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

.

NEW DEFINITIONS OF LYRIC:

A RESPONSE

Marjorie Perloff

Published in New Definitions of Lyric, ed. Mark Jeffreys (New York: Garland Press, 1997): pp. 243-53.

Whatever the word lyric connotes in the late twentieth century, there seems to be a consensus, at least among the contributors to this volume, that the “new” lyric is no longer governed by romantic norms.  Alison M. Cummings, for example, begins her essay on women’s lyric in the 1980s with a critique of “romantic conceptions of lyric subjectivity,” that is to say, the conception of “an autonomous, coherent agent, intent on turning away from external reality and ‘inward’ toward the self” (AC 1). [1] For Christopher Beach, the “experimental poetry” of the 1980s and 90s (especially the Language model) has positioned itself against the “mainstream” poetic of transparency and “readability” (Barthes’s term),  of “a coherent formal structure and to some version of a consistent, identifiable lyric voice and stance” (CB 1).  And Michael Golston describes Peter Inman’s Language poetics as pursuing “a full-out frontal assault on conventional poetic practice,” with its “impassioned or meditative poetic voice [and] determinate setting and/or occasion” (MG 1).

Kevin McGuirk makes such assault the subject of his essay on the cultural identity of lyric in postwar Britain.  McGuirk begins with a powerful attack on the lingering Arnoldian view of poetry as the “preserve of spirit-and-art”:

The affiliation of lyric with Arnoldian culture has ensured the valorization of one             form of lyric poetry–what we call romantic lyric–and determined for the genre as   a whole a conservative agenda.  The romantic lyric has conventionally been taken as          naturally and essentially lyric–a form without a specific cultural identity. . . .     Culture is supposed not only to be transcendent . . . but also transparent, and this           requires the effacement of those visible features of race, class, and gender, which             are crucial determinants of everyday experience.”  (KMG 2)

For McGuirk, the “naturalized” romantic lyric must give way to what he calls (and Susan Vandenborg uses the same epithet) a more “communal” form in which the individual “I” is replaced by a broader “we.”  His example of such communalism is the Anglo-Caribbean poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, in whose reggae poems the “subjectivity of romantic lyric is replaced by a collective subject acting for and within a social group against oppression.”

Coming at romantic lyric from a very different vantage point, Jeffrey Walker wants to return “lyric” to its original central place in the culture.   In classical antiquity, Walker argues, the “postromantic opposition between the practical and the aesthetic” (JW 3) did not exist; rather, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus argued in the first century BC, lyric was held to be a branch of rhetoric.  The lyric poem, in this case, is simply the form of “argumentation intending persuasion of an audience” that is written in verse.  The paradigm here is the Pindaric ode in which “argument [is] suffused with music,” the poem being no more or less than “a sung oration, a verse oration.”  “The point I wish to stress,” says Walker, “is that the not-quite-linguistic, not-quite-rational and all-pervasive appeal of versification, and only that, is what makes the early Greek lyric recognizable as poetry, rather than as epideictic prose” (JW 13).  Indeed, what has made lyric theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so problematic is the widespread acceptance of Aristotle’s redefinition of lyric in the Poetics.    For Aristotle insisted that versification cannot be the definining feature for poetic discourse, that, on the contrary, lyric is a branch of mimesis or representation.  But–and this is Walker’s thesis– if lyric is no more than a representation of universal human experiences, a kind of mini-drama or “self-expressive outburst uttered by a speaker with his back turned to the reader / listener,” this “rhetorically restricted paradigm for lyric is, in principle, a paradigm for minor poetry” (JW 25).  The “apostrophic lyric,” as Walker calls this “minor” form, “can only re-embody, echo or duplicate what its ‘knowers’ feel already,” and the lyrical thus becomes the “embodiment of ineffable, uncommon and sacred moods to which a poetic psyche may be privy in its fleetingly recovered moments of pristine, prelapsarian solitude” (JW 26, 28).  And these “recovered moments” are, of course, the epiphanies or “spots of time” characteristic of romantic lyric.

For Walker, as for the other essayists, romantic lyric  thus becomes a derogatory term; it connotes inwardness, subjectivity, monovocality, and transparency–all of these politically suspect in the age of multiculturalism.  But in making these claims, Walker, McGuirck and the others seem to be conflating two things:  the attenuated, neo-romantic lyric of the later twentieth century, as that lyric has been promoted by such leading critics as Harold Bloom, and the actual English lyric of the romantic period.  The term romantic,  in other words, needs to be historicized more fully than it is in these essays. [2]

Take Kevin McGuirk’s account of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s treatment of the “I”:

[Johnson’s poems] evade our paradigm of the lyric because they eschew the      displacement of conflict to a subjective or aesthetic plane where tensions are            resolved in a confined dramatic space.  They are not about lyric consciousness and    they display none of the textual self-containment that attracts the attentions of close           reading criticism. Typically, a Johnson poem’s ‘I’ is necessary but liminal to the      representations of the poem.   In “All Wi Doin is Defendin,’ the ‘I’ is primarily             positioned on one side of the opposition between the ruling class ‘yu’ and his own             community’s ‘wi,’  but the poet’s own identity within his community slips between          ‘wi’ and the ‘they’ of the rebels, and the ‘I’ of his own enunciative act (‘an I say’):

wi running wild

wi bitta like bile

blood will guide

their way

an I say

all wi doin

is defendin

so get yu ready

fi war . . . war . . .

. . . . In keeping with the highly rhetorical character of the work, audience plays a  constitutive role, unlike the merely overhearing reader of romantic lyric.  Johnson appeals to and speaks for his community, or admonishes the oppressor.  (KMG 17-   18, my emphasis).

Now suppose we compare “All Wi Doin is Defendin,” to the following lyric poem:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh,

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse[3]

Is Blake’s “London,” the poem before us, primarily “about lyric consciousness,” and does it in fact “displace . . . conflict to a subjective or aesthetic plane where tensions are resolved in a confined dramatic space”?  Is it a “self-expressive outburst” uttered by a speaker whose “back is turned to the reader”?   Hardly.  The first-person pronoun appears four times in the space of the poem’s four four-line  (each line having four stresses) stanzas: “I wander,” “I meet,”  and  “I hear” used twice.   The intransitivity of these verbs is telling: the poet who uses them is primarily a witness.  What he sees in the London of 1784, smarting under the repressive policies of William Pitt, is a city where everything has become “charter’d,” the adjective referring both to the chartered rights of Englishmen as contained in the Magna Carta and now curtailed by government policy as well as to the commercial chartering of city property which impedes and inhibits even the natural flow of the Thames, just as every human being on the streets seems to bear a public brand (“Marks of weakness, marks of woe”).   The repetition of “mark,” and then of “every” (used five times in stanza 2), together with the pounding four-beat rhythm and insistent semantically-charged rhyme  (“appalls”/ “walls”; “curse”/ “hearse”) emphasizes the overwhelming force of the poet’s vision.  He doesn’t try to read meanings into “every cry”; but he hears those  “mind-forg’d manacles” as in a nightmare from which he cannot awake.  In the last two stanzas, Blake excoriates the political evils of his time: the very existence of poor chimney-sweepers casts a pall (“appalls”) the “blackning Church” which allows for such poverty.   The “hapless Soldiers sigh” is a similar reproach to the Palace that has created the army in which he must serve.  And “most thro’ midnight streets,” the “curse” of the “youthful Harlot” stands in judgment on the very institution of marriage (the “Marriage hearse”) and the baptism of infants.

Here, as in the Johnson poem McGuirck discusses, the ‘I’ is necessary but liminal to the representations of the poem,” which speak for themselves with astonishing metaphoric condensation.  Is this “I” an “autonomous, coherent agent, intent on turning away from external reality and ‘inward’ toward the self” (Cummings)?  Is his speech “transparent” (Beach)?  Is he merely a “commentator,” rather than a “doer” (McGuirck)?  And is this lyric deprived of rhetoric, of its argumentational potential, and hence “minor” (Walker)?

It may be objected at this point that Blake’s is not a representative case.   Let us look, therefore, at a second Romantic lyric, this one usually taken to be the epitome of Romantic subjectivity:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.   (HBLT 154)

Here is the “impassioned, meditative poetic voice” (of the poet who formerly “had no human fears”),  the “determinate” occasion (“now,” when Lucy is dead), and the “recognizable ‘musical’ quality” (two ballad quatrains) Michael Golston attributes to romantic lyric.  The poet, far from appealing to an audience, as does Linton Kwesi Johnson, is “overheard,” trying to come to terms with death–a death unanticipated, unprepared for, and thus all the more terrifying in its finality.

Yet although Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1800) is indeed a “personal” (rather than a public or political) poem, no one, I think, would maintain that it has the “transparency” or “stability” now regularly ascribed to romantic lyric by advocates of the “new” poetry.  No eight-line poem, I think, has been subjected to more intense scrutiny and debate than this one: witness Paul de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” and earlier commentators from Cleanth Brooks to J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom.  From the word “seal” in line 1 to “Rolled round” in line 7, every word, image, and syntactic construction here can be construed in more than one way.  If, for example, the poet is saying he originally cared deeply for Lucy, how is it that, even in the past, Lucy “seemed a thing”?  And how does the “now” of line 5 relate to that past “seeming” or “Earth’s diurnal course” in line 7 to the “earthly years” of line 4?  What, in short, is it that happens in the gap between the two stanzas?

In romantic lyric, Kevin McGuirk complains, “Culture is supposed not only to be transcendent . . . but also transparent, and this requires the effacement of those visible features of race, class and gender, which are crucial determinants of everyday experience.”  How does this caveat apply to Blake’s “London” or Wordsworth’s Lucy poems?  “I wander through each chartr’d street”: it is true that here Blake claims to speak not from a particular class, race, or gender position (although of course we can read his working-class background and maleness back into the poem), but for the London dweller of his time, and, beyond that time, for the rebellious post-revolutionary individual who is suspicious of all man-made institutions, especially the Church.   As for Wordsworth, here too the poet writes as “a man speaking to men,” in this case, a person who contemplates another’s unexpected death from the perspective of agnosticism, the notion of an afterlife here supplying no comfort, indeed making no difference.  One might argue that, as in Blake’s poem, the speaker who remarks on his former indifference or insensitivity to the beloved’s fate, is characteristically male: he is the one who ruminates, she the mere occasion for that rumination.  But one would be hard put to find this a patriarchal poem, for the graphing of the poet’s emotions, coupled with a particular set of assumptions about the relationship of the human to the natural, makes issues of gender seem somewhat beside the point.

Beside the point, perhaps, because Wordsworth and Blake are writing at a moment in history when the individual was held to be unique and was generally believed to be speaking for others, when, therefore,  the lyric “I” could claim to be a representative “man speaking to men.”  An ordinary rustic, Wordsworth insisted in the famous “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, would have the same feelings the poet was expressing in his lyric but the ordinary rustic couldn’t articulate them as can the poet.   The same is true for “London”:  Blake is only telling his readers what they should already know about the “mind-forg’d manacles” that threaten their lives, but the poem can make the case more vivid, intense, and inexorable.

From our own vantage point, these claims for representativeness may well be found specious:  the illiterate peasant, after all, does not have the same “feelings” as the Cambridge-educated poet, especially if we hold, as I do, that there are no feelings or thoughts outside of language.  Then, too, neither Wordsworth nor Blake can be said to be “speaking” for women, much less for the inhabitants of China or Africa.  But early nineteenth-century England knew none of the sense of multiple communities that characterize our own poetry world at the end of the twentieth century.  An Englishman “spoke for” Englishmen, who, in turn, represented mankind.  And therefore the poets really believed themselves to be representative, and to be, according to Blake and Shelley, minor prophets.

In late twentieth-century U.S. culture, such faith is hardly possible; indeed poets don’t even make a claim for the “universality” or “representativeness” of their individual visions.  For one thing, the “correspondent breeze” of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Emersonian belief that nature always wears the colors of the spirit, far from being an article of faith, as it was for the romantics, seems curiously out of place in the post-Einsteinian, post-atomic universe in which we live.  Yet critics continue to assume the presence of romantic continuities, as when Helen Vendler compares Jorie Graham to Keats or Harold Bloom speaks of A. R. Ammons as a Wordsworthian poet.  And the situation is compounded by the fact that, as various essayists here ahve noted, the dominant poetic discourse itself does not call the romantic paradigm into question.

Consider the following lyric, published in 1995 by one of our most admired and frequently anthologized poets, Denise Levertov:

CROW SPRING

The crows are tossing themselves

recklessly in the random winds

of spring.

One friend has died, one disappeared

(for now, at least) leaving no address;

I’ve lost the whereabouts

of a wandering third.  That seems to be,

this year, the nature of this season.

Is it a message about relinquishment?

Across the water, rain’s veil, gray silk,

flattens the woods to two dimensions,

While close at hand

the crows’ black fountain

jets and falls, jets and blows

this way and that.

How they scoop themselves

up from airy nadirs! [4]

Like “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” this is a meditation on death and the relation of human life to the natural cycle.  It begins with description, the first-person speaker observing the wild motion of crows in the “random winds / of spring.”  Their reckless “tossing” recalls, perhaps, Yeats’s “cold and rook-delighting heaven”; here, as in “The Cold Heaven,” the sight triggers thoughts of love and death: “One friend has died, one disappeared,” and so on.  The very landscape seems to be sending out “a message about relinquishment,” the “rain’s veil, gray silk,” “flatten[ing] the woods to two dimensions.”  But–and the turn comes in line 12 of this free-verse poem, the “crows’ black fountain,” which “jets and falls, jets and blows / this way and that” also provides intimations of renewal: “How they scoop themselves / up from airy nadirs!”  I, too, the poet implies, will experience new life, another chance, another spring.

How is the reader to respond to this hopeful conclusion?  Can we agree with Levertov that the death of loved ones is, after all, part of a larger natural cycle?  That, so to speak, what goes round comes round?  And if we do agree, what assumptions must we make?  First–and here Kevin McGuirk’s analysis is especially apposite– that lineation and the use of concrete nature imagery are a guarantee of some form of poetic transcendence.  The poet stands outside and above the everyday world; she need tell us nothing about herself, the friends who have died and disappeared, the actual natural setting of rainforest.  It is evidently enough that the “I” is sensitive to her surroundings even as she is to her deprivation of others.  And further, the poem’s “tensions” are indeed, as McGuirk puts it about the romantic paradigm, “resolved in a confined dramatic space.” (KM 17).  We know nothing about this woman who speaks, nothing about those who have died or left the scene, nothing about the actual setting.  We only have, in Jeffrey Walker’s words, “a sort of purple patch, an interlude, an elegant attitudinal display which derives its significance from the implied or given narrative-dramatic frame” (JW 25-26).

To put it another way: the rhetoric of “Crow Spring” suggests that there is no such thing as cultural construction, no social class, race, or gender.   Her universal “I” simply addresses other such abstract selves.   The assumption made is that such voice-and-address is a form of poetic license.  For if Denise Levertov were writing a letter or an essay or a philosophical meditation, her generalized thoughts on wind and rain, the loss of nameless friends, and the promise of at least some “fountain” of renewal, would gain little credence.  Unlike Wordsworth, whose every word contrasts human affect to physical, material reality (e.g., the “slumber” that “seals” the “spirit” to the state of being “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”) in what is a complex pattern of ironies (“she seemed a thing who could not feel / the touch of earthly years”; now she really is a “thing”), Levertov relies on the mere appearance of poeticity (“Look! I’m a lyric poem!) to assert a relationship to nature that is nowhere convincingly rendered.  “Crow Spring” is very skillful in its choice of adjectives and verbs, but it finally leaves the reader with a “so what?” feeling.  So what if these unknown “friends” are gone?  So what if the poet sensitively describes the crows’ movements?  Who really cares?

The problem–and it is by no means just Levertov’s problem–is that the basic human-natural correspondence no longer has much meaning, that the pathetic fallacy cannot be maintained.  We now know only too well that meanings cannot be read into the landscape.  That people die of AIDS or cancer or in automobile accidents, whatever configuration the birds outside the window may make.  That there is no “message about relinquishment” in the random wind.  Indeed, “nature” in the greater part of the globe has been so massively destroyed, so polluted by industrial waste, pesticides, and automobile exhausts, that the “veil” is no longer the “gray silk” of rain but an air system much more threatening.  More important:  “nature,” for most people is now mediated by celluloid and pixels: even the photographs of crow flight we see in magazines have been heavily manipulated, digitalized, enlarged or reduced in size.

Hence the hesitation expressed by the essayists here about stable identity and “autonomous, coherent agents.”  How is it that Levertov’s “I” can speak so coherently and logically about the shape of things now and to come?  Why is her identity  not conditioned by the same reckless “tossing”?  And how does this “I” relate to an actual audience?  I am not sure Alison Cummings is right when she suggests that women poets like Sharon Olds, Joy Harjo, and Susan Mitchell solve the problem:  the selections Cummings cites may be about “split subjects” and “fragmented models of reality,” but their language is at least as straightforward as that of the male “free verse lyric” Cummings descries.   Again, I am not sure that McGuirk makes a strong enough case for the (to me) fairly flat and one-dimensional rhetoric of Linton Kwesi Johnson.  McGuirk argues elegantly that Johnson avoids the self-consciousness that weakens Tony Harrison’s working-class lyric, but in the end his unqualified praise of Johnson’s dialect poetry may be itself slightly romanticized.

A more accurate formulation, it seems to me, is that of Susan Vandenborg who puts forward the notion that the palimpsest may well be the lyric form native to our poetic moment.  A palimpsest is “a parchment or other writing material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing” (SV 1).  Using this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, Vandenborg examines Susan Howe’s poetry, finding that in this poet’s work, erasure and “writing over” never quite effaces lyric subjectivity, even as the found text “increasingly becomes the decisive influence over the new message and form” (SV 2).  It is a complex two-way process.  On the one hand, as Vandenborg shows in great detail, Howe is squarely in the romantic tradition, her very choice of found texts bearing witness to her particular individuality, even as she uses language and visual constructs to problematize that lyric self.  “By displacing the self to the printed word, “ Vandenborg concludes, Howe creates a traceable tradition for her audience to follow” (SV 37).  The palimpsest form thus allows for the “communal” that McGuirk also talks about.  But in Howe’s complex verse-prose sequences, it avoids the Scylla of excessive plain speaking (Johnson’s dilemma) as well as the Charybdis of what is perhaps Peter Inman’s too blanket a rejection (see Golston’s very interesting essay) of even a modicum of “normal” intelligibility.

These are, of course, issues that can and should be argued.  But what need no longer be argued, it seems to me, is that lyric poets writing at the turn of the twenty-first century need do no more than record “sensitive” responses to a generalized outer world. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater: romantic poetics itself remains one of the highpoints of Western lyric– a poetics whose very violation today makes it an especially interesting object of study.

MARJORIE PERLOFF

published in Thumbscrew, 18 (Spring 2001): 46-48.

John Ashbery: Your Name Here. Manchester: Carcanet. £7.95

David Herd. John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. £45.00.

* * *For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year—a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate? Has Ashbery’s vision changed dramatically, his experience taken a new turn? Has there been a noticeable stylistic shift? Have the poet’s advancing years (Ashbery is now over seventy) brought the wisdom Yeats claimed as the compensation for what he called ‘bodily decrepitude’?

It is probably too soon to assess the overall trajectory of Ashbery’s poetic career. But as this dazzling new collection makes clear, his ability to produce memorable poems uniquely his own remains undiminished. True, one could argue that there is a generic Ashbery poem. The speaker usually begins with an observation — ‘Disturbing news emanates from the wind tunnel’ or ‘Out on the terrace the projector had begun / making a shuttling sound like that of land crabs’—an observation that involves seemingly absurd detail or non-functional simile. An Ashbery poem characteristically collages childhood memories, present conversations, and interweaving narratives —almost always non-sequiturs that nevertheless add up to the sensation of being alive, here and now, in the bizarre, media-filled culture of the late twentieth century. The bemused and beleaguered Ashbery voice is immediately recognizable in such locutions as ‘I know I shall one day come to the reason / for manners and intercourse with persons. / Therefore I launch my hat on this peg’, or ‘I am wondering where to stand—could that group of three / or four others be the beginning of the line?’ Ashbery’s demonstrative pronouns remain largely indeterminate, so that when we read a line like ‘We doctored it all up’ (‘A Suit’), we cannot know what ‘it’ refers to. The preferred verse form continues to be a stanza of irregular length made up of long, loose free-verse lines, most of them enjambed. As for wisdom, the ‘I’ of these poems is just as uncertain, hesitant, self-deprecating, and receptive to new possibilities as was his younger self. He never pronounces, never generalizes, never claims to have the truth or even to experience the privileged moment when the poet sees into the life of things. If anything, these poems end, as does the brilliant ‘Sonatine Mélancolique’ with the memory of

A time when we too were out of step
and the whole sentient world offered to bathe us—
pale bluster, flubbing today again and again.

Despite such marked continuities, the new poems are recognizably different as well. For one thing, they are more relaxed, more humorous, more willing to let it all hang out than were those in, say, The Double Dream of Spring or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Memory has become increasingly obsessive, playfulness and camp more acceptable, and dialogue with a ‘you’ who is a close friend or lover becomes the normal lyric mode as does the telling of tales that invokes a shared past. Bowdlerized citation used for burlesque effect—from pop song, poetry, newspaper headline, opera libretto, French novel, advertising jingle–has become a stock-in-trade: every line points to something we have heard before—but where? In this free-wheeling new landscape, the anxiety of such poems as ‘These Lacustrine Cities’ and ‘”They Dream Only of America”’ has given way to a certain measure of serenity. ‘Yes,’ we read at the conclusion of ‘A Suit’, ‘I could have told you that some time ago.’ But since we have no idea what ‘that’ is, the ending is not exactly reassuring either.

Take ‘Redeemed Area’, whose suggestive title encompasses all sorts of possibilities, from actual ‘redemption’ to its antithesis—an area ‘redeemed’ for the sinister uses of others. The poem opens with an absurd bit of dialogue, or is it monologue?

Do you know where you live? Probably.

How can one not know where one lives? Never mind: the narrator goes on to tell a more or less realistic story about one Abner (Li’l Abner of the comic strip?) ‘who ‘is getting too old to drive but won’t admit it’ and who goes out in search of ‘ cough drops / of a kind they don’t make anymore.’ But the ‘drugstore has been incorporated into a mall’ and ‘All the houses / are owned by the same guy, who’s been renting / them out to college students for years, so they are virtually uninhabited.’ It all makes good sense: students are known to wreck rental units and urban blight has brought decay to the ‘old’ neighborhood.

But just when we think that the poet is giving us a ‘normal’ account of suburban sprawl, a surreal note is introduced:

A smell of vitriol and socks pervades the area
like an open sewer in a souk. Anyway the cough drops
(a new brand) tasted pretty good—like catnip
or an orange slice that has lain on a girl’s behind.

If this sounds like mere clowning around, the drawing of absurd comparisons and making of foolish similes, think again. The smell really may be a mix of sulfuric acid and sweat (from dirty socks), thus reminding the poet—in a moment of comic alliteration, of an ‘open sewer in a souk’—a souk or Oriental bazaar. Cough drops do taste medicinal and hence perhaps like extract from the catnip plant, and as for that orange slice—how, one wonders, would lying on a girl’s behind affect its taste?

Here, as so often in Ashbery’s lyric, ‘nonsense’ turns out to be oddly apropos. For, as in Joyce’s ‘Araby,’ exoticism soon mutates into the merely tawdry. Consider the next stanza:

That’s the electrician calling now—
nobody else would call before 7 A.M. Now we’ll have some
electricity in the place. I’ll start by plugging in
the Christmas tree lights. They were what made the whole thing
go up in sparks the last time. Next, the light
by the dictionary stand, so I can look some words up.
Then probably the toaster. A nice slice
of toast would really hit the spot now. I’m afraid it’s all over
between us, though.

This is at once hilarious and poignant. By the time one comes to the last line, one realizes that the speaker has been fooling around so as to ease the pain that parting from a lover is about to bring. The absurd suggestion about the Christmas tree lights suggests that the loss of electricity has marked the end of a holiday season, a season of love and pleasure. The inconsequential shift from the Christmas lights to the dictionary stand and then to the toaster, turns the ‘redeemed area’ of the title into a space of chaos and impending trouble. But the poet refuses to mourn: ‘Gradually,’ he declares, “everything will return to normal.’ Indeed, ‘I have adjusted the lamp, / morning’s at seven’.

This last line illustrates the thickness of Ashbery’s poetic texture. ‘Morning’s at seven’ comes, of course, from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes: ‘The year’s at the spring, / And day’s at the morn; / Morning’s at seven . . . God’s in His Heaven– / ‘All’s right with the world!’ But Ashbery isn’t drawing a simple contrast between Pippa’s cheeriness and his own chaotic life. For ‘Morning’s at Seven’ is also the title of Paul Osborn’s 1939 Depression drama—a Midwestern family tale where things get a bit more complicated. Perhaps, the poet suggests ruefully, a bit of distance will give him the perspective he needs:

the tarnish has fallen from the metallic embroidery, the walls have fallen,
the country’s pulse is racing. Parents are weeping.
the schools have closed.
All the fuss has put me in a good mood,
O great sun.

Again, the absurd quickly yields to pathos and back again. Tarnish is what is left when the metal flakes off, not vice-versa. The ominous and generic news—‘the walls have fallen . . . parents are weeping / the schools have closed’—is never explained; indeed, these are no more than generic signs of doom. And yet ‘all the fuss has put me in a good mood’: if the world is indeed in such a sorry state, how sorry can the poet feel for himself? And so, in a wry allusion to Apollinaire’s ‘Soleil cou coupé’ (in Zone), we have, finally the invocation ‘O great sun.’

Ashbery has many imitators both in the U.S. and the UK but not one who can match these tonal shifts and thick allusions. Indeed, it is the density of reference and vocal range that also makes Ashbery’s poems—early and late—so hard to talk about. David Herd’s new full-length study makes a valiant effort to chart the poet’s entire career to date, to determine ‘What are the continuities? What are the differences? . . . . How does one volume lead to, or away, from another?” He proposes to do this by examining the relations of the poems to their period and rehearses, with great skill and thorough scholarship, what Ashbery was doing when, whom he spent time with, what he was reading, and what was happening on the political and cultural front. The anomalous Tennis Court Oath (1962), for example, is read in the context of the poet’s alienation in his early Paris years—an alienation heightened by Cold War culture in the U.S., as defined by critics like David Riesman, Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, and Philip Rahv.

But compelling as is the attempt to link Ashbery’s poems to The Lonely Crowd or The Hidden Persuaders, the poems don’t quite come alive as a result. Why, after all, is The Tennis Court Oath so different from the work of Ashbery’s Paris friend Harry Matthews on the one hand, his Harvard /New York friend Frank O’Hara on the other? Why is his response to Philip Rahv so different from Robert Lowell’s? Nor does it help to posit generalizations like ‘How and whether to risk the sublime in a cultural climate in which poetry is failing to communicate are problems which persist throughout Ashbery’s poetry of the 1970s.’ To what poet would this diagnosis not apply? In his first chapter, Herd notes that Ashbery himself has repeatedly expressed the desire to be more fully understood. But understanding can only come from reading the poems themselves, word for word, and line by line, with as much knowledge of genres, conventions, and poetic topoi as possible. Indeed, Herd’s comparisons of Ashbery to Pasternak or Pascal are finally no more satisfying than earlier links drawn between Ashbery and Keats, Ashbery and Emerson. No labels seem to stick to this great mercurial poet, who has, in his own words,

. . . wriggled farther into an indeterminate space
that was actually a mood, or many moods, one overlaying another
like gift wrap.