson, new forms of significance emerge as we scan the material traces she has left.

XCVIII. Polis is tears.62

XCIX. The prison house of official verse culture In a commencement address at Bennington College, “Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing: The Words and the Bees,” D. W. Fenza, executive director of Associate Writing Programs, told the assembled young writers that it is “morally repugnant” to question the merits of the literary prize system.63 Immoral is boilerplate for a cold warrior; repugnant gives the remark its pataque(e)rical bona fides. But his more significant insinuation, in this context, is that those who profess the work of “Wittgenstein, Marx, Foucault, hooks, Fanon, Lacan, Spivak, Lyotard, Kristeva, Poulet, Butler, and Gertrude Stein” are akin to insect parasites. Fenza’s encyclical, published in the official house organ he edits (so here official verse culture is not a metaphor), went out to virtually every graduate creative writer teacher in the US. In it, he blasted me for emitting “the noxious air of literary politicking” without apparently recognizing his 62. Content’s Dream, 137n18, echoing Charles Olson’s “polis is / eyes” in “Letter 6,” The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 30. 63. D. W. Fenza, “Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing: The Words and the Bees,” Writer’s Chronicle 38, no. 6 (May/Summer 2006). I quote from pp. 3, 4, and 8. I have spoken at AWP’s convention just once, where I presented a parodic recapitulation of “Recantorium” with reference to Fenza’s commencement address: jacket2​.org​/commentary​/ recantorium​-­adapted​-­2013​-­awp​- ­convention.

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own production of noxious airs. Fenza takes exception to a remark in my memorial essay for Creeley where I speak of “neatly laundered poems of the poet laureates and Pulitzers.”64 He then goes on to list recent laureates and Pulitzer winners, commenting, “To suggest, as Bernstein does, [that these poets write] complacently in ‘uniformitarianism’ [sic] . . . it’s rather extreme; it’s the demagoguery of a tone-­deaf poetics; and, I feel, it’s morally repugnant.” Fenza confuses aesthetic difference with blasphemy. Compare Fenza’s moral outrage at my “demagogic” lumping together a decade’s worth of generic prize-­winning poets to his lumping together a century’s worth of philosophy and poetics. The insect metaphor is the basic conceit of the commencement address (the section quoted is called “Beware the Ichneumonids”). Fenza argues that “literary theorists and cultural critics,” such as Marjorie Perloff and me, who teach the list of proscribed authors are analogous to “ichneumonids . . . parasites with peculiar habits of breeding.” He offers this explanation to his audience of creative writing teachers and students: “An ichneumonid wasp, for instance, uses her ovipositor to inject her egg into the back of a caterpillar.” Readers of Al Filreis’s Counter-­revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry 1945–1960 will find Fenza’s language familiar. A 1948 New York Times Magazine article speaks of modernist poetry as if it were a “mosquito that sucks your blood”—in other words, a “parasite that must be contained.” An article in the Saturday Review in 1952 describes Stein’s work as a “yellow fever” that “must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection.”65

64. The Creeley essay is collected in this book. Fenza is offended by my remark that Creeley offers “a bulwark against poetic uniformitarianism and complacency.” 65. Counter-­revolution of the Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 205–7. I discuss this book in “Anything Goes” in Attack of the Difficult Poems. Dehumanization is a staple of attacks against Barack Obama. In the summer of 2010, in the heat of the presidential election campaign, Ted Nugent evoked Poe’s “perfect army of . . . Chimpanzees”: “I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame, enough Americans to be ever-­vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-­raised, communist-­educated, communist-­nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.” No doubt he was winking, but he still ran into difficulties, even though “mongrel” is a possible reverse pataquerical and was used by Obama himself in this way (though not without controversy when he did). See Charles Blow, “Accommodating Divisiveness,” New York Times, February 21, 2014, A19. See also “Presi-

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In his 2013 annual report to AWP, Fenza promoted as a motto for his organization a century-­old quote from Walter Lippman: “The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.”66 Fenza’s ahistorical appropriation of this quote is meant to dismiss formal innovation and promote cultural containment (one from many): not resistance via difference but assimilation via absorption. But contra Fenza’s interpretation, Lippman was arguing in 1914 for the continued need for American radical inventiveness, new ideas, and “intellectual revolt” (191) and against its “irreconcilable enemy,” classicism: Let it be understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which living tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their manifestations. [In contrast] the man whom I call here the classicalist cannot possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be nothing new under the sun. (187)

Fenza feeds on husks humming his “nothing new under the sun” mantra. In contrast, Lippman was suggesting that the new wave of immigrants would be a necessary dynamic force for America. In a disser-

dent Obama Calls African-­Americans a ‘Mongrel People,’ ” The Hill, July 29, 2010, thehill​.com​/ homenews​/administration​/111611​-­obama​- ­calls​-­african​-­americans​-­a​ -­mongrel​-­people-­. On the TV show The View ( July 29, 2010), Obama said of African Americans: “We are sort of a mongrel people. I mean we’re all kinds of mixed up. That’s actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it.” While mongrel suggests menacing and barbaric, insect suggests something more fundamentally alien. Rush Limbaugh has accused Obama of wanting to infect America with the deadly Ebola virus, while Michael Savage dubbed him “President Ebola” (www​.npr​.org ​/2014​/10​/09​/354890869​/ in​-­u​-­s​- ­ebola​-­turns​-­from​- ­a​-­public​-­health​ -­issue​-­to​-­a​-­political​- ­one). This relates to the stigma of the angry black man as a demonic “it,” as in the September 16, 2014, grand jury testimony of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer’s killing of Michael Brown Jr.: “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry it looks, that’s how angry he looked.” (documentcloud​.org​/documents​/1370494​- ­grand​-­jury​-­volume​-­5​.html). 66. Cited by Amy Paeth in “State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945– 2015,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015. The Fenza report is at awpwriter​ .org​/application​/ public​/ pdf​/AWPAnnualReport13​.pdf. Lippman is quoted from Preface to Politics (New York: Mitchell-­Kennerley, 1914), 189.

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tation on the postwar development of “state verse culture,” Amy Paeth juxtaposes Fenza’s quote to a discussion of Robert Frost’s 1942 “The Gift Outright,” which Frost read at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. The poem famously begins “The land was ours before we were the land’s”: Paeth notes its “ahistorical temporality,” that is, the desire to “possess” a wilderness that is misrepresented as blank or empty. Such a wilderness must be settled by “dispossession,” that is, the erasure of alterity.67 The limits of a nepohumanist ideal for poetry is that work that does not meet one’s aesthetic approval is stigmatized as nonhuman, unintelligible, barbaric because there is, to return to Marc Shell’s formulation of the limit of Christian tolerance, no adequate account of the nonsibling human. All of the professing of feeling and human warmth gives way to the hard boot: the barbaric yawp is OK only if it is “our” barbaric yawp. All great poetry is universal or transcendent, they say, but great is a reference to quality only within a particular, and unacknowledged, aesthetic ideology.68 For Fenza and his coconspirators, the only thing they recognize as nondogmatic is their own dogma.

C. Ladies and gentlemen, if you see someone at risk of falling on the tracks, please call for assistance.

CII. The Tell-­Tale Heart If I were King of the Forest . . . Each rabbit would show respect to me. The chipmunks genuflect to me. Though my tail would lash, I would show compash For every underling!69

67. Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright,” poetryfoundation​.org​/ poem​/237942. Bob Perelman and Derek Walcott discuss the poem at MAPS, english​.illinois​.edu​/ maps​/ poets​/a​_f​/frost​/gift​.htm. See also Susan Howe, The Birth-­Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), and “Artifice of Absorption” in A Poetics. 68. In “Towards a Translation Culture” (2011), Lawrence Venuti takes this up from the point of view of an institutional preference for “belletristic” translations that are resistant to reflecting on their poetics. M-­Dash, mdash​-­ahb​.org​/ the​ -­translation​-­forum​/1​-­towards​-­a​-­translation​- ­culture. 69. E. Y. (Yip) Harburg from The Wizard of Oz (1939); a second-­wave modernist, born Isidore Hochberg (1896–1981).

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Official verse culture presents itself as being free from agendas, releasing its editors and prize givers from the need to pre­sent alternative points of view or to acknowledge the partisan nature of their approach to poetry. Agendas are what other people have. Consider this from a 2006 profile of Helen Vendler in the New York Times Book Review: In the early ’70s, as editor of the Book Review, [John] Leonard was having trouble navigating the insular world of poetry. Poets “would never tell you if you’d asked them to review their best friend or worst enemy or ex-­lover,” Leonard recalled. “There was always some agenda, and I could never figure out what it was.” So he hired Vendler to vet the flood of poetry books, reviewing some herself and suggesting reviewers for others. All this was done quietly. “We just couldn’t tell anyone,” Leonard said. “It would put her under enormous pressure.”70

There is a delightful doublethink here: it seems like Leonard is saying he wants to free the Book Review of agendas, but he could also be saying that he needed to find a person could assure that the right agenda was followed. Vendler went on to be appointed poetry critic of the New Yorker in 1978 and later became a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. As she moved between the Times, New Yorker, and NYRB, she was not content just to put forward her own agenda; she was also vitriolic in her denunciations of work that challenged it. The pattern was set in her 1973 Times review of America: A Prophecy, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha, which proved her ideological bone fides for her subsequent New Yorker appointment. In his response, Rothenberg notes that Vendler’s diatribe represents an active, parochial and deeply entrenched attempt to keep the mind within what many of us have come to feel as intolerable limits. . . . To love a particular poetry is one thing; to assert its absolute supremacy over [other traditions] is another. Yet such is the genteel madness of certain academics, that they go on forever . . . with a mindless reliance on words like “great” and “best.”71 70. Rachel Donadio, “The Closest Reader,” New York Times Book Review, December 10, 2006. This article provides the date of Vendler’s New Yorker appointment. Leonard is speaking of personal rather than aesthetic agendas, but the Cold War rhetoric of freedom from agendas is most striking because it represses the bait-­ and-­switch. 71. Helen Vendler, review of America: A Prophecy, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha, New York Times Book Review, December 30, 1973, and Jerome

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Vendler’s reliance on “great” and “best” fuels her mocking the inclusion in the anthology of “H.D., Zukofsky, Rexroth, Oppen, Fearing, Patchen, Olson, Duncan, . . . Harry Crosby, . . . Else von Freytag-­Loringhoven, Marsden Hartley, . . . Lorine Neidecker, Mina Loy, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, . . . Sadakichi Hartmann.”72 But—heh!—what a great list of poets! Vendler pulls no punches in her lifelong battle against the scourge of bent studies: “Never mind, dear reader, that you never thought Marcel Duchamp belonged in an anthology of American Poetry, or that anonymous schizophrenics did either.” Flash forward to David Remnick, the New Yorker’s current editor, describing his agenda-­free appointment of Paul Muldoon as the magazine’s poetry editor in 2007: “It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of. . . . Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job.”73 Official verse culture legitimates itself by denying (or naturalizing) its positions. Only a very commanding agenda for the poems and commentary published over the past quarter-­century could have so successfully steered this magazine clear of so many significant developments in poetry and poetics and toward many poems and essays on poetry that seem mystifyingly mediocre for those who don’t share the magazine’s poetic agenda. No doubt this is analogous to how publications that share my agenda look to those who don’t; but, in practice, most oppositional poetry publications flaunt, rather than deny, that they have pitch. In the mother of all postwar oppositional agendas, Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” (1950), Olson writes, in a slap in the face to the American Cold War gambit

Rothenberg, Book Review letter to the editor, January 27, 1974. Disclosure: Vendler includes me in the ranks of the unintelligible in a passing dismissal in a June 12, 2008, review of Jorie Graham, “A Powerful, Strong Torrent”: “And Graham, unlike such Language Poets as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe (whose moment seems to have expired), always rewardingly makes sense, whatever her acrobatics.” (Neither Howe’s, Rothenberg’s, nor my work has ever been reviewed in NYRB.) 72. Vendler’s negative review of Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of American Poetry in New York Review of Books (November 24, 2011) created an unprecedented mainstream backlash against Vendler. But it should be noted that Vendler was a prominent proponent of Dove and that Dove in her anthology largely follows Vendler’s proscriptions as given in the quoted review: only three of these mocked poets (H.D., Olson, and Duncan) are included. For a summary of Vendler’s canonical praise of Dove, from a writer sympathetic to her, see thenewyorkerandme​.blogspot​.com​/2011​/12​/ rita​- ­dove​-­plays​-­race​- ­card​.html. 73. Motika Rich, “Pulitzer Winner to Take Over as New Yorker’s Poetry Editor,” New York Times, September 20, 2007, E3.

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of, well, projecting dogmas on everyone but oneself: “So there we are, fast, there’s the dogma.”74 Robert Creeley, echoing Wallace Stevens’s “It Must Be Abstract” and “It Must Change,” makes the point explicit: “Blasting at indoctrination, Olson blasts with a thunderous indoctrination. He insists that it must be dogmatic.”75 But official verse culture legitimizes itself not just by insisting that it is superior because agenda free but also, at the same time, tokenizing poets who fall outside its aesthetic center of gravity. John Ashbery often is used as just such a token. And I am too, though not as often as I’d like: All right, Mr. Remnick, I’m ready for my close-­up. Meanwhile, at NYRB, Charles Simic offered another exemplary shaming of the bent poetics of stray marks, which, according to Simic (concurring with AWP director Fenza), has been corrupted by contact with “French cultural and literary theory”: “If you were stuck in prison, what would you rather have under your pillow: a volume by Emily Dickinson or one by Gertrude Stein?”76 If I were in jail, I would probably want to read a manual on how to appeal my case or, if not, how to break out. The context for Simic’s ideological agenda is fleshed out in his coeditor Sean O’Brien’s introduction to New British Poetry. O’Brien trashes British poetry that challenges the aesthetic status quo. The introduction proudly claims that such “incomprehensible” “Postmodern” work, replete with “confusion and disorientation,” is excluded from the anthology, which is dedicated to put forward “the UK Mainstream.”77 Yet the publisher turns this clear declaration of partisanship into an Orwellian claim that the anthology is “definitive.”78 For Simic, we are still living in the Cold War, in which poetry’s value is to assert its essential and universal humanness. Just as Vendler’s ostracizing of iconoclastic poets shows her inability to grasp the cultural and historical richness of American poetry traditions, Simic’s stigmatizing Stein while iconizing Dickinson reveals his inability to grapple with either. His 74. Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 241. Olson understood dogma as the “firm persuasion” of the animate voice (417), which, rhetorically, can be contrasted that with the prototypical deanimated New Yorker poem. 75. Introduction to Olson’s Collected Prose, xv. I quote the subtitles to Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” 76. Charles Simic, “Getting the World into Poems,” New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010. Simic appears to be NYRB’s designated poetry critic, though Vendler continues to pitch in. 77. New British Poetry (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004). 78. www​.graywolfpress​.org​/ books​/new​-­british​-­poetry.

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is a jailer’s view of art. Poetry is to be written by soothing asylum keepers for the benefit of the incarcerated. Such an approach to poetry sacrifices aesthetics in the name of Duty, even sacrificing Duty for dutifulness. I dwell on these publications and critics because I think that they, along with the national prizes, do matter for poetry in our culture, but mostly in the negative sense: they make poetry seem culturally dull, more concerned with civic uplift or memoir than aesthetic invention, even when this betrays the aesthetics of the poets being championed.79 Official verse culture is not fifty years behind poetry (it has yet to catch up with the 1950s) or one hundred (radical modernism still too radical); it’s timelessly off the mark. Still, don’t get me wrong (even if I am wrong or do you wrong): not only do I want to be part of the conversation, I want the poets I most care about to be included too. Moreover, my own secure digital cabana within official verse culture gives me the standing (when not crawling) to make my critique without being written off as just another jilted lover (which is what I am, let’s face it). Nor do I believe that the critics and prize givers with whom I disagree are “morally repugnant” or that the poets they champion should be treated as “anonymous schizophrenics.” As noted, debunkers, per se, are no better than the debunked; in Poe’s story the inmates, after the insurrection, are harsher to their keepers than the other way ’round. And what of the claim of editors that their poetry coverage is agenda free in its quest for a consensus view of “the best”? If you are an anonymous schizophrenic, a queeroid woman, a perverse formalist, articulating in your work “confusion and disorientation,” then there is a certain slant of darkness that oppresses like the cleft of cathedral prayer. But perhaps the problem with these periodicals is less a matter of commitment to one kind of poetry than a profound indifference to poetry, based on a sense that it is more a form of lyric decoration than a site of Mental Fight. For such editors, poetry should be pitched to those who prefer not to read poetry. Indeed, there is a constant chatter in the massed media that “difficult” poetry has taken over the field to the detriment of “accessible” poetry, which is too often (and mistakenly) identified with 79. The prestige of the awards, like the cultural importance of the New Yorker and NYRB, is not bound to poetry; neither the awards nor the magazines would qualify for a prize based on their historical record of their poetry preferences, but then that is not significant to these organizations, for whom poetry is a loss leader, a colorful bit of fluff, or then again a dollop of moral fiber, wrapping paper for the main acts, whether journalism, history, visual art, fiction, or cartoons. But then if all you know about poetry is who wins the major prizes and what these publications present, what else could you think?

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bland poetry. In their campaigns against the pataquerulous, these editors, and the small group of their officious critics, end up marginalizing the approaches to poetry they advocate by dehistoricizing and deformalizing them. Their estimation that poetry is culturally insignificant underlies the decisions and revisions in respect to their poetry coverage. But wait . . . don’t you hear it? The tell-­tale heart of poesy beating “louder—louder—louder!” under the floorboards laid by official verse culture? How much longer will it be before the moment arrives when the Simics & Vendlers, Benn Michaels & Fenzas can bear to “dissemble” no longer and “shriek”— “I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of [its] hideous heart!”80

For, dear reader, don’t you yet see that these are the insurrectionists, who claim to be stewards of values they actively work to destroy? Reader! I implore you to listen before it’s too late! The lunatics have imprisoned us and say that we are deviants, monkeys, insects, anonymous schizophrenics!

CV. In Praise of Disfluency To be crippled means to be institutionalized, infantilized, unemployed, outcast, feared, marginalized, fetishized, desexualized, stared at, excluded, silenced, aborted, sterilized, stuck, discounted, teased, voiceless, disrespected, raped, isolated, undereducated, made into a metaphor or an example. To be crippled means to be referred to as retard, cute, helpless, lame, bound, stupid, drunk, idiot, a burden on society, in/valid. To be crippled means to be discounted as a commodity or regarded as mere commodity. Jennif er Bart let t, A uto b io gr aphy/ A nti - ­A u t obiog r a p h y 81

80. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-­Tale Heart” (1843), www​.eapoe​.org​/ works​/reading /​ pt043r1​.htm. See, earlier in this book, Thomas McEvilley’s “hideous flowers of the grave,” which echoes Baudelaire’s “fleurs du mal.” In Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), Benjamin Friedlander recasts Poe’s reviews with contemporary literary subjects. 81. (Palmyra, NY: theenk Boooks, 2014), 11. See Bartlett’s preface to Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos, 2011) and the inter‑ view with her at Jacket 2: jacket2.0rg/?q=commentary/jennifer-­bartlett- ­conver sation-­jane-­joritz-­nakagawa.

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The poetics of disfluency and disability is the horizon for a querical poetics of de-­arrangement.82 For the purposes of these quarrelsome quarries, I am less interested in narratives of social/cultural identities or disabilities than in how such frames (and the experiences they embody) transform both the writing and reading of poems: difference making for difference, not difference expressed through sameness. This is a theme explicitly taken up by Amanda Baggs in her video In My Language.83 Baggs divides the video into two parts. The first aims to pre­ sent a primary experience of autistic consciousness; it resembles works of radically deranged art but is framed as expressive of Baggs’s state of mind and modes of perceptual grappling and communication. The second part of the video is a pata-­translation of the first part into more normative language, which has the effect of framing the first part not as unintelligible but as otherwise intelligible. Charges that Baggs’s video is a fraud, that she is not really autistic, which Baggs documents on her website,84 add a devilish twist to the work, since the humanist need to pity authenticated suffering metamorphoses into a virtual Tarr and Fethering by her accusers. If Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932) remains the signature work of pataqueasical scopophilia, our age demands its freak shows “tamed by Miltown” into memoirs whose reliability is comparable to (and often as financially advantageous as) junk bonds.85 Browning’s cinema creates a Brechtian self-­consciousness on the part of the viewer via repulsion and fascination; Chaplin’s Little Tramp is the converse, eliciting empathy and identification, without pity. Baudelaire’s “À une mendiante rousse” remains the paradigm for the aversion of objectification. In “Pastoral,” Williams’s approach to the “the houses / of the very poor” is exquisitely oblique: the “weathered,” haphazard scene “smeared a bluish green” oc-

82. See Michael Davidson’s groundbreaking, Concerto for Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 83. www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​JnylM1hI2jc. The video has received over one million views. See also David Wolman, “The Truth about Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know,” Wired 16.03 (February 25, 2008), archive​.wired​ .com​/medtech​/ health​/magazine​/16​-­03​/ff​_autism​?currentPage​=​all. 84. abaggs​.blogspot​.com. 85. “The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace . . . / Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries / Of the inward gaze; / Better mendacities / Than the classics in paraphrase! . . . / A prose kinema.” Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920), EPC Digital Library, writing​.upenn​.edu​/ library​/Pound​_Ezra​_Hugh​ _Selwyn​_Mauberly​.html. “Tamed by Miltown” is from Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

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cludes voyeurism.86 In contemporary poetics, Leslie Scalapino’s “Bum Series” (Way, 1988) revisits this dynamic voyeurism and displacement to create an ontological space for turning toward (averting aversion).87 Following Blake and Emerson, Baggs turns pity back onto the beholder as she holds her own ground. “In My Language” turns many of the tropes and quirks of defamiliarizing poetry on their head, returning the metaphors to their source—or rather returning the source to its metaphors and to its criteria, in Wittgenstein’s sense: “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (§580). Bangs confronts a misleading binary picture of inner process and outer expression, the idea that there is a core, privately experienced, “truth” that needs to be translated into the memoir’s outer expression.88 In a 2001 talk on stuttering and torture, Jordan Scott, charting the interrogator’s relentless search for hidden truth, twists a linguistic knife into actual flesh. In his talk, Scott presented examples of interrogators interpreting outer expressions of verbal disfluency as concealing the sought-­ after inner truth.89 Yet the impulse of the torturer to push against the stutter only intensifies the subject’s stutter. Scott’s own stuttering while he lectures collapses the stadium of explanation of academic discourse onto itself: Scott not only talks about stuttering but lacerates his discourse with verbal interruptions, except that these irruptions don’t interfere with, or compromise, his talk; rather, they make it palpable. In Scott’s collection of poems, Blurt, he sets out to create works that trip his tongue in performance.90 To hear Scott read is to be aware of stut-

86. Collected Poems, 1:64. Williams ends the poem with the pataquerical imperative “No one / will believe this / of vast import to the nation.” Only this and nothing more. He comes back to the ontology of voyeurism in “The Young Housewife.” 87. Duchamp’s bachelor machine, “Étant donnés,” turns the gaze back on the gaze. See also “Reznikoff ’s Nearness” in My Way: Speeches and Poems. 88. “ ‘But you surely cannot deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner process takes place.’–­What gives the impression that we want to deny anything? When one says ‘Still, an inner process does take place here’—one wants to go on: ‘After all, you see it.’ And it is this inner process that one means by the word ‘remembering.’—The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our faces against the picture of the ‘inner process.’ What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word ‘to remember.’ We say that this picture with its ramifications stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is.” (§305, Anscombe trans.) 89. North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival, University of Pennsylvania, January 21, 2011, writing​.upenn​.edu​/pennsound​/ x​/North​- ­Of​-­Invention​.php. 90. (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2008).

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tering as a literary device collapsing into stuttering as animalady. Scott’s work is a spiky reminder that disability is not (only) a metaphor. Blurt plays on its difference from poems that use stuttering for sound or social or semantic effect—but not by insisting on his real disability versus another’s metaphoric use of disability. Like Baggs, he compounds and propounds the difference. What would happen if his stuttering was cured? Would he lose his poetry street cred? Or would he be better off increasing his stutter, as the professional Frenchman’s accent grows stronger each year he lives in the New World? Or does that just bring us back to Freaks? “The Human Abstract” is echoing on the green: “Pity would be no more. / If we did not make somebody Poor.”

CVII. Alien tears All who see me do mock me—they curl their lips, they shake their head. . . . Psal m 22 , tr an s. Robert Alt er 91

He that toucheth pitch, shal be defiled therewith. Sh imo n ben Yesh ua ben Elie zer ben Sir a92

Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray. Ol i ver Gold sm ith93

But let a Splinter swerve. Em i ly Dickin son 94

And alien tears will fill for him Pity’s long-­broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn. O scar W i l de95 91. Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 72. 92. Ecclesiasticus 13:1, King James Bible (1611). Ben Sira is the second-­century BCE author of the Hebrew book of Ecclesiasticus. 93. Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village” (1770): www​.poetryfoundation​.org​ /poem​/173557. 94. #556. 95. Oscar Wilde, “The Battle of Reading Gaol” (1897), final four lines of sec. 4, RPO, rpo​.library​.utoronto​.ca​/poems​/ ballad​-­reading​- ­gaol. These lines are Wilde’s

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I know that queer things happen in this world. It’s one of the few things I have really learnt in my life. W i t t genste i n 96

CVIII. There’s a reason the keepers are the keepers The sweepers sweeter But somewhere there’s an in between That wants to be but never’s been

CIX. Passing after trying my animal noise / I break out with a man’s cry L arry Eigner 97

American culture is filled with both the desire to pass and a resistance to passing: to be absorbed by the dominant culture or to remake that culture. Assimilation is motivated as much by fear as by desire. Twentieth-­century American popular entertainment, from vaudeville to popular song, is rife with examples of ethnic and racial performance, where stigmas are flaunted by their putative victims for an audience that identifies with these stigma—or are displayed to indulge the racialist fantasies of nonidentifying audiences. Or both: for the play of same and difference is always a lure. Starting in the 1910s, the Ziegfield star Fanny Brice (born Fania Borach in 1891) performed Yiddish-­accent shtick (most famously “Cohen at the Beach”), but she also used her Yiddish accent to create an outrageously incongruous comic effect to her American immigrant rendition of “I’m an Indian” (“O look at me I’m an Indian, that’s something that I never was before”): from shtetl to reservation, Jewface as redface.98 An obtrusive nose visually represents Jewface: Brice got plastic epitaph at Père Lachaise. His haunted elegy views society from the vantage of a prison cell; it is the outcasts/prisoners for whom he mourns. In this poem, sorrow is an aesthetic principle that creates an autonomous work of art: a poem of, by, and for sorrow, sorrow for sorrow’s sake. 96. Wittgenstein to G. E. Moore, 1946, in Wittgenstein in Cambridge, letter no. 353, p. 400. 97. Larry Eigner, Selected Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, in press), no. f9, September 1954. 98. The Library of Congress streams a 1921 recording of Brice performing “I’m an Indian,” www​.loc​.gov​/ jukebox​/ recordings​/detail​/ id​/8288/, lyrics by Blanche

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surgery to remove this difference in 1923.99 By the mid-­1940s she had perfected her ventriloquized foreignness, rocketing into mass culture with another of her Ziegfield shticks, the weird but not ethnically marked pataquerical radio voice of Baby Snooks. All the while, Brice sang less-­accented torch songs such as “When a Woman Loves a Man”—her middle voice, which Brice explicitly tied to universal socialist values in “The Song of the Sewing Machine” (1927): There is no song, there is no birds And God is just another word If you listen to the song of the sewing machine100

The dream of American “liberty” doesn’t pass the sweatshop test (“America never was America to me,” as Langston Hughes more famously put it):101 it is class consciousness, not nose jobs, that erases difference, understood here as economic, not racial or ethnic. —Beyond the fear of ethnic or racial difference is the fear of animal difference. The fear of animalady manifests as the need to pass as human (cultivated, learned, well mannered, well dressed), which is figured, in the tale of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, as the need to pass as not insane. Michael McClure directly confronts the phobia of not passing as human in “Ghost Tantra” 49, in which he not only invents a zaumist “beast language” but also performs the poem to growling tigers, exceeding his own expressionist linguistic acrobatics in the final minute (in the audio recording) of the lion’s sounds that persist beyond the poem, theatricalizing a full dissolve of the human into animality.102 It’s a marvelously incantatory, almost satiric exorcism of the human. The conceit of McClure’s perfor-

Merrill, music by Leo Edwards. This song is not to be confused with, but is worth comparing to, the later Irving Berlin song from Annie Get Your Gun (1946), “I’m an Indian Too,” which has been criticized as racist. For “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach,” go to archive​.org​/details​/FannyBriceCollection1927​-­1930Complete. More discussion on this topic in “Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics” in Attack of the Difficult Poems. 99. Herbert G. Goldman, Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 100. Lyrics by Ballard MacDonald and Billy Rose (born William Rosenberg in 1899), who had also written “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach.” Full lyric and sound file at jacket2.0rg/commentary/song-­sewing-­machine. 101. “Let America Be America to Me,” in The Collected Poems of Langton Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersand (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 189. 102. jacket2.0rg/commentary/michael-­mcclure-­reads-­lions.

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mance is not man taming the beast. Rather the performance is a coming to literary terms with our inner beast, not as noble or even more human than we are (à la Cocteau’s “où est ma bête?”)103 but as something that, like the body, marks animal being as a base level of human being. But any such literary effort necessarily courts—either by romanticizing or by stigma—jungleification, primitivism, savagery. In Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack (1975), George Kuchar (who wrote the script) plays a circus truck driver who has fallen in love with the female gorilla in his charge. In the final, touching scene we see the driver in bed with someone in a very campy gorilla costume. From Baudelaire’s “À une mendiante rousse” onward, artists have tried to find a way to portray society’s “others” without voyeurism, pity, condescension, or romanticizing. Kuchar in bed with an actor in a gorilla suit is the perfect realization of the possibility of the pataque(e)rical as a quest for what Kuchar calls “otherworldly humanity.”104 Like many pornographic films, Thundercrack portrays a descent into animalistic sexual drives, brought to a head in this last scene. With its parodic bestiality, Kuchar reverses the normal direction of assimilation: he wants to pass as animal. As if on cue, on July 30, 2009, Fox News ran a segment with Megyn Kelly that attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting a movie series showing Thundercrack, a film that was disgusting, according to Kelly, because it showed sex between a man and a gorilla. Moral repugnance is the last refuge of scoundrels.

CXX. I hate emotion and speech don’t treat me none too good neither.

CXXXIII. As I was reviewing this piece, I saw a number of fatal flaws: the romanticism in the valorization of the failed, the dehistoricizing of stigma, the contradiction between singular and plural, instant and series. The hour was far too late for me to cancel those sections of this work and still have adequate material to pre­sent to you. I keep them here to show the unseemly twists and turns of a soul thrown upon the open seas of life without paddle, ballast, or rudder: one addled, bolloxed, uttered.

103. So says Beauty confronted with the loss of her beast in Jean Cocteau’s 1948 film La Belle et la Bête. 104. Kuchar uses this term in one of his last films, Lingo of the Lost (2010).

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CXXXIV. It’s always historicize, not only historicize.

CXXXVI. Provide feedback on this essay Did this essay solve your problem? __Yes __No __I don’t know Was this essay relevant? __Yes __No What can we do to improve this essay?

CXXXVIII. Give a person a poem and it’s read in a moment. Teach a person to write poetry and it lasts a lifetime. Teach a person to write a poem and he can begin to understand himself. Teach a person to read a poem and she can begin to understand the world. Give a man a bowl and he will have something to put his soup in. Teach a man to bowl and he can join a league.

CXL. “Cock-­a-­doodle-­de-­dooooooh!” “Cock-­a-­doodle-­de-­dooooooh!”

Pataquericals & Poetics

1. Primary Vernacular Terms (Pejoratives) odd weird curious strange alien funny peculiar oblique obscured eccentric bizarre off-­key dubious perverse deviant affected fey swish sissy

freak hideous warped twisted girly effeminate insincere low-­bred vulgar disgusting illiterate ignorant awkward clumsy erroneous ugly mongrel monkey

monster untermensch (subhuman) heathen deformed demonic outcast slow weakling bum vagabond parasite louse infidel diabolical foreign barbaric inhuman

2. Secondary Constellation of Senses Related Also to Language Use and to Wittgenstein’s Use of Queer in Philosophical Investigations. merkwürdig seltsam rare unordinary extraordinary

remarkable unexpected altered incongruous ungraspable

difficult anomalous duck-­rabbit

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3. Tertiary Constellation (e.g., as Applied to Money) forged fake

false phony

duplicitous

disturbed impaired

disfluency

4. Related to Disability deformed misshapen

5. Positive Literary Terms of Art charm (cf. Andrew Welch) derangement of the senses (Rimbaud) nonsense (Lear/Carroll) swerve (Lucretius, Jarry) aversion/aversive/aversion (Emerson) artifice (Wilde) ’pataphysics ( Jarry) estrangement (ostranenie) (Shklovsky) zaum (Khlebnikov/Kruchenykh) alienation effect (Brecht) negative dialectics (Adorno) homophonic (Zukofsky) detournement (Debord) bachelor machine (Duchamp) degenerate (entartete Kunst) fractal (Mandelbrot) grotesque erratic errant ambiguity ambivolence ( James Joyce / Steve McCaffery) nomadic (Pierre Joris) opacity density rupture fracture stuttering (cf. Nathaniel Mackey, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol”) hyperbole irony

Pataquericals & Poetics : 347

bathos contradiction (Marx, Whitman, Brecht) deformative/deformation polyseamy multifoliate variance alien angel (McGann on Poe) patacriticism (McGann) alternative pluriverses polyverse (Lee Ann Brown) colliderings (O’Sullivan) stray marks (Howe on Dickinson)

6. Explored in “Artifice of Absorption,” “Close Listening,” “Poetics of Americas,” “Objectivist Blues,” and This Essay artifice impermeability antiabsorptive thickness interruptive abnormal nonstandard dialect pidgin creole ideolect miscegenated syncretic pharmakoi (scapegoat, Derrida) anoriginal (Freud / Andrew Benjamin) bent studies dysprosody dyssemia dystressed syllables

7. Book/Press Titles Asylum’s Press (after Goffman) Veil (after Hawthorne and Morris Louis) Stigma (after Goffman)

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The Sophist The Nude Formalism Rough Trades Girly Man The Introvert

8. My Coinages com(op)posing dysraphism klupsy (cp. klutzy) pluriperversity/polyversity frame lock (after Goffman) rearrangement of the senses bent studies Mental Fright anti-­bachelor-­machines lowbred (vs. hybrid/elliptical) patalyrical (cf. Nude Formalism) pataquerical pataque(e)rical pataqueroid pataqueronormative pataquerulous pataquerulous(e) pataqueasical clinamacaronic patanational aversive poetics animalady irremediation nepohumanism necrohumanism echopoetics midrashic antinomianism

9. Jewish fragmented uprooted wandering untrustworthy

Pataquericals & Poetics : 349

unstraightforward doubletalking shtick viral schlemiel/shemozzle degenerate (entartete) mischling (mongrel)

10. Reversals innovator rebel extraordinary exceptional iconoclast genius special