The Case of Language Poetry

Marjorie Perloff

But the identification of avant-garde with movements is not without its problems. The artist usually considered the quintessential avant-gardist, Marcel Duchamp, never quite belonged to any group: as he told his his young protégée Ettie Stettheimer in 1921, “From a distance these things, these Movements take on a charm that they do not have close up—I assure you” (Kuenzli 220). And the most radical American writer of the early twentieth century was one who disliked literary movements, belonged to no cénacle, and participated in no group manifestos or activities. I am thinking, of course, of Gertrude Stein, whose salon was frequented by many of the leading avant-gardists—Apollinaire, Picabia, Pound—but whose strongest allegiance was neither to other avant-garde women writers (most of whom she treated dismissively), nor to gay poets, much less to fellow Americans, but to that great modernist aggressively heterosexual male painter—Picasso. Was Stein then “avant-garde” without being part of a movement? Was Joyce? This last question is wittily raised in Tom Stoppard’s play “Travesties,” where Lenin, Joyce, and Tristan Tzara, all living in Zurich in the mid 1910s, meet. Whose, in this case, is the “real” revolution? And, when we turn to the post-World War II avant-gardes, where do we place Beckett, whose works were originally perceived as shocking and incomprehensible? In what avant-garde movement did this extraordinary avant-gardist participate?

The concept of individual genius, it seems, dies hard. Does this mean that the term avant-garde has become meaningless? Not at all. The dialectic between individual artist and avant-garde groups is seminal to twentieth-century art-making. But not every “movement” is an avant-garde and not every avant-garde poet or artist is associated with a movement. What we need, it seems is a more accurate genealogy of avant-garde practices than we now have. In what follows, I wish to consider a particular avant-garde movement that has remained powerful—but also quite controversial– ever since its inception in the early 1970s—namely, Language poetry, sometimes also placed, together with related practices, under the umbrella of “experimental writing” or “innovative poetry.”

The trajectory of the Language movement raises particularly knotty questions about avant-garde practices. Are the “second-generation language poets,” many of them graduates of the Buffalo Poetics program, founded by Charles Bernstein, themselves avant-gardists? Or is Language poetry already passé, replaced by a newer and genuinely different avant-garde formation? Or, as mainstream poets and critics insist, was the Language movement never more than a pretentious gesture—a movement most of whose members remain unrecognized by anthologists, unreviewed in the important periodicals, and passed over for all the literary prizes? And finally—to come back to the question I raised vis-à-vis Duchamp and Stein—is Language poetry in fact the achievement of a few poets who theorized its aims and methods, or would the turn toward an asemantic, asyntactic poetry have occurred in any case?

In order to frame this discussion, it will be useful to distinguish between the various avant-garde paradigms that have held sway in the course of the twentieth century. Two cautions are in order vis-à-vis the classification that follows. First, for reasons of expertise as well as space, I restrict myself to the (largely American and Western European) verbal and visual arts. And second, the classification is meant to be suggestive rather than definitive. Obviously other criteria would yield other genealogies.

Avant-Garde and Community

(1) The prototypical avant-garde was a movement that brought together genuinely like-minded artists, whose group commitment was to the overthrow of the dominant aesthetic values of their culture and to the making of artworks that were genuinely new and revolutionary—works that would be consonant with the new technology, science, and philosophy. The key example—and I take this to be the great avant-garde of the past century—was the Russian avant-garde from 1912 or so to the mid-twenties. The poets, painters, sculptors, photographers, makers of artist books and performances—Goncharova, Malevich, Tatlin, Khlebnikov, Krushchonykh, Mayakovsky—later, Rodchenko, Lissitsky, Meyerhold—were in accord on basic avant-garde principles, especially in their drive toward a non-representational art and poetry and the concomitant emphasis on faktura (the material base of the text or artwork), sdvig (the orientation toward the neighboring word), and ostranenie (defamiliarization). An artist like Malevich was identified with a larger group, and yet he also stood on his own as a great early Modernist artist, transcending that group identity. Note that his own “movement” Suprematism was a one-man operation: Malevich, after all, was the only Suprematist [figure 4].

Surrealism and German Expressionism are examples of avant-gardes that similarly fused shared aesthetic values and individual development, but neither movement involved the rupture we associate with the Russian avant-garde. Surrealism was a natural outgrowth of Dada revolt and of Freudian theories of the subconscious, even as German Expressionism can increasingly be seen as continuous with the Decadence of the 1890s, Edvard Munch providing a key link between the two. But certainly such notable surrealists as André Breton and Max Ernst had a life outside and beyond their particular cenacles even as Kandinsky rapidly moved beyond his early Expressionist affiliations to create his own unique identity.

(2) A variation on #1 is the movement whose group ethos was strong and whose aesthetics and politics were highly integrated and articulated, but whose individual members did not come to be regarded as major modernist artists. Here Italian Futurism is a key example: although the visual artists—Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, Antonio St. Elia—produced outstanding and highly original works, and although the Italian Futurists more or less invented forms like the manifesto, performance art, and innovative typography, Futurism’s literary contribution was weak. The movement’s chef d’école F.T. Marinetti is known today as the inventor of parole in libertà [figure 5] and for the brilliant conjunctions of what he called “violence and precision” in his manifestos, but his poetry and fiction have never really caught on. In Italian Futurism the movement thus exceeded the artist. Its great strength was its “revolutionizing” of so many media—photography, film, architecture, poetry, fiction, drama. But its politics, which hardened in the course of the 20s into a proto-Fascism, undercut the reception of even these advances.

Zurich Dada had a related trajectory. We think of the Cabaret Voltaire as producing the quintessential avant-garde, the ultimate contrarian spirit of revolt in all its wit and wonder, but however colorful and intriguing the personalities, performances, and manifestos of its polyglot expatriate members –Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara [figure 6], Richard Huelsenbeck—these Dadaists have never been taken quite seriously as poets. When, at war’s end, the movement broke up, many of the individuals floundered, while others like Hans Arp were soon associated with other movements. Meanwhile, the term Hanover Dada refers to the work of a single great artist, Kurt Schwitters, whereas Berlin Dada, now very popular in academic circles because of its radical left politics, is hardly “Dada” at all, the graphics and paintings of John Heartfield, Raoul Haussmann, and George Grosz are vicious satires on war and postwar capitalism that carry forward the lessons of German Expressionism. Didactic and ideological in intent, these works have left behind the anarchy and non-sensicality of the Cabaret Voltaire. [1]

(3) The antithesis of a community like Zurich Dada is the avant-garde in which a congerie of disciples and acolytes gathers around a central charismatic figure. New York Dada, which I spoke of earlier, is a case in point. Guy Debord’s Situationism was another—a movement that would have been nothing without its leader. Imagism and Vorticism, sometimes included under the avant-garde rubric, would have been negligible without the presence of Ezra Pound and possibly H.D. in the former, Wyndham Lewis in the latter. As soon as Pound’s Imagist credo had been diluted into what he called “amygisme” (for Amy Lowell), Pound blew the whistle on the use of the term and founded, together with Lewis, Vorticism, a movement now generally regarded as a footnote to Italian Futurism. But Pound, H.D., and Lewis emerged as important individual writers, who soon went on to produce ambitious works by no means covered by the Imagist or Vorticist label.

(4) A fourth kind of avant-garde formation is the geographical. Black Mountain was a movement that depended on residence at Black Mountain College for its definition. Many fascinating artists passed through Black Mountain—from Joseph Albers to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, from Buckminster Fuller to John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Allan Kaprow. The problem of geographical definition is that the avant-gardists in question had, as critics have now noted, little by way of a shared aesthetic. Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley were both followers of William Carlos Williams, but in neither case does the poetry have affinities with, say, the more political and narrative work of Ed Dorn, who was also an Olson student at the college. For a few years, the Black Mountain Review brought these poets together, but their group impetus was never strong.

A more prominent example of avant-garde as geographic community was the so-called New York School. As a designation for the abstract expressionist painters from Jackson Pollock [figure 7]and Mark Rothko to Helen Frankenthaler and Franz Kline, all of whom were living and working in New York in the fifties, the term New York School makes sense, as it does for the Frank O’Hara circle of poets –Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and a large contingent of second generation New York schoolers like Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer. But New York is one thing, avant-garde another. David Lehman’s controversial book The Last Avant-Garde makes the case for O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, and Schuyler (he omits Barbara Guest) as avant-gardists on the strength of their new colloquialism, spontaneity, defiance of fixed meters and forms, and the “new” relationship of the verbal to the visual arts. But both New York painting and poetry were soon seen as squarely in the Romantic and Modernist tradition. The New York school did not attack art as a bourgeois institution, nor did it call into question the centrality of painting and lyric poetry among the media. Ashbery, for that matter, always rejected the New York label, and his own poetry was soon seen as closer to Stevens, Eliot, and Auden than to the neo-Dada often attributed to New York school poetry. As for Lehman’s term “last avant-garde,” many critics, myself included, have objected strenuously to the word “last,” whose foreclosure of all further innovation is designed as a thinly veiled attack on Language poetry. Like the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance poets, the New York school was—and remains—an important c ommunity, but not, either by intention or outcome, a fully-fledged avant-garde.

(5) A variant on the communitarian model is the school or workshop, whose cardinal example today is Oulipo, the Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle, founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. Made up of mathematicians as well as writers, the group assigned itself the task of how mathematical structures might be used in literary creation. This idea was soon broadened to include all highly restrictive procedural methods, like the palindrome and lipogram, that are strict enough to play a decisive role in determining what their users write. The most notorious example of this approach is Georges Perec’s novel, La Disparition (A Void), written without a single appearance of the letter e. Oulipo is thus a group project that observes particular rules and prohibitions. At the same time, its leading writers—Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud—have produced highly individual work. Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life a User’s Manual) , while based on Oulipo principles, is a picaresque hyperreal novel that speaks to readers who have never heard of the Paris workshop.

Oulipo is a bona-fide avant-garde in that it has, from its inception, radically questioned the very possibility of poetry or fiction as self-expression or invention. But its parameters are necessarily narrow, and the work is largely confined to the verbal medium, even though there are now subgroups with names like Oupeintpo, Ouphopo, and Oumupo. [2] An Oulipo analogue on the visual arts side is Fluxus, which dates, like Oulipo, from the sixties. Like Oulipo, Fluxus was a movement bent on making “art” rooted in scientific and philosophical ideas, but codification was not its métier. Then too Fluxus was an international movement, fusing Dada and Zen elements to assert that all media and disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion, that indeed anything can be considered “art.” As such, Fluxus objects and performances would appear to be the antithesis of Oulipo villanelles and lipograms, but in fact Fluxus principles, its list of what Pound called “Don’ts,” as embodied in the work of artists and poets like George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Jackson Mac Low, and Dick Higgins–may well be just as rigid as Oulipo ones. But in Fluxus, as in Dada, the movement has proved to be stronger than its individuals.

(6) In recent years, ideological and identity-based movements have sometimes been labeled “avant-garde”: for example, the Black Arts movement, the feminist performance art of the ‘70s, or the “new” Asian-American poetries. But the “breakthrough” of such movements tends to be short-lived, the aim of the groups concerned being ironically counter-avant-garde in their drive to win acceptance within the larger public art sphere. Once received into the canon, as has been the case with such representative figures as Teresa Hak Kyung Cha or Amiri Baraka in contemporary poetry circles, group identity is largely discarded.

(7) Finally—and largely antithetical to all of the above — is the movement that doesn’t see itself as a movement at all but comes to be considered one by outsiders and later generations because its artists share a particular aesthetic and possibly a politics as well. In the 60s in New York, there was a loose congerie of artists, composers, dancers, and poets more prominent than the second generation of the New York School although there was some overlap between the two. John Cage, who has already been mentioned vis-à-vis Black Mountain, and who was certainly the presiding spirit of Fluxus, the movement that was at least partially born in his seminars at the New School, was the center of an avant-garde that included Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns [figure 8], Robert Rauschenberg, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Jackson Mac Low, and, on its margins, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. The Swedish concrete poet/artist Oyvind Fahlström, who came to New York and collaborated with Rauschenberg, belongs to this group. The Cage circle was primarily, but not exclusively, a gay movement but its sexual thematics were heavily coded. Today, the conceptual artists in question have achieved a certain prominence but, with the exception of the painters and possibly Merce Cunningham, not quite full acceptance. A decade after his death, Cage (born 1912) is still considered a charlatan in many art circles even as Feldman and Tudor remain coterie composers, adored by their champions but unknown by the wider concert audience. To paraphrase Pound, this is an avant-garde that has stayed avant-garde.

“Word Order = World Order”?

What, then, of the Language movement, which was the most prominent American poetic avant-garde of the ‘80s and ‘90s? The genealogy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, as Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein called their now famous little mimeo magazine, first published in 1978, must be understood in the context of the prevailing poetry culture of the time. In the U.S., it was the moment of burgeoning Workshop activity, poet after poet writing his or her “sincere,” sensitive, intimate, speech-based lyric, expressing particular nuances of emotion. Here, for example, is the prize-winning poet and a professor at the University of Virginia, Gregory Orr, memorializing his mother in a poem called “Haitian Suite” [figure 9]:

Hunched over a desk
in another house, I hear
the curtains rustle.
Again she stands behind me,
quiet and tall as a lamp,
while I push clumsy words
around on a page, trying
to make them fit. Closing
my eyes, I feel a summer
breeze warm as breath cross
my face, coming all the way
from a grave in Haiti.

The poem’s mode is an attenuated Romanticism, its Wordsworthian premise being that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. But in “Haitian Suite,” the emotion communicated—grief for one’s dead mother—is rather pat, and it is too transparently put into what are modestly called the “clumsy words” of the poem—clumsiness being appropriate because it evidently underscores the depth of the poet’s actual feelings. Accordingly, the verse must be “natural” and “free,” the syntax that of the declarative sentence, the language accessible, and the imagery concrete (“I hear / the curtains rustle’”). Metaphor is used sparingly but exactingly: the mother’s ghost is “quiet and tall as a lamp,” because, of course, she provided the light that helped the poet to become a man.

The agonism of the avant-garde is usually directed, not at an earlier generation as would seem logical, but against the complacencies of one’s own. Barrett Watten, almost exactly the age of Gregory Orr and a graduate of the Iowa Writing Program, was living in Oakland in the early seventies and was editing, first with Robert Grenier, then after 1973 on his own, the little magazine This, whose very title suggests that poetry is not made of images but of words—and unlikely words at that. This published Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson and Steve Benson, Rae Armantrout and Lyn Hejinian. Its presiding spirit was a slightly older poet first associated with the New York school, whose radically asyntactical and densely semantic poetry became a model for the younger group—namely Clark Coolidge. One of Watten’s early essays, reprinted in his Total Syntax (1985), was a piece on the new syntactic possibilities raised by the work of Coolidge, Silliman, Benson, and Robert Smithson.

For Watten and his fellow Bay Area poets, the impetus for a “new” poetics was primarily political. In a recent essay called “The Turn to Language and the 1960s,” Watten argues that Language poetry owed its birth to the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the political revolution it unleashed. The valorization of speech, first a positive sign of the new counterculture, became dubious as writers came to regard natural speech as adequate to the conveyance of an agonistic politics. Even such talented poets as Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, Watten posits, tried to express their horror at the Vietnam War in direct, experiental speech forms—forms that separated subjects as experiencing “selves” from the “history” they were trying to represent. By contrast, the younger poets of Watten’s own new movement understood that poetry must have a materialist base, that language and syntax must do the poem’s work. As Watten put it, “The language-centered poetics of the 1970s permitted the recovery of a totalized outside that was a casualty of the conflict between expression and representation in the 1960s” (2002: 183).

Ingenious as this argument is, it does not withstand scrutiny. True, the poetry of Ginsberg, Levertov, Merwin, and other 60’s poets was rooted in a lyric subjectivity and transparency that could not quite come to terms with the atrocities perceived to be taking place. But Watten writes as if there had been no horrors to represent before the Vietnam War, whereas great war poetry had always taken what Watten calls the “constructivist” route. Consider Khlebnikov, whose last poems, dealing with the brutal famine produced by the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s, are short, ironic imagist lyrics that capture the horrors of war only too well. Or George Oppen, the Objectivist poet who has been one of the chief precursors of the Language movement, and whose long political/philosophical poem “Of Being Numerous” neither eradicates the speaking subject nor the possibilities of normative syntax.

If Watten’s argument is overstated, it nevertheless testifies to the characteristic avant-garde need to transform one’s immediate adversary—in this case the “natural” speech-based poetry dominant in the sixties —into a permanent condition and to make the case for one’s own oppositional circle as having some sort of avant-garde purity and priority. “We were,” so to speak, “the first that ever burst / into that silent sea.” A similar problem occurs—and I shall come back to this point—with the claim made by language poets that theirs was a unique attack on the capitalist reification and commodification of the sign, that only the blasting apart of the word and its referent could convey a meaningful critique of capitalism.

The Watten-Silliman circle did not yet use the term Language poetry, which officially came into being with the launch of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1978 and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book in 1984. Here the principles of this particular avant-garde were laid out just as squarely as Marinetti had promulgated his call for the destruction of syntax and the abolition of all ego psychology in his pre-World War I manifestos, although the Language poets, operating in a more belated, self-conscious age, gave their prescriptions a more theoretical base than the Futurists could muster.

The first of the “Language” principles is perhaps most clearly articulated in Charles Bernstein’s “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1977), which follows the Futurist format of numbered propositions so as to launch a witty attack on the aesthetic of “the natural look” then dominant in poetry:

17. Take it this way: I want to just write—let it come out—get in touch with some natural process—from brain to pen—with no interference of typewriter, formal pattern. & it can seem like the language itself—having to put it into words—any kind of fixing a version of it—gets in the way. That I just have this thing inside me—silently—unconditioned by the choices I need to make when I write—whether it be to write it down or write on. So it is as if language itself gets in the way of expressing this thing, this flow, this movement of consciousness. [figure 10]
But there are no thoughts except through language, we are everywhere seeing through it, limited to it but not by it. Its conditions always interpose themselves: a particular set of words to choose from (a vocabulary), a way of processing those words (syntax, grammar): the natural condition of language. . . .

18. There is no natural look or sound to a poem. Every element is intended, chosen. That is what makes a thing a poem. (1984: 44-45; 1986: 48-49). [figure 11]

Bernstein had studied Wittgenstein with Stanley Cavell at Harvard, and his notion that “there are no thoughts except through language,” is a version of Wittgenstein’s “The limits of language mean the limits of my world” (1992:§5.6), that “Language is not contiguous to anything else” (1980: 112). The articles of faith of 60’s poetry–—Olson’s “Form is never more than the extension of content” and Ginsberg’s “First thought, best thought”– were thus overturned in a new call for poetry as making, construction—the importance of each and every word and especially of word order. But unlike the New Criticism, which demanded unified and centered structure, the “aura around a bright clear centre,” as Reuben Brower called it, the constructivist aesthetic of Language poetry insisted on the making process itself, in all its anti-closure, incompletion, ad indeterminacy.

“Stray Straws and Straw Men” was first published as part of a symposium called “The Politics of the Referent,” edited by Steve McCaffery, published in the Canadian journal Open Letter in 1977 and reprinted by Andrews and Bernstein as Language Supplement Number One in June 1980. McCaffery’s own essay, dramatically titled “The Death of the Subject,” provides a second major principle. “There is a group of writers today,” McCaffery begins, “united in the feeling that literature has entered a crisis of the sign . . . and that the foremost task at hand—a more linguistic and philosophic then ‘poetic’ task—is to demystify the referential fallacy of language.” “Reference,” he adds, “is that kind of blindness a window makes of the pane it is, that motoric thrust of the word which takes you out of language into a tenuous world of the other and so prevents you seeing what it is you see” (1977: 1). [3] Such a thrust—the removal of what McCaffery calls later in the essay “the arrow of reference”– is essential because “language is above all else a system of signs and . . . writing must stress its semiotic nature through modes of investigation and probe, rather than mimetic, instrumental indications.”

Here, in a nutshell, is the animating principle of much of the poetry to come: poetic language is not a window, a transparent glass to be seen through in pursuit of the “real” objects outside it but a system of signs with its own semiological relationships. To put it another way, “Language is material and primary and what’s experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations.” McCaffery himself points to the Russian Formalists, to Wittgenstein, Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida as sources of his theory, and indeed language poetics, in this first stage, owes a great debt to French poststructuralism. [4] And McCaffery sounds a Derridean note when he declares that “the empirical experience of a grapheme replaces what the signifier in a word will always try to discharge: its signified and referent.” Indeed, in poetry the signifier is always “superfluous,” overloaded with potential meanings and hence more properly a cipher (1980: 4) [figure 12].

The twin rejection of poetry as natural speech (Bernstein) and of poetry as a vehicle for the communication of a set of external meanings animates much of the theoretical writing of other language poets. In the Introduction to his In the American Tree (1986), Ron Silliman notes that the poets he has included in his anthology want to “renew verse itself, so that it might offer readers the same opacity, density, otherness, challenge and relevance persons find in the ‘real’ world.” And again, “What a poem is actually made of [is] not images, not voice, not characters or plot, all of which appear on paper, or in one’s mouth only through the invocation of a specific medium, language itself” (xiv). “Where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas,” writes Lyn Hejinian in “If Written is Writing,” “now one seeks ideas for vocabularies” (Andrews 29). And in “The Rejection of Closure”: “Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say” (48). [5]

What Bernstein has dismissed as the “transom theory of communication” (the “two-way wire with the message shuttling back and forth in blissful ignorance of its transom”) [6] is thus emphatically rejected. There are two corollaries, one Barthean, one Marxist-Althusserian. “Language-centered writing,” McCaffery tells us, “involves a major alteration in textual roles: of the socially defined functions of writer and reader as the productive and consumptive poles respectively of a commodital axis” (1980 3). And again, “The text becomes the communal space of a labour, initiated by the writer and extended by the second writer (the reader) . . . . The old duality of reader-writer collapses into the one compound function, and the two actions are permitted to become a simultaneous experience within the activity of the engager” (1980 8). “Reading” is thus “an alternative or additional writing of the text.” “The ‘open text,” as Hejinian puts it, “by definition is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive” (2000: 43). [7] Indeed—and here the Marxist motif kicks in—“to remove the arrow of reference,” to “short-circuit the semiotic loop” (McCaffery, 1980: 9) is a political as well as an aesthetic act. For, in Silliman’s words, “Under capitalism, reference is transformed (deformed) into referentiality” (Andrews 125). In “Text and Context,” Bruce Andrews reinforces this notion, dismissing referentiality as the misguided “search for the pot at the end of the rainbow, the commodity or ideology that brings fulfillment” (McCaffery 1980: 20). Our public language, so the argument goes, is so debased, so formulaic, so cliché-ridden, that poetry must resist its reifaction by blowing apart its phraseology and syntax, to reassert the complexity and untranslatability of poetic language. [8]

The four principles I have cited [figure 13]—(1) poetry is not “natural” speech but, on the contrary, something carefully constructed; (2) poetry rejects the “referential fallacy” in favor of the play of signifiers that are suggestive and multivalent; (3) poetry relinquishes its author’s control over the text, functioning instead as a “communal space of labor’; and (4) poetry has no place for the direct communication of information, which is the hallmark of the commodity fetish– were, of course, never designed to be as doctrinaire as I have made them sound here. There was always a good deal of variation and controversy within the Language community and especially between its East and West Coast branches. Still, these basic principles give the movement its general tone, and they are usually accompanied by two further axioms, although these are less intrinsic than practical.

First poetry could—and often should—be written as prose—not ordinary prose, of course, but what Silliman named “the New Sentence” best exemplified in his own Ketjak and Tjanting as well as in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, where a given sentence never “follows” logically or sequentially from its predecessor and yet is related to all the other sentences by careful orchestration of leitmotifs, phrases, and numerical constraints. “New sentences,” as Bob Perelman explains Silliman’s concept, “are not subordinated to a larger narrative frame nor are they thrown together at random. . . . the new sentence arises out of an attempt to redefine genres; the tension between parataxis and narrative is basic. Among other things, Silliman wanted to escape the problems of the novel, which for him were of a piece with the larger problems of capitalism” (61).

Perelman, writing in the mid-90s, acknowledges that the latter generalization won’t really hold: “Today parataxis can seem symptomatic of late capitalism rather than oppositional. Ads where fast cuts from all ‘walks of life’ demonstrate the ubiquity and omniscience of AT&T are paratactic” (62). Still, he posits, the “new sentence” is a useful tool: “First, it is arbitrary, driving a wedge between any expressive identity of form and content.” And “to use the sentence as basic unit rather than the line is to orient the writing toward ordinary language use” (65). In breaking up the continuity of lyric voice as well as the “smooth narrative plane” (78), the “new sentence” has been, so Perelman posits, an important element in language poetics.

A second ancillary principle, implicit in all those I have cited thus far, is that poetry incorporates its own poetcs, that it has a theoretical base. Perelman’s own “Marginalization of Poetry,” Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption,” Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and Melville’s Marginalia, Rosmarie Waldrop’s Reluctant Gravities” —all these are works that use poetic figuration and structure to present a particular poetics as well. As such, theorypo or poetheory as we might call it, was positioned as the very antithesis of the epiphanic lyric of the Writing Workshop.

Language Poetry thus presented itself as a decisive rupture with the poetic status quo, a distinctive way of Making It New. In the hands of its main practitioners, it produced a series of long poems that are now classics of a sort, from Bernstein’s “Dysraphism” to Hejinian’s My Life, Silliman’s Tjanting, McCaffery’s Lag, and Howe’s Thorow.[9] Meanwhile, a host of other poets contributed short essays and reviews to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and to such related journals as Roof, Hills, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K, Temblor, Raddle Moon, Writing, and How(ever) (now the online journal How To). And anthologies like Silliman’s In the American Tree (1986) and Mary Margaret Sloan’s Moving Borders (1998) append a back section with sizable statements of poetics by the authors included. Thus, although Language poetry has never gained acceptance from the mainstream press—even Bernstein has never been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review or The New York Review of Books—and has been largely kept out of the loop of the prize, award, and fellowship cycle,
[10] its impact has been far-reaching. Students from Finland and Germany, Portugal and Japan have come to Buffalo to study in the Poetics Program and have returned to their own communities with new modes and strategies. In Australia and New Zealand, as in Brazil, Language Poetry became a kind of watchword and is perhaps the key influence on the “new” poetries of these nations. In the U.S, UK, and Canada, My Life, Howe’s Thorow, Bernstein’s With Strings, and McCaffery’s Panopticon are taught in college classrooms, and a number of scholarly books– by Ann Vickery, Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Frost–already appeared on feminist language poetries and other facets of the “new poetics.” Graduates of the Poetics Program and related programs at Brown, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania have infiltrated the university literature and creative Writing classrooms and are accordingly introducing Language poets to undergraduates who assume, not surprisingly, that these poets have always been there.

The big lesson learned from Language Poetry, I would argue, has been that, contemporary pop culture notwithstanding, poetry matters, that it is not just a craft for sensitive spirits who wish to express themselves but an intellectual discipline dealing with the most pressing philosophical and cultural issues of the day. As such—and this is especially striking to me—the “new” poetics have made subtle inroads into the very mainstream poetries that have scorned it. In the fashionable new journal Fence, for example—a journal by no means devoted to Language poetry–one now reads prose poems like the following:

[Meanwhile the grove tree . . .]

Meanwhile the grove tree ejaculates baby mandarins. Middle branches, just beyond the approachable hand. Among them recur one or two of obscene glamour. The rest appear no more lucent than noodle shop formica. Be patient, be a member. They will gather up in late summer’s humid belly and rot. They will drop and not bounce. Pick up one that is crow-black. Carry it as talisman. (Fence 50) [figure 14]

This is the first of a three-poem sequence by a young poet named Ted Mathys, who is described in the contributors’ notes as a graduate of Carleton College currently living in Hong Kong. If Mathys’s are not quite “new sentences,” the poem nevertheless works hard at being oblique and avoiding all first-person commentary. No direct treatment of the thing here! No identifiable or consistent persona! And the language is purposely “enigmatic.” Why, for starters, refer to a tree as a “grove tree” without the necessary adjective, as in orange grove or magnolia grove? And does the verb “ejaculates” really describe how the tree sheds its ripe mandarin oranges? Never mind, the verb “ejaculates” sexes things up: no ordinary fruit fall in this landscape. The “grove tree’s” fruit, moreover, is described as out of reach, not, as would be logical, of the “approaching” hand but of an “approachable” one, as if to say that the orange should have the volition to understand that this particular hand has its best interests at heart. Again, some sort of sexual contact is implied. And why do some mandarin oranges have “obscene glamour”? Glamour, evidently, because “mandarin” connotes the exotic East although the fact is that mandarin oranges are not particularly attractive and are hardier than normal oranges. The reference to their “obscenity” thus falls rather flat, especially since the next sentence oddly shifts from the semiotic play of what precedes it, giving s a good old-fashioned metaphor: the other mandarins are “no more lucent than noodle shop formica”—in other words as dull and opaque as cheap formica. But what do noodle shops have to do with anything here? And who is being told to “be patient, be a member”? A member of what? We only know that the overripe and hence rotten little orange, the crow-black one that dropped in “summer’s humid belly,” become the poet’s talisman. And this talisman theme is reinforced by the “black mandarin’s” reppearance in poems 2 and 3, evidently symbolizing the power of the unlikely, the undesirable, the reject to enrich our lives.

Mathys’s little poem thus follows the poetics laid out in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. The irresolution and mutivalency of its words and images is designed to be “non-absorptive”; the lines of direct communication are broken down. It avoids the lyric first person, focusing on what is seen and understood without reference to the poet’s personal life or ideas. It is written in prose, not verse, and especially in the third poem, “Then the synesthetes. . .”, it claims access to theoretical issues, alluding to Rimbaud’s demand for “derangement and fairy juice” and Kandinsky and Liszt’s “tast[ing of] a plate of chords and strokes.” Even the title “Then the synesthetes” would seem to speak to a sophisticated poetic audience.

Surely the founders of the Language movement could not have anticipated that, within twenty years, the case against “the natural look,” the authoritative Cartesian subject, the transparency of meaning, and the use of “old-fashioned “lineation” (much less meter) rather than the “new sentence” would become mere items to be ticked off on the “How To Make It New” list, that the “innovative” writing produced in the Workshop—now often a theory workshop as well as a place to practice one’s poetic craft—would become just as tedious and formulaic as the Workshop poetry it had once spurned. Indeed, the epithets innovative, experimental, alternative, radical– not to mention avant-garde—are now so reified in their own right that one sometimes finds oneself longing for a transparent nature lyric or love sonnet, preferably one with lots of rhyme, repetition, and refrain.

How did things come to such a pass? At the most immediate level, the problem is simply temporal: no avant-garde cénacle can keep up its momentum for three decades. Then, too, the absorption of Language poetry into the academy inevitably meant that the application of its principles would be codified, watered down, and misunderstood by what Pound called “the diluters, those who follow the inventors and masters of a given mode, “produc[ing] something of lower intensity, some flabbier variant” (23). But there is something else. By 1990 or so, the fighting principles of Language poetry—principles I have here been outlining—ran into the juggernaut of Political Correctness. The demand for inclusiveness, for more women and especially minority poets, meant that candidates began to qualify as bona fide “language poets” on what were in fact extra-aesthetic grounds. Whereas a related movement like Oulipo never changed its rules, demanding a particular expertise and outlook from all its members, Language poetry was now pressed to be inclusive, not to mention polite, tolerant, and fair-minded. Readings began to balance Language Poet X with mainstream poet Y, established poet X with novice Y, even as publication series like the University of California Poetry Series felt they had to offset the difficulties of Lyn Hejinian with the more transparent lyrics of Carol Snow, and so on. Something for everybody (we hope!): this is the mantra.

How does this turn of events compare to the trajectory of other avant-gardes? In the early twentieth-century, the avant-garde was likely to meet its dissolution in the face of war or some form of political crackdown. The Russian avant-garde, for instance, was the victim of the revolution it had ironically worked to bring about: with the ascendancy of the Culture Commissars in the early twenties, avant-garde production all but ceased, although certain individual artists like Lissitsky and Rodchenko worked out ways of accommodation and special coding. The Italian avant-garde dissolved in the course of World War I, in which such leading figures as Boccioni and Sant’Elia were killed. Futurism after the war either moved in the direction of Fascism or dissolved into a polite and meaningless salon painting that no one could fault. As for Zurich Dada, at the end of the enforced exile its members underwent during the war, the movement gave way to a Paris version that soon turned from the cult of anarchy, agonism, and chance to the Surrealist concern with the dream states, automatic writing, and Communist politics.

Again, geographical avant-gardes like the New York School or the so-called San Francisco Renaissance transform themselves as their actual milieu changes. The New York of Frank O’Hara, where poets easily moved in and out of this or that cold water flat and somehow found employment to support their poetry habit, is long gone, and San Francisco is now a major corporate center of the computer and internet industry. From the vantage point of these movements, Language poetry has lasted a rather long time, propped up primarily by the once suspect university that now fosters so many of its readings, performances, and publications. But such patronage has had its price: what we might call the curricular avant-garde has bred a second generation that seems –at least to me—to be spinning its wheels, try as it may to separate itself from its more successful precursors. Influence does not, in any case, go in a straight line: second-generation New York abstract expressionists, for example, were soon eclipsed by artists, whether Pop, Minimalist, Conceptualist or Color Field, who revolted against its very principles. The lesson for students of the avant-garde would seem to be that whatever the “new wave” proves to be, it is not likely to be a continuation of the avant-garde—in this case, of Language poetry—as we know it.

Indeed, such Language issues as the repudiation of the “natural look” no longer have the urgency they once had. As mediated by the internet, no poem can be fully “natural”; on screen, it is always already simulated and simulatable. In the same vein, the debate about reader construction (who owns the text?) becomes irrelevant, the reader having the “privilege” of transforming any given text into something else. Even a forwarded email is no longer the “real thing,” for the forwarder can edit it at will, all the while presenting it as belonging to its original author. The resistance to commodified language thus becomes less interesting than the ability to cite that language and “write through” it or to play it off against other discourses.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the difference the new digital technologies has made to all writing—poetic writing included. Language poetry, however agonistic vis-à-vis the mainstream, was, like the other poetries of the time, a page-based phenomenon. Whether the poems in question were long or short, in verse or in prose, they were of course poems to be read and digested in the privacy of one’s own space. True, these poems were and continue to be read publicly, but ironically the poetry reading has itself become a way of perpetuating what Bernstein called the transom theory of communication: the poet in front of the room at the lectern, leafing through his or her recently published volumes and new notebook drafts, reads to those others who are in the audience. Digital discourse is fast making this mode obsolete, for one can now produce one’s own temporal and spatial environment for the reception of the reading in question, even as the “look” of the poetry being read becomes very important on the computer screen.

Seeing, hearing, performing: in the internet age these take on a rather different valence from the poetries of the eighties. The complex semantic charge of much Language poetry, for example, downplayed the concomitant complexities of sound or visual structure, and by the mid-90s, younger “experimental” poets, trained to believe that metrics and traditional genres were old-hat, produced countless free-verse or prose poems, whose visual and aural potential remained largely undeveloped. Meanwhile, as websites like Kenneth Goldsmith’s ubu.com make clear, a new poetics is emerging that traces its genealogy, not, say, to the Objectivists, as was the case with Language poetry, but to Brazilian Concrete Poetry of the 50s, to the procedural poetics of Oulipo, and to sound poetry from Kurt Schwitters to Henri Chopin to the ethnopoetic performances of Jerome Rothenberg and the soundworks of the Four Horsemen. And further, as Craig Dworkin’s online Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing suggests, there is now increasing interest in the “non-expressive” writings of such artists as Vito Acconci and Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris and Adrian Piper—writings that negotiate, in Dworkin’s words, “between the modernist emphasis on . . . the materiality of language itself and a postmodernist understanding of a theoretically based art that is independent of genre, so that a particular poem might have more in common with a particular musical score, or film, or sculpture than with another lyric” [www.ubu.com]

Independence of genre in relation to modernist materiality: Dworkin reminds us that Modernism remains at the very base of so-called “experimental” or “innovative” poetics. Indeed, after decades of Modernist-baiting, every indicator suggests that the Moderns are back with a vengeance, or more accurately that they have never left us. And, in the context of Pound (whose lyric poetry minus the Cantos the Library of America has just brought out in a volume of 1200 pages), or Stein, recently the subject of Ulla Dydo’s massive genetic study, The Language Rises (2003), or the Duchamp of the readymades and boxes I discuss in Twenty-First Century Modernism, certain individual Language poets have already emerged as poets who are judged according to their own lights, the larger Language movement itself notwithstanding.

Consider the case of Susan Howe, who is technically a Language poet in that she is included in all the “Language” anthologies, teaches in the Buffalo poetics program directed until recently by that most visible of language poets Charles Bernstein, and is grouped with Language poets in courses and on reading lists. Like Bernstein and Hejinian, Howe has always abjured the “natural look” and the transom-theory of communication; her referents are always ambiguous and she easily shifts from verse to prose and back. She has never produced the collections of lyrics that mark most poetic careers, and none of her narratives are ever linear, logical, or even sequential. Again, like the other Language poets, Howe’s hybrid forms contain political critique—in her case, critique of New England history and antiquarian zeal in all their patriarchal authoritarianism, its latent capitalism, its lingering Puritanism.

But—and this is where Howe parts company with most of her peers—her discourse radius is neither that of pop culture nor of everyday life in a mediated America but of history, whether New England history, the history of Ireland in the 19th century, or of Prague during the Thirty Years War. In her poetic imagination, past and present are one, the key to their understanding being lexicography. Webster’s 3d International Dictionary, Howe has often remarked, is her Bible. Then, too, having been trained as a visual artist, Howe’s romance with history is created by the relation of word to image, sentence to photograph as well as to documentation both verbal and pictorial. And, whereas some Language poets write a loose, free verse, Howe’s is tight and formalized, her short highly structured verse columns resembling chants and spells that modulate at their breaking point into a sometimes documentary, sometimes highly poetic prose.

Howe’s most recent book The Midnight, for example, was prompted by the death, in her nineties, of her Irish actress mother Mary Manning, whose life was as poignant as it was colorful. But Howe’s is no usual memoir or elegy; rather, her complex portrait is a collage, built on altered family photographs, fly-leaves of old books, citations from Victorian writers on whom Mary Manning and her brother John were raised—Lewis Carroll, W. B. Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson—anecdotes about Mary’s acting days and her Irish critics and directors, citations from Emerson and Pierce, all these juxtaposed to two series of short lyric poems called “Bed Hangings,” [figure 15]which in their turn draw on a “pedestrian gray paperback” Howe discovered by chance in a bookshop in Hartford, called Bed Hangings: a Treatise on Fabrics and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650-1850.” Why should bed hangings and their cognates—old laces, curtains, bed covers, drapes, weavings — appeal to the poet? Perhaps because, as she tells us, she is “an insomniac who goes to bed in a closet” (43). Bed hangings, in any case, are central to Howe’s own weave, The Midnight being structured as a tissue of resonant narrative and lyric fragments in which words and images transform each others’ meanings.

The book opens with a facsimile of the title page of Robert Louis Stevenson’s great tale of romance and evil, The Master of Ballantrae (1889):

There was a time when bookbinders placed a tissue interleaf between frontispiece and title page in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together. Although a sign is understood to be consubstantial with the thing or being it represents, word and picture are essentially rivals. The transitional space between image and scripture is often a zone of contention. Here we must separate. Even printers and binders drift apart. Tissue paper for wrapping or folding can also be used for tracing. Mist-like transience. Listen, quick rustling. If a piece of sentence left unfinished can act as witness to a question proposed by a suspected ending, the other side is what will happen. Stage snow. Pantomime.
“Give me a sheet. [figure 16]

And on the verso:

The counterfeit presentment of two papers. After 1914, advances in printing technology rendered an interleaf obsolete. Mischief delights in playing with surfaces. Today each spectral scrap intact in a handed down book has acquired an enchanted aura quite apart from its original utilitarian function. Wonderfully life-like, approaching transparency, not shining: this pale or wanly yellow, tangible intangible murderously gentle exile, mutely begs to be excused. Superstition remains—as spiritual hyphen. Listen, quick rustling. In second character, freed from practical obligation. I’m not asleep just leafing. Miniature scenery. Etiquette.
On your side, with pleasure.” [figure 17]

Howe’s is, of course a ‘counterfeit presentment” because her image can render the title page covered by tissue interleaf only as a facsimile. The spectral scrap” of tissue is the first of the many covers, linens, cloth tissues, curtains that mask and yet define the “story” of Mary Manning as of Susan Howe herself, as “told” by means of lyric, narrative, pictogram, painting, and especially what we might call, on the model of Duchamp’s assisted readymade, the assisted photograph—a photograph doctored up so as to participate in the metonymic tracery of Howe’s long poem.

Consider page 119 [see figure 18] where the poet reproduces a facsimile of the first or “A” page of Mary Manning’s address book, the last such she evidently owned, in which she was jotting down phone numbers at the time of her death. The facsimile page is separated by a block of print (Howe’s account of her mother’s comings and goings between Ireland and Cambridge, finally settling in the latter) from a rather muzzy photograph (facing right even as the address-book page faces left) of a young girl, pasted at an angle into its frame, reproduced at the top of the page. Howe’s note for this image reads “Photograph of Mary Manning, circa 1913. Caption reads: ‘Watching an aeroplane / Mary Manning.’” But the caption is not reproduced here.

Watching an aeroplane in 1913? The page from the address book has been cropped and angled so that only two numbers are legible: Aer Lingus (800-223-6537) and Audio Ears (484-8700). What do these signify? Was Mary Manning Howe planning a trip to Ireland when she died? Did she want to die in her home country? Or is it merely a useful phone number to have when Irish visitors come to Cambridge? Again, if this very old lady wanted to call Audio-Ears, perhaps for a new hearing aid or repair of an old one, what does that signify vis-à-vis thoughts of death and Ireland? Mary Manning’s purpose remains mysterious. But The Midnight itself makes the connections. For can it be a coincidence that Aer is an anagram for Ears? Or that Ling-us contains the root that gives us linguistic? Then, too, Aer is a synonym for “air” or song—a language air, so to speak–and as such it depends, of course, on “Audio Ears.” Howe’s poetic text thus works by juxtaposition: for example, the facsimile of a scrap of paper that may not even really exists is contrasted to the very much existing facsimile of Emily Dickinson manuscript 169—it bears only the three words “grasped by god” (126)—which is literally inaccessible: a fragment kept with the Dickinson papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library, is out of bounds in a room closed to readers.

In the intricacy of its collage cuts and juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated facsimiles and fragments, The Midnight can be called a language poem, but its refractions and reflections are probably closer to a Henry James novella than to the work of her fellow language poets. Which is to say that her poetry is finally sui generis. But, then, such individuation is hardly surprising. As Pound understood when he abruptly turned away from the Imagism he had invented, once an avant-garde movement has caught on, it is time, in Jasper Johns’s words, to do something else. At his inaugural reading at the Kelly Writers’ House of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he had just become a professor, Charles Bernstein concluded with the following poem, which goes like this:

every lake has a house
& every house has a stove
& every stove has a pot
& every pot has a lid
& every lid has a handle
& every handle has a stem
& every stem has an edge
& every edge has a lining
& every lining has a margin
& every margin has a slit
& every slit has a slope
& every slope has a sum
& every sum has a factor
& every factor has a face
& every face has a thought
& every thought has a trap
& every trap has a door
& every door has a frame
& every frame has a roof
& every roof has a house
& every house has a lake (unpaginated) [figure 19]

“Every lake” was written on Bernstein’s Scandinavian tour in 2001. While visiting the lake country of Norway he was evidently told that “everyone” has a house on a lake. Then, too, he may well have remembered that Wittgenstein, whose propositions “Every lake” calls to mind, had such a house. Such information, in any case, generated the short “simple” propositions, one per line, that follow. At first these propositions are quite reasonable, even logical, what with “& every pot has a lid / & every lid has a handle,” but they become increasingly absurd, rising to the non-sensicality of “every factor has a face.” But never wholly absurd in that lines like “& every slit has a slope” make sense aurally if not semantically, the words related not only by alliteration, but by the sound play that takes us from “slit” to ‘slope” versus the missing word “slippery,” as in “slippery slope.” Indeed, the whole poem is a set of slippery slopes, whose descent leads to all sorts of wrong turnings. But then, with the pun in line 15—“& every thought has a trap / & every trap has a door”—some sort of sense reasserts itself, culminating in the inverted return to the opening, in which, this time, it is not “every lake” that “has a house” but “every house that “has a lake.” The outcome seems nothing if not plausible.

“Every lake” is, at one level, a playful send-up of nursery-rhyme logic; here nothing quite “follows” from what has come before and the propositions are largely non-sensical. But the lyric has a Wittgensteinian dimension as well. It was Wittgenstein, after all, who taught us that the meaning of even the simplest proposition like “The rose is red” varies according to its use in the language. If, for example, the context for “& every edge has a lining” were the proverb, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” then the “edge” does ‘have” a lining, for, in the case of clouds, that silver lining is the edge. A given proposition thus demands our fullest attention, but, in our media climate, Bernstein implies, we tend to process such statements just as we process the daily news: a (already not quite right) leads to b and next thing you know, b has led to the assertion of c, which fudges just enough to make a mockery of the whole sequence.

Bernstein has always played with these notions of “mistake” and mind control; his poetry has always been deeply political. But whereas his most characteristic poetry involves markedly disjunctive syntax, replete with wild puns, citations, comic routines, and conceptual vocabulary, here is a poem whose “simple” structure is that of a perfect circle, its language heavily visual and descriptive, its syntax straightforward, its diction “normal,” and its rhythm that of simple chant with incremental repetition.

Is this a Language poem? The question is moot. For what matters, twenty-five years after the fact, is less the specific avant-garde “tradition “every lake” comes from than the “individual talent” which is so clearly Bernstein’s own.

Footnotes

The Case of Ron Silliman

Marjorie Perloff

published in Qarry West, 34: Ron Silliman Issue, ed. Tom Vogler (1998): 167-81.

His works are composed very explicitly under various conditions, presenting a variety of possible words, possible language formations. Such poetry emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary, designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact–monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, wilful. (CD 40-41)

The reference, so far as Silliman is concerned (for Bernstein is of course also thinking of his own work), is to Silliman’s use, in the long poems of the seventies, of rules and procedures, whether the Fibonacci series used to produce the paragraphs of Tjanting, or the format of 223 numbered paragraphs based on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in The Chinese Notebook. Whatever the specific device used, so Silliman suggests in his “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” the construction of poetic discourse takes its cue from Marx’s famous statement, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” [3]

Early commentators on Language poetry, myself included, thus took for granted that the poetic community represented by The American Tree was united by its antagonism to lyric voice, coherent self, individual consciousness, or transcendental ego. But now that the movement is twenty years old and inevitably showing signs of strain, now that the differences between individual “Language poets” are beginning to seem more significant than their similarities, it might be well to look at the “voice” conundrum again. Statements of poetics, after all, can never be taken at face value. Is the language of the rustic, as Wordsworth famously claimed, really closer than that of the city dweller “to the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”? Is poetry, as Eliot declared, “not the expression of emotions, but an escape from emotions,” and is Prufrock thus a “persona,” unrelated to his creator? What about Pound’s axiom “Direct treatment of the thing” or Williams’s notorious “No ideas but in things!”? Are these universal prescriptions? And how accurately do they characterize Pound’s and William’s own lyrics?

Both Bernstein and Silliman have recently contributed to the Gale Research Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Bernstein’s piece, which I shall discuss elsewhere, takes the form of an autobiographical interview conducted by Loss Pequeño Glazier; Silliman’s Under Albany is a more traditional first-person narrative, “topic” sentences being used as titles or captions for blocks of narrative, often out of chronological order. [4] Read in the context of his poems, Silliman’s autobiography brings before us a very particular speaking voice–a voice not to be mistaken for Bernstein’s or, for that matter, for any of his fellow poets in The American Tree. Indeed, one wonders how or why the writers in question should continue to be identified as tout court “Language poets” and hence linked as being somehow the same. Perhaps a discussion of Under Albany will finally put to rest the group label, together with its specter of “voicelessness.”

Or so I hope, given the continuing dismissal and demonization of language poetry. At Buffalo, for example, the young poets associated with the journal Apex of the M have tried to separate themselves from an entity known as Language poetry–an irony given the continuing refusal of mainstream presses to bring out the work of the poets in question and of foundations like the Guggenheim or MacArthur to give them fellowships. “The moment of communal coherence,” as Silliman explains in his interview with Tom Vogler and Tom Marshall (elsewhere in this journal), was “extremely fragile and fleeting. . . . For langpo, that moment existed roughly from some time around 1970 until, at the latest 1981 or maybe ‘82.” The critique by younger–and basically like-minded poets (in Buffalo, in the pages of Ed Foster’s Talisman, or on Rick Caddel’s British Poets List on the Web) of the language poets’ power and hegemony, says Silliman, thus “feels like the literary equivalent of the old split between the house slave and the field slave–the real issue should be the elimination of slavery.” Touché. Just yesterday, I received a request to write an essay on some aspect of new American poetry for the English journal Poetry Review, edited by Peter Forbes. The choice of topic, wrote Forbes, was mine, “but we don’t want an essay on Language poetry because we already had one in the last issue.” A single essay on this vexed topic is evidently enough!

Suppose, then, we put the well-known Language manifestos and statements of poetics on the backburner and look at the text of Under Albany, written just this past year for the Gale Research series mentioned above. The Albany of the title is the small Bay Area town north of Berkeley where Silliman grew up but it is also the title of an earlier prose piece included in ABC (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1983). “Under” Albany thus points to getting under and inside of the parataxis of Albany, with its characteristically non-sequential, juxtapositional “New Sentences,” as well as getting out from under the stifling life of the poet’s childhood Albany, CA.

Albany, carefully plotted, consists of a hundred sentences of varying length. In the first section of Under Albany we learn that “The ‘average sentence in Albany is 6.94 words long.” [5] Since these hundred sentences will be so important to the later text, I shall cite Albany in its entirety here:

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable, though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the corner store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in te lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord’s control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-celling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry’s father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can’t read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison, a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland is 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table. (ABC, unpaginated)

Here the collocation of disparate sentence units (A never follows B) is vintage Silliman. As in Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, the poet avoids conventional “expressivity” by avoiding a consistent “I,” indeed, by not specifying who is the subject of the sentences in question. Who, for example, says “I just want to make it to lunchtime”? Or “Talking so much is oppressive”? Whose “carelessness has led to abortion”? Whose “best friend was Hispanic”? And so on.

At the same time–and this has always been a Silliman trademark–indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude a razor-sharp realism of description. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent– the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to “My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room.” And this is the white working class: “Grandfather called them niggers.” Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that “They speak in Farsi at the corner store.” The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: “The cops wear shields that serve as masks.” But the paragraph is also filled with references to sex and love, couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And finally, there is the motif of poetry: “If it demonstrates form they can’t read it.” And readings: “It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers.” Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one’s living elsewhere: “The want-ads,” as the last sentence reminds us, “lie strewn on the table.”

“Silliman’s work,” observes Jed Rasula, “may be read as a grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination.” [6] The allusion is, again, to the “Language” credo: the avoidance of all “lyrical interference of the ego,” the refusal to create a consistent or coherent “self,” whose construction of events as of verbal forms controls the material in question. The “realism” of Albany, Rasula would no doubt argue, is not that of personal expression but of a language game that allows for “thick” subject-matter even as it formalizes and thus distances it.

But must it be either/or? Is it really the case that Silliman eschews “authorial domination”? I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with such formulations. For one thing, there is a very particular “voice” that comes through Albany. We have, to begin with, not the slightest doubt that this is a man’s poem: a man, sensitive to the sexual needs and difficulties of the women in his life, but centrally caught up in the political: the abuses of the cops, the need for demonstrations, the “bayonets on campus,” the question of “nationalist movements in the Third World.” “How concerned was I,” we read in sentence 11, “over her failure to have orgasms.” Evidently not overly concerned (the “she,” we learn later, is his wife Rochelle), since the very next sentence reads “Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers.” Even such seemingly neutral statements as “My turn to cook” give Albany away as a man’s poem: woman’s “turn to cook,” let’s remember, is not an item of interest since it’s always woman’s turn.

The voice of Albany is matter-of-fact, street-wise, the voice of a largely self-educated working-class man who has slowly and painfully learned the craft of poetry, a man who’s been around and has had to put up with quite a bit, beginning with his father’s withholding of child support. Pain, violence and injustice are the facts of his life: sentence after sentence refers to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And even at the trivial level, difficulty dominates: “It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up.” “Becoming to live with less space.” “I used my grant to fix my teeth.” And so on. Yet Silliman’s utterances are by no means gloomy: on the contrary, his voice is sprightly, engaged, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the word-play of “They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs.” Or “Eminent domain. Rotating chair.” Or “There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch time.”

No individual signature? Let’s compare the prose of Albany to the following extracts:

(1) How was I to know that the woman, seated next to me on the bus,
would, when the bus lurched, just appear to lose her balance,
and, as if to keep herself from swaying, would take hold of my arm
with her hand so that pressing me between her finger and thumb
she pinched my arm. Though I believed (looking at her sideways,
and seeing only that her lips were parted slightly, with her snout
breathing softly) that during the two or three minutes
in which this pain lasted, she was saying (or at least I imagined so
from the length of time that she held on to my arm
before releasing me) I wish that I could make you yelp just once.

(2) A and Not-A are the same.

My dog does not know me.

Violins like dreams, are suspect.

I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.

The strait has frozen, and people are walking–a few skating– across it.

On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.

A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.

The world is all that is displaced.

Applies in a stall at the street corner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.

Memory does not speak.

Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.

(3) A man is standing in front of a window. In possession of
what he sees. A person becomes a lens on a room inside.
Then to walk into the room on sequent occasions. The
lights go down on the buildings outside. The window is
off the kitchen, the room is filled with people. Smoke
coming out of the cracks. What can he have. All words
resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single
point. That point is in motion, verging from one word to
the next. A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with
wavering lines. The room fills in with fragments of their
talk. But a window is an opening to the outside. He is
contradicted in his rooms, imagining a better place to live.

All three of these passages come from poetic works by West Coast poets associated with the Language movement: they are, respectively, Leslie Scalapino’s “hmmmm” from Considering how exagerrated music is, Michael Palmer’s “Autobiography” in At Passages, and Barrett Watten’s “City Fields” in Frame (1971-1990) .[7] All three poets would insist, I think, that theirs is not an “expressivist” poetry, that, in Palmer’s words, “He regards the self as just another sign.” And it is true that, read against, say, a lyric by Seamus Heaney or Louise Gluck, there is no doubt that Scalapino, Palmer, and Watten are trying, in the words of Jasper Johns, to “do something else” with language, true that they have no interest in the closural first-person metaphoric model of mainstream poetry.

But to label these texts “Language poems” and let it go at that tells us very little. Scalapino’s nine-line paragraph has a perfectly consistent angle of vision, quite unlike Silliman’s collage-prose. It is part of a longer sequence on the uncanny and terrifying substrate of ordinary life. Scalapino’s empiricist “flat” narrative purports merely to describe what happened, but what did? The scene, as so often in Silliman, [8] is on a bus; the poet is sitting next to an unknown woman. When the bus lurches, this woman, evidently to keep her balance, grabs the poet’s arm and pinches it. The incident couldn’t be more trivial but the narrator is convinced that the woman is pinching her on purpose, that somehow she is telling herself, I wish that I could make you yelp just once. There is no evidence for this malice, but no evidence against it either: we only know that “her lips were parted slightly, with her snout breathing softly,” the word “snout” for “mouth” connoting a malignant, animal quality. But of course the real focus of this paragraph is not on the stranger but on the “I,” who reads these sinister motives into the most ordinary of incidents. Somehow–how?–her mind’s not right, or is it that her suspicion is merely the emblem of the larger, depersonalized, tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest that characterizes the postmodern metropolis?

Scalapino’s prose, in any case, far from being disjointed like Silliman’s, moves seamlessly from beginning to end, from the question “How was I to know…” to the projected words of the stranger presented in italics. Silliman would never describe the woman as having a snout; indeed, his eyes would rest on the surface of her person and quickly, impatiently, move on to something else–a memory, perhaps, or a description of a boarding house, or an amusing pun that occurs to him. His jaunty utterances, upbeat despite the constant difficulties he faces, are quite unlike the just barely controlled hysteria of “Hmmm.”

Michael Palmer’s lineated poem is called “Autobiography” but the poet’s tone is more impersonal than either Silliman’s or Scalapino’s. His short sentences, separated by large areas of white space, are enigmatic and parabolic. Some of his aphorisms–”A and not-A–are the same”; “The world is all that is displaced”–allude to Wittgenstein, the latter a nice twist on “The world is everything that is the case” (1.1. of the Tractatus). Some sentences contain literary allusions: “My dog does not know me,” for example, inverts Gertrude Stein’s, “I am I because my little dog knows me.” In this context, “My dog does not know me” is equivalent to saying “I am nothing.” “All clocks are clouds” brings to mind a Magritte painting; and such lines as “Winter roses are invisible,” and “Late ice sometimes sings,” are written under the sign of Breton’s Nadja and related Surrealist dreamworks. Unlike either Silliman or Scalapino, both of them insistently urban poets, Palmer is given to references to “roses” and “ice,” to “the crescent beach, a drowned deer.” And these nature images are underscored by references to foreign (usually European) locales, as in “Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.”) One thinks here of Apollinaire ‘s “Zone” or Cendrars’s “Panama, or My Seven Uncles.”

Altogether, Palmer’s imagination is more visual than Silliman’s; his memories more hallucinatory and dreamlike. His is the anxiety, not of the malignant, faceless crowd, as in Scalapino’s piece, but of the empty room: “Violins, like dreams, are suspect.” “There is,” David LeviStrauss has remarked, “a quite identifiable first person running through [Palmer’s] books. It is usually male, neurasthenic, doubtful, by turns cheerful and morose: a reluctant survivor. If it had a visible companion, the other might be called Didi or Clov or Camier. This first person is trepidatious and apologetic, constantly undercutting its own authority.” [9] Thus in “Autobiography,” Silliman’s sturdy resilience gives way to “Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.” And although, like Silliman, Palmer writes a poetry of parataxis, his is a juxtapositioning of literary, philosophical, and aesthetic fragments rather than the phenomenology of everyday life characteristic of Silliman.

Yet another kind of psychic drive can be found in Barrett Watten’s prose poem, again part of a longer sequence. Unlike Silliman, Scalapino, and Palmer, Watten uses the third person, but his narrator, who becomes “a lens on a room inside,” functions as a kind ofJamesian register, through whom all “events” and items perceived are filtered. It is he who is “in possession of what he sees” first from outside the room and then from inside. He who feels cut off from the “fragments of their talk”. Yet he is more confident than Palmer’s self-critical “I,” more assertive about “imagining a better place to live.” Anxiety, for Watten, is socially constructed and hence to be overcome: “All words resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single point.” For the moment, however, there is no escape: “A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with wavering lines.”
In Watten’s account of displacement and possible reconnection, each sentence leads to the next. If Silliman were writing this, “The window is off the kitchen,” would be followed by a sentence like “Net income is down 13%” or “They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip.” Watten’s prose is more chaste, consecutive, linear; his vocabulary less exuberant and varied. And even though his narrator never speaks in his own person, a voice–measured yet urgent, direct yet highly “educated”–comes through. Again, no one would mistake this passage for a work by Silliman.

“Voice,” it would seem, is not so easily eradicated. But what happens when the elaborately constructed collage of Albany is used to design the openly autobiographical narrative of its successor Under Albany, coming a full fifteen years later? In a letter to me (10 January 1998), Silliman comments, “I used the sentences of Albany to tell me what to write, where to focus, that moment in the essay. The whole premise of Albany (or at least a premise) was to focus on things that were both personal and political, so when Gale called it seemed like the right place to begin. That poem always has been my autobiography, so to speak” (my italics).

The first sentence of Albany, and hence of Under Albany is “If the function of writing is to ‘express the world.’” The sentence is left suspended, the reference to writing as expression can be made only by using scare quotes. In the same vein, the last sentence of Under Albany (not a title from the original) is “It is not possible to ‘describe a life.’” Again the disclaimer, again the scare quotes. But of course the text itself does express the poet’s world, does describe a life–and does so very graphically and movingly. Despite Silliman’s evident desire to subvert the autobiographical, the lyrical, the confessional, in keeping with Language poetics, the urge is to express. On the other hand–and this is an important difference–one “expresses,” not by putting oneself at the center of the universe, but by following Wittgenstein’s precept that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” “The subject,” says Wittgenstein, “does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (Tractatus 5.6, 5.632).

Silliman’s one-hundred titles constitute the limits in question. Under the first, “If the function of writing is to ‘express the world’,” we have an anecdote about the fifth grade writing contest where young Ron separates himself from the class “star” and “wild kid,” Jon Arnold, and begins, unknowingly, to find his own métier, scribbling “longhand tales scrawled into thick notebooks (‘the assassination of Hitler,’ ‘manned rocket flies behind moon only to disappear’).” The function of writing, it quickly appears, is to “express the world,” at least, with the Wittgensteinian proviso, “the world as I found it.” Arnold’s flashy paper on “the reaction of students hearing him . . . read aloud” is an index to his later career: “I veered away from Arnold by the time high school arrived, his outsiderness reaching regular truancy. . . . When I saw him at State nearly 20 years later . . . the narrative of clothing was aging beach boy, his torso and limbs, every visible inch, covered with tattoos.” For Silliman, by contrast, home life was so bad that “school presented itself as an alternate society (if not reality), an utter necessity.” And that necessity is soon translated into “writing.” The very next title sentence, “My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room,” leads to a second account of story-telling–this time the horror stories with which nine-year old Ron barraged his younger brother, scaring the little boy nearly to death . Atypically, Silliman here probes motivation:

The cruelty of my behavior is evident. It’s not an excuse to say that I was nine years old, or twelve. What motivated me? Over forty years later, it is still unclear to me whether I was driven out of a confused sense that my brother’s arrival shortly after the disappearance of my father had been, in some vague way, the cause of that man’s abandonment, or whether the practice of emotional terrorism (modelled with such artistry by my grandmother) was simply the only form of autonomy I understood. (UA 3)

It sounds, at this point, like anybody’s autobiography–the standard retrospective account in which the mature narrator tries to make sense of the child he once was, tries to understand his motives and the familial/ social matrix in which they were developed. But just when we are comfortable with the convention, we come to sentence #3:

Grandfather called them niggers.

So that I was surprised at how many elderly African American men, all, like my grandfather, members of the Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW) came to his funeral. (3)

In the context of Albany, the first sentence is taken at face value. Followed as it is in the poem by “I can’t afford an automobile,” it gives us a sense of the bleak deprivation and petty racism of white working-class Albany, CA. But in the autobiography, the meaning shifts: perhaps, the reader now surmises, “calling them niggers” wasn’t equivalent to simple racism, for, as Veterans of World War I, black and white actually came together.

The disparity between title and text points up an interesting feature of Silliman’s work. On the one hand, the commissioned autobiographical piece seems much more “straightforward” than its earlier “poetic” source. The paragraphs themselves are not made up of disparate sentences arranged paratactically; their mode is narrative–a very immediate, documentary narrative that seems designed to give as accurate a “picture” as possible of growing up in a dysfunctional family in the dreary North Bay and moving on to the seamier spaces of San Francisco. Although the chronology is by no means straightforward, we learn a great deal about Ron’s “background.” For example:

Yet his best friend was Hispanic.

What I know of my grandfather’s family is almost entirely hearsay, although I never once in the 15 years I lived with the man heard him speak of them. His mother was “a monster,” “a terror,” “cold” and “mean.” On that my mother and grandmother both agreed. (I should be suspicious. This is the exact story I hear about my father and his family from my maternal grandmother). . . .

My grandmother’s first memory of him came from an event in the combined fifth-sixth grade class at LeConte School they attended. A fellow student had had a seizure and my grandfather, following the recommended practice of the day, had inserted his belt into the boy’s mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. While my grandmother, the youngest of 11 surviving children in a single-parent household, only made it to ninth grade, my grandfather graduated from Oakland Technical High School and worked briefly for Santa Fe railraod before joining the army and shipping off to Paris to load taxis with munitions during the First World War. Returning, he took a job with what was then called the Paraffin Company in Emeryville where he worked from 1919 until 1961. (UA 9)

This flat, documentary, straightforward account strikes me as curiously horrific. Not because the story is so sad–that would be normal–but because it is so empty. Imagine working for the Paraffin Company in Emeryville for over forty years, doing more or less the same job! Forty yeqrs during which nothing remarkable seems to happen. A more artful autobiographer would have heightened it, would have found a way to give Grandfather’s life symbolic meaning, as, say, Robert Lowell does in his “91 Revere Street.” But Silliman feels sorry neither for the grandfather nor for himself. For him, the personal is always political, and although the poet never says so in so many words, the kind of alienated labor described is just that–there is nothing more to say about it. His own path, in any case, will be different: via an endless assortment of odd jobs, writing workshops, and hoops to jump through, he will remake himself as a poet.

The macrostructure of Under Albany is thus that of Bildungsroman–a kind of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the young man is both poet and political activist in the Vietnam years. But because this particular activist-poet discovers that the self is constructed in language, he uses his core sentences to play verbal games with the reader. For example:

Revenue enhancement.
I do not recall a time in which I was not the absolutely poorest kid in my class.

or

Television unifies conversation.
Our next door neighbors, the Pruters, were the first on the block to own a set, a large box with a small blue round screen. A year later, when we first bought ours, we would turn it on at 5.00p.m. every day, letting it warm up for a half hour against one of the test patterns that was on before the arrival of the first broadcast, Howdy Doody. (12)

or

I look forward to old age with some excitement.
Sixteen years later, I writing from my room 218 in the Motel Six of Porterville, in the Sierra foothills north of Bakersfield. My nephew, Stephen Matthew Silliman is just four days old. Allen Ginsberg has been dead for 13 days. Their worlds never crossed, just as mine never crossed Gertrude Stein’s. But I know people who have slept with people who have slept with people who slept with Walt Whitman. At 94, Carl Rakosi’s mind clear as a bell. Others at 24, hopelessly muddied and muddled. Once, walking on the beach at Stinson with Rae Armantrout during our student days at Berkeley, I knelt to pick up a beautifully pocked smooth gray stone (I still have it). She asked me what I was doing. “Looking for the good ones,” I replied. (23-24)

The technique in these passages is much subtler than it seems. In all three cases the sentences don’t necessarily “follow” their titles: the discourse shifts from business lingo (“Revenue enhancement”) to the personal (#1), or contradicts the title, as in #2, where television “unifies” conversation only in the sense that everyone is staring at the same set, making only the occasional comment; everyone, moreover, is watching the same program the neighbors are watching. So much for good conversation. In #3, the paragraph does serve as “illustration” for the “topic sentence,” but in a very oblique way. The poet is meditating on the ubiquitous conjunction of birth (his nephew’s) and death (Allen Ginsberg’s), on the interrrelation of lives, past and present. The idea of recovering Whitman’s past via a series of people who have slept with other people is comically grotesque, but it illustrates nicely Silliman’s optimism, his ability to find some trivial emblem of the good life–in this case the “beautifully pocked smooth gray stone.” One feels here that the “absolutely poorest kid in the class” has become steadily happier. Thus he actually can look forward to old age. But “with excitement”? Only in the sense that the “Ron” of Under Albany has always looked forward to the next stage of his life with excitement.

There is no “reasonable” explanation of this mood. Another person might have reacted quite differently to being the poorest kid in the class or having had his father desert him. And there are strange and startling moments, for example in “Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits,” with its account of eighteen-year old Ron’s first acid trip. followed by an unpleasant confrontation with his mother, back home, who, not recognizing the symptoms, accuses him of being drunk:

Then she added, almost in the same breath, before I could decide whether or not to trust myself to say anything at all, that she’d gotten a phone call from my uncle in Pasco. My father had been in an accident somewhere in South Carolina. After several days, he’d died. I still didn’t say anything, nor did she. I went to the room that was nominally mine and lay on the bed I’d grown up with–the “cottage cheese” stucco and asbestos walls pulsated every shade of the rainbow. I don’t recall what I thought–I don’t even recall thinking–but I remember looking inside myself, imagining that I should find an emotion somewhere, puzzled a little that I seemed to find none. (UA 27)

How are we meant to react to this grotesque moment? Explanation, here as elsewhere, gives way to description, as Wittgenstein insisted it should. And the longish narrative in question now yields to a very different time and place, the title sentence being “A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph.” Beneath this caption we read, “Some of the passengers on the BART car look up, trying to figure out who the “famous” woman is. I’m sitting half a car away, jotting in a notebook.” What is the relation of the death of the prodigal father–a death learned of while high on acid–to this Angela Davis-on-the-bus vignette?

We can take it in various ways. Perhaps the passivity of the poet’s mother in the face of desertion leads her son to activism. Perhaps he escapes into it? Or perhaps he is not all that interested in the Angela Davis phenomenon, busy as he is scribbling in his notebook. Events, in any case, are not related in logical ways: in Under Albany, juxtaposition of the larger units is modelled on the parataxis of the individual sentences of Albany. Thus, although the passages themselves are narrative and coherent, we move easily from sexual encounters to rallies, to memories of the front porch at Albany, to those who ask Angela Davis for her autograph. The “new sentence” thus gives way to what we might call the “new paragraph.” The reader has to fill in the blanks.

And this is of course what Silliman wants us to do. In the interview with Vogler and Marshall, he remarks that “my writing aims at bringing the reader as deeply inside the immediate unit of writing as possible–the sentence, the line, the word” (16). Unlike the usual “‘voice’ trope,” he maintains, “an elaborate conceit . . . that attempts to focus the reader’s experience outside of him-or herself,” his writing is designed to allow the reader to “activate” the text, to “sense how her own nose interrupts and shapes the lower limit of the horizon” (17).
One might interject here that good poets have always “activated” reader response in this way, have always allowed for gaps which the reader must construct and interpret. And, Silliman is quick to add , he is by no means suggesting that anything goes: “The revolution of the word,” as he puts it, “is not an anarchist event.” Indeed, “as the author, I get to determine unilaterally which words in what order will set forth the terms through which the experience shall occur” (17, my italics).

Is Silliman’s then, as Jed Rasula posits, a “grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination”? Yes, if by “chronic” we are referring to the confessional mode of the sixties and seventies, in which verbal material is all but subsumed under the presence of a commanding “I.” But if we look further afield and read Silliman against Blaise Cendrars or Apollinaire, against the early Eliot or the late Stevens, not to mention Williams and Stein, we learn that it’s perfectly reasonable to think of Silliman as an individual lyric poet, a poet whose mainspring, however bound to the theorems of early Language poetics, has always been essentially autobiographical.
Under Albany ends with the poet’s marriage to Krishna and the implication that life in the Bay area is over: The final title is

The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

There follows the poem’s conclusion, “It is not possible to ‘describe a life’” (57). But in fact it is possible and we have just seen it happen. The caveat is that such description can never produce closure. The want-ads, strewn on the table on Silliman’s final page point toward the future: another job, another city, another life. And in this sense it really is “not possible to ‘describe a life’,” for in the act of writing, it continues to be lived. The future must be extracted, bit by tantalizing bit, from “under” Albany.

Footnotes

RON SILLIMAN’S ALBANY, SUSAN HOWE’S BUFFALO

Marjorie Perloff

published in Albany, Critical Inquiry, 25 (Spring1999), 405-434.

The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body–in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.
–Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description” [1]

One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the cardinal principle—of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England, usually labeled “linguistically innovative poetries”) [2] has been the dismissal of “voice” as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface to his anthology In The American Tree (1986), Ron Silliman famously declared that Robert Grenier’s “I HATE SPEECH” manifesto, published in the first issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), “announced a breach–and a new moment in American writing”–a rejection of “simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as unified object. And the reader likewise.” [3] From the other coast, Charles Bernstein similarly denounced “voice” as the “privileged structure in the organization and interpretation of poems.” [4] And in his early essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1976), Silliman is Bernstein’s Exhibit A for a constructivist poetry, a poetry that undermines the “natural look,” with its “personal subject matter & a flowing syntax.” [5] “Ron Silliman,” Bernstein writes, “has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape”–one that “may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily” (“SS,” pp. 40-41). And the essay goes on to unmask Official Verse Culture, with its “sanctification” of “authenticity,” “artlessness,” “spontaneity,” and claim for self-presence, the notion, widely accepted in the poetry of the 1960s, that “The experience is present to me” (“SS,” pp. 41, 42). [6]

Although Bernstein doesn’t explicitly say so, the critique of voice, self-presence, and authenticity, put forward in Content’s Dream, as well as in such related texts as Ron Silliman’s own The New Sentence (1987) or Steve McCaffery’s North of Intention (1986), [7] must be understood as part of the larger poststructuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject, a critique that became prominent in the late sixties and reached its height in the U.S. a decade or so later when the Language movement was coming into its own. It was Roland Barthes, after all, who insisted, in “The Death of the Author” (1968), that writing, far from being the simple and direct expression of interiority, is “the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” “Linguistically, “ Barthes declared, “the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’.” And he famously concludes:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God). . . . The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others. . . . Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred. [8]

Here Barthes anticipates Foucault’s equally famous pronouncement, in “What Is an Author?” (1969), that “The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’.” In Foucault’s words:

Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears. The author is now replaced by the “author function”–the function of a particular discourse– and the pressing questions about a given text become, not “what has [the author] revealed of his most profound self in his language?” but “where does [this discourse] come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” [9]

What matter who’s speaking? (“WIA,” p. 138). Beckett’s question, as recharged and transmitted by Foucault, was to be historicized, along Marxist and specifically Althusserian lines, by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism (1991). Whereas Barthes, Foucault, and the Derrida of Writing and Difference were essentially talking about how to read, how, that is, to construct an existing text without taking its author’s intentions as normative, Jameson takes the death of the author, or rather, the death of the subject, quite literally, that death being no more than one of the symptoms of the social transformations produced by late global capitalism. “The very concept of expression,” Jameson posits, “presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside” that characterizes great modernist artworks like Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots or Edward Munch’s The Scream.[10] Postmodernism no longer recognizes such “depth models” as inside/ outside, essence/appearance, latent/manifest, authenticity/ inauthenticity, signifier/signified, or depth/surface.

The “alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation,” and indeed by the “death” of the subject itself–the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (P, pp. 14-15). Coupled with that end is the end of a “unique style, along with the accompanying collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde.” The result is the now axiomatic “waning of affect” that manifests itself in an ability to produce satire or even parody, the latter giving way to “blank parody” or pastiche. “As for expression,” writes Jameson, “. . . the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling (P, p. 15).

In his first formulation of this “new depthlessness” or “waning of affect” (1984), [11] Jameson voiced some regret over the passing of Modernism. But by 1990 (the date of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism), he seems to find the passing of the Modernist Giants–Picasso, Kafka, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wright–the occasion of at least some satisfaction:

[I]f the poststructuralist motif of the ‘death of the subject’ means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism, with its “charisma” and its accompanying categorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the “genius” in the first place. Seen thus, the extinction of the ‘great moderns’ is not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in information and more literate, and socially, at least, more “democratic” in the sense of the universalization of wage labor . . . .this new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type. . . . Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regrets, as Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges. (P, p. 306; my emphasis).

I cite this passage at some length because its argument has been so thoroughly internalized in our own “advanced” discourses about the place of the aesthetic in our culture. The demise of the transcendental ego, of the authentic self, of the poet as lonely genius, of a unique artistic style: these, as we have seen, are now taken as something of a given. In their group manifesto “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry” (1988), for example, Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten concur that “our work denies the centrality of the individual artist. . . . The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing.” [12] And, given the tedious and unreflective claim for the unique insight and individual vision that has characterized so large a portion of mainstream poetry, the case for an “alternative” poetics remains compelling.

At the same time, now that the exploratory poetries associated with the Language movement are more than twenty years old, Jameson’s formulations (and related theories of the postmodern) have lost much of their edge. For, even if we set aside the work of mainstream poets like the American laureates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, Mark Strand and Rita Dove, even if we restrict ourselves to the poets of the counterculture represented in, say, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s new Poems for the Millenium,[13] differences among the various poets now strike us as more significant than similarities or group labels. Such counters as asyntacticality or the disappearance of the referent or even the materiality of the sign cannot alter the simple fact that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O’Sullivan “verbovisivocal” text from one by Susan Howe. More important: the breakdown of the high/low distinction, accepted as a cornerstone of postmodernism by the theorists of the seventies and eighties, is coming under increasing suspicion as common sense tells us that all artworks are not, after all, equally valuable (whatever valuable means), and that when, for example, Frank Sinatra is called, as he has been in the wake of his recent death, one of the great artists of the century, this statement is not really equivalent to the proposition that John Cage is one of the great artists of the century. For one thing, the two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different contexts. The word great in any case, means something different in the two cases, as does the word artist. Even One of is unstable: Sinatra fans were comparing their idol, not only to other “great” singers and movie stars but to tycoons of the American record industry, those savvy entrepreneurs who know how to market a given label. In the case of Cage, on the other hand, one of would refer to the international avant-garde market– the Hörspiele heard on German radio as well as the Zen art of Japan.

Then, too, contemporary poetics has not satisfactorily resolved the relation of what Jameson calls the “new depthlessness” to the “genius” position now occupied by those evidently deep (read complex, difficult) theorists, whose word is all but law. Indeed, even as Jameson rejects the image of the “great demiurges and prophets” like “Proust in his cork-lined room” or the “‘tragic,’ uniquely doomed Kafka” (P, p. 305), he cites, on page after page, names like Adorno and Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Hegel and Nietzsche, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau, not to mention the book’s presiding deity who is, of course, Karl Marx. If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique style or authorial presence, why are these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so definitively on the death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Foucault? Again, if in the current climate we dare not claim canonical status for Beckett or Brecht, why does Walter Benjamin enjoy that status so readily?

In a recent essay for Bernstein’s collection Close Listening (1998), Silliman speculates on this phenomenon. Silliman begins by restating his opposition to “the poem as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presentation of sincerity and authenticity that for several decades has been a staple of most of the creative writings in the United States.” [14] But, in reevaluating what he calls Barthes’s “ritual slaying of the author” (WS, p. 364), Silliman wonders whether Barthes’s theory of text construction hasn’t gone too far. The insistence, in “The Death of the Author,” that “the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted,” is finally unsatisfactory: “The idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that remains are the reports of other readers–call them critics–whose texts endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the self-knowledge of their texts as infinitely deferred, deferring, acts” (“WS,” p. 365).

And where do these acts take place? Where else but in the university? As Silliman speculates:

Perhaps it should not be a surprise, that while postmodernism in the arts has been conducted largely, although not exclusively, outside of the academy, the postmodern debate has been largely conducted between different schools of professors who agree only that they too dislike it. Thus the characteristic strategy of the ambitious critic and anxious graduate student alike is not the opening of the canons, but rather the demonstration of a critical move upon some text(s) within the already established ensemble of official canons. . . . Once incorporated into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend. (“WS,” pp. 365, 368).
Barthes could not, of course, have foreseen that the privilege he accorded the reader (“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning”) would so easily turn into the form of ventriloquism Silliman describes. But, as those of us in the academy know only too well, this is precisely what has happened. “We know now: (“On sait maintenant”): we who are critics can practice our virtuosity on this or that poem, which is consequently accorded secondary status. Hence the elevated status of Benjamin or Deleuze vis-à-vis Beckett or Kafka.

What matter who’s speaking? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry. “The relation between agency and identity,” writes Silliman, “must be understood as interactive, fluid, negotiable” (RSCL 371). It is a “relation between the poet, a real person with ‘history, biography, psychology,’ and the reader, no less real, no less encumbered by all this baggage. In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and reader that is triggered by what [Roman] Jakobson called contact, the power of presence” (RSCL 373).
I find it interesting that Silliman, once an outspoken detractor of formalism, here invokes the name of the great Russian Formalist critic. A similar shift may be noted in the work of Bernstein. In the mordantly funny essay “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic” (1998), Bernstein examines the issues posed by the poetics of cultural construction. “In the 1990s,” he remarks,

the problems of group affiliation (the neolyric “we”) pose as much a problem for poetry as do assertions of the Individual Voice. If poems can’t speak directly for an author, neither can they speak directly for a group. . . . Each poem speaks not only many voices but also many groups and poetry can investigate the construction of these provisional entities in and through and by language.
If individual identity is a false front, group identity is a false fort. [15]

And, in the related essay “What’s Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in an Age of Cultural Studies,” Bernstein gives a devastating critique of the current critical orthodoxy that treats literature as no more than “symptom” or “example,” even as the theorist is taken to be above and beyond the fray. Isn’t it possible, asks Bernstein, that Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Tasteis itself a “commodity whose status is determined by its role in the professional habitat to which he belongs?” Or, again, “Is Fredric Jameson’s writing on postmodernism a symptom of postindustrial capitalism?” (MW 62-63). “Behind every successful artist,” Bernstein declares, “is a new historian who says it’s all just a symptom. Behind every successful new historian is an artist who says you forgot to mention my work–and, boy, is it symptomatic!” [16]

Of course, as Bernstein would be the first to insist, there’s no going back to earlier models. The workshop term voice, for example, a term that implies, quite inaccurately, that speech is primary and prior to writing and that hence a poem is simply the outward sign of a spoken self-presence (as in the ubiquitous cliché, “She’s really found her voice”) is not adequate. Neither is the fuzzy term style, a term now thoroughly co-opted by the media and commodified in such titles as “Life and Style” (a daily section of the Los Angeles Times).
Perhaps a more accurate term to refer to the mark of difference that separates one identity from another, no matter how fully the two share a particular group aesthetic, is the word signature. From 1580, from the Latin signare, “to sign or mark,” a signature is “the name (or special mark) of a person written with his or her own hand as an authentication of some document or writing.” “The fatal signature,” we read in Robert Southey’s All For Love (1829), “appear’d / To all the multitude, / Distinct as when the accursed pen / Had traced it with fresh blood.” A subsidiary meaning (1613) of signature, now obsolete, was “A distinctive mark, a peculiarity in form or colouring, etc. on a plant or other natural object, formerly supposed to be an indication of its qualities, especially for medicinal purposes.” A signature thus came to mean “a distinguishing mark of any kind”: in 1626, Lancelot Andrewes wrote in one of his sermons, “The saviour . . . taking on Him “Abraham’s seed” must withal take on Him the signature of Abraham’s seed, and be . . . circumcised.” And in his translation of the Odyssey (1725) Pope writes, “Vulgar parents cannot stamp their race / With signatures of such majestic grace.” In the seventeenth century (this meaning is now obsolete), signaturewas used to designate “a naevus or birth-mark.” [17]

A second category of definitions comes from the discourse of printing: a signature, let’s recall, is “a letter or figure, a set of combination of letters or figures, etc., placed by the printer at the foot of the first page (and frequently on one or more of the succeeding pages) of every sheet in a book, for the purpose of showing the order in which these are to be placed or bound.” And, thirdly, there is the musical designation of signature; from 1806 on it has meant “a sign, or set of signs, placed at the beginning of a piece of music, immediately after the clef, to indicate its key or time.” [18]

The common thread of all three of the above categories is that of the signature as identifying mark. As such, it is not surprising that, like its cognate term, author, the word signature became suspect in poststructuralist theory. In Les Mots et les choses (1966), Foucault writes movingly of signatures as the key element in the system of similitudes that dominated the preModern world. As “the visible mark of invisible analogies,” the signature was, for centuries, the external sign of a hidden but present interiority, and the world was “read” as a large open book, whose signs, characters, numbers, symbols, and hieroglyphs demand interpretation. “To find the law of signs,” as Foucault famously puts it, “is to discover things.” [19]
Les Mots et les choses traces the historical dissolution of this Renaissance “episteme,” a dissolution considered from a hermeneutic perspective by Derrida in “Signature Event Context” (1972). “A written sign . . . ,” writes Derrida, “is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it.” [20] But since the written sign inevitably breaks with its context, “with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of inscription,” “the absolute singularity of signature as event” can never fully occur (“SEC,” pp. 9, 20). Thus writing “is not the site, ‘in the last instance,’ of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth”(“SEC,” p. 21).

From a hermeneutic perspective, this is no doubt the case. But even Derrida, posing the question, “Are there signatures?” responds, “Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world” (“SEC,” p. 20). And he ends his essay with the “counterfeit” signature “J. Derrida” (“SEC,” p. 21). The implication is that, however conscious we must be of the basic instability of a given signature, in practice, we do take signatures seriously as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, an historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on. Indeed, if our purpose is to understand specific writing practices, individual as well as generic, we can hardly avoid noting their individual stamp or mark of authorship. The new Bilbao-Guggenheim Museum, for example, may bear witness to any number of postmodern architectural traits (and some modernist ones as well: witness the building’s Frank Lloyd Wright allusions), but its indelible signature is that of its highly individual architect Frank Gehry.
This brings me back to the question of the lyric subject in the ostensibly “deauthorized” work of the language poets. In what follows, I want to look at signatures in two poetic texts, both of them written by what are nominally Language poets and both charting, in very specific ways, the geography of childhood. The first is Ron Silliman’s own “Albany,” the second, Susan Howe’s Frame Structures.

“SIGNATURES OF ALL THINGS I AM HERE TO READ”

“Albany” is a long prose paragraph made up of one hundred “New Sentences,” to use Ron Silliman’s own term, defined in a now well-known (and hotly debated) essay by that name. The “new sentence” is conceived as an independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences that precede and follow it. Like a line in poetry, its length is operative, and its meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system.[21] Here, for example, are the first twenty sentences of “Albany”:

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and [22] spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation.

And here the last twenty:

Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland is 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

As in his long poems Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, “Albany” relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional “expressivity” by refusing to present us with a consistent “I,” not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be. Who, for example, says, “I just want to make it to lunchtime”? Or, “Talking so much is oppressive”? Who believes that “music is essential,” and, by the way, essential to what? Whose “best friend was Hispanic”? And so on.

At the same time–and this has always been a Silliman trademark–indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude an obsessive attention to particular “realistic” detail. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent– the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to “my father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room.” And this is the white working class: “Grandfather called them niggers.” Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that “they speak in Farsi at the corner store.” The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: “The cops wear shields that serve as masks.” But the paragraph is also filled with references to sexual love: couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And, finally, there is the motif of poetry: “If it demonstrates form they can’t read it.” And readings: “It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers.” Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one’s living elsewhere: “The want-ads,” as the last sentence reminds us, “lie strewn on the table.”

“Silliman’s work,” observes Jed Rasula, “may be read as a grand refusal of the chronic strategies of authorial domination.” [23] Here Rasula echoes Silliman’s own early Language manifestos, with their emphasis on the avoidance of what Charles Olson called the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego,” the refusal to create a consistent or controlling self, whose construction of events as of verbal forms controls the material in question. [24] The “realism” of “Albany,” Rasula would no doubt argue, is properly understood, not as personal expression, but as elaborate network of signifiers in which conflicting vocalizations and linguistic registers come into play.

But must it be either/or? And is it really the case that Silliman eschews “authorial domination”? I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with such formulations. For who, after all, controls the specific language operations in the text before us? There is, to begin with, not the slightest doubt that “Albany” is a man’s poem, a man, aware of the sexual needs and difficulties of the women in his life, but centrally caught up in the political: the need for demonstrations, the abuses of the cops, the “bayonets on campus,” the question of “nationalist movements in the Third World.” “How concerned was I,” we read in sentence 11, “over her failure to have orgasms?” However much—and the question may have been posed to the narrator by a friend, a relative, a physician, or by himself–the very next sentence, “Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers,” places the question about orgasms in ironic perspective. Even such seemingly neutral statements as “my turn to cook” identify “Albany” as the narrative of a young man who has consciously rejected the traditional male role: in his mother’s household, after all, such a statement would have been absurd, given the traditional division of labor.

The signature of Albany is a “normal” declarative sentence (“I can’t afford an automobile”) or part of a sentence (“To own a basement,” “Died in action”), sometimes commonsensical, sometimes aphoristic, sometimes an item in a newspaper or on television. In their curious collisions, these “casual” sentences point to an author who is matter-of-fact, streetwise, and largely self-educated; his is the discourse of a working-class man (as even the first name Ron rather than Ronald suggests) who has slowly and painfully learned the craft of poetry, a man who’s been around and has had to put up with quite a bit, beginning with his father’s withholding of child support. Pain, violence, and injustice are the facts of his life; sentence after sentence refers to murders, shoot-outs, abortions, riots, asbestos poisoning and the like. And even at the trivial level difficulty dominates: “It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up.” “Becoming to live with less space.” “I used my grant to fix my teeth.” And so on. Yet Silliman’s characteristic formulations are by no means gloomy; on the contrary, his “voice” emerges as sprightly, engaged, curious, fun-loving, energetic, a voice that loves the wordplay of “they call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs.” Or, “Eminent domain. Rotating chair.” Or “There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just wanted to make it to lunch time.”
No individual signature? Let’s compare the prose of “Albany” to the following extracts:

(1) How was I to know that the woman, seated next to me on the bus,
would, when the bus lurched, just appear to lose her balance,
and, as if to keep herself from swaying, would take hold of my arm
with her hand so that pressing me between her finger and thumb
she pinched my arm. Though I believed (looking at her sideways,
and seeing only that her lips were parted slightly, with her snout
breathing softly) that during the two or three minutes
in which this pain lasted, she was saying (or at least I imagined so
from the length of time that she held on to my arm
before releasing me) I wish that I could make you yelp just once.

(2) A and Not-A are the same.

My dog does not know me.

Violins like dreams, are suspect.

I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.

The strait has frozen, and people are walking–a few skating– across it.

On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.

A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.

The world is all that is displaced.

Apples in a stall at the street corner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.

Memory does not speak.

Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.

(3) A man is standing in front of a window. In possession of
what he sees. A person becomes a lens on a room inside.
Then to walk into the room on sequent occasions. The
lights go down on the buildings outside. The window is
off the kitchen, the room is filled with people. Smoke
coming out of the cracks. What can he have. All words
resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single
point. That point is in motion, verging from one word to
the next. A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with
wavering lines. The room fills in with fragments of their
talk. But a window is an opening to the outside. He is
contradicted in his rooms, imagining a better place to live.

All three of these passages come from poetic works by San Francisco poets associated with the Language movement: Leslie Scalapino’s “hmmmm” from Considering how exaggerated music is, Michael Palmer’s “Autobiography” in At Passages, and Barrett Watten’s “City Fields” in Frame (1971-1990).[25] All three poets would insist, I think, that theirs is not an “expressivist” poetry, that, in Palmer’s words, “He regards the self as just another sign.” And it is true that, read against, say, a lyric by Mark Strand or Louise Gluck, there is no doubt that Scalapino, Palmer, and Watten are trying, in the words of Jasper Johns, to “do something else to it,” [26] true that they have no interest in the closural first-person metaphoric model of mainstream poetry.

But to group these texts as Language poems tells us very little. Scalapino’s nine-line rectangular print block, written in complete sentences but with internal spacing that emphasizes its lineation, has a perfectly consistent angle of vision, quite unlike Silliman’s collage-prose. It is part of a longer sequence on the uncanny and terrifying substrate of ordinary life. Scalapino’s empiricist “flat” narrative purports merely to describe what happened, but what did? The scene, as so often in Silliman, [27] is on a bus: the “I” is sitting next to an unknown woman. When the bus lurches, this woman, evidently to keep her balance, grabs the narrator’s arm and pinches it. The incident couldn’t be more trivial but the narrator is convinced that the woman is pinching her on purpose, that somehow she is telling herself, “I wish that I could make you yelp just once.” There is no evidence for this malice, but no evidence against it either: we only know that the woman’s “lips were parted slightly, with her snout breathing softly,” the word “snout” for “mouth” connoting a malignant, animal quality. But of course the real focus of this paragraph is not on the stranger but on the “I,” who reads these sinister motives into the most ordinary of incidents. Somehow–how?–her mind’s not right, or is it that her suspicion is merely the emblem of the larger, depersonalized, tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest that characterizes the postmodern metropolis?
Scalapino’s prose, in any case, far from being disjointed like Silliman’s, moves inexorably from beginning to end, from the question, “How was I to know…” to the projected words of the stranger presented in italics. Silliman would never describe a woman as having a snout; indeed, his eyes would barely take in her person and quickly, impatiently, move on to something else–a memory, perhaps, of what he did with her, or a description of a boarding house, or an amusing pun that occurs to him. His jaunty utterances, upbeat despite the constant difficulties he faces, are quite unlike the just barely controlled hysteria that animates “Hmmm.”

Michael Palmer’s lineated poem is called “Autobiography” but the poet’s tone is more impersonal than either Silliman’s or Scalapino’s. His short sentences, separated by large areas of white space, are enigmatic and parabolic, his images equivocal. Some of his aphorisms–”A and not-A–are the same”; “The world is all that is displaced”–allude to Wittgenstein, the latter a nice twist on “the world is all that is the case.” [28] Some sentences contain literary allusions: “My dog does not know me,” for example, inverts Gertrude Stein’s, “I am I because my little dog knows me.” [29] In this context, “My dog does not know me” is equivalent to saying “I am nothing.” “All clocks are clouds” brings to mind a Magritte painting; and such lines as “winter roses are invisible” and “Late ice sometimes sings” are written under the sign of André Breton’s Nadja and related Surrealist dreamworks. Unlike either Silliman or Scalapino, both of them insistently urban poets, Palmer is given to references to “roses” and “ice,” to “the crescent beach, a drowned deer.” And these nature images are underscored by references to foreign (usually European) locales, as in “apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red”). One thinks here of Apollinaire ‘s “Zone” or Cendrars’s “Panama, or My Seven Uncles.”

Altogether, Palmer’s imagination is more visual and literary than Silliman’s, his memories more hallucinatory and dreamlike. His is the anxiety, not of the malignant, faceless crowd, as in Scalapino’s piece, but of the empty room: “Violins, like dreams, are suspect.” “There is,” David Levi Strauss has remarked, “a quite identifiable first person running through [Palmer’s] books. It is usually male, neurasthenic, doubtful, by turns cheerful and morose: a reluctant survivor. If it had a visible companion, the other might be called Didi or Clov or Camier. This first person is trepidatious and apologetic, constantly undercutting its own authority.” [30] In “Autobiography,” not surprisingly, Silliman’s sturdy resilience gives way to “shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.” And although, like Silliman, Palmer writes a poetry of parataxis, his is a juxtapositioning of poetic and philosophical fragments rather than the phenomenology of everyday life characteristic of Silliman.

Yet another kind of psychic drive can be found in Barrett Watten’s prose poem, again part of a longer sequence. Unlike Silliman, Scalapino, and Palmer, Watten uses the third person, but his narrator, who becomes “a lens on a room inside,” functions as a kind of Jamesian register, through whom all “events” and items perceived are filtered. It is he who is “in possession of what he sees,” first from outside the room and then from inside, he who feels cut off from the “fragments of their talk.” Yet he is more confident than Palmer’s self-critical “I,” more assertive about “imagining a better place to live.” Anxiety, for Watten, is socially constructed and hence to be overcome by social change: “All words resolve this matter like a huge weight balancing on a single point.” For the moment, however, there is no escape: “A cyclone covers the surface of the ceiling with wavering lines.”
In Watten’s account of displacement and possible reconnection, each sentence leads to the next. If Silliman were writing this, “The window is off the kitchen,” would be followed by a sentence like “net income is down 13%” or “they photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip.” Watten’s prose is more chaste, consecutive, linear; his vocabulary less exuberant and varied. And even though his narrator never speaks in his own person, a voice–measured yet urgent, direct yet highly “educated”–comes through. Again, no one would mistake this passage for a work by Silliman.

The poet’s naevus or birthmark, it would seem, is not so easily eradicated. It is interesting that when, in 1997, Gale Research invited Silliman to contribute an autobiographical essay to their Contemporary Authors series, he used the sentences of “Albany” “to tell me what to write, where to focus, that moment in the essay. The whole premise of ‘Albany’ (or at least a premise) was to focus on things that were both personal and political, so when Gale called, it seemed like the right place to begin. That poem always has been my autobiography, so to speak.[31] The resultant text, in which each of the one hundred sentences is printed in boldface, followed by a paragraph of varying length, is called Under Albany. —“under,” no doubt, because the poet now tries to get inside, behind, and under his earlier statements so as to make some sense of their psychological and social trajectory. [32]
Not infrequently, the “under” entry contradicts or qualifies the original sentence. For example (sentence 3):
Grandfather called them niggers.

So that I was surprised at how many elderly African American men, all, like my grandfather, members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) came to his funeral. [33]
In the context of “Albany,” the first sentence is taken at face value. Followed as it is in the original poem by “I can’t afford an automobile,” it gives us a sense of the bleak deprivation and petty racism of white working class Albany, CA. But in Under Albany. , the meaning of what is now a title shifts; perhaps, the reader here surmises, “calling them niggers” wasn’t equivalent to simple racism, for, as veterans of World War I, black and white men may well have had interacted more fully than have their grandsons.
I have discussed elsewhere the complex relationship of title to paragraph in Under Albany. , [34] a text that is deeply moving in its account of the poet’s empty childhood—a childhood that paradoxically paves the way for the remarkable resilience and optimism of Silliman’s maturity:
I look forward to old age with some excitement.

Sixteen years later, I’m writing from my room 218 in the Motel Six of Porterville, in the Sierra foothills north of Bakersfield. My nephew, Stephen Matthew Silliman is just four days old. Allen Ginsberg has been dead for 13 days. Their worlds never crossed, just as mine never crossed Gertrude Stein’s. But I know people who have slept with people who have slept with people who slept with Walt Whitman. At 94, Carl Rakosi’s mind clear as a bell. Others at 24, hopelessly muddied and muddled. Once, walking on the beach at Stinson with Rae Armantrout during our student days at Berkeley, I knelt to pick up a beautifully pocked smooth gray stone (I still have it). She asked me what I was doing. “Looking for the good ones,” I replied. [35]

In the context of Silliman’s account of his day-to-day difficulties and trauma, the upbeat ending of this paragraph comes as a real surprise. His is a complex and engaging autobiography, but then “Albany,” the prior text that supposedly exhibits what Jameson calls the “waning of affect,” was always already autobiographical.

Hinge Pictures/ Dividing Lines

Like Under Albany, Susan Howe’s Frame Structures (1996) refigures the poet’s earlier work. It collects four of her earliest long poems (Hinge Picture, 1974; Chanting at the Crystal Sea, 1975; Cabbage Gardens, 1979; Secret History of the Dividing Line, 1978) in slightly revised versions and adds a long “preface” that gives the book its title. The poems are characterized by their distinctive visual layout: in Secret History of the Dividing Line, for example, the title (derived, minus the word “Secret,” from William Byrd’s eighteenth-century journal of explorations in the Virginia wilderness) appears in the center of a blank page with its mirror image (figure 1), even as the opening horizontal rectangles (the four-line units havejustified left and right margins and double spacing) play on the word “MARK”:

mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary manic a land a
tract indicate position 2 record bunting interval
free also event starting the slightly position of
O about both of don’t something INDICATION Americ

made or also symbol sachem maimed as on her for
ar in teacher duct excellent figure MARK lead be
knife knows his hogs dogs a boundary model nucle
hearted land land land district boundary times un (FS 89)

Here mark refers first of all to the surveyor’s (William Byrd’s) mark made in delineating a boundary between “tract[s]” of forest land. But the mark is also a trace, a sign that points us to specific things that have happened: one thinks of Blake’s “London,” with its lines, “And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The poem’s opening “Mark mar ha forest 1 a boundary manic” gives the word mark a number of paragrammatic possibilities. “Mark ma ha”: stutter is followed by exclamation, an inability, perhaps, to “mark” the boundary in question. Or again, “mar ha” may be parts of the name Martha, the t missing in the imagined source manuscript Here and throughout the text, “boundary manic” is central to the poet’s thought; she is mesmerized by questions of “secret” divisions, borders, boundaries, fault lines. Then, too, Mark refers both to Howe’s father (Mark DeWolfe Howe) and to her son, as the italicized line on the third page of the poem, “for Mark my father; and Mark my son” tells us (FS, p. 91). Indeed, the frontispiece informs us that Mark DeWolfe Howe’s Touched with Fire: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harvard University Press, 1947) is one of the poem’s sources.
On the second page of Secret History of the Dividing Line, we find the following passage:

Close at hand the ocean
until before
hidden from our vision
MARK
border
bulwark, an object set up to indicate a boundary or position
hence a sign or token
impression or trace

The Horizon

I am of another generation
when next I looked he was gone.

The final line is repeated three times on this page and relates the Colonial expedition of William Byrd to the “MARK” who is the poet’s father.
How does this allusive visual poem relate to Howe’s so-called preface, which interweaves autobiography, visual poetry, and the founding and early history of Buffalo? For example:
I was never sure what my father was doing in the army. Then I was never sure of anything what with his rushing away or changing cities and World War banging at windows the boundless phenomena of madness. I remember him coming back to Buffalo from basic training by snapshot once or twice in a uniform. Absence is always present in a picture in its right relations. There is a split then how to act. Laws are relations among individuals.

When Theophile Cazenove reached America in 1789, he realized that Philadelphia was the best scene for his operations because the future of American funds, federal and state, depended on the actions of the federal government. Pavements were in wider space and getting social satisfaction he carried along a letter of introduction from his backers in Amsterdam to Andrew Craigie in New York. The Van Staphorts told Craigie their envoy came to America “to gratify his thirst after knowledge in order to become better acquainted with the Genius of their Government and the objects of their growing commerce.” (FS, p. 6)

The common wisdom would be that these two paragraphs are “straight”—although rather odd—prose; in the first sentence above, for example, the noun phrase “the boundless phenomena of madness” is syntactically but not semantically in apposition to the noun “windows.” And the relation of syntax to semantics gets stranger as the paragraph continues: how, for example, can the poet’s father be “coming back from basic training by snapshot”? Similar nonsequiturs characterize the passage about Cazenove, as when “pavements . . . in wider space” are linked to “social satisfaction.”

How to construe this curious way of writing an autobiographical memoir, a memoir designed to serve as “frame structure” for the disjointed and fragmentary lyric poems that follow? In one sense, “Frame Structures. ” recalls Robert Lowell’s “91 Revere Street,” that bemused account of the Beacon Hill childhood and “Mayflower screwball” ancestry that makes “young Bob” the neurotic and specially gifted child he is. [36] But whereas “91 Revere Street” provides us with a series of snapshots, in which the Winslow-Lowell relatives come before us in all their foibles and futility, “Frame Structures” juxtaposes biographical sketches (for example, the poet’s American grandfather, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe [1864-1960]) with the documentary history of the founding of Buffalo, with allusions to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline and James Joyce’s Eveline as analogues to the family and social drama of the Howes and Quincys, and with scraps (“flinders”) of largely illegible text, evidently drawn from Edward Gibbon. Again, whereas “91 Revere Street” is a kind of mirror image (in prose) of the autobiographical poems like “Commander Lowell” and “Beverly Farms” that comprise Life Studies, poems that culminate in Lowell’s own very private “Skunk Hour,” in Frame Structures, the connection between Howe’s memoir and, say, the epigraphs from Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit that open Cabbage Gardens, remains elusive. Indeed, the oblique narrative that follows, which begins with the lines

The enemy coming on roads
And clouds
Aeons.
Cashel has fallen
Trees are turf
Horizon thanks to myself, yes
Pacing the study. [37]

Here, Howe’s detractors would say, is a cryptic language poem that denies the very possibilities of the expressivity one wants from lyric.
Or does it? Consider the leitmotif of framing and being framed that runs through both prose preface and visual poems, crisscrossing, in myriad ways, the related motifs of war and colonization. The frontispiece (figure 2) is an engraving from Frank Severance’s Picture Book of Earlier Buffalo, based on “an original sketch by Lt. Jesse D. Elliott, accompanying his report to the Secretary of the Navy on the Capture of the Detroit and Caledonia, dated Black Rock Oct. 9, 1812.” “The Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” as this depiction of schooners going up in smoke is captioned in Howe’s book, thus immediately introduces the motif of war, in this case the War of 1812 (FS, p. 1).
But if this is the “Second Oldest View of Buffalo,” what would the first look like? For Howe, origins cannot be known. “Lines represent the limits of bodies encompassed by the eye” (FS, p. 5). The section “Floating loans” contains an historical sketch of Joseph Ellicott’s acquisition and settling of the land in upstate New York that was to be called Buffalo. We can take in the facts but we cannot quite visualize the resulting city. “Space is a frame we map ourselves in” (FS, p. 9). When we finally do “see” the Buffalo harbor in the engraving, we are witnessing a war scene: war, for that matter, is very much this poem’s condition. At the same time, “a picture,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “held us captive”: neither poet nor reader can get beyond the engraving, the stylized image, to experience the “reality” of Buffalo. This is why names become so tantalizing: Nicholas Van Staphorst, Christiaan Van Eeghen, Paul Busti: we yearn for, but cannot get at, what’s behind them. And consider the absurdity of calling a city Buffalo. “Clans and individuals adopt the name of animals,” Howe remarks, “cities seldom do.” And she adds, “Prefaces are usually afterimages.” (FS, p. 13). [38]

The first sentence of Howe’s “afterimage,” under the heading Flanders, with its allusion to World War I, is, “On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I went with my father to the zoo in Delaware Park even now so many years after there is always for me the fact of this treasured memory of togetherness before he enlisted in the army and went away to Europe” (FS, p. 3). December 7, 1941 is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, but this fact is not mentioned, the focus being on the “usually docile polar bears rov[ing] restlessly back and forth around the simulated rocks caves and waterfall designed to keep brute force fenced off even by menace of embrace so many zoo animals are accounted fierce” (FS, p. 3). The final clause here trails off, “so many” not anticipated by what comes before. The three polar bears are framed both literally and figuratively–literally behind the “iron railing” of their cage, figuratively by “the north wind of the fairy story [“Goldilocks”] “ringing in my ears as well as direct perception” (FS, p. 3). From the opening image of (unstated) war malaise, through the accounts of King Philip’s War, the Revolutionary War, World War I, and World War II, the text’s war space is crisscrossed by “life-lines,” lines of descent, connection, and association that, as the poet puts it, “I transmit to you from the point of impact throughout every snowing difficulty,” lines “certified by surveyors chain-bearers artists and authors walking the world keeping Field Notes:” from “Flanders” to “Flinders,” [39] from Nigeria, to Niger, to Niagara, from the “iron railings” of the bear compound in the zoo to the “iron railings” of the Charles Street Jail, from Fanny Appleton Longfellow to the poet’s younger sister Fanny (FS, p. 28).

But the lines are also borders, boundaries, marks of enclosure–the line between the Boston Brahmin Howes and Quincys on the one hand and the Irish Mannings on the other. The Preface thus paves the way for the poems that follow“Hinge Picture,” “Western Borders,” “Secret History of the Dividing Line” (my italics). And even in Cabbage Gardens, the shifts in line justification and word placement (figure 3), suggests that language is always in danger of becoming an enclosed space but that the poet refuses to let forms play their accepted role. Each segment is, so to speak, a “cabbage garden” that is planted differently. [40]

The extensive historical documentation in “Frame Structures. ” thus serves to construct the past that has shaped what Howe takes to be her very palpable present. Weetamoo, “squaw-sachem of the Wampanoags, Queen of Pocasset (now Tiverton), wife of Wamsutta the son of Massasoit and sister-in-law of the Narrangansett sachem, Metacomet (King Philip to the colonial militia),” a figure Howe knows only from her reading of Mary Rowlandson, is just as “real” as John d”Wolf, “Norwest John,” a venture capitalist who “sailed to Russia by way of Alaska” (“P,” p. 21). The poet herself appears only in the interstices of the text: “Now draw a trajectory in imagination where logic and mathematics meet the materials of art. Canvas, paper, pencil, color, frame, title. . . “(FS, p. 27). Right after this catalogue of artist’s tools (where “title” is the odd item) the cited overprint text becomes illegible (figure 4), forcing the reader to become a kind of viewer / voyeur.

“Preface” never spells out its “life-lines” to the lyrics that follow. In the words of the epigraph from Duchamp’s Green Box that opens Hinge Picture (FS 32)–”Perhaps make a HINGE PICTURE. (folding yardstick, book. . . .) / develops in space the PRINCIPLE OF THE HINGE in the displacements 1st in the plane 2d in space”–the Preface is a kind of “Hinge Picture,” that contains connections to the historical and literary fragments that follow. Indeed, Howe’s book is an elaborate trace structure: Secret History of the Dividing Line ends with a verbal rectangle on an otherwise empty white field:

sh dispel iris sh snow sward wide ha
forest 1 a boundary manic a land sh
whit thing : target cadence marked on
O about both or don’t INDICATION Americ
sh woof subdued toward foliage free sh
[FS, p. 122]

From “sh” to “sh,” from “snow sward” to “foliage free,” via a “boundary manic,” a target cadence marked.” “Sh.” The rest is white space.
Compared to the “Robert Lowell” of Life Studies, Howe’s “I”— female, maverick, only half New England blueblood— is much less of an insider, much more self-conscious about her particular origins. Her Boston is always shadowed by her Buffalo. Accordingly, she rarely speaks in her own person (e.g., “I was a deep and nervous child,” [FS, p. 3]), preferring the voice of the chronicler (“Joseph Ellicott, sometimes called “the father of Buffalo,” was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1760 to Quaker parents from England” [FS, p. 5]), and the voices of others:

What are you crying for, Great-Grandmother?

For all the ruin so intolerably sad.

But we have plenty to eat. We are lucky to be living in the
United States, so very new and very old, lucky to be in the new
part. Everything is clearer now we have electric light.

You must go on as if I was an open door. Go right on
through me I can’t answer all your questions.
[FS, p. 25]

Add to such voices the visual devices– line placement, typography, page design—that characterize all four of the early books reprinted in Frame Structures. , as well as the new preface, and you have a signature (quite literally a series of marks made on paper) as unique and “personal” as any we have in poetry today. Susan Howe and Ron Silliman, included as they both are in every anthology of “Language poetry” to date, could hardly be more different in their modes of self-writing.

What then of the purported death of the subject? “The revolution of the word,” Silliman remarks in a recent interview, “is not an anarchist event.” On the contrary, “as the author, I get to determine unilaterally which words in what order will set forth the terms through which the experience shall occur.” [41] A remarkable statement, this, for a language poet, and yet, at one level, it is simple common sense: every poet, after all, gets to determine the words in his or her poem. The question remains, of course, what larger cultural and ideological constraints determine that determination. If Silliman and Howe’s poetry is, as I have argued, a complex amalgam of Language poetics and difference, a writing that is everywhere resisting its paradigm, how, to see the half-full cup as half-empty, does that paradigm itself resist its contemporary others?

Suppose we read the poems of Silliman and Howe (or Palmer or Scalapino or Watten cited above), not against one another, but against those of a very different poetic community—for example, the work of Charles Wright. Here is one of the thirteen-line lyrics (there are twenty-four, divided into three sections) in Wright’s recent sequence “Disjecta Membra,” included in James Tate’s Best American Poetry 1997:

O well the snow falls and small birds drop out of the sky,
The backyard’s a winding sheet—
winter in Charlottesville,
Epiphany two days gone,
Nothing at large but Broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s.
Even the almost full moon
Is under a monochrome counterpane
Of dry grey.
Eve of St. Agnes and then some, I’d say,
Twenty-three inches and coming down.
The Rev. Doctor Syntax puts finger to forehead on the opposite wall,
Mancini and I still blurred beside him, Mykonos, 1961,
The past a snowstorm the present too. [42]

The obvious thing would be to say that Wright’s lyric sequence, which traces the poet’s emptying out, his night and death thoughts, and the gradual renewal of being, as defined by the seasonal cycle from the end of summer to the end of winter in Virginia, is more “personal” or “expressive” than the “language poems” of Silliman or Howe. But, strictly speaking, we learn less about the particulars of Wright’s personal life than we do about theirs; people and places from the poet’s past and present remain elusive as do the causes that trigger the feeling of absence and emptiness described so lovingly in this particular snow poem, where even “the almost full moon / is under a monochrome counterpane / of dry grey.”
What is different is not expressivity or subjectivity as such but the authority ascribed to the speaking voice—and here it is a particular voice that is represented. Wright’s speaker confidently uses metaphor to characterize what he perceives ( “The backyard’s a winding sheet”) and feels (“Epiphany two days gone”); he compares the dismal sleety night to that of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, and knows that what he sees when he looks out the window are “nothing . . .but broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s.” In “Albany,” on the other hand, such connections and continuities (Wright’s winter portrait is wholly consistent and of a piece) are implictly judged to be impossible. Phrases like “the bird demonstrates the sky” or “eminent domain” cannot be taken as self-revelatory. For these utterances, in Silliman’s scheme of things, are not those of an observer located in a particular place; indeed, the distinction between inside and outside has been eroded. For Silliman, as for Howe, there are no ideas or facts outside the language that names them–no “broncos, pick-ups and 4 x 4s,” no “twenty-three inches” of snow, outside the poet’s verbal as well as literal window. Rather—and here the difference in epistemology is profound—language constructs the “reality” perceived. And this means that perspective, as in the polarbear scene in Howe’s “Frame Structures. ,” is always shifting and that the subject, far from being at the center of the discourse, as is the case in Wright’s poem, is located only at its interstices.

It is not coincidental that “Disjecta Membra” has echoes of Keats (and, later, Stevens), for its mode is Emersonian: “We live in the wind-chill, / The what-if-and what-was-not, / The blown and sour dust of just after or just before, / The metaquotidian landscape / of soft edge and abyss” (p. 194). Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. There is no way Silliman or Howe could write such a poem because theirs is not a Romantic Einfühlung into the external—is there an external?—world. And, in this respect, we can differentiate quite readily between their ethos and that of such mainstream postromantic poets as Charles Wright or Mark Strand or Louise Gluck.

It was, of course, the opposition to this romantic paradigm that prompted the theoretical discourse of Language manifestos in the first place. And that oppositionality remains significant even though the “Us-versus-Them” rhetoric of The L=A=N =G=U=A=G=E Book, now twenty years old, [43] has become complicated by the appearance of new poetic paradigms that don’t quite fit the original theoretical frame. The dialectic, in other words, has shifted ground and it now seems more useful to look at special cases within the Language movement and related alternate poetries rather than at the group phenomenon.

Indeed, the paradox is that, like the earlier avant-garde movements of the century, Language poetics may well become most widely known, when it starts to manifest notable exceptions. Imagism, after all, became interesting only when Ezra Pound declared that it had been diluted as “Amygism” and called himself a Vorticist instead. Dada, as I have suggested elsewhere, [44] derives much of its cultural capital from Duchamp, who had made his most “Dada” readymades before he had ever heard of the Cabaret Voltaire and who refused all his life to participate in Dada exhibitions. A renewal of interest in Concrete Poetry was sparked by the decision of one Concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, to cultivate (quite literally) his own “concrete” Scottish garden. And the New York School, felt by many to have lost its center when Frank O’Hara died in 1966, is now getting renewed mileage from the increasing renown of one of its charter members, John Ashbery, even though Ashbery’s poetry may well have more in common with T. S. Eliot’s than with Kenneth Koch’s. [45]
I do not mean to downplay the role of community, movement, cultural formation, or discourse in the making of avant-garde aesthetic. Community, after all, is crucial to the poets and artists who belong to it, especially in their formative stages. Indeed, the prominence of the lonely, isolated genius, which Jameson takes to be the hallmark of modernism (as opposed to postmodernism), was always something of a myth; even those “isolated geniuses” Joyce and Beckett needed a community of fellow writers and a set of publishing venues—for example, Eugene Jolas’s transition– within which to circulate.

The poet has no obligation to be a responsible historian; indeed, the anxiety of influence precludes the possibility of reliable accounts of one’s own genealogy. Here is where the poet’s readers come in. In writing as critics or literary historians, even those who are themselves poets must maintain some critical distance, discriminating, for example, between the “language” poetics of Michael Palmer, with its Celanian and French Surrealist cast, the New York school-based language poetics of Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, and the fusion of “nation language” and “video style” in the work of a proto-language poet like Kamau Brathwaite. [46]

Movement ethos, itself the stepchild of the post-structuralist critique of authorship, has, for too long now, occluded the critical need to discriminate difference, to define the signature of the individual lyric subject in its complex negotiations with its larger cultural and historical field of operation. In the words of Charles Bernstein’s satiric little poem (MW, pp. 3-4) on the limits of structuralism, “Don’t Be So Sure (“Don’t Be Saussure)”:

My cup is my cap
& my cap is my cup
When the coffee is hot
It ruins my hat
We clap and we slap
Have sup with our pap
But won’t someone please
Get me a drink.

Footnotes

.

Maggie O’Sullivan, ed. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK..Afterword by Wendy Mulford. London: Reality Street Studios, 1996. L9.0 paper.

Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. viii + 187 pp. $39.50; $15.95 paper.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

published in Contemporary Literature, 28 (Sept. 1997), pp. 558-68.

At the same moment–and here’s the irony–Ken Edwards’s London-based Reality Street Editions has published, under the editorship of the poet Maggie O’Sullivan, an anthology of “linguistically innovative” poems by women (from Canada and the UK as well as the U.S.)– poems that are nothing if not dazzling in their breadth, range, and authority. Even without O’Sullivan’s introduction and Wendy Mulford’s Afterword, the poems included (many by the same authors Perelman discusses) testify to the enormous strength of language poetry and its cognates in the 1990s. Inventiveness, both verbal and visual, intellectual density, and especially wit and energy : these are the features notable in the work of the thirty poets included in Out of Everywhere .

So what’s going on here? Are women language poets coming into their own just when their male counterparts are flagging? Has second-stage language poetry abandoned some of the principles of its New York and San Francisco founding fathers? Or is it just that Perelman is trying a little too hard to be even-handed and hence tempering his instinctive enthusiasms for radical poetries? These are not easy questions to answer.

The most successful pieces in Perelman’s collection of rather disparate and mostly previously published writings, are, to my mind, the two long manifesto-poems that frame the book. The title poem, presented at a panel on the subject of “marginalization of poetry” at the annual American Comparative Literature Association conference in San Diego in 1991, is a delicious Popean parody, a kind of postmodern “Essay on Criticism” written in 125 couplets, at once ordered (six words to the line) and free (they exhibit neither rhyme nor meter). Throughout, the poet plays on the word “marginal,” for example:

. . . to defend this

poem from its own attack , I’ll
say that both the flush left

and irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting what

I thought I was about to
write and making me write something

else entirely. Even though I’m going
back and rewriting, the problem still

reappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginal

work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but

since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they

become a marginal subset of poetry,
in other words, doubly marginal.. . . . (pp. 4-5)

and so it goes, playing on marginality so subtly that, by poem’s end, we are quite ready to assent to the poet’s wry contention that poems are, after all, quite literally “marginal,” but that, at another level, “a self-critical poetry, minus the / short-circuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, might / dissolve the antinomies of marginality that / broke Jack Spicer into broken lines” (10).

The same spirit of play animates “An Alphabet of Literary History” (#8). Again Perelman’s couplet manifesto depends upon intricate allusions to earlier poets. The section “C,” for example, begins with a parodic version of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”– “A Critic came to me and asked: What is language writing?”– incorporating Williams’ “By the road to the contagious hospital” as well as Hamlet into the global business world of the nineties:

Or I guess it is the birth of post-industrial code-splicing from a shoal of
territorial barks before any one dog has had enough. This process
gripped down and began to awaken just after the death of Hamlet’s
father in a material downpour. . . . (147)

It is a virtuoso performance, as is the dialogue between Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes (“A False Account of Talking with Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia”) that concludes the book. The two seemingly unlike writers, it turns out, have a lot more in common than their sexual proclivities and their love of cigarettes; they share an obsession with le mot juste and with precision of language, that transcends whatever their differences of nationality, style, and manner.

What, then, about the book’s larger argument? Perelman’s first chapter, “Language Writing and Literary History,” sets the stage. It begins with the observation–a very important one, I think–that language poetry was primarily an oppositional movement, conceived at a moment in our history when “The poet as engaged, oppositional intellectual, and poetic form and syntax as sites of experiment for political and social purposes” (12) were considered taboo in the creative writing workshop. Poetic language was supposed to be “natural,” and the unique “authentic” voice was considered the hallmark of poetry. In this climate, language poetics, to put it simply, sought to restore the intellectual and the political to poetry, to ally itself more meaningfully to contemporary developments in theory and cultural studies. Different as individual language poets might be, “A neutral description of language writing might attempt to draw a line around a range of writing that was (sometimes) nonreferential, (occasionally) polysyntactic, (at times) programmatic in construction, (often) politically committed, (in places) theoretically inclined, and that enacted a critique of the literary I (in some cases)” (21).

A very accurate description and admirable in its tentativeness. The difficulty, though, is that Perelman never quite explains why political/theoretical/ intellectual poetry should not be “referential” or “syntactic.” And when he turns to specific instances, he shifts gears. Passages by Rae Armantrout, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman, often no more than ten lines long, are explicated: Perelman’s readings demonstrate nicely that these passages do have meanings, that their authors have specific aims in mind, and that they “work.” But in his zeal to emphasize difference– the “mutated or degraded” words of David Melnick, , versus the “real” but violent language of Bruce Andrews, for example — Perelman seems to forget about the question of poetic necessity he set out to discuss: why, after all, are the verbal and formal choices in question superior to those of more mainstream poets?. When, for example, he says of Armantrout’s “Postcards,” “The verisimilitude of the opening stanza is ‘too convincing’: the man dutifully rubbing his eye makes the poet find her own clear vision a sham” (22), one may conclude that the poem can after all be paraphrased and is thus not so different from the poetic modes it seeks to deconstruct.

Further along in the chapter, Perelman describes the collaborations he made with Kit Robinson and Steve Benson in 1976 in San Francisco. When the three met, one of them evidently read from whatever book was lying around the house (most often, not surprisingly for the late seventies, a book of postructural theory), and the other two typed up what they heard; the “automatic listening” in question producing such lines as Perelman’s “Instead of ant worts I saw brat guts” (32), which became the epigraph for Ron Silliman’s landmark anthology In The American Tree(1986). The account of group improvisation is appealing, but it isn’t clear to me what makes this and related Dadaesque experiments all that unusual or important. And since, some twenty years after the fact, the “brat guts aesthetic,” as Perelman himself calls it (34), seems to have made little impact on the larger poetry culture, the collaborative play here described may well be a peripheral aspect of the language movement.

Indeed, Perelman’s account of the early San Francisco language scene will be of interest primarily to those who were there rather than to the wider readership he hopes to gain for language poetry. The same holds true for the chapter on Robert Grenier. Here Perelman gives an excellent account on the relationship of Grenier’s Sentences to the sequence that gave rise to it, namely Robert Creeley’s Pieces. The context of Grenier’s now fabled battlecry , “I HATE SPEECH!” is laid out and the important relationship of Grenier to the Olson tradition is ably analyzed. Perelman concludes by discussing Grenier’s recent boxes, which contain gnomic and often undecipherable sentences handwritten on separate slips of paper, grafitti-like scrawls that “dramatize in a particularly problematic way the tautotological narrative by which the ‘living hand’ of the contingent author becomes imbued, after the fact, with eternal potency.” (55). If this valiant effort on Grenier’s behalf seems less than convincing, it may well be because these writings, like the Dada experiments of Benson, Robinson, and Perelman himself, have a belated quality: from Russian Futurism to Oulipo and Concrete poetry, linguistic and figurative distortion of the kind described has made its mark. And the work that lasts is one that does not merely fragment, distort, write over or under, cut up, splice, or collage, but that uses these techniques to encode complex meanings.

Perelman knows this as well as anyone, as he demonstrates in his essays on Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews. The essays on these two poets are critiques, although very gentle ones, written in the spirit of friendship and collaboration. I applaud this aim, since first-stage language writing, beleagured as it was, assumed that every poetic inscription from within the group must somehow be normative. In “Write the Power,” Perelman compares the Utopian “liberated textuality” (90) of Bernstein’s “Defense of Poetry”–the defacing of language via consistent mispelling and faulty grammar so as to avoid all instrumentality–to Kamau Brathwaite’s dialect poetry in X/Self, which functions as overt attack on the values of the dominant culture. “For both Bernstein and Brathwaite,” Perelman argues, “writing is an engine of social change” (95); if this writing has its problems, it’s because of the inevitable gap between the reader’s position and the writer’s. In Bernstein’s case, no matter how “anti-absorbtive” the poet’s language is, the reader inevitably tries to translate it back into some form of coherent discourse, thus cushioning the poet’s transgessive thrust. In Brathwaite’s, a nonnative speaker would similarly “want to translate, get the message; the strangeness of the word would not be an uncanny revelation, it would be an all-too-familiar experience” (93).

This is a neat argument but also a somewhat reductive one. For one thing, “A Defense of Poetry” strikes me as a relatively minor Bernstein poem, a clever tour de force à la David Melnick. There are many other poems– “That Klupzy Girl,” “Lives of the Toll Takers,” “Dysraphism,” “Dark City”–that, far from playing with spelling and pronunciation, as does “Defense,” mount a very complex critique of contemporary culture and behavior. Indeed, the verse essay “Artifice of Absorption” is itself more complicated than Perelman allows, insisting on a both/and criticism where “absorption” at one level becomes “anti-absorption” at another, and vice-versa: “There is, then, a considerably history / of using antiabsorptive techniques (nontransparent or nonnaturalizing elements) / (artifice) / for absorptive / ends. . . . In my poems, I /frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable / elements, digressions & interruptions, as part of a technological / aresenal to create a more powerful/ (“souped-up”) / absorption than possible with traditional, & blander, absorptive techniques.” [1] This seems to me anything but an “apoetics,” as Perelman calls it (85); Bernstein’s is, on the contrary, a fervent plea for finding new forms of construction that will engage the reader, will, in his own words, rivet and enthrall. And in this sense, the relationship to Brathwaite’s particular form of “nation-language” (95) is more tenuous than real.
A similar tenuousness characterizes the title metaphor of Essay #6, “Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center).” Just as the strength and complexity of the structure of the World Trade Center makes it all but impossible to bring down the building, no matter how powerful the explosion, so, Perelman argues, “the scale and complexity of what Andrews is trying to bring down [especially in I Don’t Have Any Paper so Shut Up] presents him with a conundrum whose social geometry is similar to the physical geometry that ultimately contains a bomb blast: whatever he destroys tends to shield contiguous and remote areas” (97). Another way of saying this is that the violence and excess of Andrews’ language, his continuously disjunct syntax and typography, ultimately produce a kind of overkill, his “attacks tend[ing] to reinforce their target at least as much as they explode it” (100). A genuinely political poetry, Perelman posits, must assert at least some possibility for identity: “If language is made up of units broken apart as all things are by capitalism, and if nothing new is created beyond the horizon of the phrase or the sentence, then these new, charged units would still depend on capital for energy to band together in momentary transgression” (108).

Here Perelman is on to something important: it is true that Andrews’ poetry is an especially intransigent version of language poetics, that it “leaves only a narrow margin for readers” (108). Yet again I would want to defend Andrews (whose politics, incidentally, I don’t myself share) by pointing out that the sheer brilliance of the vitriol, the elaboration and variety with which the offending discourses are dismantled, creates a dazzling poetic texture and, for that matter, as individual a “voice” as any contemporary poet can claim. The genre may well be burlesque laced with invective, but burlesque is a venerable form and we don’t need to compare Andrews’s poetry to Maya Angelou’s dreadful Inauguration poem (see Perelman 101-105) to discover its strengths.

The best critical essay in The Marginalization of Poetry is, I think, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” which first appeared in American Literature. In the mid-eighties, Ron Silliman had announced, in an essay that was to become famous, “I am going to make an argument, that there is such a thing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in the prose of the Bay Area.” But although this rather grandiose announcement was followed by fascinating distinctions between conventional narrative and the “new” situation in which “The paragraph organizes the sentences in fundamentally the same way a stanza does lines of verse. . . . the sentences [do not] ‘make sense’ in the ordinary way,” Silliman was never very clear on what his own term really meant. [2] Perelman’s exposition is much clearer: the “new sentence” involves parataxis; it “gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance: new sentences are not subordinated to a larger narrative frame nor are they thrown together at random” (61) And further, “Parataxis is crucial: the autonomous meaning of a sentence is heightened, questioned, and changed by the degree of separation or connection that the reader perceives with regard to the surrounding sentences” (61).

This formulation helps Perelman refute Fredric Jameson’s now notorious account of language poetry (specifically, Perelman’s own poem “China”) as a prime exemplar of postmodern “depthlessness, Lacanian schizophrenia, the erasure of history, and the end of personal identity” (63). Parataxis, as Perelman argues convincingly, need not spell any of these things, and the critic must differentiate between the meaningful relationship of the individual sentences, for example, in “China,” and the sheer piling up of depthless images Jameson and others have taken to be a hallmark of capitalism. Most usefully, Perelman now demonstrates the strength of the “new sentence” in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, and incidentally gives us one of the best commentaries we have on the latter work. Hejinian’s sentences, Perelman shows, are “committed to breaking up any smooth narrative plane” (78), but such “de-narrativization” is part of the larger “construction” of the poem, its very carefully thought-out semantic structure. Indeed, Hejinian’s writing, whether in verse or prose, illustrates Silliman’s principles more adequately than do any of the examples he himself provides.

The Marginalization of Poetry contains many equally fine passages: see, for example, the comparison in “This Page is My Page” (#7) of Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” in which the poet insists on “grant[ing] himself full political agency” (117), to Barrett Watten’s more oblique evocations of “anti-identification” and “anti-response” (126) as political tools. All told, however, Perelman’s book is better in its detail than in its overall aim of “reconfigur[ing] the categories of literary history.” Perhaps it is simply too soon to perform such configuration, and, in any case, Perelman is too much a part of the movement to discriminate between the individidual volumes and sequences of its charter members, many of whom have by now faded into the background of that literary history whose map Perelman wants to redraw.

As poet-disseminators who make no claim, in this instance, to produce literary history or any kind of systematic criticism, Maggie O’Sullivan and Wendy Mulford avoid some of these problems. Out of Everywhere is closer to Don Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) than to Ron Silliman’s In The American Tree. In her introductory note, O’Sullivan explains that her title comes from a comment by an unidentified audience member at Charles Bernstein’s Politics of Poetic Form conference (1990). [3] In response to Rosmarie Waldrop’s talk, the woman in question observed: “there’s an extra difficulty being a woman poet and writing the kind of poetry you write: you are Out of Everywhere.” To which Waldrop responded, “I take that as a compliment. I’ve more or less claimed this is the position of women” (9).

The “linguistically innovate” poetry by women included in Out of Everywhere is thus, first and foremost, poetry that is “excluded from conventional, explicitly generically committed or thematic anthologies of women’s poetry” (9). A double whammy: this is a women’s poetry excluded from “women’s canons” as well as men’s. Its precursors include Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy, HD and Lorine Niedecker and it admits to having learned a great deal from the language poetry of its male counterparts. Indeed, the features Wendy Mulford lists in her Afterword–the “open[ing[] up” of “closed systems of signification,” the use of chance procedures and of “multi- and non-linear” verse forms, the play on “master-texts,” the disruption of “lexical tactics” and the interest in “cybertextual technologies” of the future– all these aspects of “radical form” have been discussed in earlier (and largely male) language anthologies.

But then technique is always and only technique: the “new sentence,” as many readers have noted, can be used in advertising copy as easily as in poetry. What makes the poetry in Out of Everywhere so startling is less the adoption of this or that technique than the exciting swerve away from the still ubiquitous realist / confessional mode (still especially prevalent in women’s poetry) to the historical, the literary, and the mythological. From Susan Howe’s Eikon Basilike, her verbo-visual rendition of the spurious “King’s Book” of Charles I, and Joan Retallack’s equally exciting visual constructs called Afterrimages(I discuss these elsewhere) [4] to Nicole Brossard’s politically and sexually charged lyrics, Caroline Bergvall’s antic performance pieces, and Maggie O’Sullivan’s own riddling Cockerel poems, with their incorporation of diverse linguistic registers from Old English to football cheer, what emerges in this anthology is high intelligence and daring: the willingness to take real risks.

Many of the poets included–Howe, Retallack, Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Rae Armantrout –have already had essays on their work in the pages of Contemporary Literature; it is the English and Canadian poets like O’Sullivan, Denise Riley, Karen Mac Cormack, and Catriona Strang that now deserve our attention, as well as such younger language poets as Diane Ward, whose paste-ups and sections of “Look at Joseph Cornell” are among the high points of this collection. Indeed, even as Bob Perelman seems progressively disenchanted with what he takes to be language poetry’s excessive deconstruction of individual identity, O’Sullivan’s thirty poets have found new ways, not of avoiding identity but of placing selfhood in a larger cultural and social perspective, finding themselves, paradoxically, in their relation to the “mastertexts” with which they engage. Again, this is not as extreme a stance as we might think: it was W. B. Yeats, after all, who said in 1936 that “The poet writes always of his personal life . . . he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.” [5]

Footnotes